Letter from Paris: August 28, 2024 News Digest

The opening ceremony for the Paralympics takes place today with a grand popular parade on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, coupled with a large-scale (ticketed) show at the Place de la Concorde. Choreographer Alexander Ekman orchestrated the artistic performance with 140 dancers, including 16 with disabilities. More than 4,000 international athletes will be arriving in Paris to compete, and more than 2 million tickets have been sold. On Saturday, the Paralympics torch was lit in Stoke Mandeville, a village northwest of London that’s considered the birthplace of the Paralympics Games. The flame relay crossed the Channel via the Channel Tunnel into France, where it was used to light 12 torches that were carried to 50 cities across the country.

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The city celebrated the 80th anniversary of its liberation from German troops during World War II. Held on Sunday, the ceremonial commemoration included the lighting of a Paralympics torch, a flyover by the Patrouille de France, and the hoisting of a flag under the Eiffel Tower — recalling “the firefighters who at midday 80 years ago took down the Nazi flag that had been flying there for four years, replacing it with the tricolor,” to quote Le Monde. The venerable newspaper described the Liberation of Paris like this: “On August 25, 1944, the 2nd French Armoured Division entered the capital under the command of General Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque, ending 1,500 days of German occupation. Their triumphant arrival followed a tumultuous week of strikes, combat at barricades and street battles between French Resistance fighters and occupying forces.”

President Emmanuel Macron has been engaged in a round of talks to find a new prime minister. On Monday, he declined to name Lucie Castets, the candidate put forward by the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), “even though the alliance had won the most seats in the July snap elections,” to quote Le Monde. The president “cited ‘institutional stability’ to justify his decision” not to name a left-wing PM. In an interview with Le Monde, Benjamin Morel, a political scientist and constitutional expert, says this argument is more political than a “legal constraint.” Meanwhile leftist leaders are accusing the president of denying democracy.

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday evening on a flight from Azerbaijan. As reported by PBS News, the arrest warrant “alleged his platform has been used for money laundering, drug trafficking and other offenses” including crimes against minors and online sexual exploitation. Durov is a dual French-Russian citizen. Founded after the Russian government’s crackdown following mass pro-democracy protests in Moscow in 2011 and 2012, Telegram is criticized for its lack of content moderating, leading to criminal activities.

French film legend Alain Delon died on August 18. He was 88 years old. In a tribute to “France’s greatest film seducer,” France 24 sums up the “angel and demon” aspects of the man who claimed to define himself through women: “To some he was the sexiest man of the 20th century who played the impeccably tailored, ice-cold killers popularised by 1960s New Wave films to perfection. To others, the man who often referred to himself in the third person and admitted to having slapped a woman, was an egotistical chauvinist, with feminists appalled by the lifetime achievement award the Cannes film festival gave him in 2019. His millions of fans, from France to Japan – where Delon was adored as an idol of male beauty – were prepared to overlook his failings.” Read the full article here.