The stadium century: Sport, spectatorship and mass society in modern France 9781526106254

Citation preview

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The stadium century

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Edited by David Hopkin and Máire Cross This series is published in collaboration with the UK Society for the Study of French History. It aims to showcase innovative short monographs relating to the history of the French, in France and in the world since c.1750. Each volume speaks to a theme in the history of France with broader resonances to other discourses about the past. Authors demonstrate how the sources and interpretations of modern French history are being opened to historical investigation in new and interesting ways, and how unfamiliar subjects have the capacity to tell us more about the role of France within the European continent. The series is particularly open to interdisciplinary studies that break down the traditional boundaries and conventional disciplinary divisions. Titles already published in this series Emile and Isaac Pereire: Bankers, Socialists and Sephardic Jews in nineteenth-​century France Helen Davies From empire to exile: History and memory within the pied-​noir and harki communities, 1962–​2012 Claire Eldridge Catholicism and children’s literature in France: The comtesse de Ségur (1799–​1874) Sophie Heywood Aristocratic families in republican France, 1870–​1940 Elizabeth C. Macknight The republican line: Caricature and French republican identity, 1830–​52 Laura O’Brien Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The search for a republican morality Jonathan Smyth The routes to exile: France and the Spanish Civil War refugees, 1939–​2009 Scott Soo

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The stadium century Sport, spectatorship and mass society in modern France

R O B E RT W.   L EW I S

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Robert W. Lewis 2017 The right of Robert W. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 5261 0624 7 hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1 A ‘grand stade’ for Paris: stadia, urban planning and the 1924 Olympics 2 ‘A civic tool of modern times’: politics, mass society and the stadium 3 Sportsmen or savages? Stadium sport and its spectators, 1900–​60 4 Stadium travels: spectatorship, territorial identity and global connections, 1900–​60 5 Postwar modernisation and the stadium, 1945–​98

page vi vii 1 15 47 86 127 169

Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

213 227

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Figures

1 Stade de France, Saint-​Denis. Photograph by author. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /​ADAGP, Paris. page 2 2 The Stade de Colombes during the 1924 Olympic Games. Image courtesy of Christine Dessemme /​Musée Municipal d’Art et d’Histoire de Colombes. 34 3 The main grandstand of the Stade Municipal in Lyon, 1926. Archives Municipales de Lyon, 4 FI 7. Image courtesy of Gilles Bernasconi /​Archives Municipales de Lyon. 50 4 The front page of L’Humanité on 15 June 1936, after the French Communist Party rally at the Stade Buffalo. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 61 5 Spectators at a football match. ‘Concours des Spectateurs’. L’Auto, 4 January 1921. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 95 6 Spectators at a track cycling event. ‘Concours des Spectateurs.’ L’Auto, 1 January 1921. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 95 7 The ‘line of demarcation’ between rugby-​playing and football-​playing France. L’Auto, 18 February 1922. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 128 8 The Parc des Princes, redesigned by Roger Taillibert in 1972. Image courtesy of the Agence Roger Taillibert. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /​ADAGP, Paris. 170 9 Monument to cyclists killed in the First and Second World Wars, originally located at the Stade Buffalo and later moved to the municipal stadium in Montrouge. Photograph by author. 175

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Acknowledgements

This project could not have come to fruition without enormous financial and logistical support. I benefitted from a Fulbright IIE Fellowship and an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council; I also received summer travel funding from Columbia University’s Council on European Studies, Grinnell College, Oberlin College and Cal Poly Pomona. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-​Madison, I  enjoyed sustained support from the George L. Mosse Program and a History Department Fellowship. I am also indebted to my undergraduate and graduate mentors, who have influenced this project in particular and my career more broadly. At Carleton College, Carl Weiner and Scott Carpenter helped shape my thinking about history and my love of the French language. At the University of Wisconsin-​Madison, my advisor Laird Boswell encouraged my pursuit of what might have struck many as an unfeasible dissertation topic, and has given me unfailingly helpful and kind counsel throughout my academic career. My thanks also go to Suzanne Desan, Mary Louise Roberts, Rudy Koshar and Dan Sherman for their compelling and helpful feedback on my dissertation. This book also reflects the support and engagement of numerous friends and colleagues. Sarah Robinson, Deirdre Joyce, Scott Moranda, Holly Grout, Anne MacLaughlin-​Berres, Gillian Glaes and Guy Geltner made Madison, Wisconsin, a congenial place for graduate studies. As a visiting faculty member at Grinnell College, Oberlin College, Gettysburg College, Franklin & Marshall College and Whitman College, I  benefitted especially from the intellectual engagement, friendship and support of Ed Cohn, Leonard Smith, Leena Dallasheh, Marko Dumančić, Maria

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Acknowledgements

Mitchell, Douglas Anthony, Michael Birkner, John Cotts, David Schmitz and Lynn Sharp. Andrea and Dominique Magermans made me feel like an honorary family member in Grinnell, while Anastasia Christman and Michael Bottoms did the same in Walla Walla, Washington. I  am also deeply fortunate to have ended up at Cal Poly Pomona, in a department of great scholars, inspiring teachers and genuinely wonderful people. This project owes a substantial debt to Rebecca Scales, who has given me expert feedback on many of the chapters here. Other historians have been unflaggingly kind and supportive, particularly Hugh Dauncey, Christopher Thompson, Eric Reed, Joan Tumblety and Simon Kitson. My thanks must also go to the entire editorial team at Manchester University Press for championing this project and shepherding it through to completion. I received terrific help and support from the personnel at every archive and library that I visited in France, and I fear that I must commit an injustice in not naming everyone who patiently answered my questions and helped me along the way. I also benefitted from the aid of Danielle Tartakowsky, Marc Lazar, Pascal Leroy, Patrick Vauzelle, Nicolas Kssis, Michaël Delépine and Guillaume Bobet, who were all exceptionally generous with their time and advice. My travels in Europe were made possible by the hospitality of many people, including Janina Gosseye, Jocelyn Raude, Christopher Jarvis, Judith Grynfogel, Hasana Sharp, Tony Sullivan and Peter Everett. Finally, my extended family deserves special thanks and appreciation. My grandparents Robert and Lucille Towner and Norman and Elizabeth Lewis encouraged my love of history, while Greg and Susan Dean helped make Madison a familial and familiar place. My parents Jim and Gretchen Lewis have encouraged my academic career, my love of bicycling and a desire to travel, and my sister Emily Lewis brings kindness, humour and music everywhere she goes. Finally, my wife Cathy Carlisle has graciously tolerated my intellectual and emotional commitment to this project for over a decade, while our son David Dow Lewis was born just as this endeavour reached its conclusion. They both have given meaning and love to my life in a way that makes any academic project seem insignificant in comparison. Earlier versions of portions of this book were published in ‘“A Civic Tool of Modern Times”: Politics, Mass Society and the Stadium in Twentieth-Century France’, French Historical Studies 34:1 (Winter 2011): 155–84; and ‘From the “Phoenix of legends” to the “ultimate monument” of the Times: Stadia, Spectators, and Urban Development in Postwar Paris,’ Journal of Urban History 38:2 (March 2012): 319–35.

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Introduction

On 28 January 1998, an impressive new sports stadium situated just north of the city limits of Paris, in the suburb of Saint-​Denis, opened its doors to the public for the first time. On this occasion, the Stade de France (or ‘Stadium of France’) hosted an international football match between France and Spain, a tune-​up for both players and the stadium in advance of the 1998 World Cup, to be hosted in France that summer.1 The actual result of the contest (a 1–​0 victory for the French) took a back seat in importance to the unveiling of the new stadium, an 80,000-​seat enclosure crowned with an ellipsoidal roof suspended by eighteen needle-​like masts (Figure 1). The stadium was greeted with a chorus of superlatives from the press, which had anxiously followed its progress since its construction began in May 1995. Le Figaro called it a ‘cathedral of light’;2 La Croix columnist Geneviève Jurgensen wrote that the stadium belonged among the ‘great successes’ of French twentieth-​century architecture due to its dimensions, its symbolic value and the ‘elegance of the solutions it proposed’ for assembling large crowds.3 Her colleague Bruno Frappat went further:  he called the stade (stadium) the ‘ultimate monument’ for the times. The twentieth century, he concluded, had been the century of sport; the new stadium was thus the perfect embodiment of ‘our concerns and passions’ on the eve of the third millennium.4 And Frappat’s remarks certainly seemed apropos six months later when the Stade de France became the arena for one of the most stunning moments in French sporting history. With 80,000 spectators in attendance on 12 July 1998, the French national team recorded a 3–​0 victory over heavily favoured Brazil in the World Cup football final, sparking national euphoria and a spontaneous celebration of over one million people on the Champs-​Elysées in Paris.5

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1  Stade de France, Saint-​Denis.

The completion of the Stade de France was probably a better barometer of the state of affairs in 1998, leading up to the World Cup, than a symbol of the relationship of the French to sporting spaces and spectator sport throughout the entire twentieth century. And yet, the idea of the stadium as the embodiment of French ‘concerns and passions’ was actually not so far off the mark. This book will argue that stadia, as physical urban landmarks and as venues for spectator sport and political mobilisation, played a privileged role in shaping mass society and mass culture in modern France. From the earliest years of the twentieth century onward, the stadium proved to be a controversial space for politicians, urban planners and architects; it was at the centre of long-​running debates about public health, national prestige and urban development that spanned the century. The stadium also functioned as a critical space for mobilising and transforming the urban crowd, in the twin contexts of mass politics and mass spectator sport. Political actors ranging from the left-​wing Popular Front coalition of the mid-​1930s to Vichy officials during the Second World War staged stadium-​based spectacles in an attempt to both rally and discipline their supporters, while sports officials, journalists and businessmen simultaneously courted and criticised the public which flocked to stadia for rugby, football and cycling in droves during

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Introduction

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that same period. In the process, the stadium became a site for confronting and resolving tensions concerning political allegiance, class, gender and various forms of place-​based identity and community, and for forging particular kinds of cultural practices related to mass consumption and leisure. Finally, as stadia and spectatorship changed dramatically in the years after 1945, their transformations reflected and constituted part of the process of postwar modernisation in France, at the same time that their history also illuminated accelerating processes of globalisation that connected developments in France even more closely to those elsewhere around the world. In short, the stadium mattered as a built space and a site for mass spectatorship in twentieth-​century France. The history of the stadium, as traced in this book, is embedded in multiple kinds of narratives about the French past. First, the story of the ‘stadium century’ is naturally connected to the history of French sport; the following chapters trace the relationship of stadia to the emergence of mass spectator sports, notably football, rugby and cycling, as well as the connections between stadia and the burgeoning media complex that promoted and analysed sport itself. In addition, the book analyses the way that stadia and sports themselves developed and were transformed over the course of the century. Second, the analysis here highlights the ways in which the history of the stadium is also a history of French urban spaces, politics and society as a whole. This history encompasses the stadium’s relationship to French urban development, particularly within the Parisian basin, from early hostility to spectator sporting spaces to the sweeping transformations and changes of the era after 1945. It also includes the stadium’s role as a space for mass politics, from physical-​fitness demonstrations in Lyon in the mid-​1920s through the Popular Front and Vichy to the ‘events’ of May 1968. Moreover, it is also constituted by the stadium’s place as a social space, as a site for grappling with tensions about class, gender and communal identities, and as a location for forging particular kinds of cultural practices related to mass consumption and leisure. Finally, the history of stadia and spectators in France functions as part of a history linking the French to their counterparts in Western Europe and elsewhere around the world, as these spaces and the people within them were part of global networks that have only intensified from the late nineteenth century to the present. Thus, the history of the stadium presents an interconnected narrative of the ‘concerns and passions’, to use Bruno Frappat’s phrase, that animated French life throughout the twentieth century and that continue to do so in the first decades of the twenty-​first century. In taking

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The stadium century

the stadium seriously as a historical space, and in arguing that the histories of spectator sport, urban modernisation, mass politics, consumer culture and globalisation were all interconnected as they unfolded in the stadium, this book offers a fundamentally new perspective on modern French history. Certainly, the contemporary stadium has been the subject of thoughtful analyses by architects, geographers and sociologists, who have capably traced the general evolution of the stadium as a space for urban renewal, consumption, displays of collective identity, violence and discipline.6 In France, the history of the stadium has been the subject of some almanac-​style guides and a few specialised architectural retrospectives.7 The construction of the Stade de France, having occurred relatively recently and in conjunction with the 1998 World Cup, has also attracted a fair amount of attention from historians, sociologists and geographers.8 However, in the broader scholarly literature about mass society, politics and leisure in twentieth-​century France, the stadium has only made cameo appearances. Historians of modern French political culture have briefly noted that stadia were employed for large demonstrations and theatrical performances during the 1930s and throughout the Second World War, within the context of their analyses of political spectacle or popular demonstrations, but have not explored the meaning of the stadium as a political space.9 In a similar fashion, recent works on the history of French sport have ably traced the linear development of football and rugby, and have highlighted the connections between those sports and narratives about modernity, national identity and empire, but have devoted less attention to the physical spaces that evolved in tandem with the sports themselves, and have largely ignored how different spectator sports developed in relation to each other within those stadium spaces.10 Scholars have also written extensively about the culture of football supporters, both in France and in Europe more broadly, but this literature, with a few exceptions, is predominantly composed of studies of modern crowds that rely heavily on sociological models of group behaviour and identity and correspondingly suffer from a lack of historical specificity.11 In essence, the scholarly literature has typically treated the French stadium as an afterthought, as a setting for other activities (whether political or sporting) that have been considered in isolation from each other and from the spaces in which they occurred. This book, in contrast, makes the case that both the French stadium and the events within its confines played a critical part in shaping twentieth-​century politics, culture and society. On one level, the stadium was a staging ground that was not merely incidental to the political rallies

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Introduction

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or sporting contests that it hosted, but integral to the way they came about. Political demonstrations in stadia drew part of their content and power from the very spaces in which they were unfolding; discussions of spectator behaviour for football and rugby matches were framed and shaped by the stadium itself. In this regard, then, this book approaches stadia from the point of view that spatial organisation is not merely the result of social relations in society, but is in fact integral to the production of the latter.12 The space of the French stade certainly reflected the workings of power and existing social structures, but also helped create French social, cultural and political realities. If this book offers a new set of approaches to French history through its focus on the stadium, it also more specifically challenges a set of perspectives about the history of French sport. It combats the arguments that French sporting spaces, and the activities that developed within their confines, were relatively unimportant in comparison with their equivalents elsewhere in Europe and North America, and in relation to other kinds of sporting spectacle in France. Stadia, of course, were hardly unique to France. They proliferated across Europe –​and indeed much of the globe  –​in the decades after the First World War. French stadia were, in fairness, not the most remarkable examples of the genre until the early 1970s. Stadia in Great Britain, Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States were much more impressive than all but a few of their French counterparts before the Second World War; after 1945, new stadia in Latin America and Eastern Europe also surpassed most French arenas in size and capacity. Crowds at French sporting events, too, were consistently smaller than their equivalents abroad, even for the very biggest and most high-​profile events, such as the single-​elimination Coupe de France football championship or matches in what was then the Five Nations rugby competition. Finally, French urban spectator sports like rugby and football seemed to pale in comparison to the popularity of an internal rival, the Tour de France cycling race, which drew millions of French men and women to the roadsides of the Hexagone (mainland France) as it passed through each July.13 This book, however, suggests that French sport and its spaces merit a thoughtful reconsideration. The fact that stadia became ubiquitous spaces around the globe, linked from the late nineteenth century onwards by sporting networks, consumer practices and an expanding mass media complex, meant that they offered contemporaries a ready-​made benchmark for comparisons about sport, urban policy and national identity. These comparisons, which continually circulated in various iterations throughout the twentieth century, reveal how

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The stadium century

stadia inside and outside French borders helped the French assess their nation’s own place in relation to Europe and the rest of the world, as well as in regard to nebulous notions about progress and modernity. And while French crowds were certainly smaller in absolute terms than crowds in a place like Great Britain, particularly for weekly matches, major competitions still attracted large gatherings of anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 spectators. In short, the stadium was, in John Bale’s words, the ‘prime twentieth-​century container’ of the urban crowd, for sport and (during a specific time period) for politics.14 The very fact that French journalists, politicians and other officials expended so much energy discussing stadia, whether the latter were ever built or not, and in analysing and critiquing the behaviour of spectators, stands as evidence that the stadium and its crowds weighed heavily on the imaginations of contemporaries from the 1920s onwards. As for the Tour de France, it was certainly important, but was hardly some sort of sui generis phenomenon that eclipsed all other kinds of French sport and stadium spectacle. In fact, the Tour was tightly integrated into existing networks of urban stadia and commercial sport. Moreover, the narratives that it produced about gender and place-​based communities closely resembled those that concerned stadium crowds in France, with stadium spectacle at points generating an even richer and broader set of commentaries on society and France’s place in Western Europe and the world than did the Tour.15

Histories of stadium space This book, then, assesses the overall place of the stadium and its spectators in French politics, culture and society over the course of the twentieth century. In its approach to this particular built space, it adopts Henri Lefebvre’s useful distinction between so-​called ‘representations’ of space –​as conceptualised by ‘scientists, planners, urbanists, technocractic sub-​dividers, and social engineers’ –​and ‘representational’ space, or that of practice and daily life.16 Considered as the former, as a kind of planned space, the stadium was a significant urban landmark, whether constructed or merely proposed and debated, throughout the twentieth century in France. Advocates of a massive Olympic stadium, or grand stade, in the early 1920s, for instance, argued that the stadium would bolster French national health and symbolically attest to France’s recovery after the First World War, while detractors of the stadium saw it as an expensive, unprecedented and unnecessary intervention in the urban landscape. The latter group was able to prevail through the early 1960s.

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Introduction

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By that time, however, politicians across the political spectrum began to view the stadium more positively as an indicator of national prestige and a marker of France’s place at the forefront of technological modernity, leading to the renovation of the Parc des Princes between 1967 and 1972 and (several decades later) the successful push to build the Stade de France. By the time the Stade de France was constructed, stadia also figured directly in plans to strategically redevelop blighted old industrial areas, particularly around Paris. In short, over the course of the century, planners, architects and politicians debated the symbolic and concrete meanings of the stadium in connection to urban development and modernisation, as well as in relation to more abstract ideas about national health and vitality. This history of the stadium as a planned space of representation also extends beyond the built form itself to the approach authorities adopted regarding the people who inhabited the stadium –​athletes and, more relevantly for the purposes of this book, spectators. Throughout the century, the stadium was frequently conceptualised in terms of how it would control, discipline and ultimately ‘improve’ the public that filled it. Politicians, police and sports journalists alike grappled with the long shadow of anxieties and fears about the purportedly dangerous and revolutionary urban masses in France, so vividly encapsulated by Gustave Le Bon’s early twentieth-​century pseudo-​scientific analysis of the ‘irrationality’ and ‘unconscious’ motives of the crowd.17 The image of the crowd as a potential source of violence and revolution was given additional resonance at the end of the First World War by the Bolshevik Revolution and the apparent threat to the social order posed by the new French Communist Party. While Le Bon’s writings or overt anti-​Bolshevism might not have explicitly guided the politicians or sports journalists who thought about stadium crowds in the interwar period, the perception of the crowd’s disruptive potential was never far from the surface. Political actors and sporting ones alike deployed the physical structure of the stadium to confine spectators to particular areas and to subject them to surveillance and scrutiny.18 At the same time, politicians and sports journalists also sought to transform the public once it entered the stadium, whether into a disciplined collective of new militants or into a well-​behaved, knowledgeable gathering of sporting spectators, in each case defusing the potential danger that the crowd might have posed. And, while the overall context for discussions of stadia and spectatorship had shifted by the latter half of the century, the architects of the Parc des Princes and the Stade de France also envisioned that their new stadia would help create a new kind of public, in this case a more ‘festive’ and familial one.

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The stadium century

However, the history of stadium spectatorship does not simply consist of the ways by which architects, politicians and sports journalists imagined and shaped the crowd. The stadium was not only a planned space, but was also (in Lefebvre’s words) a ‘representational’ space that was ‘directly lived’ by its inhabitants and users.19 The prescriptive visions for stadium spectatorship were always tempered and modified by the actual lived experience of spectatorship itself. Spectatorship, as a practice, challenged dominant modes of spatial representation and functioned as a form of resistance to attempts at discipline.20 Spectators heckled the referee or the trade union speaker in front of them, formed partisan supporter groups, evaded the ticket collector, refused to be confined to their space within the stadium, resorted to violence, or voted with their feet by not attending matches or political rallies. The spectator experience also reflected what historian Vanessa Schwartz, in analysing nineteenth-​century urban spectacle, has described as ‘crowd-​pleasing’.21 Communist demonstrations, for instance, might have been designed to produce disciplined militants, but they also proved a powerfully compelling and entertaining audio-​visual experience, featuring parades and choral singing, among other activities. Sporting events in the stadium, for their part, might have corralled the crowd into uncomfortable standing-​room-​only sections, but they also offered drama and excitement, from cyclists sprinting around a precipitously banked corner of a vélodrome (a stadium with a bicycle-​racing track) to football players trying to scrape out a last-​minute goal. While crowd pleasing was certainly the work of the organisers of large-​scale political and sporting spectacle, it was also a response to the experience of spectators themselves, who agitated for better loudspeakers and ways of being kept abreast of developments inside the stadium, and complained when the spectacle did not live up to their expectations. Ultimately, the encounter between the planned space of the stadium and the stadium’s lived experience created a place for addressing and resolving some of the anxieties and tensions about the very nature of modern mass society, from the role of the masses and women in public life to the appropriate place of leisure as a consumer practice in contemporary France to the relationship of local communities of spectators to the nation at large and to other spectator communities around the globe. Spectators were most intensely mobilised for political purposes inside the stadium during the period between the mid-​1920s and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. During this era, too, discussions of spectators both framed and created fears about class and gender, as well as a sense of France’s declining place in the world. But, by the early years after the Second World War, stadium spectators were increasingly

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Introduction

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depoliticised and –​in the sporting context –​increasingly envisioned in less problematic terms, as a public of consumers to be courted and accommodated inside the stadium.22 By the end of the century, the narratives surrounding both stadia and the events within their confines had further shifted, as a result of a variety of factors, encompassing everything from physical changes to the sporting landscape (such as the construction of new stadia), the ongoing interaction between visions of spectatorship and the lived experience inside the stadium, and an accelerating process of global comparison and convergence that saw French sporting spaces and sporting practices come to resemble their foreign counterparts more closely, and that shifted the kinds of place-​based identities and communities associated with the stadium as a result.

Structure and organisation In the chapters that follow, this book traces multiple histories of modern France that intersected in the stadium: the transformation of built space and the urban landscape; the proliferation of new spectator-​oriented activities, from political demonstrations to large-​scale sporting spectacle; and the narratives and practices that accompanied them, all of which were historically contingent and evolved over the century. The book is organised with an attention to both thematic continuity and chronological development. Chapter 1 explicitly covers the period between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War: it provides an introduction to the histories of French sport and urban development, and then focuses on the spirited debates over the construction of an monumental stadium in advance of the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris as a case study for examining the place of the stadium in the domain of French national and municipal urban planning in the first half of the twentieth century. Intended as a monument to the Olympics movement, sport and a healthy nation in the wake of the First World War, the so-​called grand stade instead elicited anxieties about interventionist urban planning and government involvement in promoting spectator sport. The Conseil Municipal de Paris (Paris municipal council) eventually voted against the project; while the Olympics still took place, the apparent failure of the grand stade cast a long shadow over the rest of the interwar period in terms of sport and its spaces and revealed deep-​seated anxieties about the nature of the mass sporting crowd and the place of commercial sport in French life. Chapter 2 traces the way that municipal and national political actors alike came to promote a form of stadium-​based spectacle from the

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The stadium century

mid-​1920s through to the end of the Second World War. Like the first chapter, it considers the stadium first from the perspective of politicians and other public figures, as actors ranging from Edouard Herriot in Lyon to the Popular Front government of the late 1930s to Catholic youth groups to the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War all deployed the stadium as a staging ground for demonstrations and mass theatrical pieces. However, unlike the first chapter, Chapter 2 delves more deeply into the history of spectators to argue that the stadium itself suggested a particular symbolic and spectacular political language, and turned the crowd into an essential participant in the process, all while emphasising a kind of self-​discipline and offering authorities the ability to easily police and regulate the crowd. Mass politics, in its stadium incarnation, was characterised by both discipline and delight. But while the crowd may have been disciplined and mobilised inside the stadium, it also occasionally eluded those constraints, thus undermining political spectacle as the latter was envisioned by its organisers. Moreover, the stadium demonstration itself proved relatively ephemeral as a political form, disappearing (save for anachronistic revivals) by the 1950s, as the stadium crowd itself became progressively depoliticised. Chapter 3 also focuses heavily on the problematic stadium crowd, but in the context of sporting spectacle rather than mass politics. It doubles back chronologically to begin immediately before the First World War, to trace the earliest manifestations of fears about the mass sporting public, before concentrating on the period between 1918 and the mid-​1950s, when rugby, football and cycling became the pre-​eminent spectator sports in France, promoted and analysed by a burgeoning media complex that included daily newspapers, specialised periodicals with mass popular appeal and radio broadcasting. Journalists and sports officials sought to ‘improve’ and reshape the crowds that gathered, both through the built form of the stadia themselves and through intensive discussions of appropriate spectator behaviour in the sporting press, in ways that reflected underlying anxieties about class and gender. But these physical and rhetorical efforts to redefine the sporting public were continually undermined by the commercial logic of sport itself and the actual practices of spectators inside and outside the stade. The development and transformation of sporting spectacle in the stadium ultimately permitted French men and women to debate and partially resolve deep-​seated tensions about the composition and nature of French mass society, as the intensity of worries about the crowd began to wane after the Second World War. Chapter  4 concentrates on the spectator communities generated within the stadium from the early years of sporting spectacle before

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Introduction

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the First World War to the late 1950s and early 1960s; however, unlike Chapter  3, it turns to the ways in which stadia and spectators helped define the boundaries of those communities in terms of geography and, in a more abstract sense, progress and modernity. Spectatorship, as discussed in the sporting media and as a lived practice on the part of spectators themselves, delineated local and regional distinctions in France, especially in the case of rugby. But spectatorship also helped define the national collective, through literal and imaginary voyages within France to the de facto national stadium outside Paris in the suburb of Colombes and, even more significantly, abroad to other stadia around the globe. These comparisons, made possible by the very nature of sport as a globalising phenomenon that featured standardised and transnational competitions and a sporting media complex that reached across national lines in promoting them even during the first half of the twentieth century, allowed French men and women who either travelled to foreign stadia or who merely read about them or heard them described on radio broadcasts to evaluate France’s relationship with its counterparts in Europe and North America, in ways that contributed to a sense of French inferiority before the Second World War and that were only slightly less critical of the French polity and society after that conflict. In the process, commentary on stadia and spectators situated local and national communities in France in relation to a set of global benchmarks of progress, modern development and national vitality. The first four chapters, then, assess the contested place of the stadium in the realm of public policy and the stadium’s role as a crucible for shaping and creating the modern mass crowd in France up until the early 1960s. While each chapter charts a process of change over time, each one also attests to a certain stability and continuity, particularly at the level of stadia and sports themselves: most French stadia in the 1960s dated back to the interwar period, and the organisational structures of French sport still remained largely unchanged from the status quo of the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter 5, however, traces the increasingly rapid changes and ruptures that characterised stadia and spectator sport over the last four decades of the twentieth century. At the level of urban planning, the stadium (particularly the Parc des Princes after its renovation between 1967 and 1972) was a concrete manifestation of widespread modernisation and urban change after 1945. The chapter also argues that transformations to sport and its spaces constituted another aspect of postwar modernisation itself. The reconstruction of the Parc des Princes and the construction of the Stade de France several decades later represented an ongoing attempt to reinvent mass spectatorship as a more comfortable, appealing

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The stadium century

and democratic activity. French sport, too, began to move haltingly into a new era, one eventually reshaped by television broadcasting and the ‘virtual’ spectatorship it facilitated. Stadia themselves not only reflected these kinds of changes, but also came to be re-​evaluated in their own right by politicians who gradually reached a consensus about the symbolic qualities of stadia as well as their concrete potential for transforming the urban environment. But, as this chapter also suggests, the modernisation of stadia and sport increasingly aligned itself with developments in North America and Europe, and was situated within transnational frameworks of sporting modernisation in the second half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, the history of the stadium and its spectators in twentieth-​ century France was (and still remains) a partial history of mass society, in terms of its forms of entertainment and leisure and (for a time) its politics. The very fact, too, that the stadium was hardly unique to France means that the story told here connects at multiple places to ones that could be recounted about other nations and regions. Yet the narrative in this book remains fundamentally rooted in the French twentieth-​century experience, albeit with an eye to the interconnections between France and the rest of the world. The stadium shaped the way French men and women spent their leisure time, experienced politics and debated the limits and contours of their own society, and thus became a key space for coming to grips with the realities of modern life.

