The Brazilian commentator who said he could not understand a people who prefer tasting snails to watching football must have eaten his words yesterday when more than a million French men, women and children swarmed to the ChampsElysees for the World Cup victory parade. It was, they said, greater than the crowd which welcomed Gen de Gaulle to Paris on the liberation of the city from German occupation in 1944.
The Paris avenue was transformed into a sea of people, many of them wearing red, white and blue and waving French tricolours.
They chanted "On a gagne" and "Et un, et deux, et trois, zero" in a reminder of the team's winning score against Brazil on Sunday night. Cheers and applause rippled through the huge crowd with an eerie power. The fans perched atop lamp posts, bus stops and newspaper kiosks. The euphoric crowd was so dense that, in two hours, the opentop bus carrying the French team and their trainer, Aime Jacquet, advanced only the equivalent of two metro stops. The football heroes could progress no further towards the Arc de Triomphe and police cleared a path for them to exit the ChampsElysees via the Avenue George V. They are likely to be mobbed again today when they will be the star guests at President Jacques Chirac's annual Bastille Day garden party for 4,000.
Many of yesterday's crowd were among the 1.5 million French people who descended on the ChampsElysees on Sunday night. The celebration was marred at 3.00 a.m. yesterday when a car ploughed through the crowd, injuring 80 people, 11 of them seriously. The driver, a 44-year-old teacher who suffers psychiatric problems, turned herself into the police yesterday. She is believed to have panicked.
Some of the revellers spent the whole night on the ChampsElys ees and stayed on until the afternoon for the victory celebration. Emmanuel Poulain, a 32year-old forester from near the Swiss border was one of them. "We wanted to continue the celebration, to show our joy, to thank the team," he said.
With her bleached blonde hair and carefully made-up face, Chantal Villemann (58), a marketing consultant, is not usually a football fan. "This time I got carried away," she said. "Until the World Cup, the French thought their team was no good, but they proved they were. French people usually don't support their athletes, but this time they were behind them, and it made a difference."
Louis Gaben (75), a retired sociologist, said he had come to the ChampsElysees to study the crowd. "I find it very mixed, very sympathique," he said. "There is a shared feeling - that of national pride. People thought patriotism was dead in France, but this shows it's not. These big crowds are essential for people to feel part of one community. This victory has given a new value to the notion of sports in France. And it helps bring down barriers between races, between ages and different social classes."
The crowd, like the athletes who were being feted, was black, white and Arab. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the May 1968 revolutionary who is now a German member of the European Parliament, told a French newspaper: "The French team is not at all good for [the extreme right leader Jean-Marie] Le Pen. This group represents a different France from the one the National Front dreams of."
Michel Bangui, a 31-year-old office technician, wore a red, white and blue track suit and held a huge flag. The son of a Central African immigrant and a French mother, Mr Bangui said he hoped the World Cup would reduce racial tensions, "but I'm not convinced. I'm frightened by the rise of the National Front. The French remain French."
AFP adds: "Football has united our country around the flag," said the mass-circulation tabloid France- Soir. The victory was "a tricolour orgasm", it said. Once referred to as the red, white and blues, the multi-racial team has now been dubbed, and fondly at that, the "Black-white-and-Arabs".
During radio phone-in shows, immigrants have flooded lines to say that for the first time their children, often the butt of French racism, were singing the anthem and waving the flag.
In a knock-on effect, President Jacques Chirac's popularity last week rocketed 15 points to 68 per cent, his highest score since taking office three years ago. His Socialist rival, the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, gained 10 points to reach a 70 per cent popularity rating.
"There is still a future for French confidence, for French ambition, for French unity - and not just in the stadium," said the right-wing Le Figaro.