“The whole ceremony was very *you*“ Part 1: Enchanté, really?
Like Paris itself, the 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony had many layers: some visible, many hidden, and a few misunderstood. Yes, there was Joan of Arc and there was blasphemy —just not where you think.
If you don’t want to look at the dark underbelly of how Olympic preparations, including the opening ceremony, affected Parisians at street level, skip directly to “What you saw but maybe didn’t get”, where I dive into symbols and hidden cultural references.
Disclaimer: I am neither connected to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), nor to the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee, nor to the creative team led by artistic director Thomas Jolly. The following is about my lived experience leading to, and during, the actual ceremony in Paris. I am a cisgender heterosexual able-bodied neurotypical white Parisian bourgeois man who appears middle-aged, and often walks in strange Parisian locations wearing a tailcoat, a top hat, and a leather mask with golden gears around the eyes. This will be important for later.
What you didn’t see before the ceremony
In the city, with the city, or using the city?
A few days before the opening ceremony, I posted a video advertising my GPS-guided audio walks, and commenting on the fact that the Paris Olympics were clearly designed to look good for TV cameras and for ticket holders, but not for Parisians.
You may have seen reports about how the security measures, set up weeks in advance, virtually trapped residents in mazes of tall metal fences, sometimes affecting people’s access to services, including medical care. It also killed foot traffic to many cafés, restaurants and other small businesses that rely on the usually busy touristic month of July. Due to empty streets, and to the need to show government-issued QR codes to access the central security perimeters, many compared the situation to Covid lockdowns. Except this time, staff salaries were not reimbursed by the state, so the financial losses were much larger. These Olympic lockdowns also affected Parisians who neither lived nor worked in central arrondissements, and were just trying to go from point A to point B in what is usually a highly walkable -and now cyclable- city.
Longtime Paris lovers will argue that, from demonstrations to Bastille Day fireworks to construction sites, Parisians are used to temporary traffic disruptions, blockades and a changing urban landscape. But these disruptions are compensated by significant benefits for a large proportion of the population. What is a temporarily longer commute or more packed metro, compared to the communal pleasure of forcing the government to overturn an unpopular law, watching world-class fireworks for free while picnicking, or even getting a whole new tram line? But for the Olympics, Parisians have been enduring major disruptions, while reaping only minor benefits. First, Paris is already one of the most visited cities in the world: it just doesn’t need more tourists. Second, the handful of free concerts & shows organized by local municipalities as side events to the games doesn’t actually make up for the many non-Olympic cultural events that were canceled due to Olympics logistics. But the worst are probably events that did happen, but that excluded most Parisians. The Bastille Day fireworks were shot at the Eiffel Tower as usual, but the Champs de Mars esplanade, where hundreds of thousands usually gather, was off-limits because of Olympic structures. That night, the city was full of confused Parisians and tourists desperately roaming around town to find any view of the show from any possible angle. Sadly, the best place to watch it was online.
Olympic structures are not just off limits, they’re so massive they also block Paris’ famous perspectives. The archery field taking up the Esplanade des Invalides has cameras on very high ziplines, so it will look great on TV and for paying customers, with both the Eiffel Tower and Alexandre III bridge in the background. But all regular pedestrians get at street level are opaque barriers, chain link fences, and the back of massive grandstands. This may sound like nothing to you. But in the most densely populated capital of Europe, characterized in part by pollution, expensive rents and tiny apartments, a major upside is you can look at centuries of glorious architecture and walk through incredible perspectives at anytime, for free. No Parisian will demand that they should be let in every private event, or attend the theatre or football matches for free. But if a game or a performance is blocking their view and their freedom of movement, damn right they want to be able to at least take a peek. In Paris, public space belongs to everyone. Sadly, its privatization kept getting worse until the Opening Ceremony.
