Olympic Ceremony Put a Changing France on Full Display

A new France was consecrated Friday evening during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. When Aya Nakamura, a French Malian singer, came sashaying in a short fringed golden dress out of the august Académie Française, she redefined Frenchness.

Adieu the stern edicts of the Académie, whose role has been to protect the French language from what one of its members once called “brainless Globish.” Bonjour to a France whose language is increasingly infused with expressions from its former African colonies that form the lyrical texture of Ms. Nakamura’s many blockbuster hits.

France’s most popular singer at home and abroad gyrated as she strode forth over the Pont des Arts in her laced golden gladiator sandals. A Republican Guard band accompanied her slang-spiced lyrics. Her confidence bordered on insolence, as if to say, “This, too, is France.”

Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, had said that Ms. Nakamura sings in “who knows what” language. But her denunciation of the performance on the grounds that it would “humiliate” the French people failed to stop it.

The backdrop to the ceremony was a political and cultural crisis in France broadly pitting tradition against modernity and an open view of society against a closed one. The country is politically deadlocked and culturally fractured, unable to form a new government or agree on what precisely Frenchness should be.

In this context, the thrust of the ceremony, as conceived by its artistic director, Thomas Jolly, was to push the boundaries of what it means to be French in an attempt to bolster a more inclusive France and a less divided world. It was a political act wrapped in a pulsating show.

Ms. Nakamura uses slang like verlan that reverses the order of syllables, and West African dialects like Nouchi. She mixes languages, including English, and R&B and Afropop.

In the France imagined and embraced by Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally party there are white people of ancestral lineage who are somehow more French than brown or Black citizens of immigrant lineage, like Ms. Nakamura, who was born in Mali.

It has long seemed like these visions, inclusive and nationalist, were irreconcilable. But Ms. Nakamura’s performance was a blending, not a confrontation. The uniformed band, a bastion of French tradition, played the music of a Mali-born artist with millions of followers on social media. Uniformed trumpeters and trombonists jammed to “Djadja,” Ms. Nakamura’s breakout 2018 hit and now an anthem of female empowerment.

Here was the reciprocal openness to the “other” that was Mr. Jolly’s core theme in a ceremony that mixed kitsch and solemnity, the camp and the classical, literary culture and a queen’s severed head, a heavy metal band and a metal horse galloping in silvery splendor on the waters of the Seine.

All this, for a moment, portrayed a tolerant and vibrant France to the world {snip}

Other than to declare the Games open, President Emmanuel Macron was silent. {snip}

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Yet, in the end, Mr. Macron backed and approved an Olympics ceremony that screamed France is free and multiple. It embraced the diverse, the sexually provocative, the risqué, and the disruptive {snip}

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Not all were satisfied. Edwige Diaz, a lawmaker and member of the National Rally, listed what she found wrong with the ceremony on the CNews television channel on Monday. This included “L.G.B.T. lobbying,” an “ode to drugs,” a Republican Guard that was “ridiculed,” a glorification of “revolutionaries and anarchists,” a “parody of Christianity” and “woke propaganda.”

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