They had waited 100 years for it and the French, mostly, were determined to love their kitsch, crazy, subversive, waterborne and very rain-drenched Olympics opening ceremony. Less happy were far-right figures, who spied “wokeist” propaganda.
A thoroughly unscientific poll on the rue de Rochechouart in Paris – where the far right have never had so much as a look-in – found plenty of enthusiasm.
“It was a great ceremony – just a shame about the rain,” said Alain Vigent, 54. “It was like us, really: a joyful, contradictory, rather chaotic mess. With some truly amazing images. The Revolution, the singing head of Marie Antoinette …”
Outside the greengrocers, Sandrine de Souza, 38, said that after weeks of political stress and what had looked at one stage like the prospect of a far-right government, “all that exuberance” and “the willingness to go a bit mad” were very welcome.
“I understand some of it might have looked a bit strange to some people outside France,” she said. “But every Olympic host country loves its own opening ceremony. I remember London, that was a great spectacle. But you also had that whole chunk with nurses and doctors – it looked fun, but I don’t think anyone else understood it.”
President Emmanuel Macron, who when he first heard of the idea of staging the show along 6km of the Seine, with the great monuments of Paris as decor, had dismissed it as “not very serious”, led the praise, thanking Thomas Jolly, the show’s director, effusively on Friday night.
“Thank you and your creative genius for this grandiose ceremony,” Macron said on X. “Thank you to the artists for this unique, magical moment. Thank you to the police and emergency services and volunteers. Thank you to all who believed … We did it!”
The press were equally enthusiastic. “Beneath the deluge, the capital and its river, the Seine, became the theatre for a dreamlike spectacle that acknowledged the history of a France that is mixed, inclusive and unafraid of controversy,” said Le Monde.
The paper compared the show to those that “travelling theatre troupes put on centuries ago, when they crossed the city” to drum up business, or “the touring circuses that still parade in our streets: a parade of acrobats, to fill the big top”.
That was the joy of Friday evening, France’s newspaper of record said: “a charm of fire eaters, tightrope walkers and tumblers”, giving the necessary procession of international delegations “an air of celebration, in an extraordinary ceremony”.
Libération hailed “a succession of collages imbued with inclusivity and self-deprecation”, a “catharsis that was all the more welcome” after the stress of France’s snap elections and “sublimated by the rain that turned into an artistic asset”.
The ceremony, watched by more than 23 million people in France, was a successful “mix of Parisian picture postcards, performances from stars and a mashup of styles” the paper said. Le Parisien, too, was blown away by “an unbelievable evening”.
The opening ceremony was “exceptional, surprising, often fascinating” the paper said, albeit also “very damp and, at times, frustrating”. Many French media outlets translated the international reaction to the show, also largely positive.
For Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung it was “spectacular”, while Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo called it “a ceremony built around diversity … that will stay in Olympic legend.” The New York Times liked the “blaze of French style blending history and artistic audacity”, and the Washington Post said the ceremony showed “bold thinking could bring a shine back to a global event” and wished Los Angeles, the next host, good luck doing better.
(They did not bother translating some of the British headlines, which, in the proud tradition of much UK media coverage of France, were distinctly less flattering. “La Farce” was the verdict of the Daily Mail, describing it as a “surreal opening ceremony dubbed ‘the worst ever’”, while for the Times it was “a damp squib of a show”.)
For the conservative Le Figaro, the ceremony was also “a grandiose and sumptuous spectacle”. But it also complained about “multiple ideological escapades” that spoiled the effect and may, it suspected, have been aimed at stirring controversy.
“As if,” commentator Paul Sugy said, “at the moment when it celebrates its pride and its history, France cannot help drawing from its revolutionary guts the spirit of provocation and discord that has always fuelled its paradoxes and divisions.”
France’s far right – which, but for the “republican front” and mass tactical voting that pushed it back to third place in the second round of this month’s parliamentary elections, might very well have been in government – was frankly outraged.
Although Marine Le Pen did not react, her ultra-conservative niece Marion Maréchal said she was watching the opening ceremony with her children but finding it “hard to appreciate the rare successful scenes” amid such “crude woke propaganda”.
In between “the decapitated Marie Antoinettes, the kissing threesomes, the drag queens, the humiliation of the Garde républicaine forced to dance to Aya Nakamura, the general ugliness of the costumes and choreography”, Maréchal said, “we’re left desperately seeking a celebration of the values of sport and the beauty of France”.
Nakamura, who was born in Mali and grew up in the northern Paris suburbs, is the most listened-to French singer in the world, but even the suggestion that she would be singing at the ceremony drew virulent far-right criticism earlier this year.
“Shameful!” tweeted Julien Odoul, the spokesman for Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN), of the singer’s performance on Friday night. “Aya Nakamura, no way! The opening of the Olympic Games is the ransacking of French culture.”
Odoul and others also took exception to a particularly startling scene in which the singer Philippe Katerine appeared (almost) naked in a fruit bowl. “In the eyes of the world, France is the incarnation of beauty, elegance and romanticism,” he said.
“In the space of an evening, the organisers of the opening ceremony have accomplished the feat of devastating the image of our country. It’s enough to make you weep.”
Far right and conservative Catholic ire was mostly targeted at the assembly of drag queens who posed in imitation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. This was “not France speaking, but a left-wing minority ready for any provocation”, Maréchal posted in English. Secular France allows blasphemy, seen as part of free speech.
The author and translator Bérengère Viennot had the final word. “This ceremony married classical and popular culture, atrocious taste and High History, wokeism and unchecked humour, technical prowess and the genius of Piaf – and has succeeded in provoking a terrific argument,” she said. “It’s a perfect allegory of the French spirit.”
