“What matters the bottle as long as one has the intoxication”, wrote Alfred de Musset in a dedication to a friend, in the epigraph of the dramatic poem The Cup and the Lips. Having become a proverb, the quote ends a short passage that exhorts us to love Love: “Doubt, if you wish, the being who loves you, / A woman or a dog, but not love itself. / Love is everything, – love, and life in the sun. / To love is the great point, what does the mistress matter?”
During the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, it was this poem by Musset that resonated in my ears, while I wondered if this deluge of disgrace would finish me off. I exaggerate. I loved the Pont d’Austerlitz, I was moved to tears in front of Axelle Saint-Cirel, sublime, breathtaking, regal, singing The Marseillaise On the roof of the Grand Palais, I enjoyed the ride on the Seine and burst into childish laughter in front of Aya Nakamura and the Republican Guard.
But the gross unsightliness of the costumes, the adolescent bias “we’re going to thumb our noses at the far right because we’re conformist progressives lalalère” and especially the brutal desire to erase female bodies saddened me more than angered me. Since when do we have to hide this breast that I can’t see? Since when did Liberty Leading the People lose its nipple? Why were the only women’s bodies those of statues emerging from the Seine, women of the past, dead women, women without bodies, where were the women who vibrate, who live, who move, who enjoy? Marie-Antoinette appeared in her last finery, truncated, head cut off, discontinuity of the female body, absolute refusal of the female body once again becoming the place of shame. In this delirium of refusing to “objectify” women, there are no more women’s bodies at all.
Drunkenness being Paris, the eternal
But I will answer to anyone who asks me the question again in a few months, in a few years, if I liked the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, I will say “yes”. Like the majority of French people. And why is that? Because what does the bottle matter as long as we have the intoxication, the bottle being what it could have of distressing ugliness and useless ideology and the intoxication being Paris, the eternal. What this ceremony has reactivated is a French pride that is never expressed as strongly as in the celebration of Paris, capital of the world.
What the majority of French people loved, what thrilled them, was the setting, finding the Seine and its monuments at the center of their History which is their present. The French spirit, made of irony and an incorrigible feeling of superiority, was there, despite the pathetic and bitter desire of the “scriptwriters” of the ceremony, first and foremost Patrick Boucheron, chief demolisher of the Republic, full of bloody hatred, to massacre History, to make people forget the bicentennial of the Revolution and especially François Furet, to no longer conjugate France except in the present of its bitterness.
This feeling of pride combined with joyfully unbridled enthusiasm, this collective communion supporting individual sporting achievement, was confirmed during the competitions. This France is mine, it is ours. At the end of a difficult year, of a dissolution that bordered on hysteria, of a fractured France, where identity merchants sold off sordid division, where French universality was painfully erased, where artificial antagonisms made us forget the beauty and the very special specificity of France, I vibrated, I shouted, I applauded all the medals, I sang at the top of my lungs at each Marseillaiseand I cried over all the missed medals.
As for all French people, there were no more blacks, whites, roots, origins, reds, greens. There were only French people, French people who, consciously or not, remembered what France is. This wonderful country where, despite all the attempts to trample on the citizen, to reduce him to his sex, his color, his ethnicity, his religion, to lock him in the filthy prison of identity, something that comes from the depths of its history and its Revolution, still revolts, to say no. We are all French, and proud to be so. Thank you to our extraordinary athletes for reminding us of this. At the right time.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed to fighting against identity obsession, is a writer and journalist.
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