There are always two dangers lurking for the French when they travel the world, and even more so for the Parisians. One is to be ridiculous. The other: to be arrogant.
I don't say it, a simple pedestrian in Paris who today will be on the ground floor, walking here and there, talking to everyone, observing how a city that doesn't believe at all that it needs the Olympic Games is experiencing the Olympic Games. The thing about the ridiculous and the arrogant was told to me this week, in a café in a popular district in the north of Paris, by one of the architects of the opening ceremony on the Seine: the historian Patrick Boucheron. Boucheron, with a team of writers and playwrights, spent months preparing the scenery and the story. What worried this wise man, who is neither ridiculous nor arrogant, was that during the parade France would appear, looking down on the rest and giving lessons.
“Honestly,” he told me, “we're not here to teach.”
And they didn't give them. The rain spoiled the party a bit. The pedestrian sometimes found it kitsch, sometimes boring, but that's part of the format.
But that wasn’t the most important thing. The most important thing was what France wanted to say about itself. Because a ceremony like this is the way a country presents itself to the world and explains what it is and, above all, what it wants to be. And the France that hundreds of thousands of viewers saw this Friday is a France that says to the world: “The best of France is universal. The best is nourished by what is outside and is a mix of cultures and people. The best is never confined to an identity or a subject.”
Of the scenes that took place on the river for over three hours, there is one that will resonate in France for a long time, and that says much more than a hundred political speeches and essays. It is scene number 4, the one with the motto egalitarianequality. The place was the Bridge of Arts, opposite the Institute of France, the headquarters of the French Academy. Founded in the 17th century by Cardinal Richelieu, under the Augustan dome sit the immortals (as they are called) who guard the essence of the French language. And there, in what this pedestrian said was the high point of the ceremony, Aya Nakamura stepped forward.
French born in Mali. Raised in the suburbs of Paris, the suburb always associated with poverty, immigration, riots. Self-taught artist. Bestselling songs that intersect with African-Americanism r'n'b with African rhythms and Antillean music such as the saltand in which he mixes the language of Molière with the jargon of the suburb. The guardians of the patriotic essences look at him with suspicion, some with hatred. When it leaked in March that he would take part in the ceremony, France jumped on the Le Pens and the Zemmours. A small ultra group even hung a banner on a Seine bridge as a sign of protest: “This is Paris, not the Bamako market.”
Well, there it was in the day of glory from France to the world, on the glorious opening day of the Games, Aya Nakamura sings the hits of Charles Aznavour and sings her own mega hit Djadja. And she did it with none other than the gang of the Republican Guard. Pop and martial music. Mixture and tradition. The woman who reinvented the French language, and who was accused of distorting the French language, danced in front of the door Academy with the trumpets and uniforms of the military band. all fused, all in one exciting dance and music.
Here comes Franceas it is, and not the imagination of the nationalists. The performance, and indeed the entire ceremony, had a healing effect on many French people, who had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown for a few weeks.
Less than a month ago, it was conceivable that Le Pen’s party would win the July 7 elections and that on Thursday a prime minister from her party would be sitting in the authorities’ gallery. It didn’t happen, but this is also a country and a city emerging from a series of difficult years: the years of attacks, of the yellow vests, of the pandemic, of disputes over identity, of defining what is French. , who is and who is not.
The Olympic Games offer an answer: a story without chauvinism that connects the most French with what is multicultural, that justifies subversive and forgotten heroines, a France that may be a postcard, but not a musty postcard. It is not a block, nor a speech engraved in stone, nor in papier-mâché from the popular amusement park Puy du Fou, which glorifies the mythical story of kings and heroes. France will be under water on July 26, 2024 It is the France of the anti-Puy du Fou.
“We said to ourselves: what is a Frenchman in the eyes of the world?”, the historian Boucheron explained. “In short, he is someone who is ridiculous and arrogant. That is why we tried not to be ridiculous or arrogant.” And at the ceremony on the Seine it was neither ridiculous nor arrogant, although it could sometimes border on the ridiculous, and the grandeur of any Olympic ceremony, and even more so in Paris and on the Seine, can inevitably be arrogant.
But it was something else: a “fragile and vulnerable” country, to use Boucheron's words, “that knows that it is the world that has made France what it is.”
“What do you want me to tell you?” the historian concludes. “The far right cannot win all ideological battles.”
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