What the Paris Olympics opening ceremony really
meant
The opening ceremony of the Olympic
Games traditionally offers the host city the
opportunity to celebrate sporting excellence and
international unity while also presenting to the world
a flattering portrait of its own nation, informed by its
own culture. [...]
[...] Entitled ‘Ça ira’ (‘It’ll be all right’), the show
garnered mixed reviews in the French press. It was
described variously as magical or catastrophic, as an
astonishing apotheosis or a distressing accumulation
of kitsch. Lady Gaga performed up and down a flight
of stairs, dressed in feathers. The French singer
Philippe Katerine, covered in blue body paint and
dressed up as Bacchus, reclined in a platter of fruit.
A threesome blossomed in the Bibliothèque
Nationale. Decapitated figures of Marie-Antoinette
holding their singing heads appeared at the windows
of the Conciergerie. A floating piano was set on fire.
The ceremony was conceived over two years by a
committee made up of historian Patrick Boucheron
(a member of the prestigious research institute, the
Collège de France), the scriptwriter Fanny Herrero
(creator of the Netflix series 10 Pour Cent/Call My
Agent), the novelist Leïla Slimani (winner of the
Goncourt literary prize for her novel Chanson
douce/Lullaby), and the dramatist Damien Gabriac,
who were all assembled in 2022 by the event’s
master of ceremonies, theatre director Thomas Jolly.
to co-write the script of their celebration of France.
[...]
The man behind Le Puy du Fou is entrepreneur and
politician Philippe de Villiers. Although de Villiers
briefly served as Secretary of State for Culture under
Socialist President François Mitterand, he is
currently a member of French nationalist party
Reconquête!, whose leader is the far-right firebrand
Eric Zemmour. De Villiers is a Christian traditionalist
who has expressed hostility towards Islam and has
maintained that during the French Revolution a
political ‘genocide’ was perpetrated against the
Royalist people of Vendée.
It was therefore important for Jolly and his team
firmly to distance their own project from Le Puy du
Fou and to offer instead, as Jolly said: ‘the opposite
of a virile, heroic and providential history’, of ‘an ode
to grandeur’ or to the ‘manifestation of force’.
Besides de Villiers’ theme park, another anti-model
may have been the opening ceremony of the 2023
Rugby World Cup. Hosted by the popular actor Jean
Dujardin and featuring a playful celebration of
traditional French life, it was criticised for portraying
a nostalgic and ‘rancid’ version of France. To be sure,
at a time when France is politically and culturally
riven, it would have seemed important to tell a
national story that would unite rather than divide. In
contrast, Jolly aimed for a celebration of ‘planetary
multi-ethnicity’. But was it not in hindsight a mistake,
a missed opportunity, to throw out, for fear that it
might be politically toxic, anything that might be
perceived as a celebration of French history, or the
shared heritage that binds all French people
together?
Patrick Boucheron, the historian in Jolly’s team, has
declared his ‘resistance’ to the idea of a ‘roman
national’, the strengthening story a nation
collectively weaves about itself – the word roman
meaning in this instance at once a narrative and a
romance. Boucheron favours instead a decentring of
national consciousness and a deconstruction of
national history. There was always a danger in
rejecting historical greatness for ideological reasons.
Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte – both absent
from the celebration – really do belong to all French;
including them in the narrative would not have made
it reactionary. Meanwhile Jolly’s desire
systematically to foreground pop culture in order not
to appear elitist often felt parochial. What is the
long-term cultural significance of Nicky Doll, Paloma
and Piche, stars of the reality show Drag Race
France? Was the performance of John Lennon’s song
Imagine really, as a sports historian declared in the newspaper Libération, ‘heavy with meaning’
because of its nature as a ‘political and cultural
allegory’?
Wasn’t it also a pity not to celebrate France’s
contemporary achievements, especially the
rebuilding of Notre-Dame after its devastation by
fire, and the Grand Paris Express transport network
being developed for better integration of central
Paris and its banlieues?
But above all, what was missing from the show, with
rare exceptions – such as the sight of the Olympic
cauldron rising into the sky tethered to a gigantic hot
air balloon – was beauty. This signalled a lack of
cultural confidence on the part of the ceremony’s
storytellers. It was telling, for example, that Marcel
Proust, one of France’s most exceptional writers,
was featured as a caricatured carnival head,
alongside Little Red Riding Hood and Marcel
Marceau. Nor was placing the ceremony under the
auspices of ‘Ça ira’, a 1790 anthem of the French
Revolution as familiar to the French as the
Marseillaise, an expression of intellectual
confidence. Like the Marseillaise, ‘Ça ira’ is a call to
violence – an ode to the systematic hanging of
aristocrats from lamp-posts – and insisting, as Jolly
did, that it can be reframed as a message of hope and
of ‘union and unity within diversity’ is meaningless.
Ultimately, whether any of this landed with its
audience remains doubtful. In spite of the driving
rain, the French enjoyed the show’s wackiness, the
party atmosphere, the excitement and anticipation
of the Games. And the Games themselves were a
wonderful success. But a message was sent
nevertheless. And now that the Olympic truce is
over, Emmanuel Macron must once again face up to
a divided nation
In: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/what-the-paris-olympics-openingceremony-reallymeant/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwuMC2BhA7EiwAmJKRrLbi3d14OiB6WRug_hjU2I-75FCfTsQ0RitnqNM3GJxOqz9UCUlUBoCZ4IQAvD_BwE