King Hassan II of Morocco watched the Bastille Day parade at the side of President Jacques Chirac. A giant plywood replica of the Gate of Meknes was built on the Place de la Concorde for the occasion.
Who but the French would invite a king to help them celebrate the overthrow of their own monarchy?
But the presence of the Moroccans seemed almost an embarrassment, a reminder of a not too distant colonial past on a day when "moral", "just" and "humanitarian" war was all the rage, when every officer, politician and commentator had the name "Kosovo" on his lips.
Later, Mr Moktar Erreda and his comrades sat on little red and gold chairs in the reception room of the Elysee Palace. The Moroccan veterans of French wars had been flown to Paris for the last Bastille Day of the century.
After the second World War and Indo-China, these turbanned old men with brightly ribboned medals pinned on their white djellabas were subjected to an hour-long television interview with President Chirac, broadcast live on the giant screen beside them.
As the President droned on about reducing taxes and establishing pension funds, the Moroccans gazed absent-mindedly at the sun-tanned women in cocktail dresses and men in suits with Legion of Honour rosettes.
They apologised to the liveried waiters who came to fetch the buffet plates they'd stashed under their chairs. "It reminded me of when we were young lads," Mr Erreda said of the military parade. "Only we didn't have such fine equipment".
The old man from Marrakech thinks he was born in 1920: "They didn't keep records in those days."
He joined the French army in 1938, when Morocco was a French protectorate. It was the lot of colonised people to be poor and fight their masters' wars then.
Only two of his eight brothers and sisters survived, and his mother died in childbirth.
"I helped to liberate Royan, near La Rochelle," he said, proudly recalling the second World War. Later he went to Indochina, where he was taken prisoner by the Viet Minh.
He had two years' captivity to fathom out why he had been wounded twice, why a Moroccan was being starved and beaten in Indochina. On his release in 1955, after 17 years of service, Mr Erreda resigned from the French army. But he did not want to comment on war or colonialism.
"I was a soldier," he said. "A soldier cannot have opinions."
But heads of state must have opinions, and Mr Chirac was eager to express his. "Europe will not really exist until she has a defence and intervention capability," he said. This was the lesson of the Yugoslav war.
The Serb President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, "will pay for the atrocities . . . If he is rejected by his people and cannot leave his country, it is an unpleasant situation for him."
To the anchorman who had the nerve to ask why France had followed the US, "gendarme of the world", Mr Chirac replied sharply: "Not at all. It was of our own free will that we decided to participate, and became the second participant after the US and ahead of all the other Europeans . . . France kept her independence, but associated herself with an operation based on morality," he concluded.
The Yugoslav war must have been a godsend for the French military, and the 1,000 officers at la Garden-Party de l'Elysee seemed more jaunty than last year.
With dwindling resources and the abolition of conscription, the French armed forces were searching for a raison d'etre which Kosovo provided.
Yesterday officers lamented that French cruise missiles weren't ready in time for the war, that French aircraft could not fly without cover from US electronics. But in his annual message to the armed forces, Mr Chirac promised to fight for more defence funding.
On another front, however, there was a whiff of sedition. The French press has finally woken up to the fact that France is the only western democracy that still stages lavish, Red Square-style military parades.
Yesterday's included 5,500 marching soldiers and 90 aircraft streaming red, white and blue smoke. "It evokes the French conquest of freedom," the Defence Minister, Mr Alain Richard, said in favour of the practice.
"It is the expression of a message in which we believe collectively, that is addressed to the world." Besides, he added, the parade attracts tourists.
But as they sipped champagne on the Elysee lawn, the press corps ridiculed the show of strength they'd just witnessed.
"An anachronism", a foreign editor of a major daily commented. "A waste of money", "a sign of insecurity", "pretending we're still a great military power" were other remarks.
I put the question to a general on President Chirac's staff. Nonsense, he said. "The French people love their army. There would be an outcry if we stopped it. People like to see where their tax money is going."