Olympic Folies de Grandeur

In his great book, Russia in 1839, the Marquis de Custine remarks that tyrannies demand great sacrifices of their populations to bring forth trifles—such as magnificent military parades that are for show rather than for war.

It would be a logical error to conclude that where great sacrifices are made, there must be tyrannies, but the poor logic of it does not prevent the thought from entering one’s head when one considers the Paris Olympic Games that are about to take place. If they go off without a terrorist attack, they will be considered to have been a triumph, irrespective of the devastation and debt they have caused and leave behind.

A straw poll, admittedly strongly biased towards taxi drivers, suggests that no one in Paris, apart from members of the political elite, wanted the Games to be sited in the city in the first place. Why should the population pay for the folie de grandeur of their rulers, even if democratically elected, merely for the sake of their fleeting prestige? (Is not the tendency of democratically leaders to such folie as great as that of any ruler by supposedly divine right, insofar as the former are the incarnation of the vox populi and therefore they speak with the mouth of God? How easily the legitimately elected conclude that all they do is legitimate!)

For ordinary Parisians, the two weeks of the Olympics, and the further two weeks of the Paralympics, will be somewhat reminiscent of the Covid lockdowns (I have already forgotten how many there were and how long they lasted). Everyone who is able to do so has been advised to work from home; the population has also been advised, again if it is able, to remove itself to the countryside for the duration and to return only when the epidemic of mass tourism and surveillance by every possible contrivance is over. People I know in the environs of Paris are fleeing to the provinces because they would otherwise need a special pass to leave or enter the street in which they live.

L’Institut pour la Justice, a small organisation dedicated to the difficult task of introducing some sense into the French criminal justice system, sent me a paper subtitled “Who will win the sprint against insecurity?” I have met no one who would place his all on a bet that the forces of order will win, hence a general atmosphere of apprehension if not of outright dread. If something should go wrong—that is to say, if terrorists commit an outrage—it will not be for lack of efforts to prevent them. The Olympics are like whipping: it will be nice when they stop.

The opening ceremony alone will be a security nightmare. Not content with the usual such ceremony in a stadium in the presence of “only” 100,000 people, it will take place on the Seine, along whose banks will be—it is expected—600,000 spectators. Their access to eight miles of riverbank will have to be closely controlled by means of personalised QR codes, a process that, even if it is carried out flawlessly, will have cost a fortune in time, effort and money. There will be, according to the paper, one security agent for every fifteen spectators, or four every hundred yards or so.

Not that the security nightmare will be over once the pharaonic ceremony has passed safely—assuming that it does. The Games are taking place in twelve sites, on any one of which there might be an attack at any time. Vigilance cannot be reduced for a moment, for a single such attack would more than vitiate the supposed and fleeting prestige that the Games had brought to a city that is not, after all, entirely lacking in prestige even without the Olympics. (No one who has been in Paris during the tourist season, insofar as there is such a thing nowadays, would think that what the city needs is an extra 16 million visitors.)

The intense concentration of the forces of order on securing the safety of the Olympic Games (and who knows what madmen there may be among the 43,000 athletes taking part?) might mean a bonanza of impunity for the criminals, hooligans and rioters of France. The paper gives reason for disquiet: since 2017, the number of violent crimes causing injury in France has increased by 60 per cent, not surprisingly worst in Paris, where the increase was 17 per cent between 2022 and 2023 alone. At the best of times, the control exercised by the forces of order is tenuous in what are called les zones sensibles, the sensitive areas, as if such areas were bruises on the body politic; it would be surprising if no one in them had thought of taking advantage to cause havoc during the Games.  

Then there are the drones. According to Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, quoted in the paper, there were in 2022 only two small areas of France absolutely secure against drone attack, the Elysée Palace and the Ministry of the Interior. True, the Bastille Day parade last year was made secure, but that was for twenty hours, and the Games will last 400 hours.

One might have thought, then, that the forces of order had enough to be getting on with without having to secure the Games. So alarmed by the increase in juvenile crime has the government become (and not only the government, of course, but also the public), that the minister in charge suggested that parents—quite often, the parent—of the delinquent should be made criminally responsible for the crimes of his or her offspring, for example by reducing or stopping his or her social security. But it is too late to stop the Games, the show must go on.

The taxi drivers to whom I spoke do not see the Games as a bonanza for them, only a nuisance. The only increase in fares that they will be allowed is in the fixed rate from the airport to the city. All of them said that they were going to leave the city for the duration. Of course, what people say they will do and what they actually do when the time comes are sometimes rather different; but this is at least an indication of popular sentiment. I have not met a single person who is positively enthused by the prospect of the Games, though I sometimes read the official enthusiasm of officialdom.

For example, the paper to which I have referred quotes Tony Estanguet, a former champion canoeist, and the son of a champion canoeist, who serves as the head of the Games organising committee. He hopes, he says, that Paris during the Games will be the most secured place on earth—more secured, presumably, even than Pyongyang.

I can’t say that this is a vision that fills me with joy, even if the wish is fulfilled, especially as the reason for it is so completely trivial. Increased cyber-surveillance, facial recognition cameras every­where, control of the population’s movements: these are all things governments can easily become addicted to. Income tax, after all, was a temporary expedient of the British government which spread with the efficacy of a virus, and against which no vaccine has yet been found.

I am aware that catastrophism, the contemplation of future catastrophe, has its pleasures, and likewise that not every feared or predicted catastrophe comes to pass. I have the distinct impression, for example, that environmentalists enjoy warning against the end of the world and believe that it would only serve everyone right, that the world would be a far better place if left to the bacteria and the jellyfish. Perhaps the Olympic Games will be one long joyous festival, and the gloom, as is so often the case, will prove to have been factually unnecessary and morally reprehensible. After all, if hundreds of millions of people want to watch athletes throwing a very heavy ball in a rather peculiar and unnatural fashion, what is the harm in it? By the standards of what eternity, as Somerset Maugham might have put it, would it be better for them to interest themselves in something else, supposedly more elevated?

Still, there is little doubt that Paris has not been beautified by its vainglorious and completely unnecessary decision to host the Olympics. It is true that the security situation in the world has deteriorated unpredictably since the decision to apply was taken; but the horrible physical mess that has resulted, the City of Light becoming the City of Concrete, was all too predictable, and the harm done to a unique place is much more important than the pleasure, which could have been taken anywhere in the world.

Under his pen-name Theodore Dalrymple, Anthony Daniels recently wrote The Wheelchair and Other Stories and These Spindrift Pages, a collection of literary observations and reflections (both published by Mirabeau)