Social cleansing
While there are some positive effects, the games’ detrimental effects on working class neighbourhoods have been years in the making. They are beyond the scope of this article, and well covered in a book. On top of systemic urban changes, at least seven workers died while building games-related infrastructure. Some had emigrated to France just to work. Macron’s “new school right-wing” (indeed, not centrist) administration tries to maintain a “tough on immigration” image, but they sure seem to enjoy the cheaper, more disposable workers that enabled the Olympics to happen. Furthermore, while many Parisians cannot afford Olympic event tickets, some cannot even afford rent. Many unhoused people, including children, were bused outside of Paris for the same reason the sports venues where built near iconic sites. Paris needed to look picture-perfect on TV: the Olympics wanted shots that included both athletes and monuments, and excluded poor people. Months ago, people living in tents were expelled from the very banks of the river Seine where the ceremony would take place. But even more remote bridges and canals were violently “emptied” by police, often with massive blocks of concrete placed there to prevent people from coming back. One such location is now a temporary Olympic bicycle parking spot. The hunt didn’t stop at the ceremony sites, as police also expelled young undocumented migrants from Spot 13, one of my favourite open air street art galleries.
Apparently, even this wasteland under a highway overpass was deemed too luxurious for them - or too visible. People who escaped the roundups just relocated further south within Paris, such as in my 14th arrondissement. As it featured no Olympic sites, there would be no cameras, so there was no need to chase the poor away: they got to stay. But to discourage these escapees from actually staying in Paris, the police even banned charities from operating in the streets during the Olympics. So even if poor people managed not to get arrested, or placed in psychiatric wards with instructions to keep them in until the end of the games, they would not have access to their usual food and hygiene supplies. See this report (in English) by “Le revers de la médaille” (the flipside of the medal) for more. Targets of this “social cleansing” are not limited to unhoused people: sex workers have been harassed by police even on rue Saint-Denis, which has been a tolerated sex work location since the Middle-Ages. And this goes beyond sex work: overnight, hedges in the gardens between the Louvre and the Tuileries were cut in half. Due to its original height, this maze-like structure had been a gay hookup spot for centuries. HIV/AIDs non-profit organization AIDES, who parks their van nearby to offer onsite STI testing, risk reduction and outreach, doesn’t know where they went. Men still have sex with men outdoors somewhere in Paris, but in more hidden locations, and without the condoms or health checks provided by the NGO. As the time of the opening ceremony drew nearer, displacements and barriers kept both intensifying and climbing up the social ladder, affecting even the posh residents of central Paris. The maze was about to turn into an actual mouse trap. A bourgeois mouse trap, but still a trap.
No man’s land
It’s important to mention that many of these negative elements are neither to blame on the Paris municipal administration nor on the creators or the ceremony. For example, metro tickets, which were supposed to be free, ended up being twice the usual price. This was imposed not by the mayor, but by the “old-school right-wing” administration of the Greater Paris region, who has authority over public transportation. Likewise, to be as inclusive as possible, the ceremony was meant to welcome 600’000 spectators, spread all along the Seine, with paying seats on the lower banks and on the bridges, and a lot of free tickets on the upper banks. This number was halved by the police (which is run by Macron appointees, and Macron himself was part of the ceremony security meetings), suddenly making the ceremony much less inclusive. Of course, the police did not achieve this cut by removing paying seats, but by completely emptying entire sections of the cheaper/free upper banks, officially for security reasons. You may remember that, due to public outrage (wrongfully aimed at Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo), Macron eventually overturned his own appointee’s decision to remove bouquinistes’ boxes from the banks during the ceremony. So sure, the boxes were still there on the day. I saw them. They were closed. And the bouquinistes themselves were nowhere to be seen. As a matter of fact, no one was: as a soldier armed with an assault rifle kept repeating to me, they had been ordered to turn these banks a “no man’s land”. And I had to leave. Now. Even local residents had to leave the streets and the edge of the banks. You read that right: people who lived on these banks, who already had to endure tall metal cages for days, were not allowed to step foot in their own, exceptionally car-free street during the ceremony. They had to stay inside their apartments, or behind those very same barriers that were so far from the Seine that they couldn’t see anything. Unlike the happy people shown at the balconies on TV, people who lived on lower floors, who are often poorer, had all of the disadvantages of the ceremony, and none of the advantages.
