Philip Dine

Loughborough University

Introduction

A dramatic act of symbolic reconstruction occurred in June 1995, when Bradford Northern, the rugby league club long synonymous with sport in that city, announced its decision to change its name to `Bradford Bulls'.1 This move is of some significance for our understanding of the challenges of globalization faced by traditional patterns of communal identification as we approach the millenium, and was most obviously prompted by the international marketing success of the Chicago Bulls basketball team. Howevever, the decision to sacrifice a century of Yorkshire tradition on the altar of the mighty dollar is by no means necessarily tragic, and may even be regarded as timely. After all, the dropping of the `Northern' tag - exactly one hundred years after the historic meeting in Huddersfield which gave birth to the breakaway Northern Rugby Union - can in no sense be portrayed as a betrayal of Corinthian sporting values. Neverthless, the sports historian may properly be allowed to regret the passing of what is a particularly tangible sign of modern sport's existence as a privileged site for the study of the past in the present. Happily, such relics of nomenclature continue to litter French rugby football, and most obviously the union code; although for how long must be in doubt in the globalizing wake of the recent rugby union World Cup competition. However, for the time being at least, such famous names as Le Racing Club de France (based in Paris) and L'Aviron Bayonnais (literally the Bayonne `oar', or rowing club, from the far South-West) continue to remind us of their very specific historical origins. It is to those origins which we need to return to if we to be able to make sense of French rugby's historical significance as a major site for the construction of masculine, class-based, regional, and national identities.

French `difference'

To the British outsider, France is primarily remarkable as the great exception to the pattern of rugby union's dissemination in the later 19th and early 20th centuries: a fact still reflected in its current status as the only major rugby-playing nation outside what we might call the British imperial bloc of the home countries, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. This historical difference has, over the years, been reflected in the emergence of a distinctly French rugby culture which has not infrequently brought the Fédération Française de Rugby (FFR), the national organizing body for the union game, into sharp conflict with the other rugby playing nations, and in particular the British home unions; a situation not helped by France's obvious linguistic and cultural isolation in this particular context. However, French `difference' has also given rise to a unique style of play recognized and applauded both by the French themselves and by their international opponents.2 It is this tradition of le rugby-fête or le rugby-champagne, of le «French flair», as the French themselves call it, that we associate with France and French rugby from les frères Boniface to Serge Blanco; as do the French themselves, with justified pride. However, for the French observer of rugby union, the game also immediately signifies another, much longer established, and self-consciously regional, collective identity. For in much the same way as rugby league is specific, both in terms of geographical implantation and local cultural assimilation, to the north of England, so rugby as a whole is in France synonymous with the South West of the country: a habitual association which has, over the years, resulted in the mythification of the region as l'Ovalie, the land of the oval ball. This mythical South West is a place where rugby-players are born rather than made, and where they become the bearers of a quasi-mystical sense of local and regional identity; as such it may usefully be compared with the fondly imagined South Wales where coalminers doubled as brawny forwards and grammar-school boys went on to become twinkle-toed three-quarters;3 and like the South Wales of Arthur Gould, Ken Jones, Bleddyn Williams, Barry John, Gareth Edwards, Gerald Davies and the rest, it does have its roots in a certain historical reality. In order to judge where sporting fact ends and sporting fiction begins, it is useful to consider briefly the development of French rugby as a whole, and then to go on to examine in more detail the history of the relationship between rugby union (hereafter RU) and rugby league (hereafter RL) in the game's geographical and cultural heartland, the South West or le Midi.4

The historical development of rugby in France

As Pierre Arnaud, Richard Holt and others have demonstrated, the rise of modern sports began in France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, with military-style gymnastics providing the first real alternative to traditional, village-based forms of amusement.5 However, the appeal of gymnastics, although strongly encouraged by political nationalists as the basis of both a physical and moral regeneration, and thus of a future revanche, or revenge, against the Germans, would wane as other sports were introduced into France in the 1880s. Where gymnastics had, ironically, been imported from Germany itself, these new sports - athletics, football, and rugby, as well as others such as rowing - came from Great Britain, and specifically from the English public schools. As Richard Holt has explained, these imported forms of physical exercise were to offer new opportunities and new roles to both individuals and the group:

