The ballet d'action, a narrative ballet, was an invention of the eighteenth century. It replaced the pompous grands ballets of baroque absolutism that had evolved out of the Italian Renaissance intermedii. Both court entertainments, grands ballets and intermedii or divertissements, had primarily represented and glorified the sovereign; the ballet d'action, on the other hand, was supposed to tell stories that followed their own narrative logic and lay beyond princely power fantasies.

The emergence of the ballet d'action relied on three factors: first, enlightenment ideas had spread to dance theory. Hence it became possible to introduce the notion that dance could and should be independent from the other arts. Secondly, the academic ballet of the eighteenth century strove towards a technical refinement that aristocratic amateurs practising dance could no longer fulfil. Thirdly, theatre as a cultural institution underwent a process of professionalisation in which the performer and the observer began to be separated from each other.

Critical contributions for a ballet reform came from France and the French danse d'école. Paris, the Mecca of the art of dance, housed the Académie Royale de la Danse, founded by Louis XIV in 1661, the institution that had overseen dance and had created a style that reached far beyond Paris or France into Europe. Students of the Académie had been celebrated as virtuosi. Increasingly, though, the empty pompousness of the absolutist court ballets and the rococo divertissements aroused more and more criticism.