“We decided,” Macron said the other day, “that this was the right moment to present and realize this crazy idea.”

In France, history, that stage set up for spectacle, is always on your heels, or beckoning you to join in. It is no surprise that among the various creators enlisted to conceive and shape the Olympic launch — including a celebrated theater director, a novelist, and a screenwriter — is a historian who has helped create a distinctly French story to open these Games, the first to be held in Paris in a century.

“What makes this ceremony so special? “The original, I would say, is the maximum risk, but also the beauty,” historian Patrick Boucheron said at a press conference Friday morning. “We are not going to go round in circles in a stadium, but we will have this panorama, this imaginary parade — that is the power that this city has to speak to the world.”

The organisers hope to convey the story of a unique, imaginative, open and daring Olympic Games to the 11 million-plus visitors who will descend on the city in the coming weeks, and to attract an estimated 1.5 billion viewers worldwide on television for the opening ceremony alone.

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

One of the topics of that debate is the opening ceremony itself, a spectacle that will draw more than 300,000 people along the Seine, and whose security risks are staggering.

If there were any doubts that the Olympics would be a target, they were dispelled before dawn on Friday, when saboteurs attacked high-speed train lines in France that hundreds of thousands of spectators, as well as some athletes, had planned to use on their way to the Games.

French and other security officials have warned for months that Russia, bitter over its virtual exclusion from the Olympics, or other malicious parties would do everything they could to disrupt the events, whether through cyberattacks, arson or other means.

And France, it is worth remembering, has been the scene of more deaths from terrorist attacks than any other European country in this century – including the horrific coordinated attacks in 2015 on Paris’s main stadium, cafes and a theatre.

That’s part of French history, too. Paris announced its bid to host the 2024 Olympics just months before those attacks. After they happened, officials said they understood that the Games, though years away, would be part of the city’s recovery and a demonstration of its resolve.

So when the railways were targeted in arson attacks on Friday, there was little surprise. Security officials had surely expected more attempts, possibly violent ones, to disrupt the Games.

“France,” Boucheron said, “is no longer able to teach the world lessons from its history. We are alive today, we are making do with what we have, and we have only one message. … And that is that despite everything, we can still live together.”

The brilliance of the Opening Ceremony and the rest of the 2024 Games – events taking place against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, the Palace of Versailles and the Place de la Concorde – should, tragedy aside, provide a sense of joy.

No stage is more attractive than Paris. And if the city can pull it off, a place steeped in history will write itself a new chapter, indelibly stamped in the opening ceremonies and the days that follow.

“What we simply want is to produce images that we will remember, that we can talk about in the morning,” Boucheron said. When he wakes up, he said, the world will see “some things that will be successful, some things that will be failures. … We are all perhaps a little dull.”