Something unusual happened to the French far right during these Olympic Games: it went silent. Jordan Bardella, the poster boy of the National Rally (RN) who shared his life between public rallies and TV studios before the Olympic torch rose and lit up the Paris night two weeks ago, has all but vanished. When he is still talked about, it is to wonder where he could have gone. The south of France, perhaps, unless it is the coast of Amalfi, or both.
Marine Le Pen is apparently cuddling her five‑month‑old grandson in Brittany when she’s not tending her cats at her home in the Yvelines, according to the RN-friendly Le Journal du Dimanche, which reassured its readers that nothing was amiss: it is well known that the leaders of the French extreme right have always taken their holidays seriously. They were now “regrouping” after their defeat in the second round of the parliamentary elections. Le Pen’s social media team had posted on her X account a few tweets – six in total – of support and appreciation for the most striking successes of the French Olympic delegation, and that was all.
But how could it be otherwise?
On one hand, the country has had the greatest party anyone can remember, to which the grumps of the far right had made sure they wouldn’t be invited and which it was too late for them to gatecrash. It is the curse they cannot exorcise: as they thrive on anger and division, what to do when everyone else, regardless of nationality, gender, age, religion or lack of, colour of skin and – yes – political inclination is having such tremendous fun? If they had joined in, they would have betrayed themselves.
On the other, the chaos they had predicted did not materialise. There has been no traffic gridlock in the capital. Public transport has worked like a dream, despite the efforts of saboteurs to derail the system literally before the feast had even begun. Tens of thousands of police officers were deployed to ensure the security of Olympic venues, which we had been told guaranteed there would be serious trouble elsewhere; yet crime went down during the Games. Four days before the opening ceremony, the RN spokesman Laurent Jacobelli was sharing his concern that we would have a Games “without a public”. More tickets have been sold than at any other Olympics. Even the Seine behaved itself in the end. Every gamble was won, and it hurt.
The paradoxical problem of the RN’s patriotes is that they cannot rejoice in the success of their own country. Surely, the love shown to Paris and to France by the rest of the world for putting on such a show should swell their hearts with pride? But no. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is a socialist. The country’s most beloved judoka Teddy Riner hugged Emmanuel Macron as if he and the president had won gold together.
There were so few straws to clutch at that one extreme-right influencer, Damien Rieu, tried to spin it by saying: “Without knowing it, the Parisians had lived in [what] a city run by the extreme right would be like: no more street sellers, security, absence of hordes of migrants.” Even more bizarre, the word spread on some far-right platforms that France’s new hero Léon Marchand had to be one of theirs as he had posted on his X account images of the fleurs-de-lys (the French monarchy’s symbol, which has been appropriated by the French fundamentalist Catholic ultra right). They had failed to realise that those fleurs-de-lys were a reference to the coat of arms of his home town, Toulouse.
The far right wanted the Games to fail, but could not say it loud; and when they whispered, or resorted to innuendo, it is they who failed. There has been no better example of this than the triumph of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, in front of thousands of spectators willing her to victory at Roland Garros on Friday night, after a row engineered by the International Boxing Association that threatened to turn the Paris Games into another battlefield for the culture wars at one stage.
We will all keep our own favourite images and memories from these Games, be they the triumphant return of Simone Biles, Riner’s ippon for the ages, the lap of honour of the heptathletes led by the immense Nafi Thiam, Marchand swimming in water found on another planet in the 400m individual medley. As for me, I will never forget Valentin Madouas ascending the paved streets of the Butte Montmartre towards an unexpected silver medal, accompanied by a deafening chorus of cheers – as all of the other cyclists were on that blessed day – the crowd standing 10 deep, as it had for mile after mile after the race entered the capital, bursting with joy and song, waving flags of seemingly every nation in the world.
My goodness, how beautiful can sport be. How precious it is. And how good it feels to show the love for one’s own and one’s own country when this love is untainted by a sense of God-given superiority, scorn or hatred for the other. The tricolor flag in which the Le Pens of this world drape themselves was everyone’s again, triumphantly so, and so was the Marseillaise, which hadn’t been sung with such regularity or such fervour since 1944. The true patriotes had won.
Those Games will not by themselves mend the fractures which exist in French society. Macron will have to find a prime minister (Riner and Antoine Dupont have been suggested). The far right will be back, hoping for the hangover of all hangovers after the party of all parties. What the Games will have shown, however, is that those fractures may not run as deep as we feared, and that most of us wanted them to heal. That’ll do for a legacy.
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