Notes 1 The name ‘Stade de France’, while interpreted literally as ‘Stadium of France’, also referenced the administrative region –​the Ile-​de-​France –​that encompassed Greater Paris. For the naming of the stadium, see Libération, 6 December 1995. 2 Le Figaro, 26 January 1998. 3 La Croix, 26 January 1998. 4 La Croix, 26 January 1998. 5 Laurent Dubois, Soccer Empire:  The World Cup and the Future of France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 3. 6 See Rod Sheard, The Stadium: Architecture for the New Global Culture (Singapore: Periplus, 2005), p. 158; Sybille Frank and Silke Steets, eds, Stadium Worlds: Football, Space and the Built Environment (Abingdon:  Routledge, 2010); and John Bale, Sport, Space and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 7 See Michaël Delépine, Les Stades du football français (Paris: Alan Sutton Eds, 2010). See also Frédérique de Gravelaine, Le Stade de France:  au coeur de la ville, pour le sport et le spectacle. L’Histoire d’une aventure architecturale et humaine (Paris: Le Moniteur, 1997); and Xavier Rivoire, Stades de légende: 50 enceintes mythiques du football européen (Paris: SOLAR, 2002).

13

Introduction

13

8 See Hugh Dauncey, ‘Building the Finals:  Facilities and Infrastructure’, in Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare, eds, France and the 1998 World Cup:  The National Impact of a World Sporting Event (London:  Frank Cass, 1999). See also Marie-​Hélène Bacqué, ‘Le Stade de France à Saint-​Denis:  grands équipements et développement urbain’, Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine 79 (1998): 129–​30. 9 For the era of the Popular Front, see Jessica Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–​39 (Basingstoke and New  York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); Danielle Tartakowsky, ‘Manifestations, fêtes et rassemblements à Paris, Juin 1936–​Novembre 1938’, Vingtième Siècle 27 (1990): 50–​65; Tartakowsky, Les Manifestations de rue en France, 1918–​1968 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), pp. 239, 412–​13; and Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France Defending Democracy, 1934–​38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 307. Philip Nord has briefly addressed Vichy’s stadium-​based theatrical performances:  Philip Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 272. 10 In this vein, see (among others) Geoff Hare, Football in France: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Philip Dine, French Rugby Football: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 2001); and Dubois, Soccer Empire. Joan Tumblety has deftly reconstructed the political stakes involved in the debates surrounding stadia at the time of the 1938 World Cup: Joan Tumblety, ‘The Soccer World Cup of 1938’, French Historical Studies 31 (1) (2008): 77–​116. 11 The best work on the historical evolution of spectatorship in France is Marion Fontaine’s local study of Racing Club de Lens: Marion Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens et les ‘gueules noires’:  essai d’histoire sociale (Paris:  Les Indes Savantes, 2010). For contemporary French sporting spectatorship, see Christian Bromberger et al., Le Match de football: ethnologie d’une passion partisane à Marseille, Naples et Turin (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 1995); see also Christian Bromberger, Football, la bagatelle la plus sérieuse du monde (Paris: Bayard Editions, 1998) and Bromberger, ‘Le Sport et ses publics’, in Pierre Arnaud et al., eds, Le Sport en France: une approche politique, économique, et sociale (Paris:  Documentation française, 2008), pp. 113–​34. See also Catherine Carpentier-​Bogaert et al., Le Peuple des tribunes: les supporters de football dans le Nord-​Pas-​de-​Calais (Béthune: Musée d’Ethnologie Régionale, 1998). Much of the sociological work on sport and spectators has been heavily influenced by the arguments of Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, who see spectator sport as a kind of displaced violence and a permitted space for normally forbidden behaviours. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, The Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 174. Patrick Mignon’s work emphasises the different ‘mobilizing passions’ motivating French football spectators compared with their counterparts elsewhere. See Patrick Mignon, La Passion du football (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998).

14

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The stadium century

12 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 4. 13 Historians have argued the Tour was so successful because it was ideally suited to French demographics: it exported modern athletic contests to the doorsteps of spectators across a sparsely populated, rural country, unlike a sport like football, which had less of a natural support base in France because of the relative scarcity of metropolitan areas with high population densities. See Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1981), pp. 101–​2; Christopher Thompson, The Tour de France: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 22. 14 Bale, Sport, Space and the City, p. 9. 15 While excellent, the historiography on the Tour de France has largely ignored the race’s connections to French sporting culture more broadly. See Thompson, The Tour de France; see also Georges Vigarello, ‘Le Tour de France’, in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire III: Les France (Volume 2) (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 883–​925. For a global and commercial history of the race, see Eric Reed, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in a Global Era (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 16 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 38–​9. 17 For late nineteenth-​century writings on the crowd, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors:  Visions of the Crowd in Late 19th-​Century France (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1981). See also Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). 18 Drawing off the works of Michel Foucault, John Bale has argued that the modern stadium has become an enclosed technological space that spatially confines its spectators and subjects them to sophisticated surveillance. See Bale, Sport, Space and the City, p. 11. For Foucault, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), pp. 217–​18. 19 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 38–​9. 20 For another articulation of this distinction between representative and representational space, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 99. 21 Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-​de-​Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 5. 22 This excludes, of course, the discussions about hooligan violence that began to emerge in the 1970s in France, which were never as pronounced as those that took place in Great Britain.

15

1 A ‘grand stade’ for Paris: stadia, urban planning and the 1924 Olympics

In March 1922, the Paris municipal council debated a measure to grant a ten-​million franc subsidy for the construction of a new 100,000-​seat stadium in the south-​west corner of Paris, destined to serve as the principal site for the upcoming 1924 Olympic Games. The advocates of the project, notably the members of the French Olympic Committee (Comité Olympique Français, or COF) and their allies on the municipal council, argued that a monumental grand stade would boost the prestige of Paris and France. By ratifying the plan, argued city council member Paul Fleurot, the city of Paris would give the Olympic Games the ‘splendour needed for this grandiose international demonstration’.1 The proponents of the grand stade not only suggested that the nation needed the massive stadium to symbolically demonstrate its recovery from the First World War, but also claimed that constructing such an arena would be the first step of a national policy designed to build sporting facilities for the youth of France. Finally, they argued that the spectators in attendance would be inspired to take up sport themselves after having witnessed great athletes in competition: Pierre Doumerc, the director of the Extension of Paris (an urban planning position), maintained that the grand stade was necessary to ‘bring the masses to sports’.2 Yet these arguments failed to sway the majority of the municipal council, which voted convincingly to deny funding to the proposed stadium for reasons ranging from fiscal conservatism to hostility towards large-​scale sporting spectatorship in general. While Paris still hosted the Olympics in 1924 after the private Racing Club de France rescued the COF by expanding its own stadium in time for the Games, the entire Olympic experience was stamped by thwarted expectations. The COF

16

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The stadium century

was disappointed that the final version of the Stade Olympique was considerably smaller, at roughly 60,000 seats, than the stadium it had originally proposed. Nor was the location of the Olympic stadium in the industrial suburb of Colombes, north-​west of Paris, reminiscent of the Olympia of antiquity. The British Manchester Guardian called Colombes ‘one of the least attractive of the suburbs’ around Paris, a ‘township of many factory chimneys, graveled empty spaces, and unkempt trees’.3 On the way to the stadium in 1924, a columnist for the weekly French periodical L’Illustration passed by ‘the chimneys of factories vomiting clouds of smoke’, and ‘large industrial buildings with raw blue windows that appear to be the carcasses of giant zeppelins’.4 While the Games themselves featured some exemplary athletic performances, they failed miserably as a commercial endeavour. Aside from the well-​attended football final, no other Olympic event drew more than 31,000 spectators. Total gate receipts, even when combined with revenue from souvenir sales and restaurant concessions within the stadium, totalled less than seven million francs, which did not outweigh expenses incurred in organising the Olympics. Faced with these dismal statistics, L’Auto, the influential daily sports newspaper, concluded that the Games had been overpriced and too far away from Paris to attract the average spectator.5 The failure of the 1924 Olympic Games to attract large crowds and turn a profit might well be relegated to a footnote in the history of the modern Olympics, which have since become the pre-​eminent global sporting spectacle, alongside the football World Cup, of modern times. But the 1924 Paris Games also proved an early flashpoint in the debates over the place of sport and spectatorship in twentieth-​century France. While spectator sports like cycling, football and rugby had steadily grown in popularity from the 1890s onward, the spaces in which they took place were largely privately owned. The Olympics, because of their scale, ceremonial pomp and nationalist competitive trappings, seemed to necessitate something different: official national involvement in promoting spectator sport. This was particularly evident in the contentious discussions about the planned 100,000-​ person, thirty-​ million franc Olympic stadium, which proved divisive from the start. The stadium’s advocates argued that its construction would somehow spark a nationwide revival of French physical fitness, deemed critical in the wake of the First World War, while its detractors saw the Stade Olympique as an expensive space for parasitic mass spectatorship. Yet even the promoters of the Olympic Games themselves were leery of the crowds that they hoped to attract: they feared that the mass public was potentially disorderly and dangerous, and that it showed an alarming propensity to seek

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Stadia, urban planning and the 1924 Olympics

17

out the ‘spectacle’ of sport rather than appreciate sport’s higher moral and physical purpose. The Olympic debates –​and the ultimate rejection of any substantial government subsidy for the grand stade –​both revealed deep fractures over spectator sport as a matter of official public policy and urban development, and set the template for further debates that ran through the interwar period up through the late 1950s. This chapter discusses the ‘stadium crisis’ surrounding the 1924 Olympic Games as a useful point of departure for understanding the history of stadia, sport and spectators in France. It begins by tracing the multiple historical developments that made debates over an Olympic stadium possible in the first place: the evolution and diffusion of physical culture practices, from military gymnastics to cycling to the Olympic movement, in the last decades of the nineteenth century; growing concern over the health of cities and their inhabitants in the early twentieth century; and the brutal trauma of the First World War and its impact on public policy. The chapter then turns to the heated debates over the grand stade as a planned urban space, an arena for sport and a problematic locale for assembling the mass public. It concludes by considering the longer legacy of the ‘crisis’ over the Olympic stadium during the final years of the Third Republic; the grand stade, as it turned out, ultimately cast a long shadow, even without being constructed during this period.

Gymnastics, sport and spectacle before the First World War Across Europe, the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of modern physical culture practices, from regimented individual gymnastic exercises to competitive codified games that departed from their more informal and often violent early modern antecedents.6 Gymnastics and competitive sports represented the two primary forms of organised physical activity in nineteenth-​century Europe, with the former dominant on the Continent and the latter increasingly prevalent in Great Britain. The gymnastics movement, for its part, began to grow in popularity at the beginning of the nineteenth century: one of its notable pioneers was a Prussian teacher named Friedrich Jähn. An ardent nationalist who resented the Napoleonic occupation of the German-​speaking lands, Jähn sought to restore the moral and physical powers of his compatriots and to recreate a sense of ‘tribal’ community through collective gymnastic exercises. Ironically, the gymnastics groups inspired by Jähn, called Türnen, were actually banned for several decades in post-​Napoleonic Prussia on

18

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The stadium century

the grounds that they promoted a potentially destabilising challenge to the monarchy. Nonetheless, by the early 1840s, the gymnastics movement had gained a solid foothold in much of German-​speaking Europe. In the ensuing decades, gymnastics blossomed throughout central and northern Europe, whether in the form of individualised ‘medical’ gymnastics –​ also called ‘Swedish’ gymnastics  –​or the collective, mass gymnastics envisioned by Jähn and popularised by a wide variety of groups, such as the celebrated Bohemian sokols, who performed their exercises in front of large crowds.7 In France, gymnastic exercises dominated organised forms of physical culture in the aftermath of the 1870 collapse in the Franco-​Prussian War, and became linked to both the new Third Republic and forms of military preparation. Thanks to the so-​called ‘Georges law’ of 27 January 1880, which mandated that gymnastics were required in all public boys’ schools, physical fitness practices slowly gained a permanent foothold in France.8 The explosion of physical fitness instruction, in the form of primary school drill groups (battalions scolaires) and conscriptive societies for recruits in preparation for joining the military, transformed gymnastics into a ‘public and collective practice’ (in Pierre Arnaud’s words) that was indelibly linked to republican citizenship.9 Military gymnastics were not limited to supporters of the Third Republic:  Catholic groups also turned to similar kinds of exercises as a means of both contesting the reach of the secular Republic and rendering French society more healthy.10 In any case, whether practised by republicans or Catholic critics of the parliamentary regime, gymnastics acquired relatively significant support in France by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, when approximately 200,000 French men, concentrated among the urban bourgeoisie, belonged to some sort of gymnastics federation.11 Beyond French frontiers, the main nineteenth-​century challenge to the supremacy of gymnastics as a form of physical culture came from Great Britain, where an organised and codified set of games and sports had emerged by the 1830s and 1840s. Closely associated with public schools like Eton, Harrow and Rugby, sports like association football and rugby were tied to a set of institutional values associated with the rising middle classes: combativity, manliness, Christian piety and patriotism.12 By the end of the nineteenth century, games and sports also found support from those who envisioned them as the ideal moral and physical preparation for young men embarking in the service of empire.13 Games culture, from cricket to football to rugby, also attracted an audience: by the mid-​1880s, crowds of 10,000 or more commonly flocked to football matches, particularly in Scotland and northern England. This growth

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Stadia, urban planning and the 1924 Olympics

19

in popularity certainly helped explain the formal emergence of professional football in Great Britain in 1885.14 In order to accommodate this new public –​and to profit from it by restricting access to the spectacle and charging admission  –​entrepreneurs and clubs developed specialised enclosures and stadia across the United Kingdom, beginning with cricket, athletics and horse racing in the mid-​1870s, and spreading to football soon thereafter.15 English-​style sports in France remained marginal and a distant second to gymnastics in popularity until the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the earliest dedicated sporting enclosures (like Longchamp or Auteuil in the Bois de Boulogne at the western fringes of Paris) were devoted to horse racing, not football or rugby. Still, sports slowly gained a foothold in France. British expatriates in Paris and the provinces certainly helped disseminate certain team sports, while Anglophile sporting clubs like Racing Club de France or Stade Français in Paris were founded in the 1880s by students from elite Parisian secondary schools. These clubs initially featured athletics, rowing and rugby, the last being seen as more of a sport for ‘gentlemen’ than football. Yet, football also had its adherents; the first football-​oriented elite club in Paris, Club Français, was founded in 1892, and Racing Club and Stade Français opened football sections shortly thereafter.16 Another strong early supporter of English-​ style sports in general was the Swiss aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin, who created an umbrella federation for coordinating sport in France, the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA), in 1890.17 Gymnastics and English-​style sports, however, were both dwarfed in popularity in France by one sporting pastime  –​cycling  –​explicitly designed to attract a paying public. Financed by bicycle manufacturers and the nascent sporting press, bicycle-​racing tracks known as vélodromes sprouted prolifically in the 1890s, to the point where nearly 300 existed in 1899.18 In 1894, for instance, Parisian partisans of the petite reine (as the bicycle was nicknamed) could flock to the original Vélodrome Buffalo on the north-​western fringes of the city at Neuilly-​sur-​Seine, the Vélodrome de l’Est on the eastern side of the city in Charenton, or the Vélodrome de la Seine in the west at Levallois.19 Bicycling competitions here were fused with the world of the theatre and circus:  some events were carnivalesque contests of dexterity, while races and sprints were dramatic and dangerous, as accidents on the track (in the words of Christopher Thompson) were ‘frequent, spectacular, and sometimes fatal’.20 Most of the vélodromes built during the bicycle-​racing craze of the 1890s proved ephemeral and soon disappeared, but the most influential and important cycling stadium of all –​the Vélodrome du Parc des Princes –​was one of

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The stadium century

the notable survivors. Built on land leased directly from the city of Paris, it opened its doors in Auteuil in the south-​western sixteenth arrondissement (administrative district) in 1897.21 Under the direction of cyclist-​ turned-​journalist and sporting impresario Henri Desgrange, the Parc des Princes would become one of the cornerstones of a commercial sporting empire, run by Desgrange and his colleague Victor Goddet, that later included the daily sports newspaper L’Auto (created in 1900), the indoor Vélodrome d’Hiver, which hosted cycling, boxing and wrestling matches after 1910, and the enormously popular Tour de France road cycling race, which debuted in 1903 and which culminated in Paris on the track of the Parc for over sixty years, until 1967.22 By the first decade of the twentieth century, then, a diverse array of physical cultural practices had already emerged in France, along with a growing fissure between those practices oriented towards ‘participation’ and those that were inherently conceived to attract spectators. English-​ style sports, in particular, remained the domain of middle-​class elites, although these pastimes were slowly drawing small crowds for football and rugby matches. Meanwhile, overtly commercialised sporting competitions with paid professional competitors –​namely cycling and boxing –​ were attracting a burgeoning audience that did not necessarily participate in sports themselves. The people who took it upon themselves to promote the cause of sport in France did not view this as an entirely positive development; even Desgrange, who made his living from sport in general, was dubious about the values transmitted by professionalised sporting activities like boxing and cycling.23 Aside from Desgrange, the individuals who championed sport in the early years of the twentieth century were almost all well-​heeled elites who condemned passive spectatorship. For the novelist and playwright Henry de Montherlant, sport was a catalyst for a necessary ‘revolution in the manner of sensing, thinking, judging and action’.24 That last word was extremely important: the men who defended the importance of participation might well have taken their cues from contemporary philosopher Henri Bergson, who argued for the importance of action rather than rational contemplation as a means of understanding life.25 For these sportsmen who deliberately used that English word to describe themselves, the seeming antithesis of action was ‘spectacle’. The term, used to refer to an event that had theatrical qualities or was somehow commercial in nature, carried with it the connotations of the artificial and the theatrical. Sport-​spectacle, in this sense, was a sporting event featuring paid performers who competed in front of a paying crowd, obligating the promoter to pay a fixed percentage of the gate receipts

21

Stadia, urban planning and the 1924 Olympics

21

as taxes to the municipality or state.26 By implication, it was an activity open to the masses, like cycling or boxing, and was automatically suspect because those spectators themselves were not becoming sportsmen. This is not to say that spectatorship was completely discouraged among elite sporting circles during the first decades of the twentieth century; it had its place, but on a smaller scale, as a demonstration of associational friendship rather than a pastime for everyone to enjoy. As one example, when Lucien Choine, a member of Racing Club de France, urged his fellow club members to come to the small privately owned Stade du Matin north-​west of Paris in Colombes to watch Racing Club’s rugby and football matches in 1914, he hedged his plea by requesting that his comrades not arrive in ‘sufficiently vast’ numbers that would overwhelm the modest installations at the side of the pitch.27 The spectator, in this context, affirmed his (and it was almost invariably ‘his’, not her) club affiliation and social position by attending a match, and was likely capable of participating himself in the sports being witnessed. The general hostility to mass spectatorship, despite the surge in the popularity of commercialised sports like cycling, manifested itself in particular ways when it came to the most long-​lasting contribution of French sporting elites in the late nineteenth century: Pierre de Coubertin’s ‘revival’ of the ancient Olympic Games. Coubertin embarked on the project in 1894 when he announced it at a conference at the Sorbonne in Paris; the first modern Olympics were held two years later, in Athens.28 In some regards, the Olympics were a supreme embodiment of French elite attitudes towards sport. First, the actual competitors at the Games were all amateurs, not professionals:  the International Olympic Committee’s decision to rigidly enforce a puritanical version of amateur sport in 1894 essentially excluded those athletes of modest means from competitions. Second, Coubertin self-​consciously embraced what he saw as the ‘pure’ athletic endeavours of ancient Greece, as opposed to what he called the ‘the bestial drunkenness of the Roman circus’.29 There is little doubt that his use of ‘Roman circus’ in this context (a speech on the occasion of the inaugural 1896 Olympics in Athens) was shorthand for spectacular or commercial competitions without an uplifting moral purpose, which, not coincidentally, attracted spectators seeking thrills and entertainment. Four years later, Coubertin seemed to have little use for mass crowds at the Games: writing about the 1900 Olympics, a muddled fiasco held outside of Paris, Coubertin hoped that the event would draw ‘elite spectators, fashionable people, diplomats, professors, generals, [and] members of the Institute’.30 But Coubertin was also a pragmatic promoter of his Olympics brainchild and soon found a use for a particular kind of sporting spectacle.

