Olympics 2024: "We Enacted Before the Whole World the Suicide of France"
Phillippe de Villiers, French entrepreneur, politician and novelist, and founder of the Puy du Fou historical theme park, has described the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympic games as “the suicide of France,” in Le Journal du Dimanche (27/7/24). Villiers writes that “everything was ugly, everything was woke.” Here is a rough and slightly abbreviated translation:
“The ceremony aimed to be inclusive…. With my experience in live performance, I obviously watched for the subliminal behind the pink feathers, fire jets, and the light nets of the skytracers. Beyond the few passages in the first and last minutes between Nadal and Céline Dion, between the values of Olympism and the evocation of the eternal Piaf, everything was ugly, everything was woke.
It was wild, crazy, misshapen, disgraceful. We enacted before the whole world the suicide of France, violated, wounded, dishonoured…All the apparatus of the mockery of symbols was there: the Golden Calf before the two Macrons, the pastiche of the Last Supper with drag queens feasting around a Christ-like Eucharist – a woke Jesus – desecrating the famous painting of the Last Supper, foundational to a civilization.
To be honest, from the first scene in the Stade de France, everything was already said by Jamel Debbouze, who, with a hint of casual irony, calls (the French football manager) Zidane “Jesus Christ”! Mockery was the order of the day. From this address, one understands that Christianity is going to take a hit.
Muhammad, on the other hand, is safe for the evening. No offense, no allusion. “Respect,” as young people say. Blasphemy and sacrilege only come in the form of Christianophobia. And then there was that bloody evocation of the Terror, when a diva began the famous song of the sans-culottes that sent the dissidents of the time to the guillotine…
Where was the soul of France’s grandeur?
It was an evening where blood flowed in the Seine, where the vindictive mixed with the festive. Ahhh, the festive!
It was Love and even the promotion of Polyamory – love among three – with a peak of aesthetics superior to the Discobolus: Philippe Katerine, in Adam’s attire, with blue skin, posed as a decadent jester, slumped under a bridge, in an atmosphere of bacchanalia.
There was jubilant terror, but also generous orgy: the “threesome,” men in dresses and high heels. Just in case the children are watching... Where was the soul of France’s grandeur? We saw ten statues of women emerge. The only one missing was the patron saint of Paris, Saint Genevieve. Attila opposed it at the Paris Council….Joan of Arc was also not there, (vetoed by)…Professor Patrick Boucheron (co-writer of the Olympics ceremony), who prefers the voices of Lady Gaga.
On the other hand, there was Aya Nakamura, who made the poor Republican Guard sing Djadja, twisting themselves in a grotesque dance to celebrate the heavy rain….In all this, real emotion was absent. The aesthetics were lacking. The Seine churned the tidal bores of ugliness and inelegance, among the undecorated stars. We were bored. We were not captivated by the show.
For my part, I was not surprised. Because the artistic team had already announced their intention in Le Monde newspaper:
“We especially do not want a reconstruction like Puy du Fou. We want to do the opposite. Definitely not a virile, heroic, providential history. We want disorder and everything to intertwine.”
Thanks be to them, they kept their promise. My eyes were wet. It wasn’t goosebumps, but rage. I watched the torrents of rain. The sky over Paris was shedding tears of sadness on this pantomime. It was raining in my heart as it was raining on the city: Paris humiliated, Paris defiled, Paris martyred, but soon, we secretly hope, Paris liberated.
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