Both were products of the Catholic Church.
Both employed the same texts and the same kind of music.

They were developed by similar conditions; they were performed in similar circumstances and under the same rules.
For these reasons it is proper to discuss the early French religious drama and that of Italy as practically one and the same thing, and to pass without discrimination from the first performances of such plays outside the church to the establishment of that well-defined variety known in Italy as the "Sacre Rappresentazioni." This form, as we shall see, was the immediate outgrowth of the "laud," but one of its ancestors was the open-air performances.

The emergence of the churchly play into the open was effected through the agency of ecclesiastic ceremonial.
Pagan traditions and festivities died a hard death in the early years of Christianity, and some of them, instead of passing entirely out of the world of worship, maintained their existence in a transformed shape.
Funerals, as Chouquet[4] pointedly notes, "provided the occasion for scenic performances and certain religious fetes the pretext for profane ceremonies." [Footnote 4: "Histoire de la Musique Dramatique en France," par Gustave Chouquet.

Paris, 1873.] The fete of the ass, celebrated on January 14 every year at Beauvais, was an excellent example of this sort of ceremony.

This was a representation of the flight into Egypt.