The French football team will stage a World Cup victory parade in an open-top bus down Paris’s Champs-Élysées on Monday afternoon before a reception with the president, Emmanuel Macron, as commentators said the frenzied football celebrations marked a new kind of patriotism.
Around 1 million supporters gathered on the Champs-Élysées after the match on Sunday night, watching the Arc de Triomphe lit up in red, white and blue with the players’ names and towns projected on to it.
All through the night, cars sped around Paris with people leaning out of windows, sitting on bonnets, lying on car-roofs or hanging out of car boots to a cacophony of car-horns. Motorbikes zig-zagged around the streets with passengers carrying flags. In Marseille people jumped into the water of the old port.
More than 19 million people in mainland France watched the match on TV with hundreds of thousands gathered in fan-zones and outside bars across the country. At the Carillon bar in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, where nine people were killed by gunmen in the 2015 terrorist attacks, hundreds gathered.
But there were disturbances and riot police fired teargas when a small number of men stoned and broke into the Publicis Drugstore shop on the Champs-Élysée, with police later clearing the area with water-cannon. On Monday morning, Publicis Drugstore was clearing up smashed windows and a pillaged shop floor. The interior ministry said there had been 292 arrests across France overnight following the World Cup victory.
The French team will land in Paris at around 4pm, with the Paris victory parade beginning an hour later.
Macron, who has recently dipped in polls due to his image as “president of the rich”, will host the team at the presidential palace after long celebrations in Moscow where he was pictured punching the air, hugging the players on the pitch, then addressing them in their dressing room after the match.
He told them: “Kids, a big thank you, you allowed us to dream ….You have made 60 million French people dream, and children everywhere. You’ll see that tomorrow when you come home and I host you.”
It is not clear whether Macron will see his approval ratings rise amid the celebrations. When France last won the world cup 20 years ago in 1998, the unpopular rightwing president Jacques Chirac saw a boost in the polls.
The sports minister Laura Flessel told French radio that the victory allowed young French people in the suburbs — where some key players such as Kylian Mbappé grew up — “to dare to believe in their dreams”.
Source: theguardian
