By Jean-François & Hisako Moulinet, and the team of the interreligious circle “Dialogue & Alliance”
The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games has provoked many reactions in the heat of the moment.
A very real discomfort has emerged. And we believe that we must immediately learn lessons for the future.
Hence this open letter to the President of the French Republic, Mr. Emmanuel Macron, written with several of our friends.
We invite the authorities to evaluate their own contradictions, which appeared at several moments, on Friday, July 26.
Our aim is not to denigrate the entire ceremony but to show, in a constructive and calm manner, that it included sequences that distort the ideals of the French people and move away from the Olympic values.
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Open letter to the President of the Republic
July 28, 2024,
Mr. President,
Congratulations on an Olympic Games opening ceremony that left the confines of a stadium to showcase the beauty of Paris. The City of Lights shone brightly. Some moments were moving and sumptuous.
However, several parts of this ceremony are to be deplored. Ms. Anne Descamps, the communications director of Paris 2024, apologized after international and national remonstrances.
The Olympic ideal (“higher, stronger, faster – together”) is incompatible with an aesthetic of the beheading of women. Recently, France, the homeland of human rights, condemned all terrorist beheadings, even more so after the beheading of Samuel Paty. Let us abolish all apology for terror, that of the State even more so, as Robert Badinter would have done. The global audience, often family-oriented, wants to celebrate life elevated by the flame and not shortened by the iron. Honoring Olympe de Gouges as a woman of gold in the ceremony was judicious. She too would have liked to escape the guillotine that cut off her head and her ideas on women’s rights in 1793.
Our ancestors did not bequeath us libraries to scatter the pages of books and indulge in libertinism.
We avoid offending the faith of athletes and spectators. Imitating and revisiting the Last Supper with refreshing humor would have been acceptable; mocking it with infantile blasphemies was the option to be rejected without hesitation.
France wants to present itself as a country of freedom in the broadest possible sense, but for many peoples of the world, France seems to advocate provocative libertinism more than freedom. They are shocked and saddened to see that France seems to have lost the values that have built its history. Let us hope, Mr. President, that the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games will avoid such excesses.
Please accept, Mr. President, the expression of our highest consideration.
Unificationist Community of France
Federation for Universal Peace,
Federation of Women for World Peace,
French Federation of Families for Peace, etc.
Note: Dialogue & Alliance, a French-speaking interfaith cooperation circle affiliated with the Interfaith Association for Peace and Development (AIPD) – France and supported by the United Religions Initiative (URI), the Geneva Interfaith and Intercultural Alliance (GIIA), the World Committee of the Three Testaments (CMTT).
Photo: An artist’s impression of ancient Olympia
