France’s Bastille Day parade meets the Olympic torch relay

Paris hosted an extra-special guest for France’s national holiday Sunday – the Olympic flame lighting up the city’s grandiose military parade for Bastille Day.

Just 12 days before the French capital hosts the exceptionally ambitious and high-security Summer Games, the torch relay joined up with thousands of soldiers, sailors, rescuers and medics marching in Paris beneath roaring fighter jets.

President Emmanuel Macron kicked Sunday’s events off with a review of the troops.

Military bands and choirs played an important role, performing a medley of French military songs, American jazz tunes, a Scottish bagpipe ballad – and the Marseillaise.

Around 130,000 police are deployed around France for the holiday weekend.

The parade wrapped up with the arrival of the flame, escorted by riders on horseback, 25 torchbearers, and cadets dressed in the five Olympic colours forming the shapes of the five interlocking Olympic rings.

The first torchbearer was Col. Thibault Vallette, equestrian gold medallist in the 2016 Rio Olympics, who passed it on to a group of young athletes as they passed it hand-to-hand in front of the presidential tribune.

Usually, the parade travels from the Napoleon-era Arc de Triomphe to the Concorde plaza, where France’s last king and queen were beheaded.

This year, Concorde has been transformed into a huge Olympic venue for breakdancing, skateboarding and BMX.

So the parade route headed to the Bois de Boulogne park on the city’s edge instead.

Olympic venue construction around the Eiffel Tower means spectators can’t gather beneath the monument to watch its annual fireworks show, either.

After its Bastille Day appearance, the torch relay will swing by Notre Dame Cathedral, the historic Sorbonne university and the Louvre Museum before heading to other Paris landmarks on Monday.

This year’s Bastille Day offered Macron a moment of distraction from the political turmoil he unleashed with snap elections that weakened his pro-business centrist party and his presidency.

The result left a deadlocked parliament with no one clearly in charge.

The prime minister could leave office within days, while the left-wing alliance that won the most seats is struggling to agree on a proposed replacement.

Additional sources • AP

You may also like

Most read