France Whips Up Zany, Patriotic Birthday ‘Cake’

France’s 200th Bastille Day began Friday morning with a traditional parade of its military might: Squadrons of tanks and tracked vehicles carrying short-range Pluton nuclear missiles rolled down the Avenue des Champs Elysees while Mirage jets zoomed overhead spewing blue, white and red smoke, the colors of the French flag.

France’s 200th Bastille Day ended well past midnight along the same street with a zany, irreverent parade, mocking such standard symbols of nationhood. The United States was represented by a moonwalking college band. The large Soviet Union display sprayed fake snow from military-gray tanker-trucks labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet: “Glasnost.”

On the bicentennial birthday of the storming of the Bastille that launched the French Revolution, the French staged two very different parades representing two strong elements of their complex national character--fervent nationalism and creative, outrageous, rebellion.

All in all, this made for a very satisfying birthday party for the French, who thrive in such a contradictory milieu.

“The whole thing was cool. It was very original and symbolic,” said Nathalie Soudan, 22, a Paris secretary who watched the wild night-time parade from the canopy of a fast food restaurant on the Champs-Elysees.

‘Beats the Rose Bowl Parade’

“It was incredible,” agreed James Herbert, 21, a UC Berkeley student from Santa Cruz. “It sure beat the Rose Bowl Parade.”

However, Herbert said he was disappointed with the American representation in the parade, the Florida A&M; marching band that moonwalked and danced down the street to a repertoire of soul-singer James Brown classics such as “Poppa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “Living in America.”

“I thought the American one was pretty weak, to tell the truth,” Herbert said. “It was your typical stereotype, the football game with the marching band.”

Judging by the applause, the favorite floats and other participants in the nighttime parade, designed by the French-American advertising genius Jean-Paul Goude, 48, included the American band members, some of whom said they were participating in hopes that James Brown would be freed from a South Carolina prison where he is serving a six-year sentence for leading police on a high-speed chase; the large Soviet display that had a ballerina and a costumed bear skating on a silicon rink as well as a steam-snorting locomotive; a large African float with brightly costumed dancers on a giant pyramid surrounded by 400 Senegalese infantry soldiers and horses painted to look like zebras; and Italian flag throwers, their faces painted yellow.

The impressive display of military hardware and marching columns of Foreign Legionnaires and Special Forces in the morning parade, produced a much different reaction from the crowd of about 800,000 who lined the famous French triumphal avenue.

‘Straining the Buttons’

As a radio reporter was overheard remarking into his microphone during the military parade: “Old soldiers now straining the buttons of their uniforms haltingly saluted weapons that they had never dreamed of during their campaigns in Africa and Egypt.”

France is one of the last countries in the West to stage an annual military parade on its national day. The United States has nothing equivalent on July Fourth, nor do any of its other Western allies. Even the Soviet Union under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has drastically scaled back on its military parade on Nov. 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

President Bush, one of 33 visiting national leaders assembled in Paris for the bicentennial celebration and the summit meeting of the Group of Seven leading industrial democracies that also began Friday, watched the entire military parade but left his balcony seat overlooking the night parade nearly an hour before it finally ended.

However, Bush and his wife, Barbara, stayed long enough on the balcony of the Hotel de la Marine overlooking the Place de la Concorde to see a stirring float dedicated to the pro-democracy students in China’s Tian An Men Square. The float, a giant drum, was escorted to the Place de la Concorde by Chinese students wearing headbands that spelled out in Chinese characters: “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” the slogan of the French Revolution. Silently riding bicycles, the students waved a large banner that said: “We Are Continuing.”

The only sound that could be heard as the Chinese float circled the square where The Terror and the guillotine reigned nearly two centuries ago, after the French Revolution turned sour, was the eerie whistle of a chill northeast wind in the open microphones.

There was another issue that went against the grain of the general gaiety. French leaders felt compelled to continue their counterattack against British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who earlier in the week told a French newspaper and television network that France could not take exclusive credit for the Declaration of the Rights of Man that is the focus of the celebrations here.

In his annual Bastille Day interview, Mitterrand lectured both Thatcher and Bush for their “reticence” in agreeing to a north-south summit between Western industrial democracies and Third World countries.

“Great Britain can and must play a major role in this,” Mitterrand said.

French Prime Minister Michel Rocard joined in with an attack on what he termed the “social cruelty” of Thatcher’s political policies.

Meanwhile, according to the British news agency Reuters, opposition politicians in London joined the people of Paris in booing Thatcher for her tactlessness.

British Labor Party deputy George Robertson attacked Thatcher for “insulting people and making fun of them and abusing them at a time of maximum national celebrations.”

But these slight incidents did not mar the festivities. Crowds along the Champs Elysees were sometimes 40 people deep during the night parade. Some people built makeshift viewing platforms out of cinder blocks dragged from construction sites. People clung to trees, clambered onto canopies and lined the mansard rooftops of the boulevard.

The crowd was mostly good-humored although in one incident, someone threw small tear gas grenades into several dense sections of the crowd, causing people to gag and run. Earlier in the day, someone attempted to make a political point about the celebration of the revolution by throwing 200 plastic human heads, all painted red, into the Seine River that bisects Paris.

When American opera star Jessye Norman, draped in a French flag, sang the final chorus of the French national anthem, “The Marseillaise,” the crowds joined in.

“ Le jour de gloire est arrive ,” sang Norman. The day of glory had indeed come. And its send-off, the parade’s climax, was a shower of fireworks that lit up the early morning sky above a still wide-awake city.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus also contributed to this article.