I was present on the upper banks legally: I had booked a hotel within the perimeter, so that once all car and pedestrian traffic would be blocked as announced, I would already be inside the perimeter. I uploaded photo ID and proof of hotel booking to the police website, and received my QR code. I knew this was not a ceremony ticket, and I did not expect a seat or a good view, just to be allowed in the general vicinity of the river Seine as per the map. But the “grey perimeter” published on the police website omitted one major thing. It was not one perimeter, but rather multiple perimeters that were not displayed online. Rather than one “safe zone” where people would be free to roam, it was a series of large metal cages designed to corral legally present people, like me, away from the show, very early on. I did enter the zone, but made the mistake of stopping for lunch. The zone was already so secured that on the way to the café, I ran into a former prime minister and current head of the RATP transport authority, who was having lunch outside a tattoo parlor/restaurant with the current foreign minister. While still hours early, I did not reach my intended picnic/watching spot in time, and kept getting stopped by new fences and armed men.
Over the years, I have been stopped by many types of law enforcement, but this is the first time in my life I am ordered to move along the river banks for hours by half-a-dozen different types of security: uniformed police officers, plainclothes police officers, uniformed gendarmes (a branch of the military, who usually polices the countryside), plainclothes gendarmes (a first in Paris, but easier to spot due to their shorter haircuts and preppier clothes than police), soldiers with assault weapons, and Olympics private security. And the worst part is these forces acted like ticket checkers, not security. Of the six checkpoints I went through, none actually searched my picnic bag. While my utensils were made of disposable flimsy wood, the bag did contain unopened glass bottles of champagne and a bottle of rosé. And even though my QR code was valid, as confirmed by the police scanners, every officer challenged my right to be there, trying to find any reason to deny me entry to the cages, or to remove me from them. When I asked for some rationale for this “bait and switch” approach, they replied they were just following orders, and these orders were now to kick people out. Furthermore, most officers were not from Paris, so it was quite hilarious to see them trying to check my story and knowledge of Parisian geography by frantically scrolling through GoogleMaps in front of me.
The worst part was the various squads didn’t have the same orders, and said orders and perimeters kept changing during the afternoon and evening. These changes may be due to the sabotage near train lines in the countryside earlier in the morning, but as Paris Centre mayor Ariel Weil explained on The Earful Tower podcast, some officers were not exactly well trained. Some even denied the existence of any special QR code for the opening ceremony, so I had to beg them to use their scanners. Some had directly conflicting orders, so they sent me bouncing between two bridges like a pinball, for hours. At some point, one of the senior officers started yelling in his radio, asking people to stop changing orders and rules for access all the time, because he couldn’t keep up. As a middle-aged looking white man dressed in a fancy outfit, I have the privilege of not being racially or socially profiled by the police. But that day, they were both confused and on the edge. Unlike the unhoused people above, I was not hit or bused away, just yelled at, and made to leave, again and again, in multiple directions, for kilometers. I would sometimes end up in backstreets, with similarly confused Parisians who also had QR codes, and were trying to get any look at the Seine. It was Bastille Day all over again, only ten times worse.
I ended up in one of the largest cages between the Seine and the Louvre museum. It was so packed with people who had been kicked out from everywhere else, that it started to look like a Covid cluster in the making. There were official tents selling drinks and foods, giant screens… but absolutely no view onto the river. I can enjoy a communal watch party for any event, but when the actual show is happening just a few meters from you, but you’re not allowed to see it because your approved location is just not designed for it, it’s a sad joke, not a party. At that point I decided to leave: if I had to watch it on a screen, it might as well be in a place where I could actually sit down and access a real toilet. Except the rules of that cage had changed again, and my entry point was now closed, and I was yelled at again for having legally entered through that very spot minutes earlier. The army was basically kettling us. I eventually found the new exit point at the other end of the cage, and went back to my hotel. Like most people around the world, I just watched the ceremony on a screen. But this proved to be the way it was intended to be watched. People who did have tickets did not have an ideal experience either.
