As it prepares to host the Summer Olympics, France is putting a multicultural face forward, writes Adam Plowright. Not everyone there is pleased about it, he says.
Every host country of the Olympic Games faces a reckoning. It’s not a trial like a war or national disaster. It can’t be compared to an election of the sort America faces this fall. But the world’s biggest sporting event holds a mirror up to a nation like few other events. Part of the reason is that organizing it is so mind-bogglingly complex. It stress tests a country’s government. It places incredible burdens on the state bureaucracy.
That the Mali-born and Paris-raised singer is one of the best-known and most-streamed French artists internationally counted for little in the eyes of many conservatives, and indeed most of the country, according to polls. Neither did her reported desire to adapt Edith Piaf, one of the legends of French chanson. The intended statement — about multiculturalism, creativity, inclusion — was drowned out by criticism described as “pure and simple racism” by the country’s justice minister.
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