In comparison to the puerile festive games they replaced, gymnastic exercises had been physically exhilarating. But the routine apparatus work and formation exercises, which made up the core of gymnastic programmes, were too repetitive and inflexible to hold their own against the allure of more complex and less predictable team games like rugby and football. These sports combined to a remarkable degree a sense of the importance and freedom of the individual player with a belief in the value of team work. Very little in the way of equipment was needed, and these games were safe and economical in their use of space and time. Not only did the English sports tend to offer a wider variety of physical and psychological satisfactions to participants, their speed and spontaneity were also more attractive to the spectator than regimented gymnastic displays. Athletics often developed alongside football and rugby, providing summer training for the players and continuity for club social life.6

There, in a nutshell, we have an explanation of the appeal of the new `English' sports for the inhabitants of the major French population centres of the later 19th century, as France's belated industrial revolution saw old patterns of rural work and leisure give way to new, urban and technologically-dependent, modes of sociability, including notably participating in and spectating at sports events. What is more, we have at least part of an answer to the mystery of the rather misleading names of RU clubs such as the Racing Club and the Aviron Bayonnais, in that, as just noted, athletic sports frequently overlapped in this period in French clubs; a tradition which is still, incidentally, a living reality in the predominance of multisport rather than single-sport clubs in French associative life. In fact, by looking in a little more detail at the Racing Club, we are able to note a number of other key factors in the particular development of rugby in France. The Racing Club de France was one of the earliest indigenous, properly French, sports clubs and was founded by schoolboys from a number of fashionable Parisian schools, specifically the lycées Carnot, Rollin, and Condorcet, in 1882. (The very first athletic sports club of this kind - as opposed to the patriotic shooting and/or gymnastics associations - the Le Havre Athletic Club, had been established a decade earlier in 1872 by ex-Oxbridge expatriates.) The club's English name, the Racing Club, reflects both the British origins of the team game which was soon to become its principal activity - RU - and the developed anglophilia of an influential section of aristocratic and bourgeois French society at this time. The best known of these admirers of England, and particularly of the English public school system, with its strong emphasis on the importance of team games, was undoubtedly Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic games. For Coubertin and his followers, sport represented a means of preserving upper-class values and influence in a rapidly changing, because newly democratic, world. The new English sports in particular were conceived as the exclusive preserve of the privileged few, who were to be guided by a spirit of élitist amateurism.7 The Racing Club, like its great Parisian rival, the Stade Français, founded by students from the lycée Saint-Louis just a year later in 1883, was consequently highly restrictive in its recruitment practices.8

These exclusive and highly prestigious associations were to be followed by others in the provinces as rugby and the other athletic sports spread across the country in the 1890s. Everywhere a key role was played in the early phases of the new games' implantation by expatratriate Britons and French lycéens. Similarly, university students and teachers trained at the leading écoles normales were influential in the diffusion of rugby in the 1890s, with the main provincial centres, and the leading university towns - notably Bordeaux and Toulouse, but also Lyon in the South East - being won over to the game.9 However, the development of the new sports was distinctly patchy, with some of the more isolated and rural regions, such as the Massif Central, remaining virtually untouched up until World War I.10

In contrast, the South-West was to take enthusiastically to the new sports, and particularly rugby, both through the influence of a large colony of affluent expatriate Britons, such as those engaged in the Bordeaux wine trade, and through the local lycées and university. A major figure in this development was Dr Philippe Tissié, who in 1888 founded the Bordeaux-based Ligue Girondine de l'Education Physique, and who was to devote his whole life to the development of French youth through sport. He and his association were instrumental in the foundation of the first all-French club outside Paris, the Stade Bordelais, with other centres for rugby rapidly being established in schools and in clubs from Bayonne to Béziers, via Biarritz, Carcassonne, Castres, Dax, Narbonne, Pau, Perpignan, Tarbes, Toulouse, etc., etc., etc.11

This, then, was the centre of French rugby's expansion in the period up to World War I, and remains its heartland to this day. The Stade Bordelais, just mentioned, perhaps best exemplified South-Western rugby success in this early phase of the game's development, winning seven national championships between 1899 and 1911 and drawing crowds approaching 30,000.12 As these attendance figures indicate, the pre-1914 development of the game in the South West was accompanied by a dramatic increase in its appeal as a spectator sport, which would, in turn, encourage the process of rugby's democratization and popularization in the region. In the great cities of Bordeaux and Toulouse, and even more dramatically in the small manufacturing or market towns and even villages of the Midi, rugby would undergo a rapid and radical shift, ceasing to be a focus for élite sociability and becoming instead the site of ever more intense local identification and rivalry. It is this process that we need to bear in mind as we now go on to consider the emergence of RL as a distinct code in France.