What those on site didn’t see during the ceremony
They didn’t see most of it, at least live. When I first learned that the ceremony would be on boats, last for hours and feature many live performances, I wondered how they would manage the fact that the audience would be stationary, but the athletes moving on the river. What of the performers? Would they mingle with the athletes? Would there be athlete boats and artists boats? If the performers were stationary, would they repeat their performance for hours? The answer was once again: the priority is to look good on TV. So each performance would happen only once, in one spot: good for you if you had a seat at that spot, but you would watch the rest of the show on a giant screen, like the rest of the world. If you didn’t have a seat at a performance spot, too bad! Due to the rain, a lot of the BMX, skateboarding and acrobatics were pre-recorded earlier in the day, meaning that people who were seated at those spots didn’t actually see “their” live show. Spending €1500 or more to watch a few moving fountains and many boats for hours can get old quickly.
As the rain kept getting worse, some audience members left after just an hour, fuming. They felt like they had been used as extras by the TV producers to fuel the “massive popular event” narrative, rather than as a paying audience for a live show. But let’s put things in perspective: feeling ripped off when you can afford a €1500 ticket in the first place is nothing compared to what unhoused people went through because of the Olympics.
Congratulations if you’ve survived until here, you’ve clearly earned a few explanations about what people could actually see on TV.
What you saw but maybe didn’t get
From what I understood, image feeds were provided by the IOC TV production team, but each media was doing their own live commentary. I watched the BBC version on the next day, and they did miss many of the cultural references, but apparently it was still better than NBC’s coverage in the US. Part of the lack of information was due to the secrecy maintained by the creative team. It’s hard to prepare contextualization notes when the details you have are on the athletes, and not on the actual show. On top of this, part of the performances included some really cool, but pretty niche references. I think the show was visually entertaining for everyone, but if you knew French culture well, you were in for a treat.
A blasphemous prologue
Yes, there was blasphemy during the the opening ceremony, but not where you think: right at the beginning. The first scene opens with a man carrying the Olympic torch into the empty Stade de France: comedian Jamel Debbouze. Some English-speakers described him as “the grocer from Amélie”, but he is so much more. He’s one of France’s favourite personalities, accross all art forms, and rather than film, he is more famous for live performances and TV comedy series. He later used his fame and fortune to start US-style stand-up comedy shows in France. His Jamel Comedy Club both refreshed the standard format of French humor (traditionally theatrical skits and very written monologues), and allowed an entirely new generation of comics, often from ethnic minorities, to gain national recognition. When football legend Zinedine Zidane arrives on screen, Debbouze exclaims “Zizou Christ!”. Zizou is Zidane’s nickname, and the word sounds a bit like “Jésus” in French (so much that the French TV subtitles wrote “Jésus Christ”, not “Zizou Christ”). It’s important to note that, unlike in English, “Jesus Christ!” is not an expletive in French. It is not a phrase current French people use to express surprise or anger. So “Zizou Christ” literally makes fun of the fact that Zidane is a living god to many French people, and guess what? He literally saves the day, and grabs the torch from Jamel to bring it to the ceremony, saying “I’ll take care of it”. By replying his appreciative “Ça fait plaisir” catchphrase, followed by “Merci Zizou”, Jamel literally accepts Zizou as his lord & saviour and gives thanks. Blasphemous enough for you? And by the way, both men are Muslims (Zidane describes himself as non-practicing, while religion is more important and private for Debbouze). While Jesus/Isa is a prophet in Islam too, Muslims would not refer to him as the Son of God, God incarnate or the Savior. See how the French are ready to have fun with religion in their very first scene? Strangely, neither the French Catholic church (who don’t have the language barrier excuse) nor the American religious right (who do) picked up on Zizou Christ. They decided to focus on another godly reference, we’ll see why later.
Zizou dans le métro
The action then switches to Zidane running from the Stade de France directly into a fantasy Paris, straight out of Jacques Demy’s 1960s musicals, complete with jazzy soundtrack, tiny cars and pastel colors.
