PARIS — Whether it was Napoleon Bonaparte who said it, or perhaps the revolutionary Georges Jacques Danton, history mainly agrees it was a Frenchman who proclaimed, “Audacity, more audacity, always audacity!”
That devotion to daring, the embrace of breathtaking spectacle (or reckless ambition), has exerted an irresistible tug on French leaders for centuries. And it was the impulse that turned what President Emmanuel Macron called a “not very serious idea” — the notion of staging Friday’s Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics with a flotilla of barges bearing athletes down four miles of the Seine through central Paris — into one of history’s more audacious pageants.
“We decided,” Macron said the other day, “that it was the right moment to deliver this crazy idea and to make it real.”
In France, history, that stage set for spectacle, is always at your heels, or beckoning you to come along. It’s little surprise that among the several creators assigned to imagine and mold the Olympic kickoff — including a celebrated theater director, a novelist and a scriptwriter — is a historian who helped craft a distinctly French narrative to inaugurate these Games, the first in a century hosted by Paris.
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“What makes this ceremony original, I would say, is the maximum risk, but also the beauty,” said the historian, Patrick Boucheron, in a news conference Friday morning. “We will not go around in circles in a stadium, but we will have this panorama, this imaginary parade — that is the power this city has to address the world.”
The narrative of a uniquely imaginative, open and audacious Olympics is what organizers hope to transmit to the more than 11 million visitors thronging the city over the next few weeks, along with a global television audience of some 1.5 billion expected for the Opening Ceremonies alone.
The Games will thus be a counterpoint to France itself, a country whose default querulousness is central to its brand — “a joyous brawl,” in Boucheron’s description. Will the Games in any way unify France? Ridiculous. France, the historian noted, is “a country that knows how to bicker, how to debate.”
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Among the subjects of that debate lately are the Opening Ceremonies themselves, an extravaganza for which more than 300,000 people will be jammed along the Seine — and whose security risks are jaw-dropping.
If there were any doubts that the Olympics would be a target, they were dispelled before dawn on Friday, when saboteurs carried out attacks on high-speed train lines in France. Hundreds of thousands of spectators, as well as some athletes, had planned to use those lines on their way to the Games.
French and other security officials had been warning for months that Russia, embittered at having been all but shut out of these Olympics, or other malicious actors would make every effort to interfere, whether by cyberattack, arson or other means.
And France, it bears remembering, has been the scene of more deaths by terrorist attacks than any other European country in this century — including the horrific coordinated assaults in 2015 on Paris’s main stadium, cafes and a theater.
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That, too, is part of French history. Paris announced its bid to host the 2024 Olympics just months before those attacks. After they occurred, officials said they understood the Games, though still years off, would be part of the city’s recovery, and a demonstration of its resolve.
So when the railways were the target of arson attacks on Friday, there was little sense of surprise. Security officials were surely expecting more attempts, possibly violent ones, meant to interrupt the Games.
“France,” said Boucheron, “is no longer in a position to teach the world any lessons from its history. We live today, we make do with what we have, and we have just one single message. … It is that despite everything, we can still live together.”
The dazzle of the Opening Ceremonies and the rest of the 2024 Games — the events staged against backdrops including the Eiffel Tower, the palace at Versailles, the Place de la Concorde — should provide, barring tragedy, a soupçon of delight.
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No stage is more alluring than Paris. And if the city can pull it off, a place suffused with history will write itself a new chapter, stamped indelibly in the Opening Ceremonies and the days after.
“What we simply want is to produce images that we will remember, that we can talk about tomorrow morning,” Boucheron said. Upon waking, he said, the world will see “some things that will be successful, others failures. ... We all might be a bit groggy.”