1918-1930: the expansion, commercialization, and professionalization of rugby

If the Great War was a tragedy for Europe as a whole, its impact on French social life - and thus, inevitably, on the newly implanted athletic sports - was particularly traumatic. One French sports historian, Henri Garcia, has drawn particular attention to the fact that the majority of mobilized French rugby players perished in the conflagration, with many others returning so severely wounded that they would never play again.13 Yet French sport as a whole would not only recover surprisingly quickly, but would also be subject to a major expansion of both players and spectators in the 1920s. This new enthusiasm was manifested in various ways - including particularly the establishment in 1922 of a new `provisional service for physical education and sports' in the Ministry of Education, and the vocal, if highly idealized, advocacy of the new games on the part of intellectuals such as Henry de Montherlant; an artistic tendency which reached a crescendo with the Paris Olympics of 1924.14 However, in the dramatically changed social order of post-1918 France, sport would be a focus not only for new pleasures, but also for new conflicts, and rugby in particular would reflect these changed national preoccupations.

French rugby underwent a massive expansion in the 1920s, both in terms of participation and as a spectator sport. In the South-West the game undoubtedly entered the mainstream of local culture, with the fortunes of local sides becoming a focus for passionate interest on the part of whole communities.15 In this only lately and very partially urbanized and industrialized region more than in any other - and this is surely the key to rugby's abiding cultural preeminence in the South West - the traditional peasant values of the pays still held sway; that is to say the essential frame of reference was the immediate neighbourhood and the local community, as opposed to the patrie (the national entity imposed, as Eugen Weber has put it, in quasi-colonial fashion by the centralizing Third Republic, although not without considerable opposition, especially from the inhabitants of the Midi). Part of this enduring peasant value-sysyem was the network of immemorial inter-communal enmities which in earlier times had been manifested in local wars and village gang-fights on the one hand, and in traditional ball-games on the other. It is specifically this entrenched sporting expression of intense local hostility that we need to bear in mind here. Eugen Weber, in his classic work Peasants into Frenchmen, described the phenomenon in the following terms:

Games were not games to peasants, especially when they were competitive. [...] This was the truer when it came to the various ballgames roughly resembling rugby ... that were widely played by village or hamlet teams ... soule (choule) or variants thereof survived to the end of the century, and in a few places even later, despite numerous attempts to prohibit it. [...] Of course, it reflected communal rivalries and perpetuated them by creating new frictions. A game of soule went on for many hours, and ended with numerous players injured, and often some dead. It is no wonder the authorities disapproved of it and did their best to end it. And they succeeded on the whole.16

The governments of the new Third Republic (which had itself only come into being in 1870) had effectively stamped out the traditionally brutal games of the peasantry by the end of the 19th century. In the South West, however, rugby, in its rapidly democratized form, rather than its original élitist one, soon `came to reflect long-standing communal rivalries and to perpetuate them by creating new frictions'.17 Moreover, the violence to which rugby gave rise in the inter-war period, both on and off the pitch, was to strain to breaking-point the Eliasian conception of modern sports: i.e. the one within which figurational sociologists like Dunning and Sheard are working18 - and, come to that, social historians like Weber - and which emphasizes the links between social modernization, the codification of games, and the control of violence.

