I’m hardly the only one to remark on the qualitative ways in which France has felt different over the past two weeks. Perhaps the Spanish newspaper El País said it best when it remarked that the country “seems to have taken a vacation from itself”, by which it meant that grumbling had been sidelined by unabashed joy.
The police could barely refrain from dancing, France TV’s commentators couldn’t hide their emotion, the live traffic information signs on the périphérique were all in for Léon Marchand, Snoop Dogg seemed to be everywhere all at once, Parisians who stayed in the city dropped their aloof cool for giddy cheering; Parisians who fled in advance found themselves wishing they had stayed. I heard the Marseillaise and throwback pop choruses alike spontaneously break out. Hospitality “houses” set up by more than a dozen nations in Parc de la Villette hosted cheering fans from far more countries than just their own, mainly for free.
(The US and Great Britain, on the other hand, set their team houses far away from the buzz and vibrancy of La Villette – where “Club France” and over a dozen other cheery national pavilions clustered in close proximity – and charged €325 and €175 for entry, respectively. Worth it? Being too poor to know, I have absolutely no idea, but my suspicion is that both fell short of the party vibe at La Villette.)
It would be naive to imagine that come la rentrée, France’s messy and frustrating political divisions will suddenly have disappeared. Certainly it won’t deter a chunk of the commentariat and some opposition politicians from being perpetual purveyors of pessimism. But might there be something that remains from the Olympics – something that nudges, just a bit, the story that France tells itself about itself?
After all, stories tend to become our identities, according to psychologist Jonathan Adler. Adler believes it is paramount that we see ourselves as central actors in our own stories. “You tell the story first, and then you live your way into it,” he says.
But storytelling can also function in a negative way, for instance, by causing us to forget about positive traits about ourselves that we used to cherish. France too often indulges in a story about itself that tilts towards almost incomprehensible scepticism. A mindboggling 2011 poll showed French respondents were more negative about the future than Iraqis or Afghans, whose countries were experiencing war and violence – a deep and lingering pessimism that was reaffirmed in 2014, and then a decade later.
One explanation is that this is not a uniquely French phenomenon. The late Swedish public health researcher Hans Rosling demonstrated over decades that western publics were vastly more pessimistic about global development than was merited by the measurable reality of the progress that had been made – an observation that the centre-left French thinktank Fondation Jean-Jaurès recently explored at length.
But the French have a particular reputation for glumness, so maybe it makes more sense to look to the philosophical underpinnings of French intellectual culture and seize on René Descartes’ “doubt everything” as an explanation. (Personally, after being on both sides of the French academic grading system, I’m convinced that teachers who more or less refuse to give anything above 16/20 drill in the unconscious notion that things are never quite good enough.)
A third suggestion is that the French aren’t actually as pessimistic as they say they are, they’re just un-pollable, because they reflexively tend towards choosing the most catastrophic available option. But even that, if true, would be revealing as to the sway that narrative can hold over reality.
I’m often bemused by how the US and France are similar in some ways and practically inverse in others. They’re both insecure but the insecurity manifests differently. The US screams loudly to everyone that it is the best in everything, at all times. France wrings its hands with worry that it will fall short and be judged for it.
The Olympic imagery was playfully multilayered, from the logo (simultaneously a woman, a flame, a gold medal and a hint of the ship from Paris’s coat of arms), the plush Phrygian hats that were also, umm, clitorises, and the angular five continents on the floor of the Stade de France during the closing ceremony that, seen from aerial shots, also formed a jousting knight. In the same way, maybe the Olympics themselves will have been multilayered for France, nudging its story in two distinct ways.
In a country that can be rather risk averse (though not necessarily when it comes to art), Paris took a huge chance. Both in organising the games at historic venues and in the opening ceremony – which, despite a scandal pushed primarily by the extreme right in both the US and Europe – was judged a success by 86% of the French public.
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Everything that followed contributed to the generalised sense of wonder that flowed, like a river, from that opening, and which I’ve experienced on the streets, on cafe terraces, in fanzones and in casual conversations with strangers. We feel wonder, or awe, when we encounter something powerful that surpasses us somehow. An eclipse, an act of kindness, an Olympian pushing the human body to the limits of what should be possible.
Awe is real – it’s observable in the brain during an fMRI scan, and brings psychological benefits. Perhaps when we experience awe together, it brings social benefits too. Perhaps it changes the story we tell about ourselves and about each other.
When France decides to, it does things with panache, verve, sophistication, flair and humour. That’s what foreigners looking at France see most of the time, and for the past two weeks, the French have been seeing themselves through the eyes of the world. If I had to give Paris 2024 a grade? 20/20. Here’s to hoping France takes the gold medal it earned and runs with it.