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. For the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China unfurled the gifts of its civilisation to the world – from printing to gunpowder – with all the pomp and solemnity of a totalitarian regime. In 2012, the opening ceremony of the London Olympics staged a comprehensive account of British history, focused particularly on the Industrial Revolution, the National Health Service and Britain’s literary heritage and popular music, in a show entitled ‘Isles of Wonder’ directed by filmmaker Danny Boyle and shot through with what other nations deemed typically British self-deprecating humour.

So what of France and its own opening ceremony? What was the story on display? Unconventionally staged not in the Olympic stadium but along the river Seine, in a journey from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Eiffel Tower, it featured twelve thematic tableaux whose rhyming titles included the Gallic triad of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité, along with, among others, Sororité, Synchronicité and Obscurité. 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.

What did it all mean?

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.

Although the details of the show would, understandably, remain under wraps to preserve the all-important element of dramatic surprise, Jolly’s creative team described ahead of time precisely what the celebration would be like – or rather what it would not be like, namely the historical theme park of Le Puy du Fou, situated in the Loire region of western France. The theme park, which opened in 1989 and receives over two million visitors a year, features a variety of spectacular attractions including a naumachia performed in a replica of a Roman amphitheatre in Gaul, a retelling of the life of Frankish king Clovis I, some swashbuckling musketeers, automated animations of La Fontaine’s Fables, and a recreation of a First World War trench at Verdun.

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.