In the event, French rugby football would fall victim to its own success in the late 1920s, when the amateurisme marron or `shamateurism' which had characterized the sport's development in the South West throughout the decade combined with a new national championship structure based on qualification in regional pools to give rise to a number of shocking incidents usually lumped together in the local, Spanish-inflected, vernacular as le rugby de muerte: that is to say, the rugby of death. The classic example of this phenomenon is provided by the unfortunate events surrounding the rise of the Quillan club under the patronage of a local hat-manufacturer, Jean Bourrel. In the manner typical of the notables who have historically dominated the local organization and management of rugby football in France, this industrialist was able by means of offers of advantageous employment in his factories to poach players from the leading South-Western clubs (others have used and abused their positions as mayors and the like to offer municipally funded sinecures to recruits). These `mercenaries' were brought to Quillan, a very small town in the Aude département, with the result that rank outsiders were transformed into the champions of France in 1929.19 As Alex Potter and Georges Duthen put it, with beautiful understatement, in The Rise of French Rugby (1961):

Occasionally little towns lash giants. In 1929 Quillan (population 3,000) and Lézignan (population 6,000) reached the final, and as they are only about 27 miles apart, you can guess what a to-do there was.20

However, this was no rugby-playing version of Clochemerle: for this success in national competitions would only be achieved at considerable human cost. As Potter and Duthen go on to point out: `Merely as an indication of the unwholesome emotions this final aroused, we tell you that, Quillan winning, a Lézignan player tried to commit suicide'.21 Indeed, such was the intensity of the rivalry between the Quillan club and Perpignan, the old established Catalan club from which the bulk of the team, including three internationals, had been tempted away, that the 1927 away fixture resulted in the death from injuries inflicted on the pitch of one of the Quillan players, the hooker Gaston Rivière. This was by no means an isolated incident, and examples abound of extremely violent confontations between these and other clubs in the region at this time: Carcassonne-Toulouse 1927, Lézignan-Béziers 1929, and so on. Nor were they limited to domestic fixtures, with the brutal 1930 France-Wales encounter in Paris being a particular case in point.22

Such an extension of rugby-based hostilities indicates that a tradition of sporting violence rooted in age-old local rivalries had, by 1930, been very significantly intensified in response to the pressures of illicit professionalism in the South-West. Indeed, brutality had been institutionalized to such a degree that it gave rise to a characteristically méridional rugby-playing ethos. This harsh code was effectively transferred to the national and then the international stage as players, and, increasingly, supporters, travelled from the French game's heartland for matches in Paris and abroad, and was to prove extremely difficult to eradicate from French RU in subsequent decades.23 The outrage in the face of such developments of those aristocratic amateurs who had pioneered the introduction of French rugby barely three decades earlier can, no doubt, be imagined. However, their practical response requires some discussion.

1931-1939: internal schism, international isolation, the introduction of RL and the split between the codes

A clear division finally occurred within the French rugby establishment in 1931, when a new body, l'Union Française de Rugby Amateur (UFRA), split from the FFR in a last-ditch attempt at aristocratic resistance to ultimately unstoppable pressures within the game. Although twelve of the oldest and most prestigious French clubs were involved, the venture only lasted a couple of years, folding, ironically enough, as a result of financial difficulties. However, the initiative undoubtedly contributed to the breaking-off of relations by the British home unions (and those in the Dominions) later that same year, and also to a more general fragmentation within French rugby.24

International isolation was very keenly felt in French RU circles. The national XV had begun playing matches against the other major countries in the early years of this century, recording its first victory, against Scotland, in Paris, by the narrowest of margins (16-15), in 1911. The failure to repeat the feat in the same fixture two years later led to the infamous `affaire Baxter', in which the English referee was attacked by angry French supporters who invaded the pitch and subsequently went on the rampage through Paris.25 Partly comprehensible in terms of the ultra-nationalism of the period, this episode is also indicative of the extreme violence which, we have seen, was habitually associated with both players and supporters of French rugby in the early part of this century: a degree of brutality which was to see the French cut off from meaningful international competition between 1931 and 1939. After this time, the onset of World War II would obviously preclude French sporting contacts with Britain and the Empire. The decline in the number of French clubs from 784 in 1930 to only 473 in 1939 undoubtedly reflected this fact, together with wider social upheavals.26

