Jean-Baptiste Blache
German ballet dancer
Jean-Baptiste Blache de Beaufort (17 May 1765, in Berlin – 24 January 1834, in Toulouse) was a French-German ballet dancer and ballet teacher.
Life and Career
Blache was born in Berlin on 17 May 1765 of French parents. The family moved to Paris so that Blache could study with Jacques François Deshayes.
Blache learned the violin and cello, undertaking a largely provincial career. Working mainly from Bordeaux, where he succeeded Jean Dauberval, he had a brief tenure at the Opéra de Paris, where he put on The Barber of Seville (1806) and Les Fêtes de Vulcain (1820).
Among his best-known ballets are Les Meuniers (1787), which was praised by Arthur Saint-Léon, L'Amour et la Folie, La Chaste Suzanne, La Fille soldat, and Almaviva et Rosine (1806).
Blache retired in Toulouse but declined an offer from the local theatre to become its ballet master.
Family
His eldest son, Frédéric-Auguste Blache (1791- ?) revived his father's work at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin from 1816 to 1823, then at the Ambigu-Comique, where he revived the La Fille soldat. Frédéric-Auguste also wrote Polichinelle vampire, interpreted by Charles-François Mazurier (1823) and Jocko ou le Singe du Brésil (1825). Jean-Baptiste's younger son, Alexis-Scipion (1792-1852), later himself became ballet master at Lyon, Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux and St-Petersburg.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jean-Baptiste Blache” as german ballet dancer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3163887. VIAF identifies the subject as 69191236. The Library of Congress control number is n97872033. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1765, 1834, 1806 and 1820.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean-Baptiste Blache” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.