Some 18 months ago an eminent historian, a screenwriter, an award-winning novelist and a playwright began writing the script for the open-air parade that will launch the Paris Games on Friday. They had the onerous task of imagining a three-hour show that could speak not just to the French but to some 1.5 billion viewers worldwide.
On Friday at 7:30pm around 326,000 spectators on tiered seating on the banks and bridges of the river Seine will begin watching a spectacular waterborne show.
Thousands more will be glued to 80 massive screens along the route, and an estimated 1.5 billion worldwide.
So what will they be watching?
The 7,000 or so athletes sailing in a flotilla of vessels of course, but also a story about Paris – its history and monuments and how they've shaped present-day France and its people.
It will likely not be the greatest story ever told, but it could indeed be a great story.
And you could scarcely dream of a bigger stage – a six-kilometre stretch of the river Seine with the city of Paris itself as the set.
Whatever happens, and there is a degree of unpredictability, it will go down in history as the first Olympic opening ceremony to take place outside a stadium.
“For the first time we’re not going to go round in circles in a stadium but over a 6km stretch of water,” says historian Patrick Boucheron, one of the four writers enlisted by the ceremony’s artistic director Thomas Jolly to script the show.
“We’re going to give a voice to the City of Paris – she has the leading role on this extraordinary stage,” he told RFI.
Reconnaissance on the river
When Jolly and the four writers began their collective adventure at the end of 2022, the route had already been traced out.
Beginning in the east at the Gare d’Austerlitz, heading past relics of the Middle Ages including Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Conciergerie – where Marie-Antoinette was imprisoned – Le Louvre and the glass-domed Grand Palais, it ends at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
“We put on our puffer jackets and went out on boats up and down the river from the Austerlitz bridge to the Eiffel Tower,” Jolly told Le Monde daily.
“We looked at everything that was part of the history of Paris – the streets, the monuments, the squares, the statues. We went through literary correspondence, films, musicals."
After much brainstorming they wrote, in secret, for about nine months.
Wary of being drawn into the dreamlike Paris of the French cult film Amelie Poulain or American Netflix series Emily in Paris they knew they had to “play with the clichés, the American take on France, but without poking fun,” Jolly said.
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12 scenes to paint a portrait of the time
They divided the show into 12 tableaus – along, above and even rising out of the Seine – intermingled with the parade of athletes on some 90 boats.
More than 3,000 dancers and actors will perform on the quayside and bridges.
Each tableau draws on the city’s emblems and what they evoke both past and present, taking the world on a journey through Parisian history and architecture.
Notre-Dame Cathedral, for example, means many things to different people – a Gothic monument, a link to 19th-century writer Victor Hugo, but also a raging inferno.
“The last time the world saw Notre-Dame on television it was on fire," says Boucheron. "So there isn’t just a story of pride and grandeur but also one of emotion, of reconstruction.
"That's basically the story we wanted to stage – about the dogged and creative will to live together despite everything.”
Boucheron, who's described himself as a "historian in love with the present", says the ceremony had to address as many people as possible.
"It’s not like throwing a party and putting on your favourite playlist. It has to speak from the world to France and from France to the world.
"We just tried to paint a portrait of the time, so that people could relate to it.”
He insists on the originality of putting the story in motion on the Seine to “try and build a sense of momentum”.
Value of joy and excitement
President Emmanuel Macron said the ceremony would offer a “great story of emancipation and freedom” – going from the 1789 French Revolution through to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed at the spot where the parade ends.
While the details of the ceremony are shrouded in secrecy, there's a presumption that French values will be celebrated in some way or other, though there's little consensus nowadays on what those values are.
French-Moroccan novelist Leila Slimani, another of the storytellers, says she appreciates the way Paris values collective effort – how "we’re capable of building the unthinkable when we’re together,” she told Le Monde.
She said the four writers wanted their story to have a generous spirit.
“There had to be joy, emulation, movement, excitement and sparkle, and not just those famous traditional philosophical values that France likes to display with sometimes too much confidence.”
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No repeat of Rugby World Cup
The team watched old videos of previous opening ceremonies, including Beijing 2008, whose history lesson to the world was precisely what they didn't want to emulate.
They identified more with London 2012, with its mix of UK pop culture, pomp, history and self-deprecating humour.
Meanwhile, last September’s Rugby World Cup opening ceremony in Paris served “as a counter-example”, Boucheron said.
Featuring Jean Dujardin, the Oscar-winning actor from "The Artist", sporting beret and baguette, cycling round a mock-up of 1950s French villages waving to milkmaids and dancers, the show was panned by many critics as an outdated, clichéd representation of France. And a very inward-looking France at that.
“We can’t just settle for an old-fashioned image, nor an ode to the present," the historian maintains.
"History is in flux, we have to remember that a nation is not an identity, it’s a project, a political project. So it speaks to the future.
“That’s why we have this big travelling along the Seine, to try and get everyone on board."
Bicentennial of the French Revolution
Among the more inspirational shows, Boucheron cites the 1989 ceremony marking the bicentennial of the French Revolution, with spectacular scenography by Jean-Paul Goude.
Boucheron was 20 years old at the time and watching it convinced him to become a historian.
“It was a moment of acute historical awareness, A lot of things were happening in the world in 1989, in the Soviet Union, in China [with the Tiananmen Square protest].
"At that time we could still proclaim loud and clear the values of what was then called multicultural France. It's become more difficult, there’s a form of disenchantment, but we must not let ourselves be intimated.”
A few weeks ago there were genuine concerns that the far-right National Rally could take power in France following parliamentary elections. In that case, Jolly said the show would have been "transformed into a sort of ceremony of resistance".
In the end, Marine Le Pen’s party did well, but not well enough to require a rewrite.
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However, the need to resist violence remains.
"We desperately need this moment of peace and sharing, a moment suspended in time, far from the violence that’s breaking out everywhere," Slimani said.
"I very much hope that the audience will let themselves go with the flow. On 26 July we all have to find the child within us, the joy of discovering. It’s become so rare."
