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It was wet. Soggy socks wet. Ink smeared across the notepad, blurry photos wet. The chestnut trees along the Seine dripped fat raindrops into the beer faster than you could drink it. The rain puddled on the pianos and soaked poor Rafa’s pants. The joke was, it was the fault of France’s ex-president François Hollande, who seems to bring bad weather to every public event he attends.
But the show must go on! This Dunkirk of the Bateaux Mouches, a floating, five-hour musical theater extravaganza, had it all: Zizou in the Métro, Marina Viotti singing Carmen, Céline Dion on the Eiffel Tower, and so much more.
Led by the theater director Thomas Jolly, the artistic direction delivered a radical, queer, emphatically diverse performance that effectively drowned out all the fascistic undertones of a parade of flag-waving hardbodies competing for national glory. It was silly and kitschy, but in its irreverence seemed deliberately designed to rebuff France’s flirtation with the white nostalgia of the far right. The Parisian crowd, singing and dancing in puddles of mud along the banks, loved it unequivocally. (Except for Argentina, whose delegation was loudly booed… this is still a sporting event, after all.)
“The beret, the baguette and the mustache have made way for a modern, multicultural society,” wrote the left-wing French daily Libération. Aya Nakamura, the Black pop star whose Olympic appearance generated a polemic in the run-up to this month’s legislative elections, played with the Republican Guard in front of the Académie Française. The Paris Ballet’s first Black étoile, Guillaume Diop, danced on the roof of city hall. Drag queens staged a mock Last Supper, and some students had a threesome. Statues of French women rose from the Seine, and the crowd roared loudest for the Communard legend Louise Michel; Gisèle Halimi, the Tunisian-born Jewish lawyer who defended Algerian revolutionaries; and Simone Veil, who established the French right to abortion.
This was an unapologetically left-wing, secular, multiracial vision of France, past and present. After a kerfuffle over the absence of a cross on the Olympics poster, Notre-Dame was featured—but as a stage-set to celebrate French craftsmanship and construction workers, who danced from its scaffolding. Sacré-Coeur, with its right-wing history, was not. Without a touch of irony, the entire city kicked off these 2024 Olympics by joining Juliette Armanet to belt out John Lennon. Imagine there’s no countries.
Then a hooded knight mounted a robotic horse on a high-speed pontoon and carried the Olympic torch up the Seine. It was Degas at Haulover Inlet. The Book of Revelation by Boston Dynamics. It was fabulous, ridiculous, altogether too much. “If you’ve ever wondered how long it might take to visit every single landmark in Paris all in one day,” the former NFL star JJ Watt wrote on Twitter, “The Olympic Ceremony is answering that question right now, in real time.”
This was a French summer blockbuster in every way. It cost as much as a Hollywood movie, lasted twice as long, and dangled one false ending after another. And despite the promotion of this first-ever opening ceremony in and of the city, the spectacle was more designed for global television than its in-stadium predecessors. Though it was planned as a grand civic happening for 300,000 Parisians, much of the precious real estate along the Seine was dedicated to TV presenters and $2,000 seats. Most of the “attendees” could not actually see the river. Television viewers (and VIP attendees) watched lasers shooting off the Eiffel Tower, but there was nothing visible on the tower’s other three sides.
It’s a good bet, with any big party, that the pains of preparation will be washed away by the pageantry and a little bit of booze. But there’s no celebrating the opening ceremony without noting just how much the city was forced to sacrifice to make this happen.
The first alarm sounded last year, when word got out the city planned to evict the bouquinistes, those anachronistic booksellers whose green shelves are mounted on the walls of the quais, as a security measure. Many feared they would never return. The organizers backed off, but it was a sign of the militarization to come. A planned audience of 600,000 was chopped in two. By the time mid-July rolled around, the Seine’s stone banks were locked up behind steel barriers to thwart activists and terrorists. It was like Paris got braces.
An army of 45,000 soldiers and police blocked hundreds of streets. Cafes, restaurants, and galleries shut down. On Wednesday, the singer Cyrille Aimée thanked her audience for “daring to cross the Seine.” The week before, the Louvre wrote to its members to say: Don’t come. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has often boasted about her efforts to make Paris into a “15-minute city,” in which most residents can get what they need close to home. For the past week, though, the French capital has more closely resembled the 15-minute city conspiracy theory—shuttered shops, soldiers checking QR codes, and police shutting streets and bridges at random.
While the Paris Olympics were first proposed a decade ago, this ceremony was very much a venture of Emmanuel Macron, the French president who loves a grandiose gesture. “I thought the idea was crazy, and I said, ‘I’m all in,’” he recalled in 2021. In addition to the aforementioned hassle, the festivities required establishing a no-fly zone across Northern France that shut all three of the region’s airports for six hours.
And it might not have happened at all. Paris had its wettest winter ever, and the Seine was running fast and high towards the Channel all spring. No boat on the Seine can ever guarantee you a party on the deck, because in high water, your whole party will go the way of the French monarchy. But the problem facing the Olympics as recently as last month was that the water was moving too swiftly for the boats to safely navigate. This might have been fine had the ceremony proceeded upriver (it’s easier to steer against the current), but television demanded a finale in front of the Eiffel Tower.
In the end, a strategic series of upstream reservoir diversions saved the show, and Macron got everything he wanted but the weather. It was fun and smart and ambitious and sure to set off an Olympics opening ceremony arms race that the next Summer host, Los Angeles, could not be better suited to accelerate.
And yet: The Seine is not Broadway, with its constant bustle and ticker-tape parades. The river’s paradox is that it is the city’s center and an edge, all at once, a respite right in the middle of everything. The Seine, wrote Ian Nairn in his weird and wonderful 1968 guidebook, “heals the city. From north or south, you can come up to it, stretch out and forget—or regret; but either way the river gives you full space for your private world; it provides, free, the richest room in Paris.”
For weeks now, Parisians have been denied the pleasure of putting their feet up in the heart of the city. Let the games begin, and let the people their river back.