Where the staunchly amateur Rugby Football Union had feared to tread, the Rugby Football League, which had replaced the breakaway Northern Rugby Union in 1922, was only too eager to make inroads. Profiting from the vacuum left in France by the suspension of international fixtures, demonstrations of what the French were to refer to in turn as `le néo-rugby', `le rugby à treize', and `le jeu à treize' - the modern term for the code - were organized from 1933 onwards. Following unofficial contacts between British RL officials and dissident French RU administrators, the first `propaganda' match between a British select side and an Australian one took place at the Stade Pershing in Paris in December 1933. The event was sponsored, typically of such innovations in the French context, by L'Echo des Sports, the great rival of L'Auto (which itself went on to become today's national institution, L'Equipe), and met with considerable journalistic and popular acclaim.27

This clear opportunity for renewed international competition greatly facilitated the recruitment from 1934 on of leading French union players - particularly disqualified or suspended ones - to the new game; a campaign orchestrated by ex-international Jean Galia (rather like Jacques Fouroux in recent years). Galia had enough players available by the spring of 1934 to arrange both the first French RL overseas tour, of the North of England, and then a series of demonstration fixtures between the French side and a Yorkshire select team in Paris, Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Bordeaux, and Pau, as well as Lyon in the South-East.

The outraged FFR responded by banning administrators, players, and even the pitches on which the outlawed league demonstrations had taken place. Given the interest expressed in the exciting new code by significant numbers of sportsmen and spectators, together with the obvious opportunities for renewed international competition that RL offered, this heavy-handed reaction appears to have been seriously miscalculated. Indeed, the move seems to have backfired badly on the FFR by, on the one hand, confirming the advocates of RL in their belief in the necessity of change, and, on the other, drawing attention to the real choice which now existed for French rugbymen. Existing clubs switched and new ones sprang up with equal rapidity, such that there were 4,000 registered players and 172 clubs - with 14 in a national professional league and 158 amateur sides - in the newly established Ligue Française de Rugby à XIII by 1939.28

Although a number of major clubs were established outside the South West, notably in the Lyon area in the South East, it was in French RU's traditional heartland that the game really took off, with important centres for RL being established in Carcassonne, Perpignan, and Villeneuve-sur-Lot in particular. Predictably, a key role was played in RL diffusion, as with RU before it, by local notables; or at least of those who would like to be thought of as such.29 This included such men as the mysterious J.Pansera in Lyon, who was involved in the building trade and other less legitimate business, and was eventually shot dead by underworld rivals as a result of his arms-dealing activities. Dramatic as such developments might seem, however, they were as nothing compared with the fate which awaited RL as a whole in 1940.

1940-1946: military defeat and occupation: Vichy's `charter for sport' and its aftermath

It is difficult to overstate the impact on French society of military defeat and occupation in June 1940. The fall of France was to be followed by an armistice which brought about the division of the traumatized country, leaving the Germans in control of the occupied northern zone, and the collaborationist administration of Maréchal Philippe Pétain in charge of the `free' southern zone. This Vichy-based regime immediately set about carrying out its own `national revolution', a fascistic project which replaced the Republican motto of `Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité' with the slogan `Travail, Patrie, Famille'. However, whatever its other failings, Vichy was arguably the first French administration to take sport seriously, and it established a new ministry, headed by former tennis star Jean Borotra, to take care of youth and sports policy, under the overall banner of the `Charte des Sports'. A central strand of Vichy's `national revolution' was a return to the land and traditional French values, which was construed in such a way as to render unacceptable professional sports. RL was consequently targeted for suppression, with a decree dissolving the LFR being signed by Pétain himself in 1941. In the wake of this forcible `reunification' - which had been encouraged by prominent supporters of the RU code - various developments took place. The national championship, suspended in 1939, was reestablished, with the victors of knock-out competitions in the occupied and `free' zones meeting in a final decider. Players previously tainted by association with RL were allowed and even encouraged to participate in the new championship. In addition, the various regional committees organized `veillées du rugby': rugby-excursions-cum-camping-trips designed as a way of promoting physical fitness and the inculcation of the values of the `national revolution'.

