Since the bridge had so seldom been taken out of commission, and then only by enemies, no one in power had thought to issue a law governing a request to do so. The district politicians let Vuitton have the bridge for four days at a reported sixty thousand dollars, however. Construction would restrict pedestrians to a nine-foot-wide path for three days. On the fourth, September 10, from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m.—in other words, on a mild Saturday evening when it would ordinarily have been jammed—the bridge would close.

"They are turning this piece of national heritage into a cultural whore!" raged the outspoken senator Martin Mejstrřík, shortly after the hapless district mayor announced the go-ahead. "What's next, an eating party in the cathedral?"

The Czechs are renowned for their hair-trigger tempers and their athletic ability to prolong arguments, so this was merely the opening salvo in what quickly became a white-hot political cannonade. Embarrassed, the city council met and instantly backfilled the books with new regulations for the bridge's use. Vuitton smoothly moved its party to a less-iconic Vltava embankment.

It seems unlikely given her ability for controversy, but, tellingly, Madonna didn't figure much in the Charles Bridge shoot-out. Instead, the core irritant to a broad array of politicians, historical groups, preservationists, and citizens was that the right to cross the beloved bridge—a right seen as tantamount to Czech identity—could be curtailed at will by a private entity. Worse, a few local leaders had attempted to sell this right for a pittance with-out any sort of referendum. It smacked simultaneously of post-Communist corruption and old Communist diktat.

Czech Radio went out for man-on-the-street interviews. They were snappy and straight from the heart:
"Of course, I mind. The Charles Bridge belongs to the people. It's there for all of us."
"Closed to the public? That's bad. It's a national monument. It should be open to us and the tourists."
"We should put a sign at the foot of the bridge for the tourists: WE APOLOGIZE."

The central dilemma of communism—and a major cause of its death—was that there is no real community possible under a system that kills off individual responsibility. The dustup over the bridge was the opposite of that—a natural explosion of the vox populi to stop politicians from giving away bits of the cultural patrimony by fiat. Central Europe's cataclysmic rebirth in 1989—the landmark year in which Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania defenestrated their Communist governments—had taught the people the power of voice. Because the coup in Prague was bloodless, a journalist dubbed it the Velvet Revolution, but it was no less decisive: Three-quarters of a million people, more than half the population of Prague, turned out to listen to a speech by dissident playwright Václav Havel on November 25, 1989. Fifteen days later, the government fell.