22

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The stadium century

This spectacle was ‘theatrical’, to be sure, and was designed not simply to entertain, but to create a sense of wonder, awe and mystery for the viewer.31 It was also necessary, according to Coubertin, because it served a pedagogic function, helping crowds better appreciate the value of sport.32 Coubertin thus cultivated a sense of pageantry and display in the process of building the Olympics movement. By 1908, for instance, the London Olympics featured an opening parade of 1,500 athletes, who marched into the stadium to the accompaniment of a military brass band. Twelve years later, at the 1920 Antwerp Games, most of the now-​familiar elements of the opening ceremony had become entrenched: the parade of athletes was followed by the proclamation of the athlete’s oath, mass choral singing, a release of pigeons and the firing of a military salute.33 And the stadium space itself, for Coubertin, would also become central to the success of the Games. For the 1908 Olympics, English organisers constructed a stadium capable of holding 70,000 people at Shepherd’s Bush in London; only Hampden Park in Glasgow, which could accommodate 125,000 people at the time, outstripped it in capacity.34 The 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, for their part, were staged in a new brick stadium built for the occasion by architect Torben Grut. While the stadium only accommodated 22,000 spectators during the Games, the organising committee argued that the ‘composition as a whole’ featured a ‘unity and simplicity giving grandeur of effect with relatively simple means’.35 Coubertin himself later defended the stadium against the critiques of local journalists who argued that it was a waste of public lottery money by suggesting that it would pay for itself down the road as a profitable sporting facility.36 All of these developments in the world of French sport specifically and the Olympics more generally, particularly concerning the role of spectacle, would certainly prove critical after the First World War during the Parisian ‘stadium crisis’ between 1921 and 1924. What would also prove central in the years to follow was the assumption implicit in Coubertin’s defence of the Stockholm stadium: the Olympics were a high-​profile endeavour that merited official state and municipal support for sporting spaces large enough to accommodate impressive crowds. Prior to 1914, however, few French municipalities  –​and particularly not Paris –​had shown much of an inclination to intervene dramatically in the urban landscape to create new spaces for sport and recreation, let  alone spectatorship.37 Indeed, from the urban planning perspective, spaces for outdoor recreation, leisure and sport were largely ignored in the run-​up to the First World War in France: most of the existing spaces for sport were either relatively inconspicuous or in private hands. No one vocally demanded that the state, or another official entity, create

23

Stadia, urban planning and the 1924 Olympics

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specialised sporting enclosures, although the reformers of the Musée Social –​a group created in 1894 to promote what it dubbed the cause of ‘urban hygiene’ –​and sympathetic architects like Eugène Hénard came closest in their proposals to convert the old fortification belt around Paris into parks.38 Any early hopes of creating significant green space within the Paris conurbation, however, were torpedoed in 1909 when the state and the city of Paris failed to agree on a financial plan for converting the former fortified zone to green space or public housing.39 In the years before the First World War, only one major French city actively planned to create sporting spaces for recreation, participation and spectatorship. In Lyon, architect Tony Garnier incorporated the enthusiasm for urban green spaces manifested by the Musée Social and the ‘garden city’ movement in Great Britain into his plans for a hypothetical city of the future, the cité industrielle. Within his vision of the new city, Garnier included spaces for sports and other spectacles at the centre of the agglomeration; his designs featured an elongated Roman-​style stadium in the midst of greenery, surrounded by other establishments such as gymnasiums, baths and auxiliary fields.40 When the Radical Socialist politician Edouard Herriot became the mayor of Lyon in 1905, he invited Garnier to serve as the city’s principal architect, and elements of the cité industrielle emerged in later municipal projects. Lyon began construction on what would eventually become the Stade Municipal in 1913, although the stadium was not located in a ‘green space’ corridor at the centre of the city (as Garnier might have envisioned it a decade previously), but was situated instead in the old industrial district of La Mouche, on the southern fringe of the town.41 Garnier’s plans and preliminary work on stadia were an outlier before 1914. However, after the First World War, many others joined him in looking critically at new spaces for sport and leisure with urban areas as potential sites for remedying the nation’s problems. The war had brought a chilling new urgency to the fears about demographic decline and weakness that had been circulating in France since the 1870 defeat in the Franco-​Prussian War. France’s losses between 1914 and 1918 were staggering: over 1.3 million men were killed in combat and another 1.1 million survived the war with permanent disabilities. Of the male population between the ages of twenty and twenty-​seven, 25 per cent was slaughtered, which not only impacted French demographics in the short term but also had negative effects on the birth rate in the ensuing decades.42 In response to this catastrophe, efforts to physically ‘regenerate’ the French nation took a variety of forms: politicians, for instance, passed restrictions on birth control as part of pro​natalist attempts to raise the birth

24

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The stadium century

rate.43 More relevantly for the history of stadia, a new urban planning law (the so-​called loi Cornudet) theoretically required towns of more than 10,000 people to draw up plans for their future extension and expansion that included a commitment to reserving open spaces for recreation. At the same time, military officials, sports journalists and physical fitness experts demanded improved physical fitness education, better access to existing sports facilities and the construction of more stadia.44 A special assembly convened by the Prefect of the Seine in 1920 concluded that the city of Paris, or the national government, needed to construct two ‘sport parks’, each with its own stade de spectacle, within the former fortified zone as quickly as possible. Commandant Eugène Labrosse, a major participant during the assembly’s deliberations, argued that these stadia needed to be constructed with the aim of promoting physical fitness and participation; commercial profit from the stadia was to be at best an afterthought.45 This was the context, then, when the grand stade emerged on the radar of politicians after the First World War. A few of the recently constructed commercial sporting spaces, particularly the Parc des Princes, were thriving and attracting crowds, not just for cycling but increasingly for football and rugby as well. The Olympic Games resumed after an eight-​year hiatus in 1920, with the Belgian city of Antwerp hosting the festivities. Meanwhile, the carnage of the Great War seemed to give ammunition to those who wanted to improve the spaces for sport and recreation in Paris and in France more broadly. But the actual concrete debates about building a stadium would force French officials to confront lingering and unresolved questions about the overall importance of grandiose sporting events like the Olympics, as well as the relationship between stadia, spectatorship and the ongoing process of national recovery after 1918.

The grand stade and the great stadium debate of 1922 Ironically, the first major stadium completed in Paris after the First World War was not built by the French at all, but was rather the handiwork of foreigners. The American army and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) requested fields for a stadium in early 1919, as they wanted an arena for a grandiose set of Olympic-​like sporting competitions featuring Allied military personnel. Upon the conclusion of these so-​called ‘Interallied Games’, they promised to bequeath the facility to France. Acquiescing to the Americans, the Paris municipal council and the Ministry of War granted them a former horse-​racing track in the middle of the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern fringe of the city for their new

25

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stade, soon to be christened the Stade Pershing after American commander-​in-​chief John J. Pershing. The Americans quickly completed the stadium, which opened in early May 1919, in time for those Interallied Games, with dignitaries such as French president Raymond Poincaré and American president Woodrow Wilson witnessing the stadium’s inauguration and handover to the French.46 The sudden construction of a stadium that could hold approximately 35,000 people (25,000 seated and 10,000 standing) around its unconventional 545-​metre track was a welcome development, at least for the sporting press.47 L’Auto, for instance, gushed that the ‘superb’ facility  –​constructed at a cost of two million francs  –​was a ‘magnificent tour de force’.48 However, opinion was divided about the ideal role of the new stadium. On one hand, the parliamentary delegate who chaired the new national committee devoted to physical fitness, Henry Paté, lauded the Stade Pershing as a space for athletic participation. According to Paté, the Stade Pershing would facilitate the ‘regeneration of a race’ that had lost its most ‘beautiful youth’ on the field of battle. The stadium, he noted, had been constructed on the eastern side of Paris because the German aggressor had come from that direction and it reminded Frenchmen that their eyes needed to be oriented towards their rivals across the Rhine.49 On the other hand, the Stade Pershing’s dimensions and the role that it played in hosting the Interallied Games suggested to other observers that it could not be a mere training ground or locale for participation alone. Justinien Comte de Clary, the head of the coordinating body for French sporting federations, the Comité National des Sport (CNS), proclaimed that the new stadium could not be used for anything other than large gatherings; it was too massive for everyday athletic events.50 The split over the Stade Pershing’s intended function would foreshadow some of the key themes that emerged in the debates over a new Olympic stadium, which began when Pierre de Coubertin leveraged his position as head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to engineer the selection of Paris as the site for the 1924 Olympics in early May 1921.51 Soon thereafter, Parisian municipal councillor Jean de Castellane (who also sat on the COF) proclaimed that France now required a larger stadium for the Olympics. In order for Paris to ‘show itself [as] worthy of the honour accorded it’ by the IOC, Castellane contended, the city needed an 80,000-​seat stadium with adequate roofing to protect spectators from the elements, as well as a new swimming pool and an indoor arena for boxing and wrestling.52 In his initial proclamations, Castellane favoured the expansion and modification of the Stade Pershing, that arena constructed

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(in his words) by ‘our American friends’ in the ‘ravishing setting of the Bois de Vincennes’.53 A mere three weeks later, however, the attitude of the COF towards the Stade Pershing had notably hardened. The COF’s key leaders –​Castellane and the organisation’s general secretary Frantz Reichel, a long-​time journalist for the daily newspaper Le Figaro and a vehement champion of amateur athletics and ‘participation’ over spectator sport, particularly of the professional variety –​ unequivocally rejected Pershing as a possible site for a 100,000-​seat stadium destined to host the Olympic Games.54 The COF went on the offensive and lambasted Pershing on all fronts. The stadium, once depicted in the sporting press as a marvel of American ingenuity, now stood as proof of the shoddiness of American production methods, because it had been built too quickly by Yankee doughboys. From the point of view of its critics, the Stade Pershing was also simply too small and lacked the necessary grandeur that the Olympics seemingly required. According to J. Allan Muhr, an American expatriate member of Racing Club who had played for the French national rugby team in 1906, Pershing was acceptable as a stade populaire –​a stadium for normal, everyday sporting fixtures –​but was grossly inadequate for any events that attracted large numbers of spectators.55 In any case, the COF now huffed that the Stade Pershing was too far away from Paris and too badly served by public transport to be a suitable venue for the Games.56 It soon became clear that any prospective Olympic stadium needed to be enormous, at least according to the two men who became the vocal advocates of a new stade: Reichel and Jules Rimet, who was then the head of both the French football federation (known at the time as the Fédération Française de Football Association, or FFFA) and the international football federation (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA). In their pronouncements about the stadium as the year unfolded, both men repeatedly suggested that the grand stade needed to accommodate 100,000 people. At the time, this was an astronomically large figure; no stadium in continental Europe in late 1921 even came close to offering 100,000 places for spectators. But these French sports officials argued nonetheless for a monumental stadium that would boost Paris’s prestige internationally and would dwarf the efforts of Stockholm and Antwerp, the two previous host cities of the Games.57 Reichel and Rimet also believed that a grand stade would be profitable as well as monumental: they estimated that a 100,000-​seat stadium, filled to bursting during the Olympics, would gross over thirty million francs, a windfall which would more than cover the costs of hosting the Games.58 The duo further argued that, after the Olympics were finished, the stadium would

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attract capacity crowds four to five times a year for international football and rugby matches. The confidence Reichel and Rimet placed in the economic potential of the stadium for the Games themselves was overly optimistic. It would have been very difficult for 100,000 people to attend each day of the Games, given the potential costs involved and the fact that events took place during the working week. The two men also closed their eyes to the reality that no sporting event in any French vélodrome or stadium had ever drawn more than 40,000 people up to that point.59 Moreover, Reichel and Rimet seemed ambivalent, at the very best, about those mass crowds that might attend the Games and future sporting events. Reichel repeatedly stressed that the real goal of the Olympics was not to emulate other kinds of spectator sporting events like cycling, which was far too commercial and spectacular. Instead, the Games needed to convert French men and women to practising sports themselves. Reichel suggested that a grand stade would only be worthwhile if it were part of an Olympic park, where multiple small stadia intended for training purposes would be clustered around it. Ideally, all of these stadia would be built in the same location so that everyone had the possibility to use them for sports ranging from swimming to football, wrestling and tennis.60 Arguing that this Olympic park needed to be close enough to Paris for young men and women to easily access it on foot or by public transportation, Reichel and his allies tried to cast the grand stade as a means of stimulating popular participation in sport, rather than functioning simply as a venue for spectator sport. In this fashion, the long-​simmering suspicions that many French sporting officials harboured towards spectatorship made their mark on the debates over an Olympic stadium. Like Coubertin, Reichel and the other vocal supporters of the Olympics did not want to promote an event that would entertain in the fashion of the circus or the theatre. Instead, sport had to have some redemptive value, particularly if the government –​both at the national level and that of the Prefecture of the Seine, which administered Paris directly in conjunction with the Prefecture of Police on behalf of the state –​were to commit resources to its promotion.61 Reichel’s rhetoric, too, contained the explicit suggestion that sport could somehow inspire the masses, who were clearly in need of being transformed into an active, vigorous national collective. At the same time, Reichel attempted to suggest that the new grand stade would be profitable, probably as a means of persuading fiscally conservative sceptics that it would pay for itself over time. This was the last justification Reichel offered for a new stadium when the COF, in its

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final report issued in late 1921, demanded the construction of a brand new 100,000-​person stadium in an entirely new location –​the Parc des Princes, which of course was already the site of the well-​known commercial vélodrome administered by Henri Desgrange. The new stadium needed to be there, according to Reichel, because the ‘sporting public’ was much more accustomed to the Bois de Boulogne (near the Parc) than the Bois de Vincennes (which surrounded Pershing), and because the former was easier to access via subway or tramway than the latter. Consequently, Reichel argued that the gate receipts would be much higher at the Parc than they would be at a stade in the suburbs or in the Bois de Vincennes.62 But the Parc offered other advantages that Reichel did not articulate so directly. First, it was a more aesthetically pleasing setting for the grand stade than any other possible site, save for the Bois de Vincennes. During the COF’s deliberations, Reichel had rejected proposals from nearby Parisian banlieues (suburbs), particularly the gritty municipality of Colombes, offering their services as sites for a new stadium; he certainly did not want any grand stade to be built in a locale scarred by rapid industrialisation.63 Second, Reichel was using the proposed new stadium as a means of attacking commercial sporting spectacle and Desgrange’s vélodrome. Reichel would have been delighted to run that stadium out of business; he fumed repeatedly that the city still leased the land on which the vélodrome was constructed to Desgrange’s holding company (the Société Anonyme du Vélodrome du Parc des Princes) and dubbed this situation an ‘exasperating servitude’ on the part of Paris.64 It initially appeared that the COF’s proposal for a new stade would quickly carry the day, as the Prefect of the Seine and the national government cautiously endorsed the proposed stadium as a means of boosting French prestige and promoting the cause of sport. The state committed twenty million francs to underwrite the project, to be matched by a ten-​million franc subsidy by the city itself. This move represented a radical departure for both city and state, which heretofore had been highly reluctant to intervene dramatically in promoting sport or in shaping the urban landscape to facilitate sport and leisure. The argument about the new stadium fostering ‘participation’ through spectatorship reappeared when the matter came up for debate in the National Assembly in early March 1922. Gaston Vidal –​the undersecretary for technical instruction and teaching  –​argued that the state’s twenty million francs would not only build the grand stade, but would also be earmarked for the training of athletes for the Games and the construction of secondary stadia and fields. In this manner, the money invested on the Olympics would produce a high return, as the stadia

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and fields would serve the youth of France.65 In the same discussion, deputy Jean Ybarnégaray (the president of the Basque pelota association, the Fédération Française de Pelote Basque) mounted a defence of the stadium as a potent symbol that would showcase a revitalised French nation. To the forty-​two nations slated to participate in the Eighth Olympiad, argued Ybarnégaray, ‘France must no longer appear as they saw it during the war, heroic and ferocious, but [now instead] without its armour, healed of its wounds, in all its strength [and] absolutely in all of the grace of its genius.’66 Ybarnégaray, like Reichel, justified the expense of the Olympics in terms of the moral benefit that the youth of France would draw from this ‘grandiose manifestation’; the Games would accelerate the ‘beneficent’ and ‘regenerating’ role of sport. Thus the defenders of the grand stade, at the highest levels of government, argued that the stadium was simultaneously a monument that showcased a resurgent postwar France and the first and most symbolic step towards stimulating athletic participation in the nation at large. However, not everyone was convinced by such soaring rhetoric. The opponents of the new stadium were concentrated within the Paris municipal council. This was, in general, an elected body that did not have much authority. In fact, it could only deliberate on questions specifically brought before it by the Prefect of the Seine. But the municipal council also took its role in maintaining the ‘good management’ (bon gestion) of Paris seriously, particularly over budgetary matters.67 And, from a financial point of view, the projected expenses for a stade olympique generated suspicion, particularly among the council’s more left-​wing members. In a printed attack on the COF, Socialist Jean Téneveau assailed the proposal for a grand stade on economic grounds. Téneveau maintained that the Stade Pershing needed to be retained as the site of the Olympics because it cost less than any new ‘luxury stadium’ in the Parc des Princes. He argued that that the city’s share of the costs for a stade olympique would undoubtedly skyrocket from the projected ten million francs to twenty-​ five or thirty million; this struck him as a severe misuse of Paris’s available resources when the city found itself grappling with (among other things) a severe postwar housing crisis. Téneveau contended that Paris’s moral responsibility to rebuild after the First World War precluded sumptuary spending on monumental stadia.68 Hammering home his point about the financial irresponsibility of the stadium, Téneveau also attacked the COF proposal as being driven by class self-​interest: he depicted the entire plan as being engineered by wealthy ‘business sportsmen’ who were ‘never displeased by grandeur and luxury’, and who consistently favoured those wealthier western neighbourhoods of Paris that already benefitted from

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government patronage over the more impoverished eastern and northern arrondissements that were not so fortunate.69 Beyond his criticism of the grand stade’s price tag, Téneveau also challenged the perceived merit and feasibility of a monumental space for spectacular sport, and the rhetoric about creating participants through the grand stade. First, he rejected the idea that 50,000 spectators would ever flock to a sporting event during the Olympics. It would be rare, he contended, for even 30,000 spectators to attend any single match during the Games, as events would be concurrently played at different venues. Téneveau instead suggested that Paris’s existing stadia  –​the Stade Pershing, Racing Club’s small stadium in Colombes and the private Stade Bergeyre on the Buttes-​Chaumont in north-​eastern Paris  –​were perfectly adequate for the crowds that the Olympics would attract. Second, Téneveau criticised the COF’s forecast of a thirty-​million-​franc profit from the Games. He maintained that the grand stade’s proposed ticket prices, averaging five francs per ticket, would not permit sufficient numbers of people to attend the matches and fulfil the COF’s budget projections. If the COF really wanted to attract crowds, he argued, ticket prices would have to be as low as possible.70 Finally, the grand stade (according to Téneveau) was a ‘criminal’ distraction when the city should be devoting its resources to boosting participation in sport through the construction of multiple smaller stadia; he rejected the hopeful suggestion made by Reichel and his allies that the ‘spectacular’ Olympic stadium would somehow encourage a new crop of athletes to take up sport. When the municipal council formally deliberated the question of the stade olympique on 10 and 11 March 1922, Téneveau and other opponents of the stadium dominated the discussion. Marcel Héraud (a Radical Socialist) and André Le Troquer (a Socialist) argued that the stadium was an enormous vanity project for a private organisation, the COF. Far from boosting French or Parisian prestige, a monumental stadium would serve no purpose after the Olympics and would remind observers of ‘old festivals’ and ‘wasted money’.71 Le Troquer also noted, in passing, that the Stade Pershing and the Racing Club’s stadium at Colombes were perfectly adequate spectator spaces, as 30,000 to 40,000 people could attend international sporting events there. Léopold Bellan, a Radical Socialist from the second arrondissement, argued that the council ought to endorse measures that actually impacted French athletes and proposed spending one million francs on small sporting facilities in the Parisian basin. The municipal council ultimately rejected the COF’s proposal for a ten-​million-​franc contribution to a new stadium at the Parc des Princes by a 46–​19 vote, at the same time that it endorsed a one-​million franc

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subsidy for the Stade Pershing and adopted Bellan’s proposal to channel another one million francs towards local, small-​ scale sporting installations.72 The centre–​right coalition that normally dominated the council fell apart on the stadium question:  the Radical Socialist delegates, who typically voted with the Republicans and conservatives in the majority, sided with the Socialists in rejecting funding for the grand stade.73 The coalition against the grand stade also included fiscal conservatives such as Lionel de Tastes and the monarchist war veteran Pierre-​Marie Fortuné d’Andigné, a great horse-​racing enthusiast and a future financial backer of the fascistoid youth organisation, the Jeunesses Patriotes. The bulk of supporters of the grand stade, in contrast, were mostly moderates or conservatives, such as Joseph Denais, Maurice de Fontenay and Michel Missoffe, but their ranks also included dissident Socialists such as Paul Fleurot.74 In its decision, then, the municipal council dealt a sharp setback to the COF, the Prefect of the Seine and the national government. It rejected any suggestion that this kind of sporting space was crucial for national pride, health or recovery, or that it merited official support. Overall, the municipal council’s reluctance to intervene on the stadium question was consistent with a longer legacy of laissez-​faire urban management in Paris. But the stadium vote also demonstrated that the COF’s attempt to associate spectator spaces with heightened athletic participation had been a very weak pairing of two largely incompatible ideas. Building a grand stade was a symbolic gesture in favour of sport, but in practice did little to make French women and men healthier. Instead, it merely bolstered sport-​spectacle, according to the many critics of the grand stade, who were supremely unconvinced that the state needed to be in the business of promoting spectator sport in the first place. And, as much as Frantz Reichel, Jules Rimet and their allies portrayed the Olympics as an edifying, noble spectacle that would draw French youth to sport, they themselves remained deeply ambivalent about the idea of the mass spectator. Even as spectatorship and a grand stade were deemed necessary for the Olympics to be successful, the spectator himself, or herself, was to be tolerated rather than encouraged. This ambivalence undermined the COF’s cause and contributed to the rejection of a city-​funded stade olympique. However, the municipal council’s vote did not prove to be the last word on the issue of building a national grand stade in Paris. Rather than swallow the bitter pill of remodelling the Stade Pershing, the COF turned to its elite sporting allies and accepted a proposal from Racing Club de France on 22 April 1922 to host the Olympics at Racing Club’s own small Stade de Colombes.75 The agreement committed the club to

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expanding its then current stadium to boost its capacity to 60,000 places. In addition, Racing Club agreed to construct a tennis stadium for 10,000 people and a natatorium for swimming events that could accommodate 7,000 spectators. In return, Racing Club was guaranteed 50 per cent of the gate receipts that had been destined for the Comité National des Sports (CNS), a quasi-​national body of sporting federations. At the very minimum, the COF promised Racing Club four million francs from the Games; in the event that the Olympics did not gross at least eight million francs in revenue, the French state would contribute the difference between Racing Club’s 50 per cent share and its four-​million guarantee. Finally, Racing Club agreed to lease the Olympic stadium to the CNS for fifteen days a year from 1 February 1925 onwards for large-​scale rugby and football matches; it was to be reimbursed on those occasions with up to 10 per cent of the gate receipts in order to cover the organisational costs it incurred.76 In the guise of coming to the aid of the Olympic Games, the elitist and Anglophile Racing Club thus negotiated a very advantageous deal for itself. Given the fact that many of the COF’s members (including Frantz Reichel himself) belonged to Racing Club, the whole arrangement struck some observers as suspicious. Charles St-​Cyr, the former vice-​ president of Coubertin’s sporting association, the USFSA, complained to the Prefect of the Seine that city funding was indirectly being channelled into the coffers of a private organisation under the terms of the city’s agreement with the COF and Racing Club.77 Still, the COF defended itself by arguing that, as it could not have relinquished the responsibility of hosting the Games, it had been obligated to accept Racing Club’s proposal.78 In a letter to the Prefect of the Seine, the Comte de Clary cast the COF’s decision to opt for Racing Club’s proposal as a patriotic choice, which did not force the city of Paris to sacrifice any disproportionate sums for the new stadium.79 More enthusiastic support for the arrangement came from Henri Desgrange at L’Auto. Relieved that the COF was not going to build a large stadium at the Parc des Princes, which might have precipitated the demolition of his own vélodrome there, Desgrange slyly opined that the arrangement between the COF and Racing Club proved that common sense had prevailed. Further, Desgrange added that Racing Club’s rescue of the Olympic Games offered evidence that sportsmen in France could not count on the support of the city or state, but had to rely on each other.80 In the span of eleven months, dating back to May 1921 and the selection of Paris as the host of the 1924 Olympic Games, the issue of the grand stade had generated substantial debate and had nearly prompted

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unprecedented interventions by governmental authorities in the management of the urban landscape and the infrastructure of sport itself. And the ultimate refusal, in March 1922, to commit significant public support to an Olympic stadium not only reflected the obstacles to that kind of state-​sponsored building agenda in support of spectator sport, but also had long-​lasting ramifications over the next several decades. The municipal council’s decision shaped the way the Games themselves unfolded, cemented the monopoly of private actors on spaces for spectator sport (at least in Paris) and framed future debates about the necessity of a national stadium throughout the remainder of the interwar period.

