Early Modern Hot Takes : Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony
As we approach back to school, I’m holding on to the feeling I had watching the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games—the rain, the river, those young people doing love and literature in the library, and my raucous leap of joy at the strains of Rita Mitsouko’s Andy. Oh, and the athletes too, of course! Like me, you might have been texting your dix-septièmiste friend during the ceremony, or trying to fill in the blanks in the TV coverage as you watched the panoply of civic quirkiness and cultural reference unfolding under the rain (NBC are you listening? How about a French scholar next time to say something meaningful or informative about what we’re watching?)
What follows are some medal-worthy reflections on the Opening Ceremony to inspire and energize you as you think about how to work it into that French history or culture or literature or language course—and as we continue to mull over the glorious, wet, inclusive, queerly French wonderfulness that we watched together. Serving up these early modern hot takes: Therese Banks (Time), Katherine Ibbett (Water), Ellen McClure (French), Anna Rosensweig (Glitter, Grit, Gaga), Marine Roussillon (Galanterie), and Thibaut Maus de Rolley (Acrobats).
Fig. 1. Still of time machine. Thomas Jolly, director, Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games.
Time… Approximately an hour and twenty minutes into the Opening Ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, the masked character guiding viewers through the spectacle runs behind the clock of the Musée d’Orsay. In the glow of the clockface, our guide turns the lever of a conveniently placed time machine from “au-delà du futur” back to the “passé.” A tribute to Georges Méliès unfurls. If Méliès’s early nineteenth century is the “past,” would the French Revolution—so heavily brought into the present throughout the ceremony—be the time machine’s “passé lointain”? Where does that leave Molière’s Les Amants magnifiques (1670), pulled off the shelves of the Bibliothèque Richelieu in the infamous “ménage à trois” scene? Or the jardins de Versailles-turned-skatepark divertissement on the Seine? As I go into the upcoming semester and a class on “Violence, Resistance, & Tolerance in 16th-19th-Century French Literature,” the Opening Ceremony gives me an occasion to ask my students: when was—or is—France’s past? And how are we constantly constructing alternate chronologies in the present, both within and outside instances of official discourse like the Opening Ceremony?
Therese Banks, Middlebury College
Fig. 2. Plate from Le Magnifique carousel fait sur le fleuve de l'Arne à Florence, pour le mariage du Grand Duc. Jean Sauvé, publisher, 1664.
Water…In 1664 the engraver Jean Sauvé published a set of plates of a 1608 ‘Magnifique carousel’ on the Arno in celebration of a Medici marriage. One plate features two rocky islands with a profusion of river gods (tipping water out of their urns the giveaway sign) and related nymphs. In the foreground, riding on a sea monster and a giant shell, are figures Sauvé has kindly identified for us as “Deesse.” He doesn’t specify which goddess this might be: maybe Aphrodite/Venus served up on the half-shell, maybe Amphitrite/Salacia on the fish? Sauvé has also written “Fleuve” above each of the two islands, to indicate the river gods on them. It’s always made me laugh: here we are in the river, and here is the river, again, on it, fleuve-sur-fleuve, confusion on confusion, but source of much splashy delight. I thought of Sauvé’s not so helpful annotations as I saw people trying to decipher the opening ceremony: who was that racing down the river on her metallic steed? You needed annotations (or the TV commentator did) to know it was Sequana, origin of the Seine. Then the hermeneutical meltdown over Philippe Katerine’s feast of the gods turned divine interpretation into political crisis. I thought the haters needed to give up interpretation and go with the flow; the Olympic spirit, as Coubertin almost said, is the taking part, and not the taking apart.
Katherine Ibbett, University of Oxford
French…How do you unite the world without implicitly or explicitly subjugating it? In an interview published in Le Monde on July 16, the co-creators of the opening ceremony- Thomas Jolly, Leïla Slimani, Patrick Boucheron, Fanny Herrero, and Damien Gabriac- noted their intention to produce a spectacle that would fly in the face of “une histoire virile, héroïsée et providentielle.” Deliberately, sometimes confusingly and sometimes exhilaratingly decentered, the ceremony was nonetheless united by one extraordinary detail: almost every one of the songs in the ceremony, with the exception of the apparently obligatory performance of John Lennon’s Imagine, was… in French. From Lady Gaga’s feathery opening to Céline Dion’s triumphant return, with detours through Aya Nakamura, Gojira, Rim’K, Philippe Katerine, and the Marseillaise, the ceremony presented an unapologetically unsubtitled tour of cultural expression, one reinforced by reminders that landmarks as varied as the Minions, Les Misérables, hot air balloons, Assassin’s Creed, the love-related literary classics in the Bibliothèque nationale, and the actual physical landmarks of Paris itself are… French.
