It Was Olympics (and More), as Pierre Cambronne Would Say

The Olympics just ended. It’s time for the final assessment, which, according to the New York Times, is often bitter: once the focus is turned off, many are left with bitterness over an experience that could have been different. Australian swimmer Ariarne Titmus won four medals in Paris: two gold and two silver. She has no reason to feel sorry, but regarding her stay in the Olympic village, she said on an Australian television program: “We lived in filth,” no change of linen and no toilet paper. The frustrations, the contradictions, the images often left the audience stunned, as in the case of Canadian Tyler Mislawchuk, who vomited about ten times during the triathlon, after swimming in the Seine River, the last time after the finish line, in front of the cameras. For the same reasons Belgium forced its delegation to withdraw from the mixed triathlon relay to avoid swimming in the dirty, contagious water of the Parisian river.

As a result, some felt entitled to talk about simply shitty Olympics in the sense that this expression has been at the heart of French culture since at least the time of Rabelais. “To say the word and then die, what could be better?” writes Victor Hugo solemnly, quoting Pierre Cambronne’s famous reply at the Battle of Waterloo: “The Guard is dying but not surrendering.” According to other sources, Cambronne responded much simpler, saying just one word: “Shit!” Flaubert remarked more subtly: “With this great word we console ourselves for all human misfortunes; so I like to repeat: shit, shit!” In Dirty Hands, Sartre is cruder: “Cleanliness is an idea for fakirs and monks… My hands are dirty. Up to the elbows. I doused them in shit and blood.”

France had shitty poetry and music, as in Léo Ferré’s “Shit in Vauban” or Georges Brassens’s “Pornography” who also said: “Quand je dis merde, il y a des fleurs autour” (“When I say shit, there are flowers all around”). Shit culture thrives in the West, but in France it’s a local specialty. Freud thought a lot about it, but the initiation was with Dr. Charcot in his clinic at Salpêtrière.

Every Olympics has had political significance. For example, the 2008 Olympics went beautifully and became a symbol of China’s assertion on the international stage. Those Olympics are said to have reinforced the idea that the West is in a deep crisis dominated by wokeism and militarism. The Paris Games will be proof that civilization is now on its last gasp. One might say more sacrilegiously: “Satan’s Olympics.” In fact, the Vatican wrote that it was “saddened” by what happened, joining the regrets of believers of other faiths.

The beginning was a different story, starting with respect for religion. Starting 776 BC in Olympia, the All-Greek Games were a symbol of competition and peace! They were organized in honor of the gods and led to the cessation of any wars. In our time, the Olympic Games were meant to be a gathering of the world community dedicated to mutual respect and peaceful competition. Instead, the Olympic Truce called for by many (including Pope Francis) did not happen in 2024, sparking outrage at the abandonment of principles that have been the foundation of the new European identity founded in 1945.

The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris could be a great peace event, and that was the expectation, because Paris has a great humanitarian tradition: it was in the French capital that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen) was proclaimed in 1789, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. In Paris, the Olympic Games were revived under Baron Pierre de Coubertin after their closure, announced by Theodosius in 393 AD. This is despite the fact that the Paris Olympics took place during one of the most dramatic international situations that had implications for the competition. For example, many Russian and Belarus athletes chose not to participate, among them were Olympic and world record holders. Russia is a great power also in sports and the Olympics, with 1010 medals and second place behind the USA.

The past Olympic Games gave a good reason to think about interests and values. The search for primacy, greatness, and perfection encourages us to reflect on who we are and who we would like to be, questioning the existence of humanity as it is and as we would like it to be. The Olympics should encourage us to be better and set an example in that sense. The dominant vision for Paris 2024 was clear from the start: an opening ceremony with a live painting of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in a burlesque, Dionysius-referencing and rather bizarre version. A gendered parody of the most widely recognized icon of the Christian West, presented by a Paris-based travel website. Thomas Jolly was an interpreter of the spirit of the times. In four years, the Games will be held in Los Angeles, California, the birthplace of the Woke ideology and Kamala Harris. Of course, the world will not be as we know it today. There was a pandemic at the previous Olympic competition in Tokyo. The 2024 Games took place against the backdrop of bloody wars. In the years that separate us from Los Angeles, much and worse can still happen.

The main problem is the hyperbolic dimension of the epochal transition. Like other countries, France is trying to meet the new challenge of history. In the face of uncertainty, one possible response is arrogance. The self-righteous claim of the “complete eradication of rats and fecal matter in the Seine,” on which organizers have spent more than a billion dollars, is quite consistent with the claim that the Olympic Village in Paris is a bold “green experiment.”

While these fun Olympics were going on, people continued to die in packs in wars, from Gaza to Congo. In Africa, French troops made a cynical alliance with Malian jihadists and various Islamic terrorists. Are we already in a no-holds-barred war? Will it be a quick and easy war? In August, the month of the Olympics, on the other side of the Channel, Britain suddenly recognized what France had been a year earlier, when the suburbs were caught up in the fire of violent clashes. This time it’s the unknown, the underlying Britain that has revolted, who don’t vote at all, or who only voted for Nigel Farage by 15%, while 58% of Britons say in polls that they have deep doubts about the sincerity of their country’s politicians.

France has blurred and dissolved into a fog of uncertainty for the duration of the Olympics, a perception of its difficulties, from its lack of government to its economic situation that has made France one of the weakest links in Europe. Many Parisians were pleased. The reasons for this are many and often ephemeral, such as the dramatic drop in crime in a city suddenly filled with order and control. The other France watched other programs on TV and had little interest in the Games. This is the same France from Didier Eribon’s Return to Reims adjoining France Unconquered, that is the France that many of us continue to love: a France very different from the one that glorified the Olympics, held in the shadow of wars and arrogance, with a superiority complex that risks dragging everyone into the abyss.