Under the vigorous stewardship of Lieutenant-Colonel Jep Pascot, a former RU player who replaced Borotra as Minister in 1942, French RU made remarkable advances. Amazingly, in this period of hardship for the French nation as a whole, the union code saw its popularity leap, with 464 clubs in existence, representing over 16,000 playing members, in 1942-3, with another 18 new clubs, each with over a hundred members, having been set up by the following year.30

1944-present: the split confirmed and a modus vivendi reached; RU pragmatism and strength; RL weakness after initial successes

The Liberation of France brought, amongst everything else, the lifting of the ban imposed on French RL by the collaborationist Vichy administration. As part of the wider pattern of reprisals which went to make up the épuration, or `purification', of France as the Germans retreated, a number of RU clubs were attacked and damaged by treizistes, including particularly the facilities belonging to A.S. Perpignan, the then reigning champions of France.31 This was a pattern of local conflict which was, incidentally, to be repeated in 1980 when the switch of the international J.-M. Bourret from Pia XIII to the Perpignan RU club - note the direction of the move - resulted in another local `war'. The great pragmatism of the FFR as regards the payment of RU players, including periodic `amnesties' for those involved in RL, together with the union code's greater resources, means that RL `professionals' have been and continue to be considerably worse off financially than the leading RU `amateurs' in France.32

In the immediate post-war period a number of other interesting developments took place, such as the decision in 1946 by the Football Club de Lyon - the oldest and most socially exclusive RU club in the South-East, champions of France in 1910, and previously ardent campaigners against professionalism as members of the breakaway UFRA - to go over lock, stock, and barrel to RL. This move, although short-lived and not conspicu ously successful, was indicative of the code's appeal after 1945, for this was, paradoxically, to be a `golden age' for French RL.

This renaissance was due in part, Jean-Pierre Bodis has suggested, to the wartime ban itself. After the Liberation, the RL code - now formally reestablished, in spite of a determined rearguard action by the FFR - was, in its own way, able to benefit from the national wave of sympathy for the victims of World War II which, among other things, saw the once outlawed and persecuted Communist Party become France's largest political grouping.33 Moreover, as a still largely unknown sporting discipline, the game may have been able to exploit the fascination with newness that characterized the frenetically modernizing France of the trente glorieuses, the period of unprecedented economic expansion and social restructuring from 1945 to 1975. However, it was in the international arena that the thirteen-a-side game was best able to demonstrate its appeal to a France still traumatized by defeat and occupation, and now seriously in need of a focus for national self-esteem. It will be recalled that the French RU side, which might have performed this function, had been starved of international competition between 1931 and 1945, and, no doubt in consequence, proved incapable of beating foreign opponents with any consistency in the decade which followed the Liberation. However, in complete contrast, the French RL selection, led by the incomparable Puig Aubert, rapidly achieved a degree of success which obliged many doubters at home to reconsider the new sport. After defeating Great Britain at Wembley in the spring of 1949, and a British Empire select in Bordeaux at the end of the same season, Puig Aubert's side was to have its finest hour in the great French tour of Australasia of 1951 (which included a first series win against Australia). The squad which had left Marseille very anonymously returned to a welcome fit for the heroes that they now were.34

In this light, 1954 can be seen to constitute a watershed in the development of rugby football in France. To begin with, it was in that year that, thanks to the energy and ambition of administrator Paul Barrière, the first RL World Cup took place. With the French putting up 25 million francs to guarantee the competition's finances, the encounters between France, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand took place over a fortnight with the final being played at the Parc des Princes in Paris. The matches, played across the country, met with an enthusiastic popular response, culminating in the final game which saw Great Britain narrowly beat France. Bodis is probably overstating the case when he suggests that a victory might have enabled RL to catch up with RU in France, but there can be little doubt that defeat meant that an opportunity had been missed to present a resounding national advertisement for what was still very much a minority sport.35

For in the France of the postwar period, success was everything. Indeed, it might be argued that what was required of French sportsmen at this time was to act as symbols of the nation's newfound economic dynamism and (following General de Gaulle's return to power in 1958) political confidence: a sporting incarnation of renewed French power, of la France qui gagne, which could be appreciated at home and abroad. Just such an opportunity for the political exploitation, or at least recuperation, of athletic achievement occurred in RU, with the beginning in the 1950s of its own golden age. France's won its first Five Nations' championship in the watershed year of 1954, to be followed by its first Grand Slam in 1968. Moreover, the union code was effectively adopted by the governing politicians of the new, Gaullist, Fifth Republic as the national sport. The boom years of post-war economic and social reconstruction, les trente glorieuses (1945-75), thus became firmly associated with le rugby-champagne, otherwise known as le rugby-français: traditionally a regional passion, rugby football thus for the for the first time came to be considered as part of the national patrimoine (heritage).

