Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France. By Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira

Since the late nineteenth century, hot-air balloons have been a recurrent symbol of French republican identity. Balloon flights and competitions were popular attractions at the world’s fairs that the young Third Republic organized in 1878, 1889 and 1900. A century later, on 1 January 1989, the launching of hundreds of balloons across France, representing liberty, equality and fraternity, inaugurated the Fifth Republic’s year-long celebrations of the bicentenary of the French Revolution. More recently, in July 2024, a hot-air balloon embodying the Olympic cauldron rose above the Tuileries Gardens to open the Paris Olympic Games. The Olympic balloon was a homage to the Montgolfier brothers’ invention of the hot-air balloon in 1783, but equally included a more subtle republican message. It stressed the ideological link between the age of Enlightenment and the subsequent French Revolution and their self-proclaimed heir—the republican tradition that has dominated French identity since the 1870s. Further, it symbolized nearly 250 years of French technological innovation and underscored France’s domination of the skies, from the nineteenth-century ballooning revival to the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic airliner in the final decades of the twentieth century. Flying, the cauldron suggested, was a French—and specifically French republican—prerogative.