There is, in certain collective celebrations, an intensity that goes beyond the very object they celebrate. A square fills up, improvised processions form, messages come from institutions that, just the day before, hardly seemed concerned. Screens relay the moment, voices overlap, flags come out of drawers. For a few days, a figure concentrates a fervor that few public events manage to generate in this country. A statement from the supervising ministry, a second in the name of the Prime Minister, a reception at the chancery, sometimes an internship offered, sometimes a scholarship, almost always the same intensity regardless of the object. Then the wave subsides. It leaves behind a question that one does not always dare to formulate: what exactly did we celebrate, and why that, rather than something else?

The question is not new. Societies have always produced their heroes of the moment, their seasonal faces, their ephemeral triumphs. What has shifted is the boundary between what deserves recognition and what simply deserves attention. The distinction, once maintained by mediating institutions—schools, the written press, professional bodies, academies—has considerably thinned. It now plays out in a space where the speed at which an image circulates weighs more than the density of the journey it represents.