This foregrounding of Frenchness could be read as simply the latest iteration of the Gallic precedency and superiority that Louis XIV worked so hard to establish during his reign and which established France and French as the lasting arbiter and language of international diplomacy. Yet as the non-Frenchness of Lady Gaga and Céline Dion demonstrates, something else was afoot. The ceremony made me think of my visit to the newly opened Cité internationale de la langue française just a few weeks before. Located almost defiantly in the far-right town of Villers-Cotterêts, the cité provided a surprisingly exhilarating and interactive voyage through French, noting words that had been borrowed and lent, acknowledging directly the abuses of colonial expansion, providing space for contemporary writers and actors to dialogue with la langue de Molière. Like the opening ceremony, the Cité came the closest I could imagine to illustrating the principles laid down by Achille Mbembe and Alain Mabanckou in their “Plaidoyer pour une langue-monde: Abolir les frontières du français”: “le français aura des chances de devenir une langue-monde si nous comprenons une bonne fois pour toutes qu’aucune langue n’est la propriété de qui que ce soit” (66). Just by highlighting le français, small f, the ceremony organizers not only highlighted the non-proprietary nature of the French language, but also asked the worldwide audience to luxuriate in its materiality, its pliability, its resistance to being reduced to the pure instrumentality of, say, English. As an opening to an international festival that celebrates both the physicality of the athletes and sport for its own sake (swimming laps, cycling in circles, prancing in place), it was rather perfect.
Ellen McClure, University of Illinois Chicago
Glitter, Grit, Gaga…I wasn’t planning on watching the Opening Ceremony. But then during a late-night doom scrolling session sometime in mid-July I read that the ceremony had been planned as a kind of flotilla on the Seine. Instead of confining the event to a stadium, with an endless parade of athletes, the national delegations would float through Paris past many of its iconic monuments. Instead of one big spectacle, there would be several performances throughout the route. This sounded a lot like an early modern entry ceremony. I had to watch.
The first musical act featured Lady Gaga singing “Mon truc en plumes” flanked by dancers in black wielding humungous pink feathers. I was immediately annoyed. Not by Gaga—she was great—but by the distracting set piece, a glittery set of faux-golden stairs and an oversized street sign that read “PARIS” as if to remind viewers where they were. The stairs had been placed on top of the actual stairs leading from the quay down to the Seine. Paris kitsch on top of the real, actual cobblestone the ceremony purported to celebrate.
And then it occurred to me that this structural overlay of an imagined city offered another parallel to early modern entry ceremonies. Ephemeral architecture was a common feature of ceremonial culture. A temporary bridge, set of stairs, or fountain allowed a city to enhance and/or reconfigure itself to suit the occasion. Ceremonies provided opportunities for cities to mold themselves in their own idealized, aspirational image.
What would it mean to view Gaga’s set within this long tradition of ephemeral architecture? Perhaps it would mean viewing kitschy glitter less as something that covers up or covers over the “real” city’s grit, and more as something that calls attention to the city’s perpetual self-construction.
Anna Rosensweig, University of Rochester
Fig. 3. Still of dancer in white costume. Thomas Jolly, director, Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games.
Galanterie…Dans un décor imitant les jardins de Versailles, un jeune homme esquisse quelques pas de break-dance avant d’entonner un air baroque. Rendu difficile par la pluie et peu visible par les choix de la réalisation, le tableau est pourtant emblématique du projet de la cérémonie. Il met en œuvre une esthétique de l’hybridation qui mêle un patrimoine canonique et les arts urbains les plus contemporains, souvent perçus comme marginaux. L’air choisi – Viens Hymen, un extrait des Indes galantes de Rameau et Fuzelier – constitue une discrète allusion à la mise en scène de cet opéra donnée par Clément Cogitore et Bintou Dembélé à l’occasion de l’anniversaire de l’Opéra de Paris, et qui mariait déjà hip hop, voguing, krump et musique baroque.
Le choix des Indes galantes attire en outre l’attention sur l’un des fils rouges de la cérémonie: la déclinaison du mythe de la “galanterie française,” qui inscrit l’ensemble du spectacle dans la tradition des “fêtes galantes,” inaugurée par les fêtes versaillaises de Louis XIV, poursuivie par les opéras de Rameau, les tableaux de Watteau, les poèmes de Verlaine… et jusqu’aux fêtes organisées aujourd’hui encore par le château de Versailles. De la bibliothèque galante vantant la liberté d’aimer jusqu’à l’Hymne à l’amour final, en passant par les cœurs formés par la patrouille de France et par Barbara Butch, la galanterie française est bien au cœur de la fête. L’hybridation toute baroque à laquelle elle est soumise par le jeu des travestissements et des rencontres lui donne cependant une énergie et une pertinence nouvelle. Si la galanterie fut d’abord une revendication de puissance, affirmant la douceur de la domination française sur l’Europe et le monde, elle est ici relue comme un imaginaire du partage. L’ensemble du spectacle est attentif à désarmer et à dé-nationaliser la galanterie, pour en faire un lieu ouvert de rencontres. Le dialogue avec les pratiques artistiques contemporaines arrache en outre l’imaginaire galant à la nostalgie qui le caractérise au moins depuis Verlaine. La fête galante n’est plus un fantôme, un passé idéalisé et perdu, le rêve d’un petit groupe déplorant la décadence du présent: elle est partout, partagée et tendue vers l’avenir. Elle est l’un des lieux où le passé peut servir à la construction d’un imaginaire commun et ouvert.
