What The Franc
Thoughts on Paris24, queens and revolution as extreme sport
I confess I did not like Paris. I was invited to meet friends in the city and I had a strange time there. I flew in without any expectations, except that I knew I was going to get drunk and eat snails. Nothing about the city made me want to return to it ever again. The place seemed cursed like an amusement park, and not a place for real life. (First off, they can’t make coffee and they charge double for whatever they do make). Secondly, mass immigration levels have made Paris indistinguishable from a New World colony. Apart from an Algerian cafe owner who thought I was also a Berber (yes) I had no warm interactions with anybody during my stay there. That isn’t surprising, because Parisians are renowned for being cold. Except Paris is an African city now. So imagine drinking absinthe and strolling through an African neighborhood that had been forcibly medicated whilst learning to speak French inside an amusement park themed as France, but chock full of foreigners.
Afrique?
This felt a long way from the days of Alexander Dumas coming into to Parisian society and becoming as French as any colonial man could have become (excepting Napoleon Bonaparte himself). What are they doing to you all over here? I thought. Maybe it was Paris Syndrome, but I was supposed to leave the City of Light feeling like I’d seen the heart of European culture. I left it feeling like I’d just spent the trip inside a French-themed circus. I guess that’s what everybody experienced watching the Olympic Games opening ceremony last week. The world got Paris Syndrome on the 27th July. I glanced at the broadcast. I’ve now seen hundreds of clips thanks to the outrage-feed. It was blasphemous, but it wasn’t edgy or artistic. And that’s the main thing I’ve noticed in the entire furor of Paris ‘24: the rulers of the Croissant Utopia seem like they have run out of energy for anything except camp mockery of France’s beheaded Catholic skeleton. It was a pastiche of French identity and ritual homage to the death of Western culture by the Jacobin intellectual malaria that infected the French Mind. But it was also boring.
The open air mockery of Christianity (and Christian European history) necessarily demands a Christianity to mock. The revolutionary culture cannot exist without its own nemesis amongst itself, or it has nothing to revolt against anymore. The Paris opening ceremony seemed to be nothing but an admission that Revolutionary France has nothing left but (Canadian) Celine Dion to give the world. Drag Frogs offended everybody by assembling a Moulin-Rouge-for-circus-freaks and staged a public spectacle that would be illegal in equatorial Africa. And yet the men in Drag didn’t seem edgy at all. It wasn’t a surprise to see men in makeup during that opening ceremony. The Olympic provocateurs who created it don’t seem to remember that French boys always liked makeup.
I don’t think the Ru Paul wannabees writhing on the Bacchanalian table in full faces of cosmetic paint get it. Using Drag Queens for the regime’s necessary diversity signaling missed the point about men’s love of lipstick and lace: it’s Trad in France. It’s Tradder than a 1950s stay at home wife. The idea of men in similar attire now is unattractive to Conservatives, and I have the feeling its because everybody knows it’s a LARP. It’s all about genuine aristocratic prowess. Excellence wears rouge. Most of us live in a manufactured cultural field that tells us we should strive for “diversity” but not excellence. Arete be damned. Everything the Olympics is supposed to promote is being undermined now within the countries participating in the Games, because in Westernized nations you can’t have both excellence and the desired total égalité at the same time. We’re not even supposed to say we want nations, or sexual dimorphism, let alone championship. So while the drag queens opened Paris ‘24 to celebrate La Révolution circa 2024, way back in the 18th Century the aristocrats in Paris wore a full face of makeup and had skills to flex. The average Western man now:
Can't shoot.
Can't ride horses.
Can't write poems.
And he wants to wear makeup.
Makeup is for kings, not drag queens.
The emergence of Drag in Americanized Western culture is some strange aesthetic homage to America’s complex French history. This is my hunch at least. It was men in makeup who paid for the American Republic in the first place. Americanized men wear rouge now to push the gender boundaries, but lipstick-wearing French monarchs paid for the Americans to create new borders and shoot their own king out of the colonies. Who was edgier?
Before they were carving up the Middle East border with straight lines, the French made major political decisions during a bloody revolution on a tennis court. Revolutionaries occupying sports fields isn’t new. It’s a fitting symbol of what we all just witnessed at the Games: the Western world taking its revolutionary oath on a court. Revolution as the extreme sport of Modernity. Like the revolution, the French pursued the American experiment like a gold medal. They took over half a continent’s worth of river systems for the joie de vivre.
Louisiana was Parkour with the whole North American continent as the obstacle, including epic rafting, shooting hostile opposing teams (tribes), getting enemies on side as quickly as possible through brute force, bribery or bluff. There could be no greater sport than this. Then they sold it all to the Yankees ‘cause they were playing a championship match against the British for who would be Gold Medalist imperial power in Europe.
Back in Paris the French claimed to showcase their history in their opening ceremony - and they really did. They showed the inverted reality of post-revolutionary France without any point of cultural orientation except the ritual murder of its own people. It was appropriate to see the opening ceremony ascend from the catacombs “up” to the drag shows of the New Regime, whose culture exists solely to mock the Christian bones of the entire French identity buried under the rubble. If you thought it was bad taste to include an explosive tribute to the storming of the Bastille in an Olympic ceremony, consider that this mass murder is celebrated by France annually as their national holiday. The French Republic is a Death Cult. Gojira’s performance was perfectly French. It was Jacobin art, par excellence.
Reviewing the entire ceremony as an ad campaign for the champions of revolution, this macabre performance looked like well crafted PR campaign. A giant victory lap for the revolutionary regime that created it. Homage to the cult of the Revolution itself. France’s policy of laicite (state-enforced secularism) was broken during that opening ceremony, as the religion of the revolutionaries was expressed on that Bacchanalian “Last Supper” table. The message? The gods of debauchery are ruling. And the regime ritualistically reminded viewers of what is in store for anybody who opposes those revolutionary forces even by their mere presence in the world as icons of the old one. The Olympic push against Christian symbols being displayed by athletes during the Games only proves the real games are iconographic contests.
Revolution is an extreme sport. The French understand it, they took their revolutionary oath on a tennis court. There’s no better place on earth for revolutionaries to take oath and flex than the Olympic Games in Paris, a city full of queens celebrating their emancipation from the old ones.
Yet, there is one Queen in the City of Light that will ever remain seated.
The most insightful analysis of the opening ceremonies I have read thus far. I have never been to France, but your experience on your visit describes what I feared: that it's basically a Disneyland version of Paris without any actual Parisians.
Paris is a disgrace, as someone who is Franco-Canadien, I have heard tell that the southern cities or western ones are properly French, all I know is when I visited St-Pierre & even la Ville de Quebec they were Francais (thank heavens) and were magnificent.