Writing of the state of France in the twilight of the fateful Second Empire, the left-wing journalist Henri Rochefort observed: ‘France contains 36 million subjects, not including the subjects of discontent.’ Has anything changed since 1868? From the European to the legislative elections, France is a profoundly divided nation. At present and probably until mid-August, she has a caretaker government because the National Assembly is irremediably split into three camps. One might have thought that the Paris Olympic Games could have united the country. Instead, it has deepened division.
France was desperate to be enthralled, and above all, distracted by the Games
France was desperate to be enthralled, and above all, distracted by the Games. The grandiose, daring and creative opening ceremony, transposed for the first time in the modern era from stadium to the heart of the City of Light, should have fulfilled the dreams of the 23 million French viewers. But the gods were not with France. The much-trailed security threats were realised the day before when the principal TGV lines into Paris were sabotaged causing chaos for 800,000 travellers. On the day itself the heavens opened, recalling uncannily how France’s last benighted president, François Hollande, had been repeatedly rained upon at public meetings.
The ceremony concluded successfully. But then came the dissension. The centre left newspaper Le Monde – whose editorial was positively dithyrambic – carried an article detailing how the ceremony had ‘enthused the left but outraged part of the right and extreme right.’ The Conference of French Bishops ‘deplored the scenes of derision and mockery of Christianity’, most notably the parody of The Last Supper as a debauched assembly of drag queens and ‘non binaries’.
The far-left leader of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party, Manuel Bompard, proclaimed ecstatically on Twitter/X: ‘What pride when France speaks to the world.’ Doubtless he, like his colleague Mathilde Panot, leader of the parliamentary party, was taken with decapitated Marie-Antoinettes serially reproduced at each window of the Conciergerie collectively spurting blood into the sky. Panot thanked the organisers gushingly ‘for having sublimated our revolutionary heritage and France as it is, in all its richness.’ The leader of the French Socialist Party saluted the celebration of French values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, now complemented by ‘sorority, parity and inclusivity.’ This, he continued, ‘is the best response to the rise of fascism and of the extreme right’. Not to be outdone, from the Greens – the other party in the left-wing grouping New Popular Front that tops seats in the new National Assembly – Sandrine Rousseau exclaimed: ‘What a slap in the face for the obscurantists.’ While the Greens’ leader praised the diversity of the 571 French athletes, adding acidly: ‘The most beautiful response [to the fascists].’
Despite having sworn a truce for the Games, president Emmanuel Macron – ever the one to pronounce at the wrong moment – tweeted a comment (that has now been seen more than eight million times) on a video of the highly controversial Franco-Malian rap singer Aya Nakamura serenaded by the Garde Républicaine in full dress uniform with the words ‘En même temps’, his signature credo since 2017 of conflating left and right. His caretaker prime minister Gabriel Attal – wildly aspiring post Games to bridge the political chasm in the chamber with a coalition of that ilk – enjoined: ‘Name me a better duo!’.
This was guaranteed to fire up the right. The spokesman for the National Rally tweeted: ‘What an embarrassment! No way Aya Nakamura! The opening of the Olympic Games is the sacking of French culture’. A moderate-right Les Républicains senator followed suit, excoriating ‘a vision of our history, which makes a spectacle of the decapitation of Marie-Antoinette and which seeks to ridicule Christians.’ A party colleague attacked a catwalk that was ‘woke, where sport was concealed by political and societal messages’. Marion Maréchal, MEP and niece of Marine Le Pen, appealed: ‘To all the Christians of the world who are watching the Paris 2024 opening ceremony and felt insulted by this drag queen parody of The Last Supper, know that it is not France which speaks but a left-wing minority ready for any provocation.’ Social media echoed a divided political class denouncing the ceremony as ‘provocation’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘Christianophobe’.
France seeks respite from years of political and social turmoil. The Olympics will not deliver it. Back in 1954 during the short-lived Fourth Republic, the best-selling author Pierre Daninos reached for a mathematical metaphor to encapsulate France’s fissiparous tendencies, quipping that France was divided by 43 million French. ‘France is the only country in the world where if you add ten citizens to ten others, you don’t make an addition, but twenty divisions.’
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