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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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072489
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07248900.023
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1990-09-17
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WORLD, Page 30FRANCEVive la Revolution!A splashy bicentennial erupts in fireworks, parades -- and politics
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.