Focusing on the Seine rather than the stadium was one of the most self-conscious innovations of the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony. “Bold, original, and unique,” claimed the official website. Some of the scenes and characters in the aquatic pageant were explicitly designed to challenge tradition, from the statues of French women rising from their plinths to the tableau of Sequana, symbolic origin of the Seine, steering her metallic steed in a way that both suggested and supplanted Joan of Arc.
The quest for novelty in the opening ceremony has sparked lively controversy. Yet transforming the Seine into spectacle also reconnects with a long tradition of fluvial festivities, where powerful and sometimes provocative projections of national grandeur for an international audience make extravagant use of technical virtuosity, fantasy, and display.
Under the Bourbon monarchy of the ancien régime—radically revisited in the headless Marie-Antoinette of last Friday’s ceremony—royal celebrations already privileged the Seine’s potential to impress and accommodate the people. Royal weddings and baptisms called for magnificence and munificence: how better to increase the dazzle of fireworks or the ethereal beauty of an illuminated pavilion than to situate these on the Seine, its banks as viewing platforms for the largest possible public? In 1739, as many as half a million crowded the riverbanks for the celebration of the wedding of Louis XV’s oldest daughter Marie-Louise Elisabeth to the Infante Don Felipe of Spain, treated not only to the traditional fireworks but also to the novelty of a radiant édifice du feu at Pont Neuf. So deeply did the event etch itself onto national memory as a template for lavish display that in 1987 Maison Hermès, famed for its luxury products, commissioned a floating replica of the 1739 pavilion, eighty-four metres high.
Through the French Revolution and the nineteenth century, the Seine remained central to public and political spectacle. On 9 November 1801, second anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état, Paris hosted a Festival of General Peace in prelude to the short-lived Treaty of Amiens, with barges decorated to represent European nations navigating along the Seine towards the Temple of Commerce. On Place de la Concorde—which, as Place de la Révolution, had witnessed the execution of Louis XVI—a theatrical performance showcased scenes of military strife succeeded by temples of peace, industry, and the arts.
During Napoleon III’s Second Empire of 1852–70, royal and imperial traditions of free spectacles at the centre of Paris continued. Celebrations of “Saint Napoleon”, coinciding strategically with the Catholic Feast of the Assumption on 15 August, featured plays such as Les Français Protecteurs, ou les Brigands de la Montagne, as well as satisfying the customary popular demand for pyrotechnics. One unrealized design for 15 August 1867, now in the Archives nationales, imagines an allegorical pageant with colourful statues of water nymphs, tritons and dolphins on barges and pontoons, and a concluding aquatic tableau:
France, personified as a magnificent queen, journeys up the Seine in a chariot drawn by marine deities and accompanied by symbolic representations of day and night, war and peace, agriculture and the seasons. The other nations arrive to greet her—and immediately there is a great explosion of fireworks, as if to express the joy of such powerful fraternity between peoples.
Public domain via the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon.
Still more brilliant—in every sense—was the Théâtre d’Eau masterminded by architects Eugène Beaudouin and Marcel Lods for the International Paris Exhibition of 1937. This installation relied on a symbiosis of engineering, electricity and the river itself: the Seine as stage, props and prima donna. Situated at Pont d’Iéna, the Théâtre comprised 174 floating fountains, 4800-horsepower pumps, 2200 nozzles and 800 projectors illuminating the fountains and their surroundings in a kaleidoscope of ever-changing colour. “Liquid architecture,” marvelled its spectators, who also found in these fluvial fantasies the floral forms and baroque exuberance of aristocratic gardens (similarly suggested by the pontoons of last Friday’s ceremony). Sometimes, the Théâtre coincided with festivals of light and music by composers such as Elsa Barraine, Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen’s Fête des belles eaux played on the Exhibition’s theme of technical innovation: scored for six electronic Ondes Martenot and projected through loudspeakers along the banks of the Seine.
Like the 2024 Olympics, the International Exhibition of 1937 sought to promote international encounter and rivalry while projecting an image of French pride and innovation. Against the troubled background of a divided Popular Front and a rapidly rising far right, partisan enthusiasts placed the exhibition’s particular highlights at centre stage. Newspapers across the Francophone world from Maroc-Matin to Le Monde Colonial Illustré vaunted the Théâtre d’Eau’s superiority, whether over a similar installation in Barcelona in 1929 or even the celebrated fountains of Versailles. And the 1937 spectacle featured an additional novelty. Every evening, control of the console operating the display from the Restaurant du Roi George would be given to one of the female diners, “to bestow on the fountains whatever forms and colours her fantasy might suggest.”
As reflected in the 2024 Opening Ceremony, the association between the Seine, femininity, and fantasy also draws on more ancient tradition. In 1933, archaeological excavations at the source of the Seine near Dijon unearthed an original statue of the river goddess Sequana. Around her shrine, votive offerings excavated by 1930s archaeologists revealed the beliefs and creativity of first-century Gauls: bronze models of diseased eyes or disabled limbs crafted in the hope of miraculous cure. By the 1930s, the Second-Empire statue of Sequana was so comprehensively covered in graffiti—men and women etching and dating their desires and dreams—that it was due to be replaced by a replica. But as one author tetchily observed in Les Parisiens de Paris, any statue would surely need iron railings to protect it from further inscription. It isn’t easy to prevent the French projecting their fantasies onto the Seine.
Jessica Wardhaugh is a Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–39 and Popular Theatre and Political Utopia in France, 1870–1940: Active Citizens, both with Palgrave Macmillan
