La Magnifique Society

The parvis of Reims Cathedral no longer gave air. Thirteen editions of Elektricity — the last of them in September 2015 — had fitted at the foot of Notre-Dame with a cage of four thousand and a late-summer clock that arrived too late to convince headliners. In 2017 La Cartonnerie and Césaré did not invent a festival from nothing. They mutated one. They changed the name, the month and the ground: 16 to 21 May across the city, 19 to 21 in the Parc de Champagne, about twelve thousand listeners cited with caution. Anyone arriving in search of La Linea on a London Latin stage has the wrong society. The society here is rémoise, the ear is pop, indie and rock, and the park asks for Belle Époque, not a fairground compound.

Cédric Cheminaud, director of La Cartonnerie, and Philippe Le Goff, his counterpart at Césaré, explained the baptism without agency metaphor. They spent six months asking whether Elektricity should be kept. Changing dates, place and artistic line and keeping the name only out of fear looked like a trick. The park, when they visited it, gave back a sentence coverage will not drop: “C’est magnifique.” Hence La Magnifique Society: not a stadium where the crowd is stacked, an urban gathering in a bucolic frame, a pause of champagne and trees, not a field of fences. Anyone who treats this as a cosmetic rebrand skips a SMAC and a sound-creation centre that wanted the festival back as the firework of their season.

The ear is no longer only electro. Air, Camille, Vitalic, Agnes Obel, Jamie Cullum, Moderat, Trentemøller: those names measure the leap, they do not make a list. Elektricity had grown tight in electro and on the parvis. La Magnifique Society opens to pop, indie and rock — and to what the Cartonnerie programmes all year — without asking a single genre club for permission. In 2017 there was also a Japanese corner, Tokyo Space Odd, with Suiyoubi no Campanella and DOTAMA: a scene Christian Allex brought back from the Tokyo International Music Market. Anyone picturing a Champagne festival that only pours sparkling wine has the wrong contract. The contract here is musiques actuelles in a park held in UNESCO’s memory.

The audience experience follows the real format. Three days of concerts in the park, preceded by a week the notes call Avant-Garde: showcases, installations, Le Cellier, the Palais du Tau, the Comédie de Reims. You walk among century-old trees, not among paddocks. You climb to the city’s heights, near the vines, and you come down at night toward the centre. Anyone arriving from Paris or Lille does not find a three-day campsite. They find a park that would otherwise be a stroll, two stages, and the duty of returning to a hotel or a train. The weather can be Champagne May weather: cool at dusk, a shower that wets the grass, long light. The park lent the Belle Époque; the Cartonnerie lent the ear.

This society must not be mixed with La Linea. La Linea is London’s Latin-music gathering. La Magnifique Society is Cheminaud’s and Césaré’s, 2017, Camille and Air in the Parc de Champagne. Mixing them because both sell a name of society or of line is mixing a rémois park with a British stage. The ground is the Parc de Champagne. The ear is pop, indie and rock of a festival that fits between a SMAC and a creation centre.

Reims is not a suburb of Paris. It is a city of cathedral, of cellars and of a hall — La Cartonnerie, opened in 2005, SMAC label — that had already invented Elektricity and did not want to die with it. The 2017 figures — twelve thousand, a budget of one and a half million, largely self-financed — should not become a trophy. They measure how a name nobody knew four months earlier filled a park without pretending to be the automatic heir of the parvis. Later growth, six editions between 2017 and 2023, does not erase the origin: the mutation. Anyone working the site is not only tour staff. It is Carto and Césaré people who treat May as the firework of their season.

La Cartonnerie says the festival stopped in that form in order to think of another formula. That is not told here as a billboard ending or as a promise. It is told as what it was: a park gathering that had a cycle and that, when it closed it, did not cease to be rémois. Anyone who visits it in memory understands the cut as a cut, not as a change of soul. The Parc de Champagne is still the Parc de Champagne. The trees did not move to a stadium.

There is no need to invent a longer headliner list to explain the place. The place is explained by the parvis that grew too small, by the park’s sentence and by a director who would not keep a dead name. The Magnifique Society crowd does not buy a national brand compound. They decide to travel to a Reims park where pop and indie sound with the accent of a SMAC. That oddity is not improvised in a Paris office.

La Magnifique Society is best understood as an Elektricity that refused to stay at the cathedral’s foot. Between Cheminaud and Le Goff, between the 2015 parvis and the 2017 park, between Air and Camille, Reims had a pop, indie and rock festival that did not borrow La Linea’s society. La Cartonnerie lends the craft; the Parc de Champagne lends the trees. What remains is a May mutation that learned to be large without ceasing to be, at bottom, a sentence said while visiting a park.