SHARE
COPY LINK

PARIS

Bon appetit: Paris’s Champs-Elysées to host giant picnic

Paris’s most famous street, the Champs-Elysées, is to host a giant open-air picnic on Sunday as the French capital’s iconic boulevard seeks to reinvent itself.

The Champs-Elysees
The Champs-Elysees is normally a busy shopping thoroughfare. (Photo by Thomas COEX / AFP)

Nearly 273,000 people have applied to take part in the event which will see a 216-metre red-and-white chequered rug cover the picnic ground and feature free packed meals from organisers’ eight partner restaurants.

Around 4,000 people have been selected to participate in the ‘le grand pique-nique’, with each guest invited to bring up to six additional people and choose one of two sittings, at noon or 2pm.

The ‘world’s largest tablecloth’, made from 25 pieces of recycled fibre, will be assembled on site by 150 people, organisers said.

The aim of the event was to show that the Champs-Elysées, famous for its expensive boutiques and restaurants, was not only good for shopping, said Marc-Antoine Jamet, president of the organiser, the Champs-Elysées Committee.

“It’s a way of telling Parisians: ‘Come back to the Champs-Elysées’,” he said.

In 2023, the association transformed the avenue into an open-air mass dictation spellathon, pitting thousands of France’s brainiest bookworms against one another.

With 1,779 desks laid out on the boulevard, organisers had sought to break the world record for a dictation spelling competition.

A top tourist attraction, the avenue has been gradually abandoned by locals in recent years.

The historic UGC Normandie cinema, which opened in 1937, is set to close in June due to decline in business.

On Monday, the Committee was due to present a 1,800-page study of possible ways to reinvent the Champs-Elysees.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

CRIME

French cinema boss on trial for sexual assault

The head of France's top cinema institution Dominique Boutonnat denied sexually assaulting his godson as he went on trial Friday in a case that has led to calls for him to step down.

French cinema boss on trial for sexual assault

The trial comes as French cinema reels from a renewed #MeToo reckoning that has seen several big names, including acting legend Gerard Depardieu, accused of sexual abuse.

READ ALSO: French actor Gérard Depardieu to be tried for sexual assault in October

Activists have denounced Boutonnat’s continued leadership of the National Centre of Cinema (CNC), whose role includes overseeing measures to curb sexual violence in the industry.

His godson accuses him of trying to masturbate him during a holiday in Greece in 2020 when he was 19.

“I looked at him to find my godfather and that’s when I saw someone completely different… It was someone using me to masturbate,” the godson, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the court.

Boutonnat responded in court that it was his godson who had initiated the situation and kissed him.

“I feel bad about leaving an ambiguous situation, but to say there was a sexual assault is false,” he told the court.

He was placed under investigation in February 2021 but still reappointed by the government as head of the CNC in July 2022.

Training to prevent abuse has in recent months become obligatory for films seeking public funding via the CNC.

The CNC told AFP that the case against Boutonnat came from “the private sphere” and had no relation to its activities.

SHOW COMMENTS