Pageantry, history and risk combine for what might be an indelible new chapter in the city’s history.

PARIS — Whether it was Napoleon Bonaparte who said it, or perhaps the revolutionary Georges Jacques Danton, history mainly agrees it was a Frenchman who proclaimed, “Audacity, more audacity, always audacity!”

That devotion to daring, the embrace of breathtaking spectacle (or reckless ambition), has exerted an irresistible tug on French leaders for centuries. And it was the impulse that turned what President Emmanuel Macron called a “not very serious idea” — the notion of staging Friday’s Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics with a flotilla of barges bearing athletes down four miles of the Seine through central Paris — into one of history’s more audacious pageants.

“We decided,” Macron said the other day, “that it was the right moment to deliver this crazy idea and to make it real.”

In France, history, that stage set for spectacle, is always at your heels, or beckoning you to come along. It’s little surprise that among the several creators assigned to imagine and mold the Olympic kickoff — including a celebrated theater director, a novelist and a scriptwriter — is a historian who helped craft a distinctly French narrative to inaugurate these Games, the first in a century hosted by Paris.

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“What makes this ceremony original, I would say, is the maximum risk, but also the beauty,” said the historian, Patrick Boucheron, in a news conference Friday morning. “We will not go around in circles in a stadium, but we will have this panorama, this imaginary parade — that is the power this city has to address the world.”

The narrative of a uniquely imaginative, open and audacious Olympics is what organizers hope to transmit to the more than 11 million visitors thronging the city over the next few weeks, along with a global television audience of some 1.5 billion expected for the Opening Ceremonies alone.

The Games will thus be a counterpoint to France itself, a country whose default querulousness is central to its brand — “a joyous brawl,” in Boucheron’s description. Will the Games in any way unify France? Ridiculous. France, the historian noted, is “a country that knows how to bicker, how to debate.”

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Among the subjects of that debate lately are the Opening Ceremonies themselves,........

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