This development was on the one hand made possible by the massive expansion of television and especially TV sports coverage. On the other hand, the rise of French RU in the 1950s and 1960s did not just coincide with the inauguration and consolidation of a new socio-economic and political order; rather, the nation's association of one with the other, and of both with itself, was systematically encouraged by General de Gaulle and his supporters. Receptions for successful French teams at both Matignon and the Elysée were one way in which this process of identification was facilitated; as was de Gaulle's well publicized interest, which famously included a ban on Saturday afternoon meetings during the Five Nations' championship. The appointment, under Georges Pompidou's presidency, of Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a former international RU player, to the post of prime minister was the logical outcome of this policy of linking the national team's success with that of the new Republic.36 The Gaullists' adoption of RU as their (and France's) sport might be summed up as an essentially pragmatic response, based on a rational assessment of what was then available in the way of national sporting excellence: i.e. the national XV's conspicuous success in the annual ritual of the Five Nations' championship (as opposed specifically to RL, which experienced both a decline in domestic standards and in international performances after the 1954 World Cup). This strategy was, nevertheless, almost certainly influenced both by the traditional sporting sympathies of the Parisian political and administrative élite, and by key figures with a personal investment - and even a regional power-base - in the union code, such as Chaban-Delmas, the rugby-playing mayor of Bordeaux.

In the face of this state-sponsored process of national identification with RU, RL has found itself obliged to cling on for survival in its few established centres, and has proved incapable of major expansion. Periodic disputes between the two codes - as in 1980-81 - have seen the state intervene to reestablish a modus vivendi predicated upon the continuing weakness of what is still very much the junior partner in French rugby. What the Murdoch-financed future holds for both codes remains, of course, to be seen.

Conclusion

In their sociological study of British rugby, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players, Dunning and Sheard comment on the failure of RL to expand beyond its northern heartland in the following terms:

The reasons why are basically twofold: firstly because Rugby League could not hope to gain support in working-class areas where soccer was already entrenched; and secondly because its `cloth cap' image and professionalism meant that it could not compete effectively with Rugby Union for middle-class allegiance. So it was destined, virtually from the outset, to be a regionally limited, minority sport.37

In a similar vein, we might say that, in the case of French RL, the code was unable to expand firstly because it could not hope to gain durable support in the vast majority of the belatedly and only partially urbanized and industrialized areas of the South West where RU was already entrenched (although it did meet with some limited success in the industrialized South East, where it was competing directly against both RU and association football); and secondly because its brand of professionalism came a poor second to the institutionalized `shamateurism' of RU in those same areas. Quite simply, in the South West of France, the top RU players could not afford, in terms either of local esteem or of financial remuneration, to `turn professional'.

1 Fitzpatrick, 1995, p.19.

2 See, for instance, on the 1990-1 Grand Slam decider: Greaves 1993, pp.125-48 (and especially pp.130-1).

3 See Smith & Williams, 1980.

4 The title of the Toulouse-based national RU weekly, Le Midi Olympique, is worth noting in this regard.

5 Cited by Hubscher, 1992, p.44. Cf. Arnaud, 1987, p.28.

6 Holt, 1981, p.60.

7 See Weber, 1991, pp.207-25.

8 Holt, 1981, p.66.

9 Bodis, 1987, pp.143-6.

10 Holt 1981, pp.68-9.

11 Ibid.

12 On Stade Bordelais, see Callède, 1993. Cf., on Stade Toulousain, Pech & Thomas, 1986, pp.97-126.

13 Cited by Nicaud, 1992, p.42.

14 These were the last Olympic Games, incidentally, at which rugby was played, with France, the favourites, being unexpectedly defeated by the United States, as in 1920.

15 Holt, 1981, pp.74-5.

16 Weber, 1977, p.383.

17 Ibid.

18 Dunning & Sheard, 1979.

19 A recent account of these events as part of a century of hypocrisy surrounding professionalism in French RU has been provided by Escot, 1996.

