France: A Look Back at the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games (2)

Thomas Jolly's Implausible Denials

Pierre Ouzoulias, a Communist senator from the Hauts-de-Seine department of France, had stressed on X (formerly Twitter) that “blasphemy is an integral part of our republican heritage”, and that it is “a glorious feature of our revolutionary history”, thanking Thomas Jolly, artistic director of the ceremony, “for reminding the whole world of it through this Last Supper, which will be remembered for a long time to come”.

Somewhat embarrassed by these overly direct thanks, and other overly hearty congratulations, he felt obliged to make a clarification on July 28: “You will never find in me any desire to mock or denigrate anything. I wanted to create a ceremony that would heal and reconcile. And also reaffirm the values of our Republic [...]”, Thomas Jolly stated on BFMTV.

And to critics of the parody of the Last Supper, he replied that it was “not [his] inspiration”: “I think it was pretty clear that it is Dionysus [the nude dancer] who arrives at this table. Why is he there? Because he's the god of celebration [...], of wine, and father of Sequana, a goddess connected with the river. ”

“The idea was rather to make a great pagan feast linked to the gods of Olympus... Olympus... Olympism,” he continued. And on the subject of the painting of a decapitated Marie Antoinette (holding her head in her arms) in the Conciergerie, he assured that there was no “glorification of that instrument of death that was the guillotine.”

Does he think he can convince anyone? When the revolutionary filiation of his show is explicit. Thomas Jolly's references are neither St. Genevieve, who saved Paris, nor St. Joan of Arc, who saved France, but Olympe de Gouges, drafter of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen in 1791.

Louise Michel, activist and protagonist of the Paris Commune, where she displayed the black flag as a symbol of anarchism; Gisèle Halimi, the lawyer who helped introduce the Veil Law; and Simone Veil, who pushed through the same law in 1975, decriminalizing abortion. These are the people featured in the tableau entitled “Sororité,” offered for public veneration on July 26.

What is more, when he says that he has no intention to mock, he shows great ingratitude toward a man who greatly contributed to the development of his show: the historian Patrick Boucheron, professor at the Collège de France and supporter of the New Popular Front.

Boucheron clearly stated his intention: “to advocate global diversity,” drawing inspiration from “the ceremony crafted by Jean-Paul Goude for the Bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989,” where “the parade thwarted national stereotypes and was not afraid to advocate global diversity with an optimism that we have lost today.”

Patrick Boucheron is known for having strongly criticized the historic theme park Puy du Fou in a long piece published by L'Obs on July 27, 2023. For Boucheron, the opening of the Paris Olympics was not about random denigration, but about targeted mockery of the values promoted at Puy du Fou. This is what he calls “breaking codes.”

Indignation from Several Intellectuals

In Le Figaro on July 28, academician Alain Finkielkraut gave his impressions of the opening ceremony: “A magnificent ceremony that broke all the codes,” ran the headline in Libération. Let's set the record straight: it was a grotesque spectacle, which, from drag queens to Imagine and from the celebration of female solidarity to the beheading of Marie Antoinette (one of the most glorious pages in our history) piously rolled out all the stereotypes of the time.

“On one point, Patrick Boucheron is right: the French genius was conspicuous by its absence.  I'm not talking about greatness.  I don't care about greatness! No, between Lady Gaga's horrible choreography and Philippe Katerine's painful exhibitionism [the nude dancer], where were taste, grace, lightness, delicacy, elegance, or even beauty?

“Beauty no longer exists. The time has come to fight against all forms of discrimination. [...] Thomas Jolly and Patrick Boucheron applaud themselves for their transgressive audacity, even though they are zealous servants of the doxa. A nation resolutely focused on the future entrusts historians with the task of squandering its heritage.

“The Collège de France has long been a center of free thought, but now it has become a bastion of ideology. [...] The diversity of the world is happily swallowed up in the great global melting pot. And it was no longer athletes from every country who paraded before the eyes of a delighted public, it was pleasure boats with overexcited sailors on deck.”

And the agnostic Finkielkraut confides: “The deluge that then fell on the City of Light can only be divine punishment. But every cloud has a silver lining: after that apocalyptic evening, I became a believer.”

In the Journal du dimanche of July 28, atheist philosopher Michel Onfray wrote: “With the help of the Collège de France, Macron has realized the Mélenchonist dream supported by the cultural left: to celebrate the new, deconstructed Man, for a diverse, cosmopolitan, LGBTQ+, etc. ‘new France’.”

From this “kitschy woke Disneyland,” he retains the “parody of the Last Supper, quite spineless and conventional all in all. Can you imagine a parody of the pilgrimage to Mecca among these fake subversives who are really paid by the State? And this celebration of the Terror of 1793. [...]It is clear that we must put an end to this religion, which is the religion of our civilization! How?

“By rediscovering the Terror, the decapitation, the Revolutionary Tribunal, the guillotine. The same people who pantheonize Badinter for having abolished the death penalty at the same time make the guillotine an instrument of government. Attacking Christianity and celebrating the death penalty for a woman whose only crime was being the wife of her royal husband, these are sinister omens indeed.”

In the same issue of Le Journal du dimanche, Philippe de Villiers wrote: “It was hair-raising, crazy, distorted, disgraceful. In front of the whole world, we have recorded the suicide of France, thus assaulted, wounded and dishonored. The mark which runs through the fabric of the poor offended Seine, which in the end was the only one to play its cards right, was deconstruction: taking the past and turning it into a parody to make the quays of Boboland giggle.

The whole apparatus for mocking symbols was there: the Golden Calf in front of the two Macrons, the pastiche of the Last Supper with the drag queens feasting around a sort of Last Supper - a woke Jesus - which profanes the famous painting of the Last Supper, founder of a civilization. [...] As for Mohammed, he's at peace for the evening. No offense, no allusion. “Respect”, as the young people say.

“There are only blasphemy and sacrilege in the Christianophobic form. And then there was the bloody evocation of the Terror, when a diva began the famous . . . song that sent the dissidents of the day to the guillotine.  In front of a Conciergerie ablaze with vengeful backfire, we are shown Marie Antoinette carrying her decapitated head, dripping blood in her hands.”

And the creator of the Puy du Fou show confesses: “Personally, I was not surprised. After all, the artistic team had announced its intention in Le Monde: ‘The last thing we want is a Puy du Fou-style reenactment.  We want to do the opposite. Especially not a virile, heroic, providential history. We want everything to be messy and intertwined.’ Thanks be to them, they kept their promise.”