PARIS, 14 July — This year’s Bastille Day parade, which today will go down the Champs-Elysee before a reviewing stand top heavy with such dignitaries as President Jacques Chirac, will not include one exhibit that US authorities had hoped would be accorded a place of honor in the July 14 manifestation: A shiny bright 9-meter long firetruck belonging to the fire department of the city of New York.
But, “enough is enough,” say sources at the Elysee Palace who claim they’ve been besieged by phone calls from the highest levels of the United States government demanding that the truck — which took part in rescue efforts during last Sept. 11th’s attack on the World Trade Center — be allowed to roll down the world’s most famous avenue alongside the tanks, jeeps and other military vehicles that usually have their place in the annual July 14 event.
“We’ve already invited several hundred West Point cadets to march in this year’s parade, as well as some of the New York firemen who took part in Sept. 11 and have been decorated with the Legion of Honor, but there just isn’t any room for a firetruck!” said a presidential source in exasperation, imploring US authorities to stop placing pressure on Chirac to accommodate what one of his advisers has referred to as “some of the most capricious requests that have ever been made.”
Without even apparently obtaining a green light from French authorities, the bright red firetruck arrived by boat quite symbolically last July 4, after a two-week sea crossing from New York to the Atlantic port of Le Havre. Ever since, it’s been parked at an undisclosed well-protected location in Paris awaiting an invitation from the parade’s organizers who, it was hoped, it would make it their guest of honor.
For the moment, though, the nine-meter long 20-ton vehicle will have to content itself with being exposed today in front of Paris City Hall, where Parisians will be allowed to discretely walk around it, although not go aboard (FDNY authorities are fearful that a terrorist or two may place a bomb under the driver’s seat).
Already, though, some of the firemen accompanying the truck are claiming that the refusal smacks of the same anti-Americanism of which the French have been accused these past several weeks in the United States, where Americans have been encouraged — notably by American Jewish organizations — to travel anywhere but France, the world’s most-visited destination with 76 million visitors last year — for this year’s summer vacation.
Other firemen note that if the French don’t want to include the firetruck in the parade — where the only vehicles are traditionally of military origin — it’s simply out of jealousy. “Our truck,” says one firemen, making light of how the FDNY truck weighs 2.5 times a French firetruck, and is 50 percent longer — “would have attracted all of the attention away from the other vehicles in the parade.”
What he doesn’t say is that French dockers at Le Havre decided to unload the FDNY truck free of charge, while the seventy New York firemen and their families who are in Paris on a special visit are the guests of the French government which is footing much of the bill for their housing and transportation.
“This is not New York,” says the Elysee Palace source, “and one just doesn’t show up and decide to take part in the Bastille Day parade on a whim. The choice is made by the French president himself, upon the recommendation of the military governor of Paris. Imagine if we had to accommodate every organization that felt it had a God-given right to take part in a parade whose principal purpose — let’s not forget — is to commemorate military valor on the battlefield, not in the streets of New York.”
