It is an anecdote I had forgotten. In the early 1980s, after losing a bet, some friends came up with a whimsical dare: I had to park my 125cc motorcycle of the time under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and light a cigarette using the flame of the Unknown Soldier. My two companions were strolling like tourists beneath the Arc, while I simply crossed the sidewalk and rode straight under the watchful eye of Rude’s Génie de la Liberté [Genius of Liberty] sculpture to park my motorcycle. Then I nonchalantly took out a cigarette and headed toward the flame. Just as I bent down, an officer – either a police officer or a gendarme, I can’t remember – stepped out of his guard post and stopped me, informing me that I could not park there or light a cigarette in that way, and that I had to leave immediately.
So I turned around and rode off on my motorcycle, smiling and with a clear conscience, knowing I had fulfilled my obligation.
When I learned that a man was given a three-month suspended prison sentence for lighting his cigarette from that same flame, this memory immediately resurfaced – not that I thought I had gotten away with it back then, but that, clearly, things have changed.
I can understand, and I have since understood, that there are “things one simply does not do” when they are meant to reinforce social cohesion, and that these symbolic taboos are part of our way of living together.
But for the State to waste its time and our money sentencing a tearful individual who admitted to having committed the “mistake of the century” – a rather dramatic phrase, as many have done far worse over the past 25 years – and who “bitterly” regretted it, I find that it is either erring or trying to mislead us in dramatizing a story with no real significance.
Changing sense of security
Without delving into a psychoanalytic interpretation of the taboo, its meaning and limits, attempting to light my cigarette from the flame did not make me an enemy of the Republic, and I have no reason to believe that the man now convicted would have done anything worse at the next opportunity.
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