That’s when I started to be scared: were we going to get the usual old-timey Paris that had already been parodied by Flight of the Conchords fifteen years ago, and that made Emily in Paris feel so irrelevant and dated to Parisians?
Thankfully, the “rancid old France” vibe was immediately alleviated by the presence of racial diversity, including three children on modern means of transportation. This guaranteed the show would not just be about middle-aged stars and nostalgia, but would also include the new generation in all its diversity. And more practically, children who were still up at this time of broadcasting would be in for a treat.
Zidane then disappears into one of the most beautiful Guimard metro station entrances: Porte Dauphine, with its enameled lava panels and “dragonfly” glass & iron awning. A nice touch inside was that ads had been replaced with old Olympic posters (including Paris 1924). The inside of the station says “Stade de France”, but it is actually “Porte des Lilas-Cinéma”, the ghost station used by most film crews (and the only one that the RATP would allow an open flame in). Surprisingly, the RATP did allow showing a metro failure, which was brave of them, considering how bad service had been since Covid, due to the aforementioned right-wing management. Stuck in an old school metro car (none of that modern line 14 design, this is nostalgia time!) Zizou then hands the torch to the children who sneak into the forbidden parts of the metro tunnels (again, a bold decision from RATP) and magically disappear via an entrance to the catacombs. Yes, these were the real catacombs, or rather municipal ossuary, but no, they are not connected to the metro. For more on the catacombs and underground Paris in general, check out my audio walks.
Yes, the skulls are real, but there are no rats in the catacombs, because there is no food (unlike in the sewers, see below). The children then emerge into to the Canal Saint-Martin, actually located in a part of Paris with no catacombs… but again, artistic licence: that fictional connection was also used by the creators of the Netflix horror film Sous la Seine (Under Paris, though I prefer its nickname Shark de Triomphe). The children then get chased by a crocodile, which is based on the true story of the crocodile found in the Paris sewers. I also recommend the more poetic children’s book version of that story, by Lina Nordin-Gee & Oliver Gee. The trio then meets a mysterious hooded figure in a rowing boat. While he does look a bit scary, and some will see a reference to Charon, the ferryman of the Greek underworld, he actually provides the children with lifejackets. This is still a family show, so safety first: he wants the children to live, and their mission to succeed. The blue, white and red life jackets are also a hint about the amount of tricolor we’re about to see. We then cut back to live shots. Apart from image quality, the difference in the intended sunny golden hour of the pre-recorded shots and the actual gloomy weather on the day did not help with suspension of disbelief, but it worked overall. We’re here to be entertained, by ancient rituals, by fairy tales, and the first tableau is actually called….
Enchanté
In French, “Enchanté!” is a way to say you’re delighted to meet someone the first time, but it also literally means “enchanted”, i.e. imbued with magic. Children appear in the Seine holding the torch, in the Torchbearer’s boat, under the decorated Austerlitz bridge, to the musical theme of the ceremony composed by Victor Le Masne. While it may just sound like an upbeat, strings-rich tune to you, for French people over 40 it definitely feels like an homage to the opening sequence of the TV show “Champs Elysées”. This 1980s variety show started with a very similar upbeat, strings-rich tune, with all the guests arriving one by one in separate cars (of various sizes), usually with chauffeurs. They would salute the crowd on the red carpet, under arches, and only then enter the TV studio. Similarly, in this opening ceremony, delegations arrived one by one, in boats (of various sizes) with a pilot, would salute the crowd, under arches, with the Seine as the red carpet, before entering the final TV studio.
Side by side comparison here, with both musical themes.
