The French Sure Can Put On A Show
John Nelson graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York in 1965 and enjoyed a long career at sea on commercial and military support ships. After retiring from his seagoing career, he continued working in various capacities in the maritime industry until a final retirement in 2012. Since then he has been active in researching local history and restoring and operating steam engines and antique mills.
He lives in neighboring Panola County and is a long-time member of the Yalobusha Historical Society. He is also the uncle of Herald editor David Howell.
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 in 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 which 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 with a colorful military parade down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees starting at the Arc de Triomphe 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 Columbian 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 contingents 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 be 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.
