Modern France Expert Available to Speak About Games, French Culture and Society
Image by International Olympic Committee
07/24/2024
Media Contacts: Emily Gowdey-Backus, director of media relations; Nancy Cicco, assistant director of media relations
As the world prepares to gather in Paris and observe the Olympic games, France balances, often not successfully, promoting an air of celebration and putting its best foot forward, according to a UMass Lowell historian.
“Artifice and reality intertwine at the Olympic games, often in messy ways,” said Associate Professor Patrick Young. “Political reality pokes through the smooth veneer, sometimes to shocking effect. You can see this in Americans’ knowledge of Jesse Owens success in the 1936 Nazi Olympics, the Black Power Salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 games, or the Miracle on Ice at Lake Placid during the height of the Cold War.”
Calling them a “modern mass spectacle,” Young wonders how the games will, or won’t, reflect the volatility of the current moment.
So far, he points to three topics that could outweigh the grandeur, possibly vying for more attention than the Paris mayor’s dip in the Seine.
- Immigrant Labor Exploitation: Local reporting shows a reliance on undocumented immigrants to build, often at an unsafe speed for low wages, necessary infrastructure.
- Social and Economic Inequality: Coverage points to French police redistributing homeless populations in anticipation of mass waves of tourists as well as forced evictions and gentrification in the Olympic Village area of Seine-St. Denis.
- Policing and Electronic Surveillance: French officials will utilize experimental AI-enabled surveillance and data collection tools throughout the 2024 Summer Olympics.
In particular, Young emphasized the role of the police in French society. “The brutality of French police under Macron in recent years has attracted international condemnation from human rights organizations and even the United Nations. The Olympics always leave police more powerful and better equipped, and the perils of that in our time are obvious,” he said.
An expert in Modern French, European and colonial history, Young is an associate professor of history in UMass Lowell’s College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. To arrange an interview with him, contact Emily Gowdey-Backus or Nancy Cicco.