The 1924 Olympic Games and their afterlife After all the hand-​wringing in 1922 and public fears that a rejection of the grand stade would entail the loss of the Olympics for Paris, the Games themselves went forward as planned. The state ultimately committed six million francs, far short of its originally promised twenty million, to help defray the costs of staging the Olympics. Its contribution was minimally augmented by another million francs from Paris and 250,000 francs from the municipality of Colombes. As for the Olympic stadium, Racing Club’s in-​house architect Louis Faure-​Dujarric oversaw its construction. Upon completion, it boasted a theoretical capacity of 60,000 –​the largest stadium in France at the time, to be sure, but far smaller and less costly than the stadia proposed by the COF during the great stadium debate (Figure 2). The stadium itself was oval, in the old Roman manner, with a running track encircling a central pitch for football or rugby. The two grandstands or tribunes, each covered with a heavy canvas awning, were designed to each accommodate 10,000 seated spectators and ran along the straightaway of the track. The remaining 40,000 spectators were expected to stand in the virages, the uncovered curving grandstands at either end of the stadium. If the spectator spaces were not necessarily comfortable, they had been designed with an eye towards sightlines. Faure-​Dujarric reduced the number of support pillars under each tribune’s awning to ten (or one every sixteen metres) in an attempt to improve visibility for the seated spectators. In this sense, the stadium was highly modern, taking advantage of new methods of reinforcing concrete (beton armé) for the grandstands and improved steel-​making techniques that allowed the awning supports to be thinner and stronger. As further proof of its modernity, the stade boasted a press box, replete with telegraph and telephone connections, and restrooms for the spectators with

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2  The Stade de Colombes, 1924.

hot running water; it also featured a tunnel that allowed the players to go directly from their locker rooms up onto the pitch through a special trapdoor.81 The gleaming new stadium, for some observers, was a symbol of hope and opportunity in the run-​up to the Games. Poet and playwright André Obey waxed eloquently about the new stadium: it boasted a ‘harmonious cubism’ and a ‘lyrical geometry that sings’.82 Obey christened the stadium as the ‘new temple of sport’ and, addressing the stadium with the familiar second-​person pronoun tu, wrote:  ‘You will be the oasis, the clearing, you will be the cradle of a new man with pensive eyes, in whose expansive chest beats a large, calm heart.’83 In a less poetic vein, dozens of ordinary French men and women also looked to the stadium for inspiration –​and potential profit. In the run-​up to the Games, the municipality of Colombes received numerous appeals from citizens who desired permission to sell a wide variety of items inside the stadium or in its immediate vicinity. Their petitions to market pastries, beverages, fruit and souvenir trinkets, or to offer a bus service or commemorative photographs of the event, emphasised both material need and the qualifications of the petitioner for demanding employment, from sixty-​ six-​year-​old Louise Imbert, who cited dire poverty, to war invalids like Henri Vail and Jean Amoroux, who claimed their wounds entitled them to priority consideration.84

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Yet, despite such lofty expectations, the actual Olympic experience proved mostly disappointing, at least from a commercial point of view. The Games, in fact, failed to draw the large crowds that COF members had confidently predicted back in 1921. The entire Olympic Games drew 625,821 spectators, for a total of 5,531,065 francs in receipts (not counting expenses).85 The most commercially successful events, both held at the Stade Olympique, were the football final between Uruguay and Switzerland (40,522 spectators and 516,575 francs in revenue) and the opening day of the track and field competitions, which officially drew 22,737 spectators. Other events generated few francs and attracted fewer spectators. Even for football, the vast majority of the matches drew under 10,000 spectators; only the opening match on 25 May (18,991 viewers for Spain–​Italy), a match at the Stade Bergeyre on 29 May (10,455 for Switzerland–​Italy), the elimination football match between France and Uruguay (30,868 spectators), and the football final attracted more than that figure. At other venues, the Olympics barely registered.86 Small wonder, then, that despite the pomp and circumstances surrounding the Games, L’Auto quipped that the Games had ended in ‘mediocre fashion’ and were greeted by ‘general indifference’.87 If the gate receipts and spectator totals fell well short of expectations, the crowds who came to the Games also left something to be desired, at least from the point of view of the officials who organised the events. To be sure, journalists sympathetic to the COF claimed that the Games had advanced the cause of sport and participation in France. Emmanuel Gambardella, a journalist and future president of the French football association, gushed that the crowd at the Uruguay–​Switzerland final witnessed an ‘unforgettable spectacle’ that would remain etched in every spectator’s memory; he noted that the public would ‘believe what it saw’ and would take valuable lessons away from the event.88 Yet, behind this brave rhetoric, the COF despaired over the nationalistic fervour of crowds that only cheered for French athletes and jeered the referees at the rugby competition who appeared to unfairly penalise the French squad.89 Although the problem of unruly sporting crowds was becoming an issue elsewhere in France, this perceived spectator indiscipline at the Olympics was deeply embarrassing for French sports officials, because of the pomp associated with the Games and the international attention they attracted. The activities inside the Stade de Colombes reflected badly on the nation as a whole, at least according to L’Auto, which opined that such incidents were propagande à rebours (backwards propaganda) that would cause France to be judged poorly by foreign observers.90

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In the aftermath of the Olympics, members of the COF defended their handiwork and tried their best to deflect criticism. Frantz Reichel predictably blamed the city and state for failing to build a true grand stade and alleged that Parisian city authorities and the state railway company colluded to drive up ticket prices on the train line to Colombes, making the cost of attending the Games prohibitively expensive.91 But the COF was hardly blameless: it was preoccupied with automobile access to the stadium, rather than public transit, and concentrated its promotional efforts on attracting a ‘better class’ of spectators, including foreign visitors, rather than working-​class Parisians.92 It also did little to keep tickets affordable. Rather than setting prices itself, it offered general guidelines to the governing federation of each sport regarding ticketing. As a result, ticket prices increased; when the price of admission was added to transportation costs to and from Colombes, the overall expense of attending a day at the Games was probably prohibitive for the majority of Parisian spectators, causing L’Auto’s Gaston Bénac to dub Colombes the ‘inaccessible stadium’ in a caustic column.93 The commercial failure of the Games, then, likely had more to do with general elitism and incompetence on the part of the people who promoted the Olympics rather than any neglect on the part of public authorities. In this regard, the great ‘stadium debate’ did not doom the Games to failure, even as it revealed deep-​seated anxieties about spectator sport and concerns regarding the appropriate level of government support for it. The decision to work with Racing Club in building the new stadium, however, reverberated for decades after the 1924 Games. Thanks to the Olympics, Racing Club was able to transform its private facility into the pre-​eminent athletic stadium in France, at little real cost to the club. Racing Club also escaped any potentially negative consequences of the low spectator turnout: in the end, it received its guaranteed payout of four million francs, not from the state (which had originally underwritten Racing Club’s deal), but through an insurance policy taken out by the COF.94 Racing Club thus not only profited from the Games, but maintained its grip on most of the high-​profile sporting matches in France for decades to come. The Stade Olympique  –​later given the alternate moniker of the Stade Yves du Manoir, after a Racing Club member and rugby national team stalwart who perished in a 1928 airplane accident –​ would be used year after year for major international football and rugby matches, as well as the annual final of the Coupe de France in football, until 1972.95 The continued private monopoly on spectator sporting spaces in the Parisian basin was one of the biggest concrete results of the Olympic

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stadium discussions. The other lasting legacy of the Games came in the way that the ‘stadium debate’ of 1921–​22 framed further discussions about the grand stade in interwar France. Unbowed by their crushing defeat in 1922, proponents of the 100,000-​seat stadium resurfaced in the 1930s, particularly before the Universal Exposition of 1937 and the 1938 football World Cup. Between 1934 and 1936 alone, the city received proposals for at least six different grands stades in locales ranging from the Ile de Puteaux in the west to the Bois de Vincennes in the east. Henri Desgrange, perhaps fearful that someone might eventually persuade the city to build another large stadium near his vélodrome at the Parc des Princes, contributed a plan to rebuild the Parc as a 100,000-​seat stadium in 1936, while architect Albert Pouthier floated the idea of restoring the ageing and rapidly deteriorating Stade Pershing in 1937.96 A physical fitness association called the Union Nationale pour une France plus Grande suggested in 1936 that France needed a 100,000-​seat stadium to demonstrate its recovery from the First World War; their proposed stadium was to be funded by a lottery, an idea that was immediately rejected by the government.97 The grand stade also increasingly featured in the plans of well-​known modern architects and urbanists. Georges-​Henri Pingusson and Robert Mallet-​Stevens proposed an 116,000-​seat horseshoe-​shaped stadium facing onto the Seine in western Paris, at the abandoned gas works on the Quai de Passy near the Trocadéro, in advance of the Universal Exposition of 1937.98 Their more celebrated colleague within the modernist movement, Le Corbusier, drew up his vision of a grand stade at roughly the same time. Le Corbusier’s proposed arena, which he placed in Gennevilliers, a north-​western suburb bordering Colombes, was a striking construction with giant access ramps, a massive removable screen for cinematic projections in the interior and a 100-​metre radio antenna.99 Le Corbusier’s grand stade was all the more intriguing, given the fact that the architect had loudly denounced stadia and spectatorship four years earlier. In La Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City), Le Corbusier opined that modern societies had constructed stadia in which ‘games are provided for the populace –​10, 20, 30 consummate athletes performing for five, ten, twenty thousand paying, passive spectators who remain in one spot, yelling and stamping, for hour after hour on concrete benches’. Criticising this ‘vicarious dream of valor’, Le Corbusier instead proposed to bring sport fields to the doorstep of every dwelling in the Ville Radieuse, to put ‘crowds themselves on the playing field’.100 In 1937, however, he actively promoted mass spectatorship through his grand stade, a model of which was on display at the Universal Exposition itself.101

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Yet, while the grand stade of 100,000 places briefly returned to the agenda of certain public authorities in 1937, neither Paris nor the national government felt any real compulsion to construct a new stade for the Universal Exposition or the football World Cup of 1938.102 Léo Lagrange, the Socialist undersecretary for sports and leisure from June 1936 to April 1938 in three successive left-​wing governments during the Popular Front period, flatly refused proposals for constructing large spectacular arenas.103 While part of his reasoning stemmed from an ideological aversion to spectacle, which had been voiced by everyone from Coubertin in his early writings to the Socialists during the Olympic debates in 1921 and 1922, he was also doubtlessly influenced by practical economic realities: the government had little funding to build a 100,000-​seat stadium to compete with the existing privately controlled spaces like the Parc des Princes or the Stade de Colombes, even if it had the desire to do so. As the Yorkshire Post somewhat surprisingly commented, the cost of a new stadium in Paris would be ‘a good deal of money in these hard times’.104 The French government’s role in promoting the 1938 World Cup remained relatively subdued, mirroring its behaviour before the Olympics in 1924. It limited its involvement to a one-​million franc subsidy to Racing Club de France and Louis Faure-​Dujarric, which helped fund modifications to the Stade de Colombes that theoretically boosted the latter’s capacity to 70,000 people (although subsequent years would prove that the remodelled stadium could only hold 60,000 spectators).105 Thus, the net impact of the stadium debates of the early 1920s was a legacy of private control over sporting spaces in Paris and repeated discussions concerning the grand stade that always revolved around anxieties about spectators and the cost of building new stadia. That legacy notwithstanding, however, the case study presented here might easily be accused of dwelling on events that ultimately proved insignificant. In Paris at least, the status quo did not budge for the Olympic Games, and remained unchanged no matter how many times politicians deliberated the question of the grand stade, at least through to the late 1950s. But this chapter has also suggested that the process of debating the Olympic stadium, from the forces that propelled the stade to prominence in the first place to the reasons for the failure of the planned new stadium, was as significant as anything that could have been actually constructed. The Olympic stadium discussions confirmed the tensions over the proper place of spectator sport in society and the anxieties that accompanied the emergence of sport as a mass phenomenon that was not simply confined to elite athletes. To be sure, the Olympic crisis hardly resolved these anxieties about spectator sport; as Chapter 3 will demonstrate, the role of

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the sporting crowd continued to preoccupy sports journalists throughout the interwar period and beyond. But the Olympic debates linked the stadium crowd to the state and other political actors in an unprecedented fashion:  the latter were forced to assess the value of their involvement with a new kind of mass leisure practice. Left-​wing politicians like Jean Téneveau and André Le Troquer saw little use for promoting spectatorship, preferring to concentrate on rendering their constituents more physically fit through smaller participatory spaces that, like the grand stade, were in their own right more frequently confined to paper than realised in concrete. Coubertin and Reichel, and most of the centre–​right politicians on the Paris municipal council, defended sport-​spectacle on the basis of its capacity to reshape society and render it more healthy. In other words, they did not disagree with the Socialists in their long-​term vision for an active, dynamic society, but quite critically differed as to how those masses would actually be mobilised into that state. That divergence, coupled with a general reluctance to spend money on dramatic gestures and new urban spaces, doomed the grand stade. The stadium debate thus politicised the question of spectatorship and stadium construction by suggesting that crowds at sporting events were tied up in France’s broader struggles after the First World War. The crisis over the grand stade offered a commentary on what contemporaries perceived to be critical postwar problems in France. Across the political spectrum, nearly everyone voiced concerns over the need to ‘regenerate’ the nation, but the stadium debate demonstrated that a consensus was lacking over how exactly that ‘regeneration’ might take place. For some, a monumental grand stade provided a symbolic statement of French power and resolve, and would somehow inspire French men (and possibly women) to practise sport. For others, however, the stadium was an empty and expensive urban gesture that failed to resolve any of France’s real troubles. The stadium, as it turned out, was not potent enough as a national symbol to unify the divergent political camps of the late Third Republic, or to prevent disagreements between local politicians, state officials and the self-​appointed elites in the media and in private associations who trumpeted sport’s direct correlation with national prestige. Nor was the grand stade capable of serving as a justification for a more interventionist or dirigiste role for the state (or the Prefecture of the Seine as its proxy) in solving France’s perceived demographic and social problems through dramatic building projects.106 Yet the results of the grand stade debates, whether in 1922 or in 1937, should not blind historians to another story that was unfolding beyond the discussions of a de facto national stadium. At the same time that the state

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and the city of Paris repeatedly refused to build a grand stade, local municipalities outside of Paris, from Lyon to Bordeaux to Marseille to Reims to Le Havre to the Parisian suburbs of Saint-​Denis and Ivry-​sur-​Seine, began to construct their own stadia in an effort to promote physical fitness and satisfy their constituents. In these locales, the stadium may not have been invested with so much national significance, but it was certainly embedded in questions of urban planning and policy, particularly concerning public health. In all of those cases, too, the primary actors involved in building and showcasing stadia were cognisant of the dilemmas about spectatorship and participation that were so visibly showcased in Paris before the Olympic Games. In this way, the spectators who were to a certain extent politicised in the debate over the grand stade became even more explicitly political subjects to be mobilised and disciplined within the stadium. The attention of the next chapter turns to the ways in which the stadium –​ whether built by a local municipality or a private entrepreneur –​became the focal point for the articulation of a new kind of mass political language in France from the 1920s through to the Second World War.

Notes 1 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 11 March 1922. 2 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 11 March 1922. 3 Manchester Guardian, 18 February 1920. 4 Jean de Pierrefeu, in L’Illustration, 19 July 1924. During the interwar period, Colombes was home to the manufacturing plants for Hispano-​Suiza automobiles, airplane engine manufacturer Gnôme et Rhône, Ericsson telephones and the American Goodrich tyre company. Mattéo Poletti, Colombes historique (faits, documents, images et personages): des origines à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Colombes: MJC, 1984), pp. 165–​70. 5 L’Auto, 10 August 1924. 6 Pierre Arnaud has defined ‘physical culture’ as the ‘ensemble of exercises, practices or forms of practice of physical or sporting activities’ that aim for the ‘upkeep and development of the body in the attempt to [perfect] its movements and motions’. Pierre Arnaud, Le Militaire, l’écolier, le gymnaste: naissance de l’éducation physique en France, 1869–​1889 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1991), p. 21. 7 Heikki Lempa, Beyond the Gymnasium: Educating the Middle-​Class Bodies in Classical Germany (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 233. 8 Arnaud, Le Militaire, l’écolier, le gymnaste, p. 19. 9 Arnaud, Le Militaire, l’écolier, le gymnaste, p. 256. Arnaud also cautions observers about viewing the emergence of Republican gymnastics as solely the result of the trauma of the Franco-​Prussian War, suggesting that gymnastics were also intertwined with the values of the Republican teaching establishment after 1875.

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10 Alain Derlon, Sport, nationalisme français et régénération de la ‘race’: 1880–​ 1914 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), p. 150. 11 Derlon, Sport, nationalisme français et régénération, p. 137. 12 Hugh Cunningham has also added ‘a comfortable disinclination toward too much intellectual curiosity’ as another middle-​class value reinforced by sport. Hugh Cunningham, Leisure and the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780–​1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 116. 13 J. A. Mangan, ‘“Muscular, Militaristic and Manly”: The British Middle-​Class Hero as Moral Messenger’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 13 (1) (1996): 28–​47. 14 Matthew Taylor, The Association Game: A History of British Football (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd, 2008), p. 44. 15 Taylor, The Association Game, p. 44. Sundown Park, near Esher in Surrey, was the earliest example of a fully enclosed stadium for horse racing, dating back to 1875. 16 Holt, Sport and Society, p. 67. 17 Holt, Sport and Society, p. 65. 18 Ronald Hubscher, ed., L’Histoire en mouvements: le sport dans la société française (XIXe–​XXe siècle) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), p. 81. 19 The original Vélodrome Buffalo was built (in 1892)  on the grounds where American entrepreneur William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody had staged his troupe during its 1889 visit to Paris. The earliest incarnation of the Buffalo would go out of business, but the name would later be readopted by a vélodrome built just south of Paris in the commune of Montrouge in 1922. Pascal Leroy, Un siècle de sport cycliste dans les Hauts-​de-​Seine (Nanterre: Conseil Général des Hauts-​de-​Seine, 2003), p. 23. 20 Thompson, The Tour de France, p. 12. 21 Le Miroir des Sports, 6 February 1934. 22 For the early relationship between L’Auto, Desgrange and the Tour, see Thompson, The Tour de France, pp.  17–​21. The founding of L’Auto and the commercial management of the Parc des Princes will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. 23 Thompson, The Tour de France, p. 148. 24 Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie: les intellectuels et la première guerre mondiale, 1910–​1919 (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1996), p. 15. 25 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th-​Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 193. 26 By law, any réunion sportive (sports meeting) that charged an entry fee was subject to the tax on spectacles, per the law of 30 December 1916. Events were taxed on a sliding scale: réunions that featured amateur athletes or horse races were subject to the lowest rate, while any events that were ‘exhibitions’ or ‘attractions’, that were disputed by professionals, or that were organised by an entrepreneur (such as boxing, wrestling and professional cycling) were taxed at the same rate as the spectacles in music halls or theatres. Military and

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scholastic sports associations that charged entry only to cover their organisational costs were exempt from the tax. See L’Auto, 5 June 1919. A version of this law remained in effect throughout the interwar period. 27 Bulletin du Racing Club de France, 3 January 1914. 28 Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 14. 29 Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism:  Selected Writings (Lausanne:  International Olympic Committee, 2000), p. 535. The dichotomy between ancient Greece and ancient Rome was a constant trope among defenders of the Olympics movement throughout the twentieth century. See Eugène Beaudouin, ‘Les Ensembles sportifs dans la cité’, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 3 (1934): 9–17. 30 Pierre de Coubertin, Mémoires olympiques (Lausanne: Comité International Olympique, 1979), p. 32. 31 Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove have linked this variant of spectacle to Renaissance Italian theatre. See Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, ‘Spectacle and Text: Landscape Metaphors in Cultural Geography’, in James Duncan and David Ley, eds, Place/​Culture/​Representation (New  York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 58. 32 Coubertin, Mémoires olympiques, p. 102. 33 Coubertin, Mémoires olympiques, p. 102. 34 Rivoire, Stades de légende, p. 40. 35 Erik Bergvall, ed., The Official Report of the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912, trans. Edward Adams Ray (Stockholm: Wahlstrom & Widstrand, 1913), p. 170. 36 Coubertin, Mémoires olympiques, p. 80. 37 The most fully formed plans for official stadium-​like spaces had actually been produced during the French Revolution by architect Jean-​Jacques Lequeu, as enclosures for local political assemblies, festivals, and republican ceremonies during the French Revolution. His designs remained consigned to paper. See James Leith, Space and Revolution: Projects of Monuments, Squares and Public Buildings in France, 1789–​ 1799 (Montreal and Kingston:  McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 1991), p. 151. 38 Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City:  Germany, Britain, the United States and France, 1780–​1914 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 145. By 1904, the Musée Social, founded by Le Havre’s mayor Jules Siegfried, had adopted and modified Ebenezer Howard’s conception of the ‘Garden City’ into decentralised suburbs ringed by green belts. See Peggy Phillips, Modern France: Theories and Realities of Urban Planning (Landham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), p. 21. For the original Garden City, see Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd, 1902). 39 Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City, p. 152. 40 Tony Garnier, Une cité industrielle:  étude pour la construction des villes (Princeton, NJ: Architectural Press, 1989). See also Christophe Pawlowski, Tony Garnier et les débuts de l’urbanisme fonctionnel en France (Paris: Publications du Centre de Recherche d’Urbanisme (CRU), 1967), p. 96.

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41 Pawlowski, Tony Garnier et les débuts de l’urbanisme fonctionnel, p. 177. The city council approved the initial project on 13 October 1913. See Archives Municipales de Lyon (hereafter AML), 482 WP 2, Letter from Tony Garnier to Edouard Herriot, 30 July 1919. 42 Benjamin F. Martin, France and the Après-​Guerre, 1918–​1924: Illusions and Disillusionment (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 17. 43 Pro-​natalist sentiment was certainly present before 1918, but was increasingly visible after the war. See, for example, Paul V. Dutton, Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914–​1947 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 26. 44 The loi Cornudet was rendered less effective by its failure to address land requisitioning and the compensation of private landowners. Jean-​Paul Callède, Les Politiques sportives en France:  éléments de sociologie historique (Paris: Economica, 2000), p. 29. 45 Archives de Paris (hereafter AP), VR 155, Report of the Congrès pour l’aménagement de terrains de jeux et de Sports, 25 June 1920. 46 L’Auto, 22 June 1919. Wilson was in Paris for the ongoing Versailles peace negotiations. 47 This was a vague estimate, as the sporting press and even the Americans building the stadium had little idea of how many people it would actually accommodate. Estimates ranged in the press from 27,000 to 35,000. 48 L’Auto, 7 May 1919. 49 L’Auto, 15 June 1919. This quote was also attributed to an American, Colonel Johnson, in L’Auto on 22 June 1919. 50 L’Auto, 11 July 1919. 51 AP, VR 152, Untitled document by Jean de Castellane, 27 June 1921; Coubertin, Mémoires olympiques, p. 103. 52 AP, VR 152, Untitled document by Jean de Castellane, 27 June 1921. 53 AP, VR 152, Untitled document by Jean de Castellane, 27 June 1921. 54 For Reichel’s early career, see Edouard Seidler, Le Sport et la presse (Paris: Armand Colin, 1964). See Bulletin de Racing Club de France, May 1932, for Reichel’s obituary. 55 AP, VR 152, First session of the First Sub-​Commission of the Mixed Commission on the Olympic Games, 26 July 1921. 56 AP, VR 152, First session of the First Sub-​ Commission of the Mixed Commission on the Olympic Games, 26 July 1921. 57 AP, VR 152, Third session of the First Sub-​ Commission of the Mixed Commission on the Olympic Games, 20 August 1921. 58 AP, VR 152, ‘Note sur les credits envisagés et estimés par le Comité olympique français pour organiser les Jeux olympiques de 1924 avec le concours du gouvernement et de la ville de Paris’ (undated). 59 At this point, the largest crowds within a stadium had been generated by the annual finish of the Tour de France at the original Vélodrome du Parc des Princes, which could accommodate roughly 35,000 people.

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60 AP, VR 152, Report on the Condition of Stadia and Sporting Installations, 5 August 1921. 61 For the history of governance in Paris, see (among others) Florence Haegel, Un maire à Paris: mise en scène d’un nouveau rôle politique (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1994), p. 29. 62 AP, VR 152, Second session of the Mixed Commission of the Olympic Games, 23 November 1921. City councillor Paul Fleurot argued that he would have preferred a new stade located in the Bois de Vincennes, but the ‘hope of better gate receipts’ converted him to the choice of the Parc des Princes. 63 For this depiction of Parisian suburbia, see Annie Fourcault, Bobigny, banlieue rouge (Paris: Les Editions Ouvrières and Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1986), p. 15. Not all suburbs, of course, were as industrial as Colombes; Versailles, for instance, was more leafy and pastoral. See Sylvie Rab, ‘Culture et banlieue: les politiques culturelles dans les municipalités de la Seine (1935–​1939)’ (PhD dissertation, Université Paris Diderot-​Paris 7, 1994), p. 122. 64 AP, VR 152, Fifth session of the Mixed Commission of the Olympic Games, 31 October 1921. See also AP, VR 156, Letter from Frantz Reichel to Doumerc, Directeur de l’Extension, 28 October 1921. 65 Annales de la Chambre des Députés, Ordinary session of 1922, Twelfth Legislature, 8 March 1922. 66 Annales de la Chambre des Députés, Ordinary session of 1922, Twelfth Legislature, 8 March 1922. 67 Philippe Nivet, Le Conseil municipal de Paris de 1944 à 1977 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994), p. 9; Yvan Combeau and Philippe Nivet, Histoire politique de Paris au XXe siècle:  une histoire locale et nationale (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), p. 64. 68 AP, VR 152, Second session of the Mixed Commission of the Olympic Games, 23 November 1921. See also AP, VR 158, Proposal by M. Téneveau [municipal councillor] to the Conseil Municipal de Paris, 7 December 1921. 69 AP, VR 158, Proposal by M.  Téneveau to the Conseil Municipal de Paris, 7 December 1921. 70 AP, VR 158, Proposal by M.  Téneveau to the Conseil Municipal de Paris, 7 December 1921. 71 Le Troquer would later participate in Charles de Gaulle’s cabinet during the Second World War. Bulletin Municipal Officiel de la Ville de Paris, 12 March 1922. 72 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de la Ville de Paris, 12 March 1922. 73 In this regard, the municipal council’s vote actually presaged the reconciliation of the Radical Socialists and the Socialists at the national level within the so-​called Cartel des Gauches in 1924. 74 Political affiliations of the members of the municipal council can be found in Nivet, Le Conseil municipal de Paris, along with Nobuhito Nagai, Les Conseillers municipaux de Paris sous la IIIe République (1871–​ 1914) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002). 75 Formerly a horse-​racing course or hippodrome, the Stade de Colombes was purchased formally by Racing Club in 1920; before that time, the stadium

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(known as the Stade du Matin) belonged to the daily newspaper Le Matin and Coubertin’s USFSA. Florence Pizzori-​Itié, ed., Les Yeux du stade: Colombes, temple du sport (Colombes: Editions de l’Albaron, Musée Municipal d’Art et d’Histoire de Colombes, 1993), p. xi. 76 Comité Olympique Français, Les Jeux de la VIIIe Olympiade: rapport officiel (Paris: Librairie de France, 1924), pp. 47–​8. 77 AP, VR 156, Letter from Charles Saint-​Cyr to the Préfet de la Seine, undated. 78 Comité Olympique Français, Les Jeux de la VIIIe Olympiade, p. 45. 79 AP, VR 156, Letter from the Comte de Clary to the Préfet de la Seine, 22 April 1922. 80 L’Auto, 13 April 1922. 81 La Génie Civile, 9 August 1924, p. 129. 82 André Obey, L’Orgue du stade (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), p. 79. 83 Obey, L’Orgue du stade, p. 76. 84 Archives Municipales de Colombes (hereafter AMC), Carton DS 30. The letters were forwarded to the COF, which, although it did not allow these petitioners to operate inside the stadium, had no jurisdiction to prevent them from selling their goods outside the Stade de Colombes. 85 Comité Olympique Français, Les Jeux de la VIIIe Olympiade, p. 68. 86 Comité Olympique Français, Les Jeux de la VIIIe Olympiade, p. 97. 87 L’Auto, 26 July 1924. 88 Football, 13 June 1924. 89 Obey, L’Orgue du stade, p. 122; L’Auto, 20 May 1924. 90 L’Auto, 20 May 1924. 91 L’Auto, 10 August 1924. 92 To entice foreign tourists, the COF planned brochures in French, English and Spanish promoting Paris, the provinces, and the Touring-​Club de France, and to distribute those brochures in frontier train stations, major ports, hotels, theatres, restaurants and Parisian department stores. AMC, Carton DS 30, Meeting of commissioners, French Olympic Committee, 24 July 1923. 93 L’Auto, 15 May 1924. 94 Comité Olympique Français, Les Jeux de la VIIIe Olympiade, p. 825. 95 For Yves du Manoir, see Bulletin du Racing Club de France, General Assembly, 15 February 1928. 96 AP, Tri Briand 247, Study for the project to enlarge the Stade Vélodrome du Parc des Princes, 4 March 1936; AP, Tri Briand 247, Stadium proposal of Albert Pouthier, 15 April 1937. Desgrange also cannily argued, in a 1936 letter to the director of the Plan of Paris (Doumerc), that any increased competition for the Parc would actually hurt Paris in the long run, as the Parc paid rent to the city on its lease. AP, Tri Briand 240, Letter from Desgrange to Doumerc (Director of the Plan de Paris), 5 November 1936. 97 AP, Tri Briand 247, Letter from the Union Nationale pour une France plus Grande to Villey, Prefect of the Seine, 15 October 1936. See also Tumblety, ‘The Soccer World Cup’, pp.77–​116.

