by Louis-Vincent Gave, Takeaways from the first week of the Olympics are: #1: The good Security: driving into Paris from the south a week ago, the motorway was one long convoy of police vehicles. And sure enough, walking around Paris, cops are everywhere, with even back alleys and courtyards having a police car or gendarmerie vehicle stationed to keep watch. One almost has to worry that criminals in the rest of France are being given a chance to run wild. The heavy police presence does raise the question of why French people have to endure high crime levels. The number of cops on the streets indicates that it is not due to a lack of resources. So does it come down to a lack of political will? Could a government that took its security function more seriously spur a fairly rapid improvement? This seems to be the recent experience of towns like Nice and Cannes, which elected mayors who campaigned on a promise to put municipal police on the streets, and in rougher neighborhoods. Such police forces seem to have generated quick results as a motivated force can often work wonders. French geographer and left-wing intellectual Christophe Guilluy thesis is that France has broken down into three “circular” zones that contain most of the French population in and around key metropolitan areas: • At the center are the winners of globalization who work in finance, media, knowledge-based companies, universities and the government. In order to cleanse the area from fellows working in other sectors, policies are adopted that help make real estate unaffordable. This scheme has been especially aided by the central bank maintaining very low interest rates, which have duly caused property prices to go through the roof. • Next sits a “collar” on the outer region of the city where immigrants live in subsidized dwellings and act as an effective indentured labor pool for those of the inner circle, working as babysitters, cooks, domestic helpers, waiters and Uber drivers. State subsidies for housing, education, public transport and schools are heavily deployed in this second circle. • Further out is the third circle which contains the rump of the French population, who, having missed the knowledge-based revolution, reside in hollowed-out smaller towns where shops are boarded up, hospitals and schools are closing, and property values are falling. This is home to about half of the French population. Guilluy first wrote about this split 15 years ago, but its effects are now clearly visible at the polling booth, with the center voting for Macron, the collar voting for the Popular Front, and the third circle voting for the Rassemblement National. As in pre-revolutionary days, France is again split between an aristocracy that lives off the state, a self-righteous clergy and a tiers-etat that does most of the hard labor. And as in the pre-revolutionary days, as long as the clergy votes with the aristocracy, the tiers-etat cannot achieve very much. “Le tiers-etat, portant le clergé et la noblesse”. This is why the opening ceremony was an own-goal of epic proportions. Suffice to say that when the International Olympic Committee takes down the video of the events from its own website, or when countries like Algeria, Morocco and others cut off rebroadcasting, then you have failed as a show producer. What the show did not fail to do, however, was trigger disgust in the “collar” and anger in the third circle. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French leader of the far-left who holds no candle for the Catholic church but does have an astute political sense, was quick to denounce the ceremony. Perhaps less surprisingly, so did most leaders of the French right and populist right. This was on the Friday. On the Saturday, while most of the people living in the center were congratulating themselves for a transgressive and courageous show, the anger elsewhere was ramping up. Anyway, the opening ceremony left both the outer belt and third estate seething with rage. As a very left-wing friend of mine put it to me that evening “thank God this show didn’t happen just before the legislative elections. Le Pen would have won in a landslide!”. #2: The bad and the dumbfoundingly stupid As noted above, when countries cut off rebroadcasting of your ceremony and the IOC pulls your video from its website, you have failed to deliver on your brief. For most of the world, the shocking acts obviously included the overly religious imagery (a clear no-no in Olympic rules), the promotion of trans-genderism and the use of children in inappropriate contexts, some standing inches away from visible male genitalia. So this was the bad. But the dumbfoundingly stupid and—as a Catholic Frenchman—the most shocking scene by far, was the glorification of Marie Antoinette’s murder ... Leaving aside that this would have been deeply offensive to the Austrian and Hungarian delegation (Marie Antoinette was an Austrian princess), or to the Spanish King and his family (all Bourbons, as was Louis XVI) and who looked on appalled from the VIP stands at the representation of what would have been the murder of a great-great-great aunt (having a Spanish grandmother, I am disappointed the Spanish king did not walk out). Reveling in the senseless murder of an innocent woman who was in the process of dying from ovarian cancer was especially odd given that France prides itself on having enshrined the “rights of man”, and is a country where the death penalty has long been abolished. The reason I highlight this is that the coming months are bound to be fiscally tough for France (see France’s Olympics Scale Challenges). The European Union is asking France to shave €25bn from its 2024 budget and the likelihood that its 2025 budget is approved by Brussels is even lower than India leading the Olympic medal table. Against such a backdrop, who in their right mind would want to bring up France’s bloody revolutionary past? It was just last year that French suburbs (the outer ring) suffered devastating riots. Do France’s elite really think that, if there is another revolution, they won’t be the ones having to flee to London, Geneva, Brussels or Frankfurt? Why, given all of this, would they even cast such a spell upon themselves: Hubris? A lack of historical knowledge? A complete absence of self-awareness? Sheer stupidity? Incidentally, ... China and most of East Asia, [were] at least made to feel deeply uncomfortable: In most Asian cultures one rarely talks openly about death, and even less portrays it graphically. It is considered as potentially bringing bad luck. Indeed, looking at the representation of blood flowing out of the Conciergerie—the revolutionary prison in which thousands died in horrendous circumstances, some tortured, some starved, some guillotined— was creepy for anyone. Conclusion Budgetary cuts have to be made and these are likely to be painful. When these cuts are proposed, in the coming weeks and months, will inviting Celine Dion and Lady Gaga, and blowing €115mn on a party for the global glitterati, end up looking like a “let them eat cake” moment? If so, France’s leaders may well regret ever having made fun of Marie Antoinette. And for what it is worth, I know the “let them eat cake” quote was “fake news”, as Marie Antoinette never said this. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for this €115mn party, thrown for the world’s great and good, nor for the €25bn in budgetary cuts that Brussels is asking for. It brings me back to the old dictum about bread and circuses. Today, the circus is going great; the Olympics are a lot of fun and readers who can go, should go. But there is a reason the bread comes before the circus in “panem et circenses”. The autumn is likely to prove challenging. Especially if, by then, all of France’s police force is on holiday following all the overtime worked. More From Gavekal Research: