Right-wingers cry foul at Paris Olympics poster

PARIS: French conservatives and far-right figures fumed on Tuesday (Mar 5) at the official poster for this summer's Paris Olympics, complaining a Christian cross and French tricolour flags were missing.

Those responsible for the image were "ready to deny France, going so far as to distort reality to cancel its history", Francois-Xavier Bellamy of the right-wing Republicans party wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Top of the list of complaints about the fantastical Parisian panorama is a cross which in real life tops the Dome des Invalides, part of a historic central Paris military complex and site of the tomb of Napoleon.

Its absence from the version depicted on the stylised poster led Marion Marechal of the far-right Reconquete (Reconquest) party to ask in her own post on X: "What is the point of holding the Olympic Games in France if we then hide who we are?"

And National Rally (RN) lawmaker Nicolas Meizonnet wrote that the omissions must be the result of "wokism" - a bugbear of France's far right.

Artist Ugo Gattoni's design features a cartoonish Paris cityscape with major landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and a wealth of tiny details, including all 54 Olympic and Paralympic sports.

The posters "work from a distance because they feature a world, a real landscape, yet one can get lost in it," he told AFP Monday.

"Viewers can look at this poster in dozens of different ways, take different paths and really lose themselves in looking at them," Gattoni added.