Paris, City of Light and Shadows, Is Redrawn for the Olympics
He told me he was a retired movie cameraman. And what, I wondered, does he do now? “I am awaiting death with tranquillity,” he said. Fierce realism is another characteristic of a city that has seen it all.
A poll last week by IFOP, a market-research group, found that 36 percent of French people were indifferent to the Games and 27 percent anxious about them. That may well change once it all begins. The Olympics will usher an expected 11.3 million visitors through the history of France, to the Palace of Versailles for equestrian events amid the urns and statuary and formal symmetry of the Gardens, where French royals once disported themselves before being decapitated in the Revolution of 1789.
At the Hôtel de Ville, or City Hall, more elaborate than many a royal palace, the Olympic marathon will begin. It was here on Aug. 25, 1944, in a Paris just liberated from the Nazis, that Gen. Charles de Gaulle made one of his most memorable speeches. “Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris freed!” he said, before attributing the liberation to “the only France, the true France, the eternal France.”
Nearby, on the Île de la Cité, stands the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, its spire now replaced after the fire of 2019, but still encased in scaffolding as its restoration nears completion. Beyond it, at the east end of the island, is the Memorial to the Martyrs of Deportation, among them the 75,000 Jews killed in Nazi camps by the other France, that of the collaborationist Vichy regime, against which de Gaulle fought and of which he said nothing in his speech.
In some ways the very survival of Paris, marked at different times by religious wars, revolutionary terror and murderous hatred, is a miracle. In the small garden under the Pont Neuf, there is a plaque that commemorates the thousands of Protestants “assassinated because of their religion” in the city in August 1572. I never fail to stop there when I can.
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