The dramatic opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics featured French history and culture in a series of tableaux vivants and performances that referenced early modern French theater and court culture.

Several of my colleagues in early modern French history and literature have posted analyses of the opening ceremony at the Early Modern France website. Therese Banks, Katherine Ibbett, Ellen McClure, Anna Rosensweig, Marine Roussillon, and Thibaut Maus de Rolley each contributed essays on aspects of the opening ceremony’s constructions of French historical memory. 

“Approximately an hour and twenty minutes into the Opening Ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, the masked character guiding viewers through the spectacle runs behind the clock of the Musée d’Orsay. In the glow of the clockface, our guide turns the lever of a conveniently placed time machine from “au-delà du futur” back to the “passé.” A tribute to Georges Méliès unfurls. If Méliès’s early nineteenth century is the “past,” would the French Revolution—so heavily brought into the present throughout the ceremony—be the time machine’s “passé lointain”? Where does that leave Molière’s Les Amants magnifiques (1670), pulled off the shelves of the Bibliothèque Richelieu in the infamous “ménage à trois” scene? Or the jardins de Versailles-turned-skatepark divertissement on the Seine?”

The analyses of the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony are available at the Early Modern France website.