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98 Robert Mallet-​Stevens, Robert Mallet-​ Stevens:  l’oeuvre complète (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2005), p.  185. See also Pascal Leroy, ‘Le Roman-​feuilleton du grand stade’, L’Equipe Magazine 824, 24 January 1998. 99 Pascal Leroy, ‘Le Grand Stade de Le Corbusier’, 92 Express: Le Magazine des Hauts-​de-​Seine 95 (1998): 66–​7. 100 Charles-​Edouard Jeanneret-​Gris [Le Corbusier], The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-​Age Civilization (London: Faber, 1967 [1933]), pp. 65–​6. 101 Le Corbusier’s plans for the stadium are preserved at the Fondation Le Corbusier, in series I1-​19 and L2-​14. They are also available in Charles-​ Edouard Jeanneret-​Gris [Le Corbusier] and P. Jeanneret, Oeuvre complète 1934–​1938 (6th edition) (Zurich: Editions Girsberger, 1958), pp. 90–​7. 102 Rab, ‘Culture et banlieue’, p.  210. Rab notes that the Communists actually proposed a grand stade within a wider plan for stadium construction submitted to the Conseil Général de la Seine in 1937. 103 The Popular Front was a coalition involving the Radical Socialists, Socialists and Communists that came to power in parliamentary elections in 1936. For more on Lagrange’s tenure under the Popular Front, see Pierre Mauroy, Léo Lagrange (Paris: Denoël, 1997). 104 Yorkshire Post, 18 March 1935. 105 L’Auto, 18 February 1938. While the renovating architects claimed they were boosting the total number of places inside the stade to 70,000, Colombes never held more than 62,000 people in its post-​1938 incarnation. The stadium was already supposed to hold 60,000 people when it was renovated in 1938, but realistically could fit about 50,000 before it was expanded. For the renovations, see Tumblety, ‘The Soccer World Cup’. 106 For an examination of interventionist solutions to economic and social problems under the late Third Republic, see Nord, France’s New Deal, pp. 26–​87.

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2 ‘A civic tool of modern times’: politics, mass society and the stadium

Although the Stade-​Buffalo, a large commercial stadium on the southern periphery of Paris, normally hosted crowds of spectators for football, rugby and boxing matches, it was filled for different purposes on 14 June 1936.1 Over 40,000 people paid the one franc entry fee to pack the stade that afternoon and evening for a large-​scale French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français, or PCF) demonstration.2 The stadium had been transformed for the occasion: a giant temporary stage dominated the centre of the field, while the grandstands were festooned with red banners and the tricoloured French flag.3 The demonstration itself was a visually impressive affair, featuring parades of communist politicians, veterans and youth groups, demonstrations of sports, gymnastics and physical fitness, and numerous speeches pledging fidelity to the newly elected anti-​fascist Popular Front coalition of Socialists, Radical Socialists and Communists. At the culmination of the rally, the PCF general secretary, Maurice Thorez, arrived directly from Lille and delivered an impromptu speech illuminated by the stadium spotlights.4 The demonstration at the Stade Buffalo deployed striking visuals in restaging the traditional elements of communist festivity  –​parades, political speech-​making, and collective singing, among others  –​in a massive spatial environment that proclaimed PCF singularity within the framework of both the Popular Front and the French republican and revolutionary traditions. But it was hardly the only occasion when French stadia were mobilised for explicitly political ends between the mid-​1920s and the end of the Second World War. While obviously not the sole setting for mass politics in interwar and wartime France, the stadium helped frame a shared political language for a wide array of groups, ranging from

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the Radical Socialists in Lyon under influential mayor Edouard Herriot to the Popular Front (particularly its communist wing) through Catholic youth organisations to the Vichy regime during the Second World War, with Vichy in particular staging many of its key athletic demonstrations and overtly political ceremonies inside stadia.5 The centrality of the stadium to politics in interwar and wartime France stemmed, in part, from the growing implication of state and municipal actors in the administration and promotion of sport and athletics inside the Hexagone.6 As the French state and various political parties began to devote more attention to physical fitness policy and sport in the aftermath of the First World War, the stadium occupied a prominent place in public discourse. While the plans for a large national Olympic stadium (grand stade) never materialised, as related in the previous chapter, smaller stadia were steadily constructed throughout the 1920s and 1930s by both private entrepreneurs and individual municipalities ranging from provincial cities like Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Reims and Le Havre to the various suburbs around Paris. Much of the discussion about stadia, whether under the Popular Front or Vichy, focused on their construction as a means of boosting athletic participation and national well-​being; in contrast, contemporaries of most political stripes typically dismissed large-​scale sports spectatorship as parasitic. Yet Herriot, the Popular Front, the PCF, French Catholics and Vichy alike all paradoxically capitalised on the powerful connection between stadium space and bodily health to promote stadium-​based spectacle as a visible manifestation of political vitality and mass support. The stadium, in effect, gave politicians a vast spectator space that proved ideal for staging political rallies, political plays and even religious ceremonies that both rendered the crowd itself spectacular (something to be witnessed in its entirety) and that aspired to transform spectators into active participants. The stadium form of politics, however, also entailed efforts to discipline the crowd, imposed internally through an emphasis on self-​control and mediatised descriptions of orderly crowds, and externally via the structure of the stadium space itself and the way the stade lent itself to overt surveillance on the part of the police. This chapter traces the French stadium’s relatively brief heyday as a crucible for mass politics, with both festive and disciplinary components, from the mid-​1920s through to the Second World War. It suggests that the stadium’s prominence as a staging ground for political events during this period was significant in its own right, and hardly coincidental or a simple reflection of its considerable size. While the stadium’s ability to host tens of thousands of spectators was certainly part of its appeal as a

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political venue, the stadium demonstration diverged from other contemporary forms of political mobilisation, such as large-​scale rallies in city squares or open fields or the street processions (cortèges) staged by the Third Republic and its critics on both the political left and right, in both its content and its spatial composition.7 Even as the disparate stadium demonstrations of the interwar and wartime periods shared certain similarities with each other, they also differed widely and served actors with divergent agendas: the stadium was mobilised at times in defence of the Third Republic, whether in the guise of supporting secular republicanism, the Popular Front, or socialism, and at times dramatically against it, namely under Vichy.8 Those differences, however, do not negate the fact that groups on the left and right all used the stadium to display and mobilise ‘the people’ in their efforts to generate a united collective of supporters, as a means of suturing together what they deemed to be France’s fractured political community.9 This chapter thus re-​evaluates the place of the stadium within a broader history of political mobilisation in interwar and wartime France. But it also helps reassess the history of political spectacle and spectators in interwar Europe itself. While historians of the period have often emphasised the power of images and visual culture in creating an alienated crowd of spectators incapable of participating in political life, the analysis here focuses on spectacle as a set of visually oriented practices designed to simultaneously coerce, influence, persuade and entertain in forms that could encompass political demonstrations, sporting activities and theatrical performances. In the context of mass politics, the stadium certainly helped discipline and shape the spectators inside its confines, but it also displayed the health and vitality of political actors in ways that participants often found memorable and thrilling, but that sometimes opened up spaces for resistance and dissent.10 Ultimately, spectators were shaped and controlled, but also enticed, energised and courted by political organisations, as mass political projects in France hinged –​temporarily at least, and not always successfully at that –​on turning spectators into active participants and believers.

Stadium spectacle in the provinces and at the Parisian periphery Immediately after the First World War, the stadium was simply not employed as a space for mass politics, in the sense of large-​scale rallies featuring politicians and political parties, or political actors actively intervening to support or disrupt stadium-​based sporting activities.

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As demonstrated in Chapter  1, the very idea of involving municipal or national authorities in the business of building and operating stadia was not universally accepted by French elected officials. The early exception was the city of Lyon, the personal fiefdom of Edouard Herriot, who was the city’s mayor from 1905 until 1957 (with a three-​ year interruption during the Second World War). From the beginning of his tenure, Herriot railed against commercial and professional sport:  he envisioned the stadium as a crucible for physical fitness and argued that every town in France needed a stade as much as it needed hospitals or other installations designed to promote public health.11 For Lyon’s stadium, Herriot turned to architect Tony Garnier. Construction was authorised in 1913, began in 1914, and slowed but did not cease entirely during the First World War, thanks to the forced labour of German, Austrian and Czech prisoners of war, later supplemented by colonial workers from French Indochina.12 The municipal stadium (Stade Municipal) was completed after the conflict ended, first in modified form in 1919 and in its final distinctive version, with six massive gateways ringing a Roman-​style oval arena with a running track encircling a playing field, in 1926 (Figure 3). However, while Herriot used the construction of the stadium to trumpet his city’s commitment to promoting participatory sports and physical fitness, the major activities at the Stade Municipal were events designed

3  Postcard of the Stade Municipal in Lyon, 1926.

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to entice large crowds. The stadium’s most popular annual fixture was the Festival of Youth (Fête de la Jeunesse), an annual physical fitness festival that drew tens of thousands of spectators to the stade from 1926 to 1939. The inaugural 1926 event, incorporated into the forty-​eighth annual national gymnastics festival staged by Pierre de Coubertin’s umbrella sporting organisation, the USFSA, attracted 40,000 spectators for a three-​day festival modelled largely on displays of mass gymnastics, like those of the Bohemian sokols, performed by a variety of French and European gymnasts. The initial reception to the Fête was largely positive:  Le Progrès, the main daily newspaper in Lyon, gushed enthusiastically that watching the gymnasts inside the magisterial setting of the stade gave the spectator an exact idea of ‘true healthy force’ and ‘true freely given discipline’.13 These gymnastics events were made to be witnessed and Garnier’s stadium foregrounded both the athletes participating and the spectators who could appreciate their movements. After several years, however, the Fête de la Jeunesse –​which had by now settled into a standard format consisting of basic physical fitness routines conducted by Lyonnais school pupils of all ages in front of sizeable crowds  –​drew increasingly harsh criticism from the local press, which perceived the event as a kind of Potemkin village designed to glorify Herriot’s administration and to mask real inadequacies in Lyon’s physical fitness policies. The municipality, lamented Lyon-​Sport in 1928, ‘preferred to use all of its efforts to create a trompe l’oeil [visual illusion]’ rather than encourage programmes for physical education already in place.14 Four years later, the same newspaper bitterly complained that the Fête was intended to brainwash visiting dignitaries with an ‘enormous, well-​played farce’.15 In its critique, Lyon-​Sport targeted the idea of artificiality associated with the spectacle of the Fête, in contrast to the genuine mission of physical fitness and sport. In this case, the aspects of spectacle fooled and impressed the ignorant spectators and other outsiders, but did not hoodwink the journalists from Lyon who knew the actual (and lamentable) state of affairs in the city.16 Yet Herriot’s use of the Stade Municipal for the Fête de la Jeunesse, despite its critics, demonstrated the potential of the stadium space for promoting a particular political agenda. The Fête clearly projected a (perhaps unduly) positive image of Lyon’s physical education policies to the spectators in attendance and remained popular, journalistic complaints notwithstanding, for the remainder of the 1930s. Herriot himself argued that the Fête de la Jeunesse was ‘essential for the development’ of a secular state and offered a means of rivalling the Catholic-​affiliated sporting associations; it thus merited continued municipal funding in the midst of

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an economic downturn in the 1930s.17 For Herriot, the Stade Municipal and the events that unfolded within it thus functioned as a potent symbol of his administration’s activities, and what Elisabeth Lê-​Germain has called his ‘sporting politics’ that linked the municipality to an active and healthy youth population.18 Herriot’s Lyon was certainly the first prominent French city to explicitly link physical fitness, secular republicanism and spectacle within its own municipal stadium, although other municipalities (usually under the control of the French Socialists) began building smaller stadia or sports parks oriented towards promoting ‘participation’ in the 1920s and early 1930s. At the same time, the PCF in France began to take advantage of the stadium as a key space for making its cause known and for mobilising its militants, first through its approach to sport in general and later through more overtly political rallies. As a rule, the Communists frequently lauded their own athletes as key cadres in the fight against ‘militarism’ and in defence of the Soviet Union, and habitually railed against the ‘political’ character of what they called ‘bourgeois’ sporting associations and the parasitic nature of professional sport. The Tour de France, in fact, was a prominent and frequent target of PCF criticism for the way that the race supposedly exploited its working-​class competitors.19 Not surprisingly, when the PCF won local elections in a number of Parisian suburbs like Saint-​Denis or Ivry-​ sur-​Seine in the 1920s and 1930s, its officials built or expanded small stadia in an effort to promote physical fitness and offer Communist-​ affiliated sports clubs a dedicated place to compete, a privilege often denied them in non-​Communist suburbs.20 On at least one occasion, too, the Communists were not content to simply fulminate about the evils of commercial sport, but turned a private stadium outside of their control into a protest arena. On 29 December 1929, approximately 200 young Communists tossed leaflets in the air and clamoured Party slogans during a match at the Stade Buffalo between the Italian football formation AS Roma (closely linked by patronage to Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government) and a mixed squad fielded by Club Français and Stade Français, as a means of calling attention to the government’s refusal to permit a German communist sporting club entry into France. Ten communist militants were eventually arrested, but L’Humanité considered the protest to have been a colossal success that ‘inundated’ the arena with leaflets and that stopped the match for ‘tens’ of minutes.21 André Reichel, writing in the right-​wing, vocally anti-​Semitic L’Ami du Peuple, countered that the communist attempt was a fiasco, and that the ‘several dozen’ militants were drowned out by those who

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wished to demonstrate that politics, especially the ‘villainous politics’ of L’Humanité, had no place in the stadium.22 In this particular instance, the Communist efforts to destabilise mainstream sport appear to have met with limited success, and indeed encountered resistance from the bulk of the spectators in the crowd. But, within their own small suburban stadia, the Communists had more of a free hand to both promote worker sport and to increasingly stage demonstrations that explicitly fused sport and political activity. In 1932 and 1933, the municipal stadium in Saint-​Denis, the Stade de l’Unité, which was capable of holding roughly 3,000 people, served as the site of the final event of the Communist International Youth Week.23 Mayor Jacques Doriot, closely affiliated with the communist youth organisation, the Jeunesse Communiste (JC), encouraged the use of the municipal stadium for an event whose programme mingled athletics with speeches and revolutionary theatre. The 1932 rally, for instance, cost one franc for entry and featured a parade of athletes, demonstrations of track and field, camping and football and performances by ‘speaking choirs’. This preceded a PCF meeting attended by 1,500 sympathisers, where the speakers railed against the diminution of salaries and military manoeuvres in the Far East.24 The communist demonstrations at the Stade de l’Unité, like other small suburban demonstrations in the early 1930s, paired the display of young athletic militants with the mobilisation of youth for the PCF’s political struggle.25 The avowedly spectacular component to the event served as a recruiting tool for the Communists. Members of the JC and clubs affiliated with the Communist-​controlled sports association, the Fédération Sportive du Travail (FST), were encouraged to bring other non-​affiliated workers to watch the festivities in the hopes that the spectators would turn into ‘participants’ (and Party members).26 Beyond its role in recruiting new adherents, the stadium space also helped generate revenue for the PCF and JC, infusing badly needed francs into Party coffers.27 The festival at the Stade de l’Unité in 1932, which police described as an overall disappointment for the Communists, was at least successful in grossing 4,000 francs, giving ‘needed funds to the regional treasury’.28 In some respects, the demonstrations inside small suburban stadia simply melded together elements of communist political spectacle that had developed in large open fields, street demonstrations and meeting halls. The bulk of communist demonstrations, from the annual parade to the Mur des Fédérés at the Père Lachaise cemetery in north-​east Paris, in commemoration of the Commune of 1871, to any number of funerary cortèges, featured processions designed to ‘make manifest’ a given issue

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by bringing militants into contact with others.29 The processional form of many of these demonstrations, however, made it difficult for the participants to witness the whole effect of the manifestation. If the demonstration attracted spectators, they were most likely exterior to the group of demonstrators themselves. This problem also applied, to a lesser extent, to the annual Fête de l’Humanité, held at the large meadow at Garches, west of Paris. While the crowd here was less likely to come into contact with other non-​militants, it had an equally difficult time seeing itself. Moreover, any grandstands or installations to focus the spectacle were temporary and transitory.30 The stadium manifestation retained elements of the cortège, namely the parade of participating groups past the main grandstand, but now staged them in an environment where spectators independent of this demonstration could witness the proceedings easily, and where the participants themselves could view its total effect. Further, the stadium demonstration incorporated the traditional cortège into the form of a classic political ‘meeting’ akin to those the Communists already held inside large indoor meeting halls like the Gymnase Japy, the Salle Bullier or the Maison de la Mutualité (‘la Mutu’) in Paris. Yet here they employed a political language specific to the stade that glorified the athletic, youthful body in unprecedented fashion. Finally, the stadium demonstration, at least in the case of Saint-​Denis, was perceived by police authorities, ever mindful of the dangerous power of crowds in general and communist ones in particular, to be potentially less disruptive to public order than parades or other street demonstrations.31 The Parisian Prefect of Police approved the 1933 Youth Week demonstration on the condition that it did not feature either a proposed ‘meeting’ or parade outside the stadium. On the day of the demonstration, the police then maintained a discreet but sizeable presence around the stadium and on the streets leading to it, in order to keep the Communists confined to the sporting arena.32 Before the Popular Front era, then, stadia were being used in France to stage festivities that reflected the agenda of particular politicians or political parties. The stadium’s association with physical fitness culture, and the spatial realities of the stadium that allowed both the crowd to witness itself and the police to confine and monitor the crowd, characterised political practices as they crystallised inside the stade. And, as the Communists and other parties of the left increasingly moved into stadium spaces like the Stade Buffalo and the Parc des Princes that could hold 35,000 to 40,000 people, they developed an even more visually impressive and dramatic political language based on witnessing (and disciplining) vigorous and healthy militants.

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Stadia and the Popular Front The Popular Front, the formal electoral alliance between French Communists, Socialists and Radical Socialists, coalesced in July 1934 between the first two parties, when the PCF (acting at least partially on Moscow’s orders) abandoned its so-​called ‘class against class’ orientation, which had previously led it to attack other left-​wing groups as vehemently as it had the right, in order to advocate for anti-​fascist solidarity.33 Elected to a majority in the National Assembly in May 1936, the Popular Front engaged in multiple initiatives to promote sport and physical fitness during the brief period (essentially one full year) that it was in power. It particularly emphasised participation instead of spectatorship. Léo Lagrange, the dynamic Socialist undersecretary for sports and leisure, rejected several proposals for enormous 100,000-​seat stadia in advance of the Universal Exposition of 1937 and the 1938 World Cup, despite claims by the proponents of such stades that France ‘needed to prove its vitality as a great nation by the construction of a Temple of Muscle’.34 Lagrange, in fact, often announced that he would never devote a single franc to stadia where 50,000 spectators observed twenty or thirty athletes.35 In order to promote physical fitness among the masses and discourage spectatorship, Lagrange created the Brevet Sportif Populaire, which tested French youth on a variety of simple athletic skills, such as running, jumping, climbing and throwing. The Popular Front’s policies, ranging from new two-​week paid holidays (congés payés), reduced price train tickets and support for the ajiste (youth hostel) movement, also facilitated the practice of ‘sport for all’, according to Lagrange, because they encouraged such pursuits as cycling, walking and swimming. Lagrange and his ministry also promoted the construction of small stadia, pools and playing fields at the local level.36 While it is unclear how much the Popular Front actually accomplished in this domain during its short-​lived tenure, it obviously intended to improve existing sports installations. The Prefecture of the Seine, for instance, carried out a department-​wide survey of sports facilities in 1936 as an effort to target the municipalities that most needed new stadia and playing fields.37 Outside of Paris and the national government, the factions that comprised the Popular Front also claimed to be acting in favour of participatory sport at the expense of sport-​spectacle. After the 1935 municipal elections in Marseille, for example, a Socialist-​dominated coalition led by Mayor Henri Tasso inherited an eighteen-​million franc plan to build both an outdoor stadium and an enclosed vélodrome. Tasso and his allies revamped the plan considerably for financial and philosophical reasons.

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They dropped the indoor vélodrome because they saw it as a purely commercial and spectacular facility that would do little to boost physical fitness among the youth of Marseille.38 Moreover, they contended that eliminating the vélodrome would lower the cost of the project to a more manageable eleven million francs, and would make it eligible for government subsidies.39 Despite protests from allies of the building firm contracted to build the original two facilities, Tasso’s administration stood firm and did not build the indoor vélodrome. Yet Marseille, like several other large provincial cities under left-​wing control in the Popular Front era, still went forward with plans to build large outdoor stadia. In Marseille, the Stade-​ Vélodrome Municipal opened its doors in 1937. As its name suggests, the stadium, like the Parc des Princes or the Stade Buffalo, featured an outdoor cycling track that encircled a central field for football; the grandstands around the enclosure could accommodate approximately 35,000 people.40 In Toulouse, while the Socialist municipality had authorised initial construction of a large stadium in 1933, the work accelerated in 1937 when the city finalised plans and signed a contract with a construction company to finish a 30,000-​ seat stadium with a central playing field and tracks for both athletics and cycling. (The stadium, however, would remain unfinished at the outset of the Second World War and would not be completed until 1949).41 In Bordeaux, a new stadium was officially inaugurated in 1938, although its political genesis, in fairness, pre-​dated the Popular Front coalition, and the political leanings of one-​time Socialist mayor Adrien Marquet were arguably complicated; he migrated away from the official French Socialist Party to found the more authoritarian Neo-​Socialist Party in 1935, and would later serve under the Vichy government. Still, the new Parc Lescure, a modernist concrete stadium with a vélodrome track and innovative roofing covering the grandstands, could accommodate over 30,000 people when it officially opened in time for the 1938 World Cup.42 Clearly, even as Popular Front officials (along with more ambiguous figures like Marquet) promoted stadia as sites of physical fitness and participatory sport, they also saw value in the stadium as a space for large-​scale spectacle. In fact, they mobilised the spectacular possibilities of the stadium to demonstrate the scope of their popular support, through sporting demonstrations and then more explicitly political rallies. In June 1937, for instance, Lagrange attended the spectator-​friendly Fête de la Jeunesse in Lyon, where he proclaimed that the 8,000 Lyonnais youth on display were the messengers of the doctrine of ‘joy through action’, which created a ‘happy, free and strong people’.43 Lagrange certainly lauded the youthful participants, but also indirectly acknowledged

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the importance of a large stadium crowd by patronising such a popular, spectactor-​oriented event. One week later, Lagrange attended the inauguration of the Stade-​Vélodrome in Marseille, where approximately 23,000 people filled the new stadium for cycling races, physical fitness demonstrations and a football match between Olympique de Marseille and an Italian team. In a speech that day, Lagrange praised the avowedly spectacular Stade-​Vélodrome, which he read as a powerful symbol of the nation’s commitment to sport and physical fitness. Marseille’s stadium and the people within it were meant to be seen: according to Lagrange, the stade constituted France’s ‘doorway opened towards other nations that will appreciate the valour and the scope of this effort’.44 Those ‘other nations’ looking through the doorway into France, left unnamed by Lagrange, most certainly included Germany and Italy, where the stadium had become synonymous with large-​scale political spectacle. In Germany, the postwar Weimar Republic had developed its own brand of celebratory political spectacle: as one example, it feted the tenth anniversary of its birth at the Grunewald Stadium in Berlin in August 1929 by staging a mass theatrical production that featured 12,000 participants and 50,000 spectators.45 But Weimar’s political aesthetics were dwarfed in scale by Nazi sporting demonstrations and political rallies that assembled youth in large numbers inside stadia like the Olympic Stadium in Berlin or in stadium-​like spaces like the parade grounds at Nuremberg adopted for Party spectacle by Albert Speer.46 Adolf Hitler himself stressed the importance of creating stadia for political spectacle and for forging a ‘new breed’ of men prepared to sacrifice itself for the violent regeneration of society.47 He consequently argued for the construction of stadia designed to hold 150,000 to 200,000 people and envisioned a horseshoe-​shaped ‘German stadium’ with room for 400,000 spectators, to be constructed on the Nazi Party grounds at Nuremberg expressly for war games, rallies and sporting activities.48 While the Fascists in Italy, in contrast, usually preferred city piazzas for their large-​scale rallies and festivals, they nonetheless oversaw the construction of the 70,000-​seat Stadio Mussolini in Turin and the hyper-​modern Stadio Giovanni Berta in Florence, and consistently politicised mass spectator sporting events (such as the 1934 football World Cup) as visible manifestations of the Fascist reshaping of Italian society.49 Faced with the necessity of mobilising the masses in support of its own agenda, the Popular Front (and later the Communists within it) transposed some of its rallies to larger stadium spaces in an attempt to rival the vast numbers of people mobilised in Germany and Italy, and in an effort to visibly demonstrate its own strength, confirm its political legitimacy

