By Mason Richey Mason Richey Sometimes the political is personal. As it happens, I’ve been in France to see friends and family for much of the summer. I’ve thus followed French politics up close.
My first few weeks saw France in political crisis following President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to hold a snap national assembly election, which threatened to bring to power the nationalist, populist, xenophobic far right. Ultimately the election produced a legislature with no functional majority for confirming a prime minister to run the government in consultation with the president. How the prime minister nomination will proceed is uncertain.
There has not, however, been much rush to solve the ugly political deadlock. The 2024 Olympic Games, hosted by Paris, have overshadowed everything else and provided an opportunity for national celebration and a break from the domestic political calendar. But of course, beyond sporting prowess, the Olympics are also highly politicized events, notably functioning as a spectacle of public diplomacy.
The host country can use the Games as a symbol of international political stature, as Beijing did in 2008, or as a tool for diplomatic reconciliation, as South Korea attempted with its 2018 Winter Games peace offensive with North Korea. France is using its Summer Games to broadcast national rejuvenation and confidence. This was especially evident during the opening ceremony, which was thematically centered around grand classical French political and social values — liberty, equality, fraternity — with contemporary derivations of sisterhood, solidarity, synchronicity, eternity and festivity.
Playing out over nearly four hours along the Seine River, the tableaux vivants (living pictures) symbolizing and embodying these themes were jaw-dropping television, spectacular in their scale, skill, ambition and edginess. The Louvre’s Mona Lisa “stolen” by the cartoon character Minions? Yes. A Napoleon caricature on a BMX bike? Yes, also.
The Assassin’s Creed figure doing parkour through Paris with the Olympic flame? Again, yes. A mechanical horse riding over the Seine carrying a masked rider representing Sequana, the Gallo-Roman river goddess? Yes, that, too. The Olympic cauldron lifted into the night sky on a hot-air balloon tribute to the Montgolfier brothers.
Of course! Dancers, singers, French heavy metal and more galore. Obviously. What got the most attention, especially internationally, was the “Blue Man” scene, featuring French singer/actor Philippe Katrine, painted blue and nearly naked, posed on a table surrounded by other surreal figures.
The scene ostensibly represented Dionysian festivity, although conservative Christian groups claim it was a perversion of the Last Supper. These groups, in fact, disapproved of much of the opening ceremony, especially the parts referencing LGBTQ+ imagery. For the record, I also disapprove of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony.
This may get me in trouble with my friends and family in France, who mostly loved it. To be clear, my opprobrium has nothing to do with the thematic content of the opening ceremony. Indeed I am happy that France has such a tolerant, liberal culture welcoming diverse lifestyles.
Rather, my criticism of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony is content-neutral, and much more general. In short, we should all be very suspicious of political “bread-and-circuses” — populist cultural events to obfuscate real challenges — which the Olympics certainly are, and especially the opening and closing ceremonies. France has enormous, seemingly insurmountable political, economic and social problems, and the French are rightly angered about the negligence of their political class — remember what I wrote above about French political dysfunction and the rise of the far right.
It is as sad as it is predictable to see Paris’ political and economic elite use the Olympic Games to distract from these problems through the mass manufacturing of emotion. As Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School demonstrated already in the 1940s and 1950s, such mass manipulation taps into incipient authoritarianism. And when the production of mass emotion is tied to nationalism, the risk is even worse.
In this light — and given gaping economic inequality, social unrest, immigration dysfunction, uncertain response to war in Ukraine — the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony, and indeed the organizing of the Games as a whole, is decadent: luxury hobnobbing for elites, mass distraction for the hoi polloi. Ultimately, this is dangerous, as it postpones and worsens the inevitable reckoning of the failure to provide liberty, equality and fraternity. I’m not just attacking France.
The same understanding of the cultural “society of the spectacle” is applicable to the rest of Europe, the U.S., Korea and beyond.
Indeed, nationalist populism globally is a major threat to international political stability. As a good dialectician, one might argue that Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues would welcome such an Olympic opening ceremony as the exposure of socio-political and economic contradictions, thus leading to their revolutionary overcoming. But I don’t believe in revolution — or at least revolution that makes things better.
Rather, I expect political leaders to make the right choices to improve the lot of citizens within established structures. I won’t hold my breath, however. Instead, I will continue to criticize bread-and-circuses.
My apologies to friends and family who don’t share my critical eye on the Paris Olympics. It’s not personal; it’s political. Mason Richey is a professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, president of the Korea International Studies Association, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of East Asian Affairs.
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