Marine Roussillon, Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
Fig. 4. Still of Nathan Paulin crossing the Seine on the slackline with acrobats perched on sway poles and La Samaritaine in the background. Thomas Jolly, director, Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games.
Acrobats…Among the many episodes of the opening ceremony missed by its TV coverage was the acrobatic show performed on the Pont-Neuf by the French circus collective Compagnie XY and directed by choreographer Rachid Ouramdane. Appearing only for a handful of seconds on the screen, the performance went barely noticed by the 1.1 billion TV viewers of the ceremony; it now survives, in fragments, in a few scattered photographs and short amateur videos posted online. These images show the artists performing a variety of acrobatic portés, hand-to-hands and human pyramids, and, most spectacularly, a dozen acrobats in long and colorful dresses perched on the top of tall sway poles, lined along the Pont-Neuf six or seven meters above the ground, like human flowers or rod puppets gently blowing in the Parisian wind. About thirty meters above, a rope-walker, Nathan Paulin, walks – under the rain! – on a slackline stretched across the Seine and the île de la Cité.
Billed as one of the highlights of the opening ceremony (the TV director, it seems, didn’t get the memo), the funambulist’s impressive feat – a 350-meter-long crossing, back and forth – was certainly meant, at least in part, to put in the limelight the Samaritaine building, located at the northern end of the bridge, on the Right Bank, from whose rooftop Paulin departed, and where he eventually (safely) returned. A high-end Art Deco department store which reopened in 2021 after a lavish restoration of sixteen years, La Samaritaine is indeed the flagship of the luxury brand LVMH, the powerful and ubiquitous “premium sponsor” of the Olympics who shaped in good measure, from start to finish, the aesthetics of the opening ceremony. In fact, it is from his Michelin-starred restaurant Le Cheval Blanc, at the top of the building, that Bernard Arnault, the founder and CEO of LVMH – and the wealthiest man in the world in 2024, according to Forbes – is reported to have watched the ceremony.
The value of this acrobatic celebration of the Pont-Neuf – and, more broadly, of Paris – goes however way beyond these branding strategies. Indeed, it reminds us (or would have reminded us, had it been broadcasted) that the Pont-Neuf – the oldest bridge of Paris, in fact, completed in 1607 – was a hotspot for street performers in the seventeenth century. Singers, mountebanks, charlatans, conjurers, puppeteers, animal tamers, illusionists would perform on the bridge, then the only Parisian bridge devoid of houses; and probably acrobats too, even if sauteurs and danseurs de corde seemed to prefer the streets adjacent to the bridge, on the Left Bank, or the river banks themselves, when they were not performing at the annual merchant fair of Saint-Germain and, later in the century, of Saint-Laurent. As for Paulin’s performance on the slackline, it closely evokes another famous and even more ancient acrobatic feat: the stunt performed on 20 August 1389 by a rope-walker on the occasion of the entry of the Queen Isabeau de Bavière into Paris – another kind of opening ceremony. According to the medieval chronicler Jean Froissart, who claims to have witnessed the scene, the acrobat descended on a rope stretched between a tower of Notre-Dame, on the eastern end of the île de la Cité, and the Pont Saint-Michel. Like others did before him – I’m thinking of Philippe Petit’s 1971 clandestine walk between the towers of Notre-Dame – Nathan Paulin added a new chapter to this history of funambulist “flights” above the île de la Cité, at the historical heart of the city.
Sadly, Paulin and his fellow acrobats remained at the margins of the opening ceremony, the whole performance turning, at the hand of a TV director, into a vanishing act. A fitting illustration of how early modern street performers – the predecessors of today’s Pont-Neuf acrobats – have tended to remain at the margins of cultural history.
Thibaut Maus de Rolley, University College London
Selected References
Dechaufour, Pénélope, and Marine Roussillon, eds. Chantier #6: Baroque is Burning. thaêtre, 7 January 2022, www.thaetre.com/2022/01/07/baroque-is-burning-avant-propos/.
Rosensweig, Anna. “Civic Pride and Royal Incorporation: Henri IV in Limoges.” Early Modern French Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2022, pp. 124-37, doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2022.2028447.
Mbembe, Achille, and Alain Mabanckou. “Plaidoyer pour une langue-monde: Abolir les frontières du français.” Revue du crieur, no. 10, 2018, pp. 60-67.
Viala, Alain. La France galante. Presses universitaires de France, 2008.
---. La Galanterie. Une mythologie française. Seuil, 2019.
For more on the Opening Ceremony, see Matthew Gin's must-read "Liberté, Égalité, Festivité: The Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics" from Journal18 (September 2024).
–Chloé Hogg, University of Pittsburgh