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and effectively discipline its own militants. The heightened place of the stadium as a large-​scale venue of choice for the left was confirmed by the use of the Stade Buffalo for the Popular Front’s public ‘founding moment’ on 14 July 1935. The events planned for the Stade Buffalo, the Assises de la Paix et de la Liberté, served as a rallying point for delegates from a wide variety of Popular Front groups and cultural organisations, and a prelude to the mass cortège planned along the traditional communist itinerary between the Place de la Bastille and the Place de la Nation later that afternoon. At the Stade Buffalo, about 9,000 spectators filled the eastern grandstand; over a three-​hour period, a succession of orators emphasised the Popular Front’s republican origins and its affinity with the French Revolution’s Third Estate, demanded better working conditions and called for resolute opposition to militarism and fascism.50 Léo Figuères, a member of the JC from Perpignan, was designated to deliver a prepared declaration of support from youth organisations; he later recalled the atmosphere of ‘solemnity and enthusiasm’ inside the stadium and how a ‘vast worker crowd’ enthusiastically sang the ‘Marseillaise’.51 The meeting ended when a delegate read the text of what would later be called the ‘Oath of 14 July’, which declared: ‘We make the solemn oath to remain united to disarm and dissolve the fascist leagues, to defend and develop democratic liberties, and to assure human peace.’ At the conclusion of this oath, the delegates rose and, with right arms extended, declaimed: ‘We swear this.’52 By staging their public baptismal in a stadium, the participating groups within the Popular Front projected the connection between an urban space  –​one associated with mass crowds, physical fitness and vitality –​and their own political agenda. The stadium format also gave the so-​called Assises de la Paix et de la Liberté multiple historical and contemporary referents that spoke to the nobility of the cause and normalised the rally within the context of athletic spectatorship. For one, the delegates deliberately mimicked a French revolutionary moment  –​the so-​called ‘Tennis Court Oath’ of the Estates-​General of 1789 –​that also took place in a sporting venue. For another, the public oath-​swearing inside the Stade Buffalo strongly paralleled the Olympic oath. As at the Olympics, a delegate promised, on behalf of all assembled, to demonstrate disciplined behaviour and solidarity in pursuit of a particular goal. This sort of behaviour effaced any distinction between ‘spectating’ and ‘participating’; it bound everyone in the stadium together in the struggle against fascism.53 The oath-​swearing, with ‘arm extended’, also trained militants, shaping them to a certain extent through the performance of one identical gesture. Finally, it also reflected the fluidity of symbolic

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practices across Europe during this period. As Philippe Burrin has noted, the ‘raised fist’ gesture, prevalent during the Popular Front era across the left, spread to France from the German Communist Party, which in turn had adopted it as a counterpoint to the Nazi salute, which itself was borrowed from the Fascists in Italy.54 Thus the stadium rallies of the Popular Front, intended as an alternative to authoritarian spectacle, certainly imitated the latter in some regards, while drawing on an older revolutionary heritage specific to France itself in other domains. Beyond its connections to the past and to athletic vigour, the physical setting of the Stade Buffalo also offered the event organisers certain logistical advantages for planning a mass rally. Unlike the Place de la Nation, the Parisian square that would be the final destination for the immense cortège planned later that afternoon, the stadium already catered to the creation and staging of a political event. The stadium was far larger than any meeting hall and could accommodate a much bigger crowd of spectators than venues like the Gymnase Japy or the Maison de la Mutualité, which could hold 4,000 to 5,000 people at best.55 In its coverage of the 1935 event, L’Oeuvre remarked:  ‘No room would have been large enough to contain the thousands of delegates … None, assuredly, would have been large enough to be up to the task of this festival of liberty.’56 Additionally, the Stade Buffalo satisfied police officials afraid of crowd disturbances. The police endorsed the stade as a venue because it effectively separated Popular Front supporters from rival demonstrators like the followers of Colonel François de la Rocque’s fascistoid organisation, the Croix de Feu, who had a demonstration planned at the same moment at the Place de l’Etoile on the Champs-​Elysées on the west side of Paris.57 If the 14 July 1935 demonstration normalised the Popular Front through the occupation of an established commercial stadium space and the projection of anti-​fascist resolve, the PCF demonstrations on 14 June 1936 at the Stade Buffalo and 4 October 1936 at the Parc des Princes confirmed, even more spectacularly, the legitimacy of the Communist project within the Popular Front. Triumphant in the May legislative elections, the Popular Front coalition had intended to organise a demonstration for 14 June on the Champs-​Elysées to celebrate, but decided to postpone any large gatherings until 14 July. The Communists objected, arguing that the Popular Front had already dallied too long in trumpeting its victory, and decided to stage their own, purely Communist event on 14 June, in the midst of ongoing mass strikes.58 Early police estimates predicted a crowd of 25,000, but over 40,000 people actually paid the one-​franc entry fee to fill the Stade Buffalo to capacity. The left-​wing press (notably L’Oeuvre and L’Humanité) estimated the crowd at 100,000

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to 120,000, claiming that thousands and thousands of supporters could not fit in the stadium and instead listened to the demonstration outside the stade via loudspeakers (Figure 4).59 What the spectators witnessed was an event that deployed striking visuals in restaging the traditional elements of communist festivity  –​ parades, political speech-​making and collective singing, among others –​ in a massive spatial environment that proclaimed PCF singularity within the framework of both the Popular Front and the French revolutionary tradition. The stadium, which normally featured advertising for liqueurs and bicycle manufacturers, was now decorated with numerous red banners and the tricoloured flag, while the track was garnished with Soviet stars and the insignia for the Amsterdam-​Pleyel anti-​war movement. The main grandstand was encircled by a red tarpaulin ornamented with the hammer and sickle. The centre of the field featured a practicable (temporary stage) and reserved areas on either side for the youth groups.60 The visual logic of the stadium, and its decorations, thus helped place the emphasis on ‘seeing’ the Party in its entirety all throughout the stadium. The Communists watched not only the cortèges on the infield and the party luminaries at the microphone, but also the spectacle in the grandstands. As a final, spectacular visual element, Thorez’ final speech was delivered as he was illuminated by spotlights, with the rest of the stadium shrouded in darkness. Like the Nazis, who were (as Peter Reichel argues) obsessed with lighting and fire, the Communists also readily deployed visual techniques designed to impress the spectators at the Stade Buffalo.61 Finally, the 4 October demonstration –​this time at the Parc des Princes rather than the Stade Buffalo –​further confirmed the PCF’s power as a political entity, as well as the ever-​present elements of surveillance and scrutiny associated with the stadium. Spatially, the Communists used the manifestation to claim a foothold in the very bourgeois sixteenth arrondissement (as opposed to the Socialist-​leaning commune of Montrouge, site of the Stade Buffalo). Indeed, the Communists quite literally occupied the Parc. Fearful of potential attempts by the fascistoid Parti Social Français (or PSF, the legalised successor to the Croix de Feu) to sabotage their demonstration, the Communists positioned themselves within the stadium well before dawn on the day of the rally. By 5 a.m., between three and seven hundred Communists were camped out on the field of the Parc, carefully monitored by the police.62 Having successfully claimed the field of the stadium, the Communists and police forces faced a more serious battle outside the stadium as the morning progressed. Right-​wing demonstrators belonging to the PSF began gathering at subway stations near the Parc des Princes from

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4  Front page of L’Humanité, 15 June 1936.

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8 a.m. onwards, with the twin intentions of blocking access to the stadium and infiltrating the gathering in order to disrupt it. By 10.45 a.m., an estimated 10,000 PSF militants began converging on the stadium, armed with clubs and other weapons. They engaged in pitched battles with the police for the rest of the morning and early afternoon. When the stadium officially opened its doors for the demonstration at 1.50 p.m., the right-​wing militants, by and large kept away from the stadium by an effective police cordon, started to attack taxis and buses carrying Communists to the demonstration. Over forty-​five taxis were damaged in the ensuing battle and thirty-​eight people were wounded. The police arrested 1,258 counterdemonstrators, four of whom were armed with firearms; ninety-​three police officers suffered injuries in the fighting, which lasted well into the afternoon.63 Yet the police brigades proved effective enough to thwart the PSF counterdemonstrators, who eventually moved away from the Parc toward the Place de l’Etoile. The demonstration itself, which resembled the 14 June event in terms of its content and form, proceeded and concluded without serious incidents.64 The 4 October demonstration thus showcased the ways in which the Communists used the stadium rally to project their vitality, aided in the process by large crowds that prominently featured youth. It also revealed how these demonstrations shaped and disciplined their militants in support of the Party and the Popular Front. Party militants were instructed to control themselves as they arrived at the Parc; PCF publications urged supporters not to sing or chant until they had reached the security of the Parc des Princes, and to remain equally quiet upon leaving the stadium.65 Within the stadium, spectators repeated gestures and activities, such as singing or oath-​swearing, that marked them as Party supporters. Moreover, the stadium space allowed them to witness others around them engaging in exactly the same activity. In this way, the physical vitality of the demonstration, and the way it was viewed, effectively helped discipline communist subjects, to the point that they were expected to police themselves and regulate their behaviour even after leaving the stadium. Crucially, the idea that discipline was critical to one’s comportment as a militant reinforces Michel Foucault’s analysis of the workings of power and visibility within Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which created a state of ‘permanent and conscious visibility’ where those observed internalised and ‘brought to themselves’ their surveillance even when they were not under scrutiny.66 While the stadium, unlike the Panopticon, was certainly was not designed for the one-​way gaze of authority directed at isolated

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individuals, surveillance was inherent to the stade, both in the process of forging militants and from the point of view of the police and the state. For the 4 October demonstration, over 20,000 Parisian security forces guarded the entrances to the Parc des Princes and occupied all of its ‘nerve points’.67 The police gaze also looked down on the stadium, as an aircraft monitored the crowd during the entire event.68 This surveillance was intended to guarantee that the rally unfolded with a minimum of disorder inside and outside the stadium. As noted above, it was not an easy day at the office for the police trying to keep the counterdemonstrators outside of the stade; still, PCF officials were apparently very satisfied with the manifestation overall. They rejoiced at their ability to have assembled such a large crowd and they lauded the ‘calm’ and ‘discipline’ of the spectators, along with the ‘organisation’ and ‘courage’ of the police that had prevented the demonstration from derailing.69 The stadium, from the mid-​1930s onwards, thus framed and facilitated the development of a particular kind of large-​scale political spectacle on the left, from the demonstrations depicted here to the festivals commemorating the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1939 at the Stade Buffalo in Paris and the Stade Municipal in Lyon, or the 1937 performance of Jean-​Richard Bloch’s Naissance d’une cité, a pro-​ Communist theatre piece designed for a mass audience, at the indoor Vélodrome d’Hiver, a space which could accommodate 15,000 spectators.70 Overall, the Popular Front (and particularly the Communists) defended the Third Republic through a political language that emphasised celebratory festivity and showcased an active, physically vibrant crowd, but that also stressed discipline, imposed both internally by militants themselves and structurally by the stadium and the police. Yet as much as the stadium demonstration during the Popular Front era was largely the domain of the triumphant left, other political and religious groups claimed or attempted to claim the stade for their own purposes, from the religious celebrations of young Catholics in 1937 at the Parc des Princes to Vichy’s later mobilisation of the stadium as a means of rejecting the very Third Republic that the Popular Front defended within the stade.

Catholic festivals and Vichy’s stadium politics Even before the Popular Front era, Catholic youth organisations such as the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC) attempted to counter the influence of the Communists by establishing a vibrant working-​class male

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presence in French streets and stadia.71 The JOC, along with Catholic-​ affiliated Scouts, held frequent ‘camp-​outs’ and rallies in local stadia in the late 1920s and early 1930s.72 Under the Popular Front, the Catholics also gained access to commercial and private spaces like the Parc des Princes and the Stade de Colombes for festivals with distinct political implications. Having staged its annual rally at the Stade de Colombes in 1935, the Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française (the umbrella Catholic youth organisation) reserved the Parc des Princes on 1 June 1936 for a ‘grandiose’ demonstration. According to L’Auto, 50,000 congressistes celebrated mass in the presence of key church officials.73 These young Catholics returned to the Parc des Princes in huge numbers the next year for the tenth-​anniversary congress of the JOC, which included a gymnastics festival that showcased both participants (20,000 gymnasts thronged the pitch of the Parc) and spectators (almost 30,000 occupied the tribunes) and which culminated with a huge open-​air mass.74 The Catholic occupations of the Parc des Princes clearly functioned as a direct response to the Popular Front. The 50,000 participants in the 1936 stadium mass, a mere month after the Popular Front’s election, witnessed the vitality of their own organisation through the sheer size of the crowd at the Parc des Princes. Fourteen days before the PCF’s own Stade Buffalo demonstration, the Catholic stadium mass thus offered opposition to communist claims on similar spaces and projected the resolve and strength of young Catholic workers. The 1937 demonstrations, too, displayed the overall health of young Catholic worker-​gymnasts and their sheer strength in numbers, causing one Catholic writer to remark that the Church had ‘begun a new era’.75 While the JOC pressured its militants to avoid political questions and focus on the claims of young Catholic workers, other groups who were avowedly hostile to the Third Republic also claimed stadium spaces at the end of the 1930s. In its paramilitary phase, the Croix de Feu found more value in intimidating the forces of order than in scheduling demonstrations inside stadia.76 But, once banned by the Popular Front and reformed as the legal PSF, de la Rocque’s group sought access to stades; in fact, the PSF’s counterdemonstration in October 1936 outside the Parc des Princes was fuelled by the national government’s refusal to authorise a PSF manifestation planned for the Vélodrome d’Hiver, controlled (like the Parc des Princes) by L’Auto and Henri Desgrange.77 The PSF and other right-​wing forces, however, eventually made use of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ (as it was known). As a result of a puzzling about-​face by the state, they were permitted to hold a rally there in July 1937 to celebrate the release of Charles Maurras (the notoriously anti-​Semitic founder of Action Française, a far-​right

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Catholic and monarchist political movement) from prison for allegedly inciting the February 1936 attack on Socialist leader Léon Blum. The PSF also mobilised militants for another large-​scale rally inside the venue in January 1938.78 After the rapid collapse of the Third Republic in the face of the German invasion in May and June 1940, the stadium also emerged as one of the preferred spaces for attempts to remobilise French men and women in support of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Initially, Vichy’s efforts, like those of the Popular Front era, concentrated on bolstering participation in athletic activities inside the stade. Vichy reorganised French sport to give the state far greater oversight and control through a newly formed commission, the Commissariat Général à l’Education Générale et Sportive (CGEGS), headed initially by famed tennis star Jean Borotra. From its inception, the CGEGS attempted to bolster physical education by reinstituting the Popular Front’s Brevet Sportif Populaire, renamed as the Brevet Sportif National, in 1941.79 Vichy also gave itself the power to appropriate land for fields and small stades, and encouraged local communes to submit proposals to the state for sports installations, so that there would be at least one sports field in every hamlet and village.80 Vichy publications frequently discussed the ideal local stadium and published detailed primers on how to build a stade, proclaiming in one such document that ‘to open a stadium was to close a hospital’.81 The CGEGS also promoted stadium construction via other propagandistic means; the film L’Appel du Stade, made in 1941 by Marcel Martin and Jean-​Georges Auriol, combined narrative and dramatised reconstructions to suggest that local efforts to build stadia and reshape French youth were succeeding.82 In its attempts to use the stade, Vichy thus directly copied (whether intentionally or not) the Popular Front’s vision of stadia as a means of bolstering participation in athletics and sports, even as it avowedly broke with the Third Republic via a ‘National Revolution’ that emphasised tradition, religious piety and obedience to its leader, Philippe Pétain.83 However, in their efforts to create a culture of participatory sport, Vichy’s physical fitness officials encountered multiple obstacles, including institutional resistance, budgetary problems and physical damage to stadia incurred during the German invasion. Borotra met persistent opposition in his efforts to persuade schools to increase the hours of mandatory physical education, which actually declined between 1939 and 1942. In encouraging the construction of local stadia, too, the CGEGS found landowners reluctant to sell arable land to the government. Moreover, some existing stadia in the occupied zone outside of Vichy’s direct control, such as the

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Stade de l’Unité in Saint-​Denis (the site of Communist Youth Week rallies in the early 1930s) and the Stade Pershing in the Bois de Vincennes, had been converted to small-​scale vegetable gardens and were clearly unfit for athletic competitions.84 But the largest roadblock to implementing new physical fitness policies was posed by Vichy’s financial difficulties. The self-​imposed penury of the Vichy regime, which paid between 300 million and 500 million francs a day to the German occupiers (for a wartime total of 631 billion francs, or 58 per cent of the government’s income), entailed that few stadia, small or large, were actually constructed during the wartime period, and even made it difficult for local stadium administrators to perform such seemingly mundane tasks as removing objectionable alcohol advertising inside stadia.85 Given such constraints, as Tous les Sports grimly noted in 1942, one could not count on a ‘magic wand of the Sports Fairy’ to produce even the most rudimentary stadia.86 The contrast between Vichy’s aspirations and actual results in terms of promoting participatory sport and encouraging stadium construction would find its eventual parallel in the fate of the mass athletic demonstrations and overtly political rallies that attempted to transform spectators into participants and believers, although this was certainly not apparent during Vichy’s first year of existence. One of Vichy’s most popular festive events, the Fête du Serment de l’Athlète, or the ‘Festival of the Athlete’s Oath’, was initiated in a series of sporting exhibitions in North Africa in April 1941, surfaced in the German-​occupied zone in Paris at the Parc des Princes on 29 June 1941, and came back to Vichy-​controlled territory and the Stade-​Vélodrome in Marseille on 12 September of that year.87 At the Paris event, the Parc des Princes was decorated expressly to reflect the cult of the leader surrounding Pétain: his portrait dominated one side of the stadium, directly across from an immense sign displaying the text of the ‘Serment de l’Athlète’. The ceremony itself featured, like so many other stadium events, a parade of young athletes, and copied from Olympic protocol as the assembled athletes swore fealty to Pétain, promising ‘on their honour’ to ‘practise sport with disinterest, discipline and loyalty, to become better and to better serve their patrie’.88 The dynamics of the spectacle promoted a culture of body-​worship that displayed the revitalisation of France through the bodies of young athletes assembled before thousands of spectators. The schoolchildren in the grandstands focused on the spectacle of the half-​nude, muscular, tanned bodies of their elders. Tous les Sports concluded that ‘many of the children [present]’ had ‘never witnessed festivals so simple, but so moving’.89 The Fête du Serment de l’Athlète thus physically embodied and displayed the virtues of discipline, obedience and physical hardiness that

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Vichy promoted as key to any French renaissance after the demoralising defeat of 1940. While it would be easy to dismiss the Fête as a propaganda exercise, the spectacularity of the festival was clearly intended to impress and excite the youth in attendance. Tous les Sports (admittedly biased in favour of the event) ran a competition among its school-​age readers to submit letters describing their experience at the Fête. The letter from the winner, a Mademoiselle Raymonde Prieur, merits a longer citation, as it expresses the role of stadium space and spectacle in both depicting France as youthful and healthy and displaying Vichy’s disciplined subjects. I saw France, the true, new France, a young and strong France, the one that the Maréchal wants: I saw the Fête du Serment … One must believe, Jacqueline, that which one sees, and what I saw there was not a lie … In the vast arena of the Parc des Princes, whose grandstands are covered by an immense crowd that includes twelve thousand children and young schoolchildren, a proud march breaks out, and the first athletes appear with easy and rhythmic footsteps … [and] will parade and align themselves in an impeccable order. What could be more beautiful than these five thousand athletes, tanned, muscular and mostly clad in white, saluting our chief, Jean Borotra, the commissaire général for education and sports, with an Olympic gesture? What could be more moving than these five thousand athletes taking the oath with a sole heart, with a sole voice, to ‘practise sport with disinterest and discipline, to become better and to better serve their patrie?’90

In this example, the masses on display –​and their healthy tanned bodies –​ were not an empty promise, but were tangible proof of Vichy’s efforts to reforge French youth. For young Raymonde, witnessing the demonstration generated belief and certainty that France was indeed ‘young and strong’. Even considering the possibility that Tous les Sports fabricated the letter out of whole cloth, the Vichy organisers clearly expected the demonstration to powerfully impact the youth in attendance and transform them from spectators into participants in Vichy’s project of national renewal and regeneration. The Fête du Serment de l’Athlète clearly ‘belonged’ in the stadium, given its focus on young athletes and physical fitness. But it also drew on a longer legacy of fusing participation and spectatorship inside the stade in order to simultaneously enthuse crowds and forge disciplined militants. In a similar fashion, Vichy also transformed several early summer holidays into stadium-​based political demonstrations. The Fête du Travail, Vichy’s attempt to co-​opt the traditional May Day festival, was celebrated in 1941 in French-​controlled Indochina through elaborate

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productions inside Hanoi’s Stade Mangin, featuring the Légion Française des Combattants et Volontaires de la Révolution Nationale.91 In France itself, the festival honouring Joan of Arc (the Fête de Jeanne d’Arc) was the occasion for an elaborate demonstration at Marseille’s Stade-​Vélodrome in 1941 and 1942. In the words of Jérôme Carcopino, Vichy’s national secretary for education, the Joan of Arc celebration needed to provide a ‘fervoured atmosphere’ to help inspire youth to follow the example of Joan herself and work to redeem France.92 The demonstration that ensued in Marseille in 1941 certainly carried out Carcopino’s directive. It followed the classic stadium pattern, with the exception that the opening parade was composed entirely of youth groups, in recognition of Joan of Arc’s status as the ‘patron saint’ of youth.93 With the marchers assembled on the infield, in front of 25,000 people, the rally began with the presentation of the national colours, followed by ‘signaling and camping’ displays by various scouting groups and physical fitness demonstrations by Catholic female youth organisations and Catholic sports federations, in a remarkable display of continuity with events at the Parc des Princes in the late 1930s.94 Georges Lamirand, Vichy’s national secretary for youth, then lauded Joan of Arc as a model for the jeunesse of France; he proclaimed that the Maid of Orléans would inspire them to remain united against all obstacles, and to work for the ‘lifting up’ of France. In his speech at the Fête, which preceded the dramatic retelling of Joan’s life through a series of ten tableaux created by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Barbier and set to music by Olivier Messiaen, Lamirand asked the assembled youths if they were ready to give themselves to the patrie, a question that drew a thrice-​repeated ‘Yes!’ from all present.95 For Vichy, the stadium space thus amplified and enabled the narrative it attempted to create about the ideal reconstruction of French society. The activities at the 1941 Joan of Arc festival, like other stadium demonstrations that preceded it, turned the individual bodies of the participants into something that needed to be seen, part of an event intended to inspire and shape the crowd. In showcasing young men through fitness demonstrations and displaying them for public viewing, the Fête du Serment de l’Athlète and the Fête de Jeanne d’Arc attempted to compensate for the nearly two million French men in German prisoner-​of-​war camps whose bodies were neither muscular nor freely displayed. The bronzed nude torsos of the Compagnons de France, performing their physical fitness demonstrations, testified to a renewal of French male strength. The female fitness demonstrations also upheld an ideal of appropriate female activity in Vichy’s vision of a renovated France revolving around the

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family, work and the patrie.96 Neither challenging nor overly athletic, the women’s gymnastics routines provided a ‘moment of charm’ and ‘admirably regulated grace’.97 The glorification of Joan of Arc, too, presented women with a valiant and chaste role model.98 By representing youth as normal and healthy, even after all of the political turmoil of the 1930s and the military humiliation of 1940, Vichy clearly hoped to convince its citizens that ‘something had really changed in the country’.99 Yet Vichy stadium festivity was increasingly less successful, as far as the regime was concerned. As public support for Vichy began to recede, the inherent risks of the stadium as a demonstration space became obvious; while a fully packed stadium testified to the enthusiasm of the public, a small gathering within the vast space of the stadium reflected poorly on the event and its organisers. Condemned by their choice of venue to assemble large masses within the stadium, Vichy authorities artificially increased attendance at the 1942 Joan of Arc celebration at the Stade-​ Vélodrome in Marseille by issuing free invitations to the best students in local schools and their families.100 Those 40,000 spectators apparently witnessed a spectacle that did not necessarily reinforce Vichy’s desired message. The tableau depicting the pilgrimage of Saint Jacques to Santiago de Compostela was acted out by hungry unemployed youths who delivered a poor performance, as they ‘did not have the same spirit as the young folk of the youth movements’.101 In a related complaint, Vichy-​ era authorities in the French Caribbean were also aware that stadia could ‘constitute forums of political protest’ where other conventional political assemblies had been systematically dissolved, as evidenced by chants in support of Free France leader Charles de Gaulle among football supporters on several occasions and a memorial rally for a victim of police violence inside a stadium in Guadeloupe.102 The 1942 Joan of Arc rally, along with other signs of dissent in the stadium, illustrated the growing difficulties that Vichy faced in mobilising and controlling its supporters and presenting a festive, spectacular face in light of wartime conditions. After the Allied invasion of North Africa and the Nazi occupation of the so-​called Vichy ‘free zone’ in November 1942, the Vichy regime began to retreat from its attempts to claim a stadium-​ based public legitimacy. Admittedly, large-​scale rallies everywhere in France were often banned from this point onwards, as evidenced by the cancellation of a planned rally by the philo-​Nazi Parti Populaire Français (PPF) at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris in early November.103 Even when tolerated, demonstrations rarely occupied stadium spaces; Vichy organisers staged the 1943 Fête du Serment at local meeting halls not as ‘gatherings for the masses’ but as smaller scale events for the athletes and their

