Zinedine Zidane hands the Olympic Flame to Rafael Nadal during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Picture date: Friday July 26, 2024.

The sight of a blaze on the Seine has historically boded ill, from the conflagration of Pont Marchand in 1621 to that of Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019, by way of the setting of fire on the Palais des Tuileries by men from the Commune. But this 26th of July Paris burned in bliss with the flames of Olympia, which for the first time ever kicked off the Games not from a stadium but from the very heart of the host city: a river in this case, a scene of grandeur with no equal which the organizers had the insight to clean up and turn into the star of the opening ceremony. So the traditional parade of athletes took place on boats sailing from Pont d’Austerlitz to Pont d’Iéna, flanked by the capital’s principal monuments, to end in a very French and pyrotechnic festivity with the Eiffel Tower as backdrop.

While the bowl containing the Olympic Torch in the Tuileries Gardens flares (again not in a stadium), sites like the Esplanade des Invalides, the Place de la Concorde, and the Grand Palais will see tourists replaced by sport competitors, and the postcard city will be the setting of sporting events. Meanwhile, at the Palais Bourbon, fires will crackle and scorch too, of the kind that are harder to extinguish: the battles of a National Assembly dominated by the New Popular Front of leftists that includes the Insoumise leader Mélenchon, whose victory in the legislative elections forestalled Macron’s fall and prevented (or postponed) the triumph of Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. The term is bound to be tense, but it starts with an Olympic truce that may just calm things down.

El País: The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, in pictures

Jours de fête