On top of the giant tricolor smoke curtain rising from the bridge, and to hammer out the fact that “Enchanté” is about French stereotypes, accordion player Félicien Brut wears blue, white, red, a beret and plays Edith Piaf. Not any song though: “La foule” a love song about meeting a stranger in a festive crowd in the city, i.e. what is supposed to happen tonight. Piaf is also known for “La vie en rose” and “life in pink” suddenly materializes on the banks: the children and Torchbearer move through a crowd where everyone is happy, dances, is dressed in pink à la Emily in Paris or Barbie (or real-life Paris rugby team Stade Français, also featured). Some people are dressed as culinary specialties (I saw a croissant, a pièce montée, and a macaron), but also a pink rat. The international crowd will think of Ratatouille, but Parisians will think of the very real rats that have been at tad too visible lately, especially during the last garbage collector strike. But these real rats actually prevent the sewers from getting clogged by “digesting” their content, so I’m glad they got featured too!
Lady Gaga is the first mystery guest, but she did not perform during the ceremony: because of the rain, the staircase was unsafe, so the performance was recorded earlier during the day and broadcast at its intended time. Yes, this means that people who did have a seat in front of that spot had to watch it on a screen, like the rest of us. I found the choice of Zizi Jeanmaire’s song “Mon truc en plume” (”my feathered thing”) quite courageous. French “r” and “u” sounds are hard to pronounce for Americans, the song is rather long, and completely unknown to many audiences. Like the aesthetic of the Zidane run, the song is from the 1960s, at a time when feathered cabaret shows were still big for people other than tourists. Therefore, this musical number caters not only to Gaga fans, but also to the “over 60 demographic”: this is a family show, aimed to please both grandparents and grandchildren. Importantly, this cross-generational aspect remained present throughout the ceremony’s soundtrack. The music was extremely meaningful, but sadly often inaudible in the TV mix. But songs were so famous that young French people on Twitter recognized them quickly, and posted series of sarcastic comments about how the show was like a wedding DJ’s setlist, or attending a party where everyone was over 30. There was indeed more 1960s content, with Gainsbourg’s “Initials B.B.” (about Brigitte Bardot) but also 1980s classics like the soundtrack to cult teen film “La Boum” and Les Rita Mitsouko’s “Marcia Baila”.
The Torchbearer then leaves the banks and starts running on rooftops and ziplining across the Seine. Fans of video games immediately got the nod to Assassin’s Creed: Unity (Ubisoft is a French industrial success, so it was a way to both get popular buy-in and remind the world that France is not just about uptight art). Furthermore, one of the most viral videos about Paris already revolves around people doing parkour dressed as Assassin’s Creed characters, which enabled me to identify one of the people behind the mask (more on this later). Ironically, this video starts with gendarmes forcing a poor person to vacate a touristy spot, in front of Notre-Dame.
For the older crowd, the Torchbearer could also be one of the many masked characters from 19th century French novels (long before American superheroes), or later films and TV series: the Man in the Iron Mask, Belphégor, Fantômas, Arsène Lupin, the Phantom of the Opera etc. As a masked Parisian myself, with an affinity for catacombs and rooftops, and having been called all those names by passer-bys, I started to feel represented, and later concurred when one of my followers DMed me: “the whole ceremony was very you”.
Once thing that the IOC TV crew mostly missed during “Enchanté” were the many giant-headed caricatures. Some were world famous, like mime Marcel Marceau, some less, and yes, there was Joan of Arc.
This is the certified Joan of Arc appearance at the ceremony, the later one is something else. The giant heads said two things: first this is a party, a street celebration (they are often used in carnivals), second this is France, we like our caricatures (remember Charlie Hebdo?) and we very well know we are currently describing a caricature of Paris. As a final confirmation that the organizers fully knew this was not real Paris but “postcard Paris”, there were literal, giant pink postcards of Paris pinned to the banks of the river.
But things were about to get real: even cancan, as cliché as it gets, was described as a “working class, anticlerical, antipatriarcal, antimilitary, and profoundly revolutionary” dance by costume designer Daphné Bürki. The tone of the ceremony was about to change.
To be continued! If you enjoyed these explanations, please consider purchasing my audio walks here. I share all kinds of stories about unknown parts of Paris, and even if you’re not physically there right now, you can listen to them at home, like a podcast.
Wow, so interesting! Thank you for this!