The Olympic cauldron in the Tuileries Gardens, a true Olympic phenomenon

The comments are complimentary, the children’s eyes are shining and the heat that is falling on Tuesday July 30 on the Tuileries Gardens, near the Louvre Museum, has not discouraged the curious.

Topped with its huge ball in the middle of the large round pool, since it was “ignited” by the legends of French sport Marie-José Perec And Teddy Rinerthe cauldron and its Olympic flame attract 375 people every hour, around 10,000 per day.

” A 100% electric flame, without fuel thanks to EDF, made of water and light “, specify the organizers; installed in a garden dating from Catherine de Medici, in the 16th century, and entirely redesigned in the following century by Le Nôtre.

The emblem of the Olympic Games

Venues are currently open between 9am and 5pm UTC. While the first 100,000 free tickets were sold out in less than 48 hours, the new slots opened by the IOC each morning are already being snapped up. This is an incredible idea “, sighs a tourist from Vilnius, Lithuania, who is experiencing his first Olympic Games.

To compete in the heart of the French capital is great. I think it’s the first time this has happened, and to put the basin in such an accessible and beautiful place is moving.

Before reaching the basin, mobile phone in hand to show their e-ticket, the public takes advantage of the trees to shelter from the ravaging sun, often with a spray bottle in their pocket. Next to it, kids throw themselves under jets of water to cool off. It’s a pride for me to see so many people gathered here. Everything is super well organized. “, says a Parisian woman. ” The cauldron is the emblem of the Olympic Games and it is very good that it is visible in a place other than a stadium. That way, everyone can enjoy it. “, underlines a young man from Agen, who has lived in the capital for ten years.

Just at the end of the Tuileries Gardens, almost every evening, thousands of people gather to watch the cauldron rise into the sky as the sun sets over Paris. It rises 60 m from the ground until midnight UT. It is then visible from several hundred meters around. In Brazil, during the Olympic Games in Rio in 2016it was the sunset that served as a nighttime spectacle along the famous Copacabana beach. Each edition of the Games has its symbol.

The city of Paris, France and balloons

Mathieu Lehanneur, designer of the basin, explained that his ” flame ring ” 7 m in diameter, topped with a gigantic balloon 30 m high and 22 m in diameter, was none other than a tribute to the first flight in a gas balloon filled with hydrogen. It had been carried out a few years before the Revolution, in December 1783, by two of its French inventors: the physicist Jacques Charles and one of the two Robert brothers. The takeoff had taken place in the same Tuileries garden.

To rise into the sky like a bird was an old dream for humanity, undoubtedly shared in the four parts of the world, and in any case by Leonardo da Vinci or Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmao. Just before the feats of the Charles-Robert tandem, other first great exploits in aerostatic flight, well documented, took place here.

The Montgolfier brothers, originally from Ardèche, began in 1782 ” experiments around a piece of fabric inflated by a fire of wool and wet straw “, as The Palace of Versailles website tells the story. And in Annonay, ” a demonstration gets them noticed by the Royal Academy of Sciences ” The two inventors were then called upon to repeat their tests in Paris, which they managed to do in full view of everyone and in a spectacular manner.

On September 19, 1783, in the forecourt of the Palace of Versailles, in front of King Louis XVI in particular, a sheep, a duck and a rooster took their places in the machine of Étienne and Joseph Montgolfier, before taking off in a non-captive flight, without being held by a rope. They rose to 600 m. Damaged, the balloon came back down a few minutes later and finally landed, more than three kilometers away, in the Vaucresson woods. The animals were then recovered safe and sound and joined the royal menagerie.

It was the Metz physicist Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier who recovered these animals, and it was he who took their place, between October and November 1783, notably for a demonstration unpublished in the park of the Château de la Muette, with the Marquis d’Arlandes and in front of the dauphin. The wind helping, they will finish their epic far away, after having enjoyed an unprecedented view of Paris, landing quietly ” in the countryside, beyond the new boulevard, opposite the Croulebarbe mill “.

The Gambetta hot air balloon getaway

These exploits were to launch a real craze, traces of which can still be found today with this Olympic cauldron, or for example with the association Les Montgolfières d’Annonay, among many others. In Pas-de-Calais is also the Blanchard column, for the crossing of the Channel.

All these adventures above all foreshadowed a little-known political event, which was to occur in 1870 in the capital, following the defeat at Sedan, after the fall of the Second Empire and the proclamation of the Third French Republic.

On October 7, a certain Léon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior of the provisional government, put into practice a novel by Jules Verne, Five weeks in a Balloonand perhaps also inspired by the American Northern general Ulysses Grant, from the American Civil War, we can read in this column of the Figaro. While the Prussian army besieged the capital, blocking roads and waterways, he left Paris by balloon, taking off from the hill of Montmartre, where his machine was made. He reached Tours, the city from where the “resistance” would be organized.

The scene is immortalized in the Monument to the balloon aeronauts of the siege of Paris, to the heroes of the post office, telegraphs and railwaysinaugurated two years after the death of its sculptor, at the beginning of the 20th century. The latter was none other than Auguste Bartholdi, the father of Liberty. His statue no longer exists, it was melted down by Vichy.

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, suggested on Monday July 29th to our colleagues at France Bleu that the Olympic cauldron could well be kept after the end of the Games. In my wildest dreams I wish she would stay “, also confides Mathieu Lehanneur.

The Eiffel Tower, installed for the 1889 World’s Fair by a good acquaintance of Bartholdi, namely Gustave Eiffel, was to disappear, and was finally redesigned to last, before becoming the number one symbol of the capital and of all of France, like later the Atomium in Brussels. So, if lightning permitswhy the basin of JO 2024 would not stay?

Read alsoJO 2024 program and calendar