France Vive la Revolution!

It was a spectacular souffle of politics, parades and visual extravaganzas — all steeped in historical symbolism, spiced with controversy and served up to the world with characteristic elan. France threw itself a revolutionary birthday party last week, and the world joined in the celebration, as President Francois Mitterrand recalled the glory of 1789 as the “birth of the modern era.”

The festivities began with a tribute to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, attended by President George Bush and 33 other world leaders. Then Mitterrand inaugurated the glittering new $400 million steel-and-marble opera house overlooking the Place de la Bastille. The celebration culminated two days later on July 14, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, as fireworks exploded over the Place de la Concorde, once the site of the dreaded guillotine. Attended by a crowd of 500,000 and beamed to a worldwide TV audience of 700 million, the $15 million “opera-ballet” by French advertising whiz Jean-Paul Goude featured Scottish pipers and Senegalese drummers, a white bear skating on an ice rink carried by Soviet sailors, and a contingent of Chinese pushing bicycles and holding aloft a banner that read WE SHALL CONTINUE.

Of course, every party has its poopers. Parisians grumbled about draconian parking restrictions. Opposition leaders complained that the three-day affair was costly evidence of Mitterrand’s “megalomania” (estimates range from $66 million to $280 million), moving Culture Minister Jack Lang to rage against “grinches and killjoys.” But such petty squabbles could not spoil the flamboyant funky fun of the Florida A&M University marching band, gliding in a moonwalk down the Champs Elysees. Nor could they dampen the soaring spirit evoked when American diva Jessye Norman, wrapped in the blue, white and red colors of the French flag, sang La Marseillaise. For a few fleeting days the City of Light shone brighter than usual. For a magical moonlit moment — but only a moment — it seemed possible that the divisions that have sundered France between revolutionaries and royalists, between left and right, between natives and immigrants, would melt in the bicentennial bonhomie.