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families.104 If, as the journalist Georges Bruni had written the year previously in Tous les Sports, ‘numbers … carry along those who hesitate’, the choice of less imposing venues in 1943 reflected both German restrictions and the realisation that political festivity could no longer mobilise sufficiently impressive crowds to ‘create the current’ in favour of both sport and the Vichy regime.105 Even as the stadium receded as a space for displaying the physical vitality of Vichy youth and projecting an image of disciplined resolve, it found itself mobilised on one tragic occasion not only to assemble men and women, but to enclose and incarcerate them as well. The French and Germans alike employed stadia early in the war to store war materiel and house refugees.106 These uses of stadia, however, were certainly overshadowed by the selection of the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris as the staging ground for the round-​up (the rafle) of Parisian Jews, organised by the Gestapo but largely carried out by French police and PPF volunteers, between 16 July and 19 July 1942. Over the course of those four days, nearly 13,000 Jews were arrested, with at least 7,000 detained in terrible conditions inside the Vél’ d’Hiv’ before being transported east to Auschwitz.107 In fairness, one could certainly ask whether the rafle belongs in the history of explicitly mass political practices inside French stadia. After all, it did not function as an attempt to showcase physical vitality or forge spectators as politicised subjects. But, in a narrow sense, it featured the stadium as a site for surveillance that was then transformed into a site of incarceration. The logistical advantages of the stadium space, which allowed the police to monitor the Communist demonstration at the Parc des Princes on 4 October 1936, were undeniably present at the Vél’ d’Hiv’ six years later. The stadium design offered a fixed number of exits, an immense space and artificial lighting, facilitating the policing of a large crowd. Once the entry points were slammed shut, surveillance gave way to imprisonment, giving the stade a close and not coincidental resemblance to Bentham’s Panopticon-​as-​prison.108

Stadium spectacle beyond 1945 In the aftermath of the Second World War, stadia elsewhere in France periodically returned as spaces for formal politics, particularly on the left.109 But many stadium demonstrations, including the Communist Party’s ‘Peace Congresses’ at the Stade Buffalo in 1948 and 1949, and the famous May 1968 demonstration at the Stade Charléty, functioned as explicit references to the ‘golden age’ of the stadium rally during the Popular Front. The 1949 Peace Congress demonstration, as one example,

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followed a familiar script: two cortèges featuring politicians, youth groups, the Communist-​affiliated sports federation, resistance fighters and old veterans like the so-​called ‘Black Sea mutineers’ of 1919, entered the stadium from opposite directions, parading around the track of the Buffalo in front of a packed grandstand. The communist press explicitly reminded its readers of the rally’s ties to the past. L’Humanité’s Simone Téry claimed that the ‘joy’ and ‘hope’ of the militants at the Stade Buffalo had not been rivalled since the grandes journées of 1936.110 The demonstration nearly twenty years later at the Stade Charléty, a small university stadium on the south side of Paris, during the so-​ called ‘events’ of May 1968 also attempted to conjure up the glories of the Popular Front. Amidst ongoing student and worker protests, militants for the student union (the Union Nationale des Etudiants de France, or UNEF) and the non-​Communist trade union (the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, or CFDT) selected the Charléty stadium, located at the southern edge of the fourteenth arrondissement, as a demonstration locale on the basis of its symbolic overtones as a space of reconciliation for workers and students.111 The national government, following in the footsteps of the police in the 1930s, endorsed the stadium rally for security reasons, believing the risk of confrontation between demonstrators and police would be reduced if the manifestation were held in the stade.112 Yet the Charléty event, which passed uneventfully as roughly 22,000 people listened to various speakers exhorting the possibility of revolution, differed from the gathering at the Stade Buffalo in 1935. It showcased a left that was deeply divided between students and the Communist Party and its proxies. Moreover, the stadium form itself was at odds with the kind of revolution proposed by the more radical elements among the protesters, as it lacked the confrontational element inherent in other demonstrations during the events of May. The insurrectional demands of the crowd at the Stade Charléty were thus in conflict with the space in which the rally took place. As Jean Lacouture acidly noted in Le Monde, the revolution would ‘not be before tomorrow, in any case’ after Charléty.113 Yet, if the ‘golden age’ of stadium festivity were revisited in 1968 and again during a 2007 rally for Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal at the Stade Charléty that clearly attempted to link her candidacy to the memory of May 1968, the stadium ceased to be as relevant as a political space in the postwar era.114 Some of the sites for those memorable prewar rallies –​the Stade Buffalo and the Vél’ d’Hiv’, for instance –​ were demolished in the 1950s (a topic that will be considered in more detail in Chapter 5). By the 1950s and 1960s, the stadium was increasingly

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supplanted by meeting halls and television studios, and was no longer the pre-​eminent political space of the era. Removed from the pivotal context of the interwar and wartime periods, characterised by the body politics of the anti-​fascist struggle and the ongoing obsession over revitalising the defeated nation, both before and during Vichy, the stadium lost much of its visual and imaginative power. Between 1926 –​the year of the first gymnastics demonstrations under Edouard Herriot’s aegis at the Stade Municipal in Lyon  –​and the end of the Second World War, however, the stadium shaped and ideally expressed a particular mode of spectator-​oriented politics. In part, the prominence of the stadium stemmed from the reality that a great number of stades suddenly dotted the urban landscape, as the period between 1920 and 1939 witnessed a boom in stadium construction in France and in Europe at large.115 Almost every municipal stadium erected in France was originally built in the 1920s or 1930s, as was the case in Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, Reims and Le Havre, among other cities. Some private stadia, like the Parc des Princes, predated the First World War, but were substantially modified during the interwar period. The Parc, for example, was remodelled between 1931 and 1932 to expand its seating capacity and improve its field and its vélodrome track. Beyond French frontiers, the Olympic Stadium in Berlin was dramatically renovated in 1936, while the major Italian stadia –​the Stadio PNF in Rome, the Stadio Mussolini in Turin and the Stadio Giovanni Berta in Florence –​were all constructed in the late 1920s or 1930s. However, beyond the wave of stadium construction, stadia themselves also suggested both the content and the form of political demonstrations in a nation where many different groups agreed on the necessity of boosting national health and fitness between the wars.116 This is not to equate the political agenda of actors as different as the PCF in the 1930s, Catholic youth groups or Vichy officials like Jean Borotra, who all claimed stadium spaces for differing ideological ends. But their use of similar physical spaces, such as the Parc des Princes in Paris or the Stade-​ Vélodrome in Marseille, should remind historians, as Jessica Wardhaugh has argued, that the right and the left were actually engaged in strikingly similar attempts to ‘imagine and realize a united popular community’ in the Third Republic’s last decade, even as their visions of the ‘masses’ that constituted that community might have differed.117 The stadium, moreover, was a readily available space that, while ostensibly promoted as the key to rendering men and women healthy through participatory sporting activities, was consistently co-​opted for spectacular purposes. Politics, as practised in the stadium by all of these groups,

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moved conventional meetings onto a vast platform, deployed a symbolic, festive and emotional political language appropriate for that space, and positioned the crowd itself as both actor and object within the framework of a new mass politics. At the same time, however, the stadium capably facilitated the regulation and discipline of mass crowds, as imposed internally through calls for self-​discipline and mediatised images of disciplined crowds, and externally via the structure of the space and the role of surveillance. The stadium, in this regard, helped make possible the coexistence of festivity and control that was arguably essential to the staging of mass politics in both democratic and authoritarian contexts in interwar and wartime France. The stadium, when considered as a political space, not only illuminates deeper trends in French political mobilisation during the interwar period and the war itself, but also offers a point of comparison between developments in France and those elsewhere in Europe. Political events in French stadia did not exist in a vacuum; some of the stadium-​based political practices in France evolved as an explicit response to the nation’s totalitarian neighbours during the Popular Front, and were even more clearly imitative during the Vichy era. Yet the use of the stadium as political venue was also the product of the wider concerns over physical health, social cohesion and bodily fitness in Europe that predated the Nazi and Fascist accessions to power: it is worth remembering that Weimar Germany, too, staged its own stadium-​based mass political festivals. Finally, the public political spectacles inside French stadia tapped internal influences not available to Germans or Italians: the Popular Front and the French Communist Party self-​consciously referenced the French Revolutionary heritage in political gatherings that borrowed from the Tennis Court Oath or re-​enacted the 1793 Fête de la Fédération, while the Popular Front and Vichy both claimed Joan of Arc as a symbolic figure in an attempt to rally youth to their respective causes.118 Not only does a history of the ‘stadium moment’ help position France vis-​à-​vis its neighbours, it also suggests that the historiography on mass political spectacle itself in interwar and wartime Europe might merit reconsideration. With a few exceptions, historians have typically focused on the connection between architecture and political spectacle in the totalitarian contexts of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union.119 In the process, these ‘spectacular politics’ have been interpreted as having been designed to reduce the spectator to a passive and acquiescent entity, through festivals, rituals and ceremonies that emphasised the aesthetic components of politics and ultimately

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precluded real political participation.120 Mass rallies, according to this line of analysis, created an irrational, emotional feeling of unity that might (in a term inspired by French sociologist Emile Durkheim) be called an ‘urban sublime’.121 There is no doubt a large element of truth to this approach, as it highlights the use of political spectacle to generate consent if not active support. Yet the focus on the passivity and alienation of spectators in totalitarian regimes may not be entirely helpful; as Daphne Bolz has highlighted, at least one prominent German under National Socialism, architect Werner March, envisioned that stadium events would turn spectators into active participants and (by extension) political supporters.122 It would not be surprising if this sentiment were to have been shared by other political actors elsewhere in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union.123 The example of France, at the very least, suggests that organisers of stadium demonstrations certainly hoped to not only demonstrate the strength and vitality of their cause, but to ‘shape’ spectators –​whether Communists or members of Vichy youth groups –​into active political subjects and believers. Thus the analysis of French stadium politics highlights the kinds of constraints and coercive impulses that characterised the mass politics of the interwar period, but also acknowledges that political organisations, not surprisingly, shared a belief that they were creating enthusiastic individual supporters, not passive spectators. What remains less clear, however, is whether the intended message was always received within the stadium in the desired manner. While evidence on this account is admittedly slight, the testimonies of Léo Figuères regarding the Assises de la Paix at the Stade Buffalo in 1935 and of young Raymonde Prieur (however problematic that eyewitness account might be) concerning the Fête du Serment de l’Athlète at the Parc des Princes in 1941 indicate that spectators could indeed participate with fervour and enthusiasm. The experience was meaningful enough for them to recount it after the fact.124 This successful mobilisation of spectators –​where spectatorship became an active act of crowd-​pleasing –​stands in contrast to other anecdotal indicators of crowd resistance and dissent.125 At a 1938 rally inside the Stade Buffalo for the Communist-​affiliated trade union, the Confédération Général du Travail (CGT), union leader Léon Jouhaux was shouted down by unhappy militants.126 As was already noted earlier in this chapter, the stadium also proved problematic for Vichy authorities at the Fête de Jeanne d’Arc in 1942, and in the Caribbean, when the stadium turned into a protest space. Beyond the questionable political loyalty of spectators inside the stadium, crowds at football and rugby matches in metropolitan France  –​as will be demonstrated in the next

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two c­ hapters  –​often resisted attempts to physically constrain them to certain parts of the stadium or suggestions that they acquire a code of appropriate dignified conduct inside the stade, periodically engaging in unruly or violent behaviour. The question of spectator resistance highlights all the more strongly the fundamental reality that the stadium stood, in interwar France, as a privileged locale for the complicated development of mass politics, shaping both its scale and its content. The architect and urbanist Le Corbusier certainly recognised the modern importance of the stadium space: he demanded that authorities construct a 100,000-​seat stadium in 1938 as a ‘civic tool of modern times’.127 While Le Corbusier’s grand stade remained confined to paper, he accurately highlighted the centrality of the stadium space to his own epoch. What contemporary Spanish philosopher José Ortéga y Gasset described in apprehension as the ‘society of the masses’ came into its own, in part, inside the stadium.128 And this applied to politics and the sports themselves in equal measure. As the next two chapters will demonstrate by considering stadia and sporting spectatorship from the years immediately before the First World War until the late 1950s, the emergence of football, rugby and cycling as popular sporting events cast a spotlight on the mass public itself. The resulting discourses and practices connected to stadia and spectators not only helped French men and women grapple with the deep anxieties about the nature of that collective body, but also positioned that public in relation to shifting notions of local, national and global community.

Notes 1 The Stade Buffalo was constructed in 1922 in the commune of Montrouge, just south of the Porte d’Orléans in Paris. Like the Parc des Princes, it featured a cycling track that encircled a playing field for football and rugby. Philippe Bovet, ‘Les Riches Heures du stade Buffalo’, 92 Express: Le Magazine des Hauts-​ de-​Seine 61 (1995): 30–​6. 2 The leftist press estimated the crowd at 100,000 to 120,000, claiming that thousands of supporters could not fit in the stadium and instead listened to the demonstration outside the stade via loudspeakers. Police estimates placed the crowd at 40,000. Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris (hereafter APPP), BA 1862, Police telegrams from field officers to the Préfecture de la Police, 14 June 1936. Also see L’Oeuvre, 15 June 1936, and L’Humanité, 15 June 1936. 3 L’Humanité, 15 June 1936. 4 APPP, BA 1862, Police report summarising the PCF demonstration, 15 June 1936. See also L’Humanité, 15 June 1936.

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5 From April 1934 until July 1939, major Parisian athletic stadia (particularly the Stade Buffalo and the Stade-​Vélodrome du Parc des Princes) were employed for at least ten large-​scale political demonstrations by the left; this total count of political stadium events does not include rallies by Communist-​affiliated youth or sports organisations at smaller stadia in the suburbs. In the fourteen-​month period between May 1941 and July 1942, Vichy’s education and sports ministries organised at least eleven large demonstrations coinciding with major regime holidays, such as the Fête du Travail or the Fête de Jeanne d’Arc, in three stadia (the Parc des Princes, the Stade de Vichy and the Stade-​Vélodrome de Marseille), along with many more elsewhere in the provinces. Evidence for demonstrations comes from L’Humanité, Le Petit Provençal, the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, the Archives Nationales de France and the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. 6 The noun ‘politics’ is used here as contemporaries employed it in the 1920s and 1930s to refer explicitly to rallies staged by institutional actors like political parties, or local and state governmental bodies, inside the stade. The use of the term is complicated by the insistence of contemporaries that sport and athletics, the normal activities inside stadia, were inherently apolitical. As Allen Guttmann has demonstrated, however, sporting events like the Olympic Games have been highly political, at least in the sense of reflecting a particular ideology, since their inception. Guttmann, The Olympics, p. 1. 7 For the longer heritage of left-​wing political mobilisation in the streets under the Third Republic, see Tartakowsky, Les Manifestations de rue en France; for festivals, see Alain Corbin et al., eds, Les Usages politiques des fêtes aux XIXe–​XXe siècles (Paris:  Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994). For funerals as mass political events during the Third Republic, see Avner Ben-​Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789–​1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8 For the relationship between spatial environment and political culture, see Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–​1990:  From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 6–​7. 9 Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People. 10 In this sense, the analysis here draws off the insights of both Michel Foucault’s work on discipline and scholarship about ‘crowd-​pleasing’ in nineteenth-​ century France. For discipline, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 217–​ 18. For ‘crowd-​pleasing’, see Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, p. 5. 11 Edouard Herriot, Créer (Paris: Payot et Cie, 1920), p. 178. 12 For prisoner-​of-​war labour, see the correspondence contained in AML 048 WP 008, Hôpital de Grange Blanche /​Stade de la Mouche:  Prisonniers de guerre (1915–​18). See also Henri Cogoluenhes, ‘Au stade municipal de Gerland’, Rive Gauche 144(1998): 3–​7. In a 1952 retrospective of building projects undertaken during Herriot’s reign as mayor, any mention of prisoner-​of-​ war labour on the Stade Gerland was omitted. In fact, the pamphlet claimed

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that construction on the stadium stopped completely during the war. See Ville de Lyon, L’Oeuvre municipale depuis 1905 (Lyon: Ville de Lyon, 1952). 13 Le Progrès, 24 May 1926. 14 Lyon-​Sport, 8 June 1928. 15 Lyon-​Sport, 17 June 1932. 16 Elisabeth Lê-​Germain, ‘La Politique sportive de la ville de Lyon au temps d’Edouard Herriot (1905–​ 1957)’ (PhD dissertation, Université Claude Bernard-​Lyon 1, 2001), p. 324. 17 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Lyon, 15 April 1935. 18 Lê-​Germain, ‘La Politique sportive de la ville de Lyon’, p. 12. 19 L’Avant-​Garde, 26 March 1932. For the Communist critique of the Tour, see Thompson, The Tour de France, pp. 196–​9, 210–​13. 20 In the municipal elections of 1925, the Communists captured eight mayoralties in the department of the Seine; that number swelled to twenty-​six by 1935. The eight original Communist municipalities were Bobigny, Saint-​ Denis, Ivry, Vitry, Villejuif, Malakoff, Villetaneuse and Clichy. See Raymond Pronier, Les Municipalités communistes (Paris: Balland, 1983), pp. 24, 28. For local stadium construction, see, for example, Archives Municipales d’Ivry-​ sur-​Seine (hereafter AMIS), 2 M/​N 121, Minutes from Conseil Municipal meeting, 11 April 1930, on the Stade Philibert Pompée (later renamed in honour of Lenin after the PCF gained control of the municipality). For relations between Communist municipalities and the so-​called ‘worker-​sport’ clubs, see Archives Municipales de Saint-​Denis (hereafter AMSD), 6M 15, Extract of the Register of Deliberations of the Conseil Municipal de Saint-​Denis, 24 July 1934. Relations with Communist sports clubs, however, were not always cordial. See Nicolas Kssis, ‘La Municipalité ouvrière et le milieu sportif: tutelle ou complementarité’, paper presented at ‘Les Associations et le champ politique au XXe siècle’ conference at the Sénat in Paris, Salle Clemenceau, 16–​17 November 2000. 21 L’Humanité, 30 December 1929. 22 L’Ami du Peuple, 30 December 1929. Reichel, not to be confused with his homologue Frantz Reichel, also wrote for Le Figaro. That newspaper and L’Ami du Peuple were both controlled by perfume magnate François Coty. For police preparation for the protest, which L’Humanité and the organ of the young Communists, L’Avant-​Garde publicised in advance, see Archives Nationales de France (hereafter AN), F7 13084, Police report, 28 December 1929. For a description of the protest after the fact, see APPP, BA 1851, Report of police in charge of surveillance at the Stade Buffalo, 30 December 1929. See also Guillaume Bobet, ‘Le Public et le spectacle sportif dans les stades de football en France, 1918–​1998: les incidents du 29 décembre 1929 au stade Buffalo de Montrouge’ (Master 2 thesis, Université Panthéon-​Sorbonne-​Paris 1, 2009). 23 Saint-​Denis was the fiefdom of Mayor Jacques Doriot, closely affiliated with the Jeunesse Communiste and a key Communist leader until his expulsion from the PCF in 1934. Jean-​Paul Brunet, Saint-​Denis la ville rouge: socialisme et communisme en banlieue ouvrière, 1890–​1939 (Paris: Hachette, 1980).

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24 APPP, BA 1647, Police surveillance report on the final demonstration of the Semaine Internationale de la Jeunesse, 12 September 1932. 25 In 1935, Communist municipalities celebrated May Day at a range of locales; 800 people attended a worker-​sport football match and political rally at the Stade Philibert Pompée in Ivry-​sur-​Seine, while 2,000 people gathered at the Stade Municipal in Vitry-​sur-​Seine on the same date for another Communist political meeting. AN, F7 13295, Police report on demonstrations, 1 May 1935. 26 L’Avant-​Garde, 30 May 1931. 27 Although membership totals were approximate in an era when the JC operated on the verge of legality, it claimed 3,872 members in May 1931 and 5,770 in 1932. AN, F7 13185, Police report on the JC, 28 June 1932. 28 AN, F7 13185, Report of police superintendent charged with JC surveillance, 14 September 1932. 29 Tartakowsky, Les Manifestations de rue en France, 7. For funeral cortèges in the Third Republic, see Ben-​Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory, pp. 136–​62. 30 For the Fête de L’Humanité, see Noëlle Gérôme and Danielle Tartakowsky, La Fête de l’humanité: culture communiste, culture populaire (Paris: Messidor/​ Editions sociales, 1988). 31 Fears about the behaviour of large crowds, of course, were hardly a product of the interwar period, although the emergence of a militant Communist Party in the 1920s certainly exacerbated existing anxieties. For fin de siècle perceptions about the dangerous crowd, see Barrows, Distorting Mirrors. 32 APPP, BA 1647, Letter from the Director-​General of the Municipal Police to the Prefect of Police, 27 July 1933. 33 Jackson, The Popular Front, p. 33. 34 AP, Tri Briand 247, Letter from the Union Nationale pour une France plus Grande to the Prefect of the Seine, 15 October 1936. See also Tumblety, ‘The Soccer World Cup’, pp. 77–​116 (96–​8). 35 Pascal Ory, La Belle Illusion:  culture et politique sous le signe du Front Populaire, 1935–​1938 (Paris: Plon, 1994), p. 733. 36 Hubscher, L’Histoire en mouvements, p. 187; Callède, Les Politiques sportives, p. 59. 37 The Archives de Paris contain the maps compiled as a result of this survey (Tri Briand 240). 38 Archives Municipales de Marseille (hereafter AMM), 112 M 7, Extract from the Register of Deliberations of the Conseil Municipal de Marseille, 2 August 1935. 39 AMM, 1 D 237/​2, Session of the Conseil Municipal de Marseille, 23 July 1937. 40 Daniel Drocourt, ‘Le Stade-​Vélodrome de Marseille, deuxième stade de France’, Marseille: Revue Culturelle 84 (1998): 69–​75. 41 Archives Municipales de Toulouse (hereafter AMT), B00027, ‘Le Stadium de Toulouse’, published by the Mairie of Toulouse, 1998; AMT, 5M 222, Dossier Parc Municipal des Sports, 1937–​1947, ‘Report on the current state of construction of the stadium at the Parc Municipal des Sports’, 3 April 1939.

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42 Robert Coustet, ‘Le Stade Municipal et le Parc des Sports de Bordeaux: recherche de la paternité’, Revue Historique de Bordeaux et du Département de la Gironde (1982): 149–​65. 43 Le Progrès, 6 June 1937. 44 Le Petit Provençal, 14 June 1937. 45 Nadine Rossol, Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany: Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism, 1926–​ 36 (Basingstoke and New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 71–​4. 46 Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–​ 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 186. 47 For Hitler’s analysis of stadia and the ‘new man’, see Peter Reichel, ‘Festival and Cult: Masculine and Militaristic Mechanisms of National Socialism’, in J. A. Mangan, ed., Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon in Aryan Fascism (London: Frank Cass, 1999), p. 165. See also George Mosse, The Image of Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 119. 48 For stadium plans, see George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New  York:  Howard Fertig, 1975), p.  32, and Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Fachismus (Munich:  Hanser, 1991), pp. 123–​ 4. The 400,000-​ person ‘Deutsche Stadion’ was obviously never completed. 49 For Fascist spectacle in public places, particularly piazzas, see Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 28, 32, 92–​3. For the politicisation of spectator sport, see both Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 171–​83, and Daphne Bolz, Les Arènes totalitaires:  Hitler, Mussolini et les jeux du stade (Paris: Editions CNRS, 2008), p. 111. 50 APPP, BA 1651, Police telegrams from field officers to the Préfecture de la Police, 14 July 1935. 51 Léo Figuères, Jeunesse Militante: chronique d’un jeune communiste des années 30–​50 (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1971), pp. 49–​51. 52 APPP, BA 1651, Police reports on the Stade Buffalo demonstration, 14 July 1935. 53 Avner Ben-​Amos has argued that funeral cortèges during the Third Republic also were envisioned by their Republican organisers as blurring this distinction between ‘spectator’ and ‘participant’. The stadium form, however, had the advantage of concentrating all of the spectators and participants in the same place, rather than creating a transitory moment of passage through the city streets. Ben-​Amos, Funerals, Politics and Memory, p. 334. 54 Philippe Burrin, ‘Poings levés et bras tendus: la contagion des symboles au temps du Front Populaire’, Vingtième Siècle 11 (1986): 11. 55 Jackson, The Popular Front, p. 307. 56 L’Oeuvre, 15 July 1935.

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57 APPP, BA 1861, Summary report on the Stade Buffalo demonstrations, 15 July 1935. In fairness, the tactic of keeping demonstrations separate was also evident for the cortège on the east side of Paris later in the afternoon from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de la Nation. 58 APPP, BA 1862, Police dossier, 9 June 1936. 59 APPP, BA 1862, Police telegrams from field officers to the Préfecture de la Police, 14 June 1936. Also see L’Oeuvre, 15 June 1936, and L’Humanité, 15 June 1936. 60 L’Humanité, 15 June 1936. 61 APPP, BA 1862, Police report summarising the PCF demonstration, 15 June 1936. See also L’Humanité, 15 June 1936. For Nazi ‘pyromania’, see Reichel, ‘Festival and Cult’, p. 168. 62 L’Intransigeant, 5 October 1936. 63 APPP, BA 1863, Police surveillance report, 4 October 1936. 64 Jessica Wardhaugh has erroneously suggested at two points in her otherwise exemplary monograph that the violence at the Parc des Princes happened after the demonstration, when the Communists exited the stadium. The police files show clearly that all of the arrests and confrontations happened before the demonstration and as PCF militants were entering the stadium. Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People, pp. 2, 149. 65 L’Humanité, 4 October 1936. 66 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 217. For Foucault, spectacle –​associated in his analysis with the bloody public executions of the ancien régime that were designed to awe and terrorise the crowd  –​was replaced in modern society by regimes of surveillance that far more profoundly disciplined and shaped the individual. One might argue here, however, that spectacle was not entirely replaced by surveillance, but was in fact integrated into mass political practices which opened the individual (and the collective) to disciplinary scrutiny. 67 L’Oeuvre, 5 October 1936. 68 L’Oeuvre, 5 October 1936. 69 APPP, BA 1863, Police report, 5 October 1936. 70 Pascal Ory, Une nation pour mémoire: 1889, 1939, 1989 trois jubilés révolutionnaires (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1992), p. 166. For Naissance d’une cité, see Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People, p. 151. 71 The JOC was founded in 1926 and its female counterpart, the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne Féminine (JOCF), in 1928. Susan B. Whitney, ‘Gender, Class, and Generation in Interwar French Catholicism:  The Case of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne Féminine’, Journal of Family History 26 (2001): 480. 72 A Gaumont news clip from July 1933 (preserved at the Parisian Forum des Images), for instance, showed Belgian cartoonist Georges Rémi, better known as Hergé (the creator of the comic-​book character Tintin), speaking to a crowd of Scouts at an unidentified Parisian stadium as part of their ‘camp-​out’.