20 Potter & Duthen, 1961, p.17.

21 Ibid., p.56.

22 Ibid., pp.56-7.

23 The free-for-all which broke out between the Castres team (and supporters) and the players of Toulouse in the final of the 1993 Challenge Yves-Du-Manoir provides an obvious example of this South-Western tradition's periodic reappearance on the national stage. Jauréna, 1993.

24 French association football suffered the same crisis of professionalism at this time. In particular, the Olympique de Marseille club employed a strategy of importing and finding remunerative employment for Parisian players to great effect, becoming French cup-winners in 1924, 1926 & 1927. The principle of professionalism was itself accepted by the Fédération Française de Football (FFF) from 1931 onwards; just as the English FA had done in 1885.

25 See Holt, 1981, pp.135-8.

26 Figures from Potter & Duthen, 1961, p.58.

27 This fruitful competition between newspapers might usefully be compared with the famous circulation war between L'Auto and Le Vélo which resulted in the launching of the Tour de France in 1903.

28 This organization became the Fédération Française de Jeu à XIII in 1947.

29 Bodis, 1987, p.212: `Ceux-ci [les dirigeants du jeu] recherchaient dans le nouveau sport un surcroît de considération sociale.' Cf. Augustin & Garrigou, 1985.

30 Gay-Lescot, 1991, p.170, for figures.

31 Augustin & Garrigou, 1985, pp.315-7.

32 Cf. the evidence of Barnoud, n.d.

33 Bodis, 1987, p.291.

34 Ibid., p.293.

35 Ibid., pp.293-4.

36 Augustin & Garrigou, 1985, p.338.

37 Dunning & Sheard, 1979, pp.228-9.

List of References

Arnaud, Pierre (ed.), Les Athlètes de la République: Gymnastique, sport et idéologie républicaine (Toulouse: Privat, 1987).

Augustin, Jean-Pierre & Garrigou, Alain, Le Rugby démêlé: Essai sur les Associations Sportives, le Pouvoir et les Notables (Bordeaux: Le Mascaret, 1985).

Barnoud, René, Quel drôle de ballon! (Lyon: A. Rey, n.d.).

Bodis, Jean-Pierre: Histoire mondiale du rugby (Toulouse: Bibliothèque Historique Privat, 1987).

Callède, Jean-Paul, L'Esprit sportif: Essai sur le développement associatif de la culture sportive (Bordeaux: P.U. de Bordeaux, 1987).

Callède, Jean-Paul, Histoire du sport en France: du Stade Bordelais au S.B.U.C., 1889-1939 (Bordeaux: Eds. de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine, 1993).

Dunning, Eric & Sheard, Kenneth, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players: A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby Football (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979).

Escot, Richard, Sous la mêlée, l'argent caché, L'Equipe magazine, no.722, 20 janvier 1996, pp.40-5.

Fitzpatrick, P., Smith in charge of Bulls, The Guardian, 13 June 1995, p.19.

Gay-Lescot, Jean-Louis, Sport et éducation sous Vichy: 1940-1944 (Lyon: P.U. de Lyon, 1991).

Greaves, A., Sport in France, in: Cook, Malcolm (ed.), French Culture since 1945 (London: Longman, 1993), pp.125-48.

Holt, Richard , Sport and Society in Modern France (London: Macmillan, 1981).

Hubscher, Ronald (ed.), L'Histoire en mouvements: Le sport dans la société française (XIXe-XXe siècle), (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992).

Jauréna, C., Toulouse sauve les meubles sous une pluie de coups, Libération, 14 juin 1993, p.42.

Nicaud, Jean, 100 ans de rugby régional (Bourg-en-Bresse: Les Eds. de la Taillanderie, 1992).

Pech, R. & Thomas, J., La Naissance du rugby populaire à Toulouse (1893-1914), in: Arnaud, Pierre & Camy, Jean, La Naissance du mouvement sportif associatif en France (Lyon: P.U. de Lyon, 1986), pp.97-126.

Potter, Alex & Duthen, Georges, The Rise of French Rugby (London: Bailey Bros & Swinfen Ltd, 1961).

Smith, David & Williams, Gareth, Fields of Praise: The Official History of the Welsh Rugby Union 1881-1981 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1980).

Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernisation of Rural France (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977).

Weber, Eugen, `Pierre de Coubertin and the Introduction of Organized Sport', My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1991), pp.207-25.

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