Members of dominant social groups, both as scholars and amateurs, have periodically been drawn to European popular culture, defined here as culturalforms associated with subordinated groups. This kind of attention may result in the transformation of these forms, through a process that reveals much about relationships between dominant and subordinate classes. In this paper a nineteenth-century popular culturalform, the rod puppet theater of northern France and Belgium, is examined as an example ofthis process. The written record and silences in the record of rod puppet theaters are used to show how popular culture becomes of interest at strategic points in history and how a reading of its unevenly recorded history can shed light on the relationship between classes. [popular culture, France, Belgium, puppets, class relations] Popular culture, following Stuart Hall, is nondominant culture, not in any way cut off from the dominant culture, but in constant tension with it. It is a fruitful area for anthropologists to study, for it is in this area of tension that relations between classes are illuminated as dominant culture constantly struggles to reorganize popular culture; to enclose and confine its definitions and within a more inclusive range of dominant forms (Hall 1981: 223). Transformations, then, are central to the study of popular culture for while popular cultural appear to persist from one period to another, come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the way they define their relations to each other, to the others and to their conditions of life (p. 228). The rod puppet theater in Northern France and Belgium provides a text from which we can piece together aspects of the relationship between dominant and subordinate classes in this early industrialized area.