After the magic of the Olympics, Paris in search of a true image

Lhe success of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (OG) owes a lot to the exceptional settings that the capital offered them. After years marked by attacks, Covid-19, cascading construction sites, the collusion between the breathtaking opening and closing ceremonies, the bodies of athletes twisting in the air and this backdrop of lustrous monuments to new instantly restored the city’s image. This Paris above which the Olympic cauldron rose had little connection with the one that was made for the Games.

The housing of the Olympic village, the Arena Porte de La Chapelle, the Olympic aquatic center, the rehabilitated sports facilities, all these works produced in record time for the event generally remained out of scope. Generally speaking, the images around which the nation seemed to reconcile itself after the traumatic sequence of the dissolution of the National Assembly were totally disconnected from the city as Parisians experience it on a daily basis. Produced by Olympic Broadcasting Service, the audiovisual arm of the International Olympic Committee, they were deliberately designed as a phantasmagoria – a cross between a Disney fairy tale, a National Geographic documentary and a Louis Vuitton advertisement.

Monopoly board

Premium partner of the event, the LVMH group imposed new clauses which resulted in the insertion, in the first hour of the broadcast of the opening ceremony, of a parallel montage of the work of the French trunk maker’s artisans and companions of Notre-Dame. The production of cases intended to transport the flame and Olympic medals, identifiable by their checkerboard pattern of which televisions broadcast close-ups from morning to evening, was also part of the negotiation.

The city with golden reflections, which stunned the world all summer, is none other than the one that the luxury and real estate giants claim to be. The Paris that they shape around the large Monopoly board that they compete for, on the other hand, is sorely lacking in image. This Paris “financialized”, “socially homogenized”, “more and more artificial”including Hacène Belmessous, in his essay Paris is no longer a party (Les Voix Urbaines, 168 pages, 18 euros), traces its origins to the failure of the city’s candidacy for the 2012 Olympic Games and the desire that arose from it to launch itself, to win the prize, into the big global competition for private capital, does not yet have a clear representation.

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