The French can put on a show
By John Nelson
Columnist
Though the event was marred by a skit featuring drag queens parodying what most people think was
Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics was quite
an extravaganza.
It was the first such ceremony staged outside a stadium in modern times, and the idea of having national
delegations float down the Seine in boats while exotically-costumed performers reenacted historic scenes
is typical of the French.
The spectacle took me back to July of 2008 when I was on a working visit to a ship docked in Le Havre,
France. I had been to most French ports over the years, but I had never spent any time in Paris. So I
scheduled a few days in the capital before taking a flight home, and it so happened that I was there
during Bastille Day, the most celebrated annual event in France.
This national holiday celebrates the storming on July 14, 1789 of the Bastille, a fortress turned state
prison. Civil strife had begun earlier, but the event is generally recognized as the real beginning of the
French Revolution that deposed King Louis XVI and ignited a very chaotic and bloody period in French
history.
Parisians have celebrated Bastille Day in various ways through the years, but in recent times it has been
marked by a colorful parade down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees starting at the Arc de Triumph and
terminating at the Place de la Concorde.
I recall at that time Paris was abuzz with excitement at the arrival of Ingrid Betancourt. She had first
come to the city as the daughter of a Colombian diplomat and had later married a French diplomat and
thus held dual citizenship.
Her escape after six years of captivity by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) was big
news at the time, and it was thought that President Nicolas Sarkozy had put some amount of French
prestige on the line in arranging her escape. He met Ingrid at the airport and was to present her with the
Legion D’Honneur on Bastille Day.
To mark the 60th anniversary of United Nations peacekeeping operations, the 2008 parade was led by
two continents of peacekeepers wearing the uniforms of their respective countries and the distinctive blue
berets that identify soldiers in that service.
Behind the peacekeepers, it was a French show, and they certainly know how to deck out their military in
striking dress uniforms. It was a colorful procession of several thousand men and women from units as
diverse as cadets from military academies to a battalion of the French Foreign Legion.
All were resplendent in their uniforms, but the Republican Guards, particularly its cavalry regiment
bedecked in uniforms and helmets reminiscent of the Napoleonic era, stood out in the procession.
In the few days I had in Paris before the holiday, I had managed to visit several of the city’s attractions,
but I had not been to the Louvre, its world-famous art museum. When I learned that it would open on

Bastille Day, I planned to take in most of the parade, and then while the swarms of summer tourists joined
locals to watch its grand finale, I would hike over and catch the Louvre at a slack time.
A line outside the entrance to the museum told me that my plan had failed, and as I soon learned,
admission was free on Bastille Day. The place was packed, but I was able to push in close enough to
catch the whimsical smile on the face of the Mona Lisa.
That smile has been a subject of discussion for almost 500 years, but it seemed to me that she was
amused that I had picked the wrong day to visit.