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73 L’Auto, 2 June 1936. 74 L’Auto, 12 July 1937. 75 Whitney, ‘Gender, Class and Generation’, p. 498. 76 Albert Kéchichian, Les Croix-​de-​feu à l’âge des fascismes:  Travail, famille, patrie (Paris: Seyssel/​Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), pp. 8, 195. The Croix de Feu frequently demonstrated on the Champs-​Elysées, but mobilised its largest number of militants for a commemoration of the Battle of the Marne near Lizy-​sur-​Ourcq, where approximately 80,000 supporters gathered on a farm. Kéchichian, Les Croix-​de-​feu, p. 172. 77 APPP, BA 1863, Police surveillance report, 4 October 1936. The Vél’ d’Hiv’ was located in the seventh arrondissement near the Quai de Grenelle. 78 Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 250; Sean Kennedy, Reconciling France against Democracy: the Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927–​1945 (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2007), p. 148. 79 Jean-​Louis Gay-​Lescot, Sport et éducation sous Vichy, 1940–​1944 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1991), pp. 30, 34. 80 Tous les Sports, 2 August 1941. The stadium-​building project was perhaps at its most intense overseas. Vichy claimed to have constructed 271 multipurpose stadia between 1940 and 1942 in Indochina. Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics:  Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina, 1940–​1944 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 192. 81 AN, F17 14460, Undated brochure published by the Direction des Sports, Loisirs, et Education Physique (likely 1942). 82 The author would like to thank Steve Wharton, who generously provided selections from chapters three and four of his Screening Reality:  French Documentary under German Occupation (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2006) well before its publication. 83 For Pétain’s emphasis on religiosity as a means to emphasise obedience to authority, see Christian Faure, Le Project culturel de Vichy: folklore et révolution nationale 1940–​1944 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989), p. 195. 84 The municipality in Saint-​Denis harvested weeds grown in the stadium to use as fodder for its horses in late 1941. AMSD, 6M 16, Letter from architect Voyer to mayor Lambert, 29 November 1941. The Vichy authorities recognised these sorts of difficulties in a projected law on the requisition of fields for stades, promulgated in March 1943. In cases where land targeted for requisition was still devoted to growing crops, potential stadium-​builders had to wait for the first harvest to take control of the terrain. AN, F17 13366 (Vichy/​ Instruction Publique), Note from the Directeur de l’Equipement Sportif to the Commisaire Général, 22 March 1943. 85 Robert Paxton, Vichy France:  Old Guard and New Order, 1940–​ 1944 (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1972), p.  144. For one example of problems Vichy officials encountered in 1941 in removing advertisments for two alcoholic beverages, St Raphaël-​Quinquina (an aperitif wine) and Pernod (an anise-​flavoured liqueur), at Marseille’s Stade-​Vélodrome, see

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AMM, 112 M 7, Correspondence between Directeur Général du Société du Stade Municipal de Marseille and the Directeur des Services Techniques de la Ville de Marseille, 12 September 1941 and 6 October 1941. 86 Tous les Sports, 21 November 1942. 87 Gay-​Lescot, Sport et éducation, p. 128. 88 For Borotra’s voyage to North Africa, see Gay-​Lescot, Sport et éducation, 129. The Serment de l’Athlète is cited here from Tous les Sports, 14 March 1942. 89 Tous les Sports, 5 July 1941. 90 Tous les Sports, 19 July 1941. 91 Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, pp. 204–​5. The Légion was also feted in other stadia overseas. In Madagascar’s capital of Tananarive (now Antananarivo), 2,000 spectators filled the stadium of Mahamasina to witness the lighting of a flame for the first anniversary of the Légion on 1 September 1941. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, p. 49. 92 Archives Départementales des Bouches-​du-​Rhône (hereafter ADBR), 76 W 155, Letter from Carcopino to the Prefects of the zone libre, 22 April 1941. 93 In order, the procession included the Scouts de France, the Eclaireurs de France (Protestant Scouts), the Coeurs Vaillants, the Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française, the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, the Jeunesse de France et d’Outre-​ Mer, Jeune-​ France, the Comédiens Routiers, the Chantiers de la Jeunesse and the associations affiliated with the Marseille-​ based Fédérations des Massilliennes. See ADBR, 76 W 155, Report from Seignard, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale, to M. l’Intendant de Police, 12 May 1941. 94 As Susan Whitney notes, the JOC in particular generally sympathised with Vichy’s efforts to reshape youth in the first two years of the Occupation, but was less unified in its support for Vichy policies on youth labour in Germany after 1942. Susan Whitney, Mobilizing Youth:  Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 248. 95 ADBR, 76 W 155, Report from Seignard to M. l’Intendant de Police, 12 May 1941. Given the explict pro-​regime gloss that characterised the Fête as a whole, it is puzzling that Philip Nord asserts that the Schaeffer and Barbier theatrical piece was not a ‘propaganda play’ at all. Nord also bafflingly describes this as France’s ‘first experience with stadium theater’, which ignores both Jean-​Richard Bloch’s Naissance d’une cité in 1937 and the frequent mixture of theatre and choral activity that typified most stadium demonstrations. Nord, France’s New Deal, p. 272. 96 For an analysis of Vichy’s approach to women and female athletics, see Francine Muel-​Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine, trans. Kathleen A. Johnson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 295. 97 Le Petit Marseillais, 12 May 1941. 98 The Communists, for their part, had incorporated the ‘Maid of Orléans’ into their commemorations of the French Revolution in 1939, drawing 30,000 people to the Stade Buffalo for a youth-​oriented festival. Pascal Ory, Une nation pour mémoire, p. 183.

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99 ADBR, 76 W 155, Report from Seignard to M.  l’Intendant de Police, 12 May 1941. 100 ADBR, 76 W 155, Report from the Chef de Service de la Voie Publique to the Prefect of the Bouches-​du-​Rhône, 21 May 1942. 101 ABDR, 76 W 155, Report from the Chef de Service de la Voie Publique to the Prefect of the Bouches-​du-​Rhône, 21 May 1942. 102 Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics, p. 125. 103 Le Petit Parisien, 9 November 1942. The PPF was created by Jacques Doriot, a member of the PCF until his expulsion in 1934. For Doriot’s drift from communist militant to fascist zealot, see Philippe Burrin, La Dérive Fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery, 1933–​1945 (Paris: Seuil, 2003). 104 Tous les Sports, 12 June 1943. 105 Tous les Sports, 3 July 1943. 106 AMT, 5M 223, Letter from the Chief Engineer of the Poudrerie Nationale de Toulouse to the Mayor of Toulouse, 1 April 1942. 107 Claude Lévy and Paul Tillard, La Grande Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv’ (16 juillet 1942) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992), p. 62. 108 For the functioning of the Panopticon, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.  201. While the memory of the rafle was largely suppressed after the war, stadia were used for incarceration on one other notable occasion. On 17 October 1961, Parisian police commandeered two indoor sports stadia, the Palais des Sports at the Porte de Versailles (the successor to the old Vél’ d’Hiv’, demolished in 1959) and the Stade Pierre de Coubertin in the sixteenth arrondissement, to hold over 8,000 French Algerian Muslims arrested after a demonstration organised by the Front de Libération National (FLN) degenerated into violent clashes with the police. See Jean-​Paul Brunet, Police contre FLN: le drame d’octobre 1961 (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), pp. 218–​19. The stadium’s use for incarceration, of course, has not been limited to France; in Chile, General Augosto Pinochet used the Municipal/​National Stadium in Santiago to round up supporters of Salvador Allende in 1972. See Mark Ensalaco, Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 28–​9. The author thanks J. Pablo Silva for the citation. Stadia have also been used in recent years as venues for housing refugees in times of war and natural disaster; examples include using a stadium in Sarajevo as a field hospital for injured Bosnian refugees fleeing ongoing fighting in 1994, the unfortunate use of the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the less chaotic employment of Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego after large-​scale fires in late 2007. For Sarajevo, see Daily Mail, 25 April 1994. 109 As a minor exception to this pattern, the Catholic Marianist movement, Le Grand Retour de Notre-​Dame de Boulogne, staged two rallies at the Stade de Colombes in 1946 that drew (reportedly) 100,000 people. See Louis Pérouas, ‘Le Grand Retour de Notre-​Dame de Boulogne à travers la France (1943–​ 1948): essai de reconstitution’, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 90 (1983): 171–​83. The author thanks Michelle Wing for the citation. Catholic youth organisations sporadically held their rallies and outdoor masses at the

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Parc des Princes, notably in 1950 and 1967, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses held a pan-​European assembly at the Stade de Colombes in 1969. See the index of cinema news clips about the Parc des Princes at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA); see also Guardian, 9 August 1969. 110 L’Humanité, 25 April 1949. L’Humanité also replayed the language of 1936, marvelling at the ‘immense’ stadium, although the Stade Buffalo was increasingly dilapidated and unimpressive in the aftermath of the war. 111 Le Monde, May 29, 1968. The Stade Charléty sits no more than three kilometres from the old Stade Buffalo in Montrouge. By the 1960s, Charléty was best known as the setting for French distance runner Michel Jazy’s greatest races. See Edwin Shrake, ‘Vas-​y, Ja-​zy! And He Went’, Sports Illustrated, 30 August 1965, pp. 32–​41. 112 Jean Lacouture, Pierre Mendès France (Paris: Seuil, 1981), p. 480. 113 Le Monde, 29 May 1968. 114 For the ‘meeting-​concert’ at Charléty in favour of Royal, which featured musical artists ranging from Yannick Noah to Renaud, see Libération, 1 May 2007. As a mild exception to this pattern, the Stade-​Vélodrome in Marseille hosted a demonstration by the anti-​immigrant Front National (FN), attended by roughly 60,000 people, in 1988; the FN was in some ways staging its public validation inside a stadium, in the manner of the PCF in the 1930s. Barthélémy Courmont, ‘L’Inquiétante américanisation de la vie politique française’, Centre d’Etudes Transatlantiques, 17 January 2007, available at: www.centretransatlantique.fr/​pdf/​bct1.pdf (accessed 7 July 2008). 115 See Jose Imbert, ‘Les Stades, leur architecture’, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 3 (1934): 31–41; Bolz, Les Arènes totalitaires, pp. 154–​5, 176. 116 The gestural and symbolic language of mass political spectacle was not exclusive to the stadium: the 1920s and 1930s witnessed plenty of rallies, parades, dedication ceremonies, and public oaths that took place beyond the stade. On the night of 12 July 1936, for instance, 10,000 veterans swore a collective oath at Verdun to defend peace. Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 312. 117 Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People, p. 1. 118 For the Fête de la Fédération, see Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire 1789–​1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 332–​3. 119 The major exception is Nadine Rossol’s analysis of political spectacle under Weimar. See Rossol, Performing the Nation, 1. 120 Simonetta Falasca-​Zamponi draws on Walter Benjamin in her analysis to suggest that the very sensory overload on display in Fascist political ceremonies alienated the individual, while Peter Reichel argues that pyrotechnics, flags, fireworks and spotlights overwhelmed the masses at Nazi rallies and manipulated the crowd into passively supporting the regime. Falasca-​ Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle:  The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1997), p.  13; Reichel, Der schöne Schein, p.  8. George Mosse and Emilio Gentile argue that the individual under Fascism and Nazism was ‘diminished’ by the way that each political

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creed functioned as a ‘secular religion’. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, pp. 1–​4; Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, p. ix. 121 For the idea of a ‘sublime’ created by technological rather than natural spaces, see David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1994), p. xiv. 122 March was responsible for redesigning the Berlin Olympic Stadium in order to accommodate 80,000 spectators before the 1936 Olympic Games. Bolz, Les Arènes totalitaires, p. 256. 123 Karen Petrone argues that public celebrations in the Soviet Union were not simply a diversion from its excesses, but instead stimulated both enthusiasm and estrangement from the regime. Karen Petrone, Life has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000), p. 206. 124 Figuères, Jeunesse Militante, 49–​51; Tous les Sports, 19 July 1941. 125 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, p. 5. 126 Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People, p. 214. 127 Charles-​Edouard Jeanneret-​Gris [Le Corbusier], Des canons, des munitions … Merci! Des logis, S.V.P. (Boulogne: Editions de l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 1938), p. 98. 128 José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1932), p. 17.

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3 Sportsmen or savages? Stadium sport and its spectators, 1900–​60

A record crowd of 25,000 spectators welcomed the first day of 1913 by witnessing an international rugby clash between France and Scotland at the Parc des Princes, on the south-​western edge of Paris. L’Auto described the ‘unimaginable din’ at the entrances to the stadium; the authorities were forced to close the gates to both the cheap standing-​ room section (the populaires) and the main grandstands as ‘not another spectator’ could fit inside the stade.1 But the crowd’s New Year festive mood quickly turned sour during the match itself. When the Scottish side handily defeated the French by 21–​3, the public turned its anger on the English referee, J.  W. Baxter, who appeared to favour the Scots in some of his decisions. At the conclusion of the match, the crowd stormed the field, hoping to lay hands on Baxter. The unfortunate referee was able to escape from the fisticuffs and the canes of spectators to the safety of the dressing rooms, thanks to the timely intervention of police forces on horseback and several burly rugby players. After a half-​hour wait, Baxter fled the vélodrome in the automobile of one of the chief French rugby officials, disappointing the thousands still waiting to inflict further damage upon him. The ‘Match Baxter’, as it came to be known in France, sounded alarm bells for French sports journalists. Le Figaro’s Frantz Reichel defended Baxter, while L’Auto’s editor Henri Desgrange deplored the conduct of the crowd and described the match as the first violent stadium incident on French soil.2 The sporting press and concerned sports authorities also read the Match Baxter as a sign heralding a new kind of sports crowd in France, one that was not comprised of true sportifs or sportsmen, but of enthusiasts who lacked the appropriate knowledge or background to

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understand sport properly. This rhetoric, of course, was a thinly veiled reaction to the influx of working-​class, lower-​middle-​class and (in the case of rugby) rural spectators into French stadia in the decade before the First World War, a phenomenon that only accelerated after 1918. During the interwar period, cycling remained the most popular spectator sporting pastime, drawing huge crowds along the route of the Tour de France and into a handful of vélodromes in Paris and the provinces for track racing year-​round. But football and rugby, too, emerged as true mass spectator sports in their own right, capable of attracting crowds of 40,000 or more for some of the more high-​profile matches: the finals of the Coupe de France football competition, assorted international football tilts and the Five Nations international rugby competition.3 Given relatively small stadia and rudimentary methods of ticket distribution, thousands of spectators were often turned away at the gates on these big occasions.4 Far from rejoicing at the burgeoning popularity of spectator sport, however, sports journalists and officials were troubled by what they deemed to be the undisciplined and violent behaviour of this new sporting public, whose growing prominence seemed to parallel the broader incursion of the masses into public life in the early years of the twentieth century. The promoters of French sport thus sought to ‘improve’ and reshape the crowd, both physically and discursively. As stadia were increasingly built or modified during the interwar period, they were designed to corral and control spectators, through fencing that separated the crowd from the athletes or by segregated seating sections designed to limit spectator movement. At the same time, the sporting press and the mass-​circulation daily newspapers propagated a narrative about ideal spectator behaviour, which urged the public to learn how to impartially appreciate sport for its own merits, suppress any kind of partisan leanings for the teams involved and tolerate the physical rigour of the stadium experience through a process of éducation sportive (sporting education) that would eventually lead to participation in sport. This ‘ideal spectator’ narrative effectively defined spectatorship as a bourgeois male pastime, dismissing other male spectators and female spectators of all classes as irrational, emotional and undisciplined people who could only acquire the necessary knowledge and rational self-​control to behave appropriately inside the stade with difficulty, if indeed at all. However, these physical and rhetorical efforts to redefine the sporting public were continually undermined by the commercial logic of sport itself and the actual practices of spectators inside and outside the stade. The spectator might have been the target of scorn and criticism, but his

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(or more rarely her) attendance proved increasingly necessary for the financial survival of sporting spectacle, whether the sport in question was cycling –​which featured paid professional athletes –​or football or rugby, which were less overtly commercialised but still dependent, at least in part, on gate receipts. The spectators themselves also redefined the crowd experience on their own terms, not on those imposed by journalists or sports administrators; in this regard, they duplicated the behaviour of those spectators at political demonstrations discussed in the previous chapter. No matter how many critical editorials appeared in periodicals like L’Auto or Football, spectators still heckled players and referees, occupied the wrong portions of the stadium or threatened players and other spectators with violence. Faced with a public that resisted physical and rhetorical discipline and that created its own spectator experience, the journalists and sporting impresarios who promoted French sport slowly, and somewhat begrudgingly, came to recognise the crowd, by the 1950s if not earlier, as more than a disorderly collective in need of ‘improvement’, as a less overtly problematic public of consumers which needed to be recruited and accommodated. This chapter thus concentrates on the transformation of spectator sport and its public inside the stadium, from the First World War until the early 1960s. This book has already dealt briefly with anxieties about sporting crowds, in the context of the great ‘stadium crisis’ in 1922; that chapter traced how fears about mass spectatorship as a leisure practice, along with fiscal conservatism, helped doom the grand stade and influenced public policy before and after the 1924 Olympics. But the analysis here, in contrast, looks more closely at the culture of sporting spectatorship itself: the mass media complex that both promoted sporting events and criticised spectators, the tensions and anxieties surrounding the crowd, the strategies developed to deal with the public and the reality of actual spectatorship within the stadium. The stadium not only gave birth to a vibrant set of leisure practices, but proved a prominent and visible forum –​both a physical space and a virtual one, in pages of the press and over the airwaves of the radio –​where French men and women worked through the anxieties inherent to twentieth-​century society that concerned the place of the crowd in public life. Writing the history of the stadium crowd, in the broader context of spectator sport, poses real difficulties not encountered in the previous chapters. One way of writing the history of sporting spectatorship in twentieth-​century France involves focusing on a narrow part of the topic; Marion Fontaine’s masterful analysis of Racing Club de Lens, a professional football club in northern France that eventually became

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synonymous with the miners who flocked to the team’s matches, is the best example of this approach.5 Yet this chapter suggests that the multiple sporting disciplines that attracted a mass public –​football, rugby and cycling on the track and on the roads of the Tour de France –​merit being considered simultaneously, rather than separately or only in small regional case studies. With that approach in mind, this chapter cannot claim to be a comprehensive account of spectatorship or an exhaustive account of events that occurred on a weekly basis over the decades considered here. Methodologically, it is forced to rely on the portraits of spectatorship that emerged in the mass media and from club publications, given the difficulties of finding and using oral accounts from the spectators who attended sporting events nearly a century ago. Nor does it claim to follow in the footsteps of recent scholarship on football supporters, in particular, which tends to offer sweeping sociological models and explanations for why the crowd behaved as it did, even as that scholarship cautions the reader to consider the crowd as a complex, variegated entity.6 Instead, this c­ hapter –​along with Chapter 4, which considers discussions of spectatorship as they related to place-​based communities and identities –​concentrates on the slightly more tangible questions of how spectatorship evolved over time, and what spectatorship appeared to mean to French men and women both in terms of how it was discussed and perceived and (as best one can tell by reading the existing sources critically) what it meant as a practice during the first half of the twentieth century.

The rhythms and structures of French interwar sport By the time of the Match Baxter, some of the sporting events that would come to define French sport throughout the twentieth century had already been created, while other competitions and the institutions that shaped French sport would emerge soon thereafter. On the cycling front, the Tour de France (created in 1903), the Paris Six-​Day bicycle races (an indoor track event dating to 1913 where teams of two riders alternated in racing over the course of six days) and many one-​day outdoor road races like Paris–​Tours or Bordeaux–​Paris predated the outbreak of the First World War. As for rugby and football, the French national rugby team first joined the Five Nations tournament against England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales in 1910; international football matches began in 1904 with a draw against Belgium in Brussels.7 By the end of the First World War, the Coupe de France  –​a single-​elimination football tournament that would attract huge crowds by the end of the interwar period –​had

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also seen the light of day. The immediate postwar period then witnessed the formal creation of the governing bodies for French football and rugby: the French football federation (the Fédération Française de Football Association, or FFFA) and the French rugby federation (the Fédération Française de Rugby, or FFR) both came into existence in 1919. The only significant changes to the rhythms and structures of French cycling, football and rugby during the remainder of the interwar period came in the early 1930s. Football added a managed form of professionalism in 1932, while amateur rugby union received a stiff challenge from an overtly professional variant, thirteen-​man rugby (known as rugby league in Great Britain), between 1934 and the outbreak of the Second World War. By the early 1930s, French sporting enthusiasts could attend a wide variety of events over the course of the year. Cycling was, of course, the sporting constant: its outdoor season ran from April to September and featured both track races and road cycling events that frequently finished within the confines of vélodromes like the Parc des Princes. Cycling continued indoors from October to late March. Football and rugby, the two other principal spectator sports with a seasonally based calendar, followed parallel schedules: both began their regular club seasons in August and terminated in April or May. Football also featured the single-​elimination Coupe de France, which climaxed in April or May with the final at the Stade de Colombes, while the biggest domestic rugby match tended to be the finale of the regular-​season championship, usually played in Bordeaux or Toulouse. International football matches dotted the calendar in the autumn and the spring, alongside international club exhibition matches, such as the annual November ‘friendly’ around the time of Armistice Day between Racing Club de Paris and the English club Arsenal, a tradition which began in 1930 at Colombes and continued until 1962.8 The primary international matches for rugby, the Five Nations tournament, took place between January and March. Other competitions in smaller arenas also dotted the calendar, from tennis (notably the Internationaux de France at the Roland-​Garros tennis facility on the west side of Paris in the spring) to regular boxing matches to auto races and other novelty events, depending on the season. While all of these were ‘spectator’ events, they were not always envisioned as commercial propositions designed to make money for their promoters. Boxing and cycling, of course, were unambiguously commercialised spectacles, where organisers paid the competitors; as a result, the competitions were subject to the state tax on ‘spectacles’ and the so-​called droit des pauvres, a tax levied for the benefit of the indigent.9 Football

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and rugby, however, were more ambiguous. The clubs that competed in football and rugby competitions were formed in compliance with the associational law of 1901, which explicitly barred them from making commercial activity their primary function.10 Even after a managed form of football professionalism was introduced in 1932, clubs remained subject to this law, which put a damper on their ability to promote themselves and pay players. Some businessmen or local notables who sponsored football and rugby clubs did so with an eye towards other considerations, such as ensuring social harmony among their employees or solidifying the links of their enterprises to the local community.11 This form of company paternalism was particularly pronounced in the case of the Football Club de Sochaux-​Montbéliard in eastern France, founded by automobile manufacturer Jean-​Pierre Peugeot in 1928; it was also evident in Lens, where the local mining company, the Compagnie des Mines de Lens, became closely linked with the local club, Racing Club de Lens, after 1933. Other businessmen involved in promoting football, in particular, included Henri Jooris, a brewing magnate (and long-​time vice-​president of the FFFA) who presided over Olympique Lillois in Lille from 1919 to 1932, and Geoffroy Guichard, the owner of the Casino supermarket chain, who was the patron of AS Saint-​Etienne.12 These entrepreneur-​owners also constructed private stadia, such as the Stade Geoffroy Guichard in Saint-​Etienne, inaugurated in 1931; the Stade Félix Bollaert in Lens, as another example, was built by the mining owners in 1932 for physical fitness and gymnastics displays, but was later expanded for the use of Racing Club de Lens.13 What unified the distinct kinds of sporting spectacle on offer, however, was the role of the sporting press in creating, promoting and analysing it for a mass audience. Without question, the dominant voice in the sporting press belonged to a former cyclist and law clerk named Henri Desgrange, who came to control a veritable sporting empire alongside Jacques Goddet, the son of his early business partner Victor Goddet, by the time of his death in 1940. Desgrange and Goddet père gained control of the new Parc des Princes vélodrome in 1897; Desgrange then became the editor of the nascent sports newspaper L’Auto-​Vélo (later shortened to L’Auto) in 1900. Desgrange and his newspaper, in turn, started the Tour de France as a gambit to promote L’Auto’s circulation in 1903. Finally, Victor Goddet and Desgrange also created an indoor cycling arena, the Vélodrome d’Hiver (or Vél’ d’Hiv’) which opened its doors near the Quai de Grenelle on the Left Bank of the Seine in the seventh arrondissement, in early 1910.14 After the First World War, the sporting empire of L’Auto, Tour de France, Parc des Princes and Vél’ d’Hiv’ expanded its influence.

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Desgrange and Victor Goddet negotiated a new forty-​year lease on the Parc des Princes with the city of Paris in 1924, and then proceeded seven years later to renovate the facility extensively. They expanded its seating capacity, improved the facilities for rugby and football, and also installed a spectacular pink cement cycling track that remained the Parc’s hallmark for nearly four decades.15 The Parc thus became the most-​utilised large stadium in Paris, hosting weekly football matches for Racing Club or Stade Français and occasional Coupe de France matches, as well as regular outdoor track cycling races and the finish for the Tour de France and other road cycling events like Bordeaux–​Paris. The Vélodrome d’Hiver was also modernised in 1931 in an effort to function more effectively as a spectator space, at the impetus of an American entrepreneur named Jeff Dickson, who persuaded Jacques Goddet (by now the successor to his father) to revamp the arena in the manner of Madison Square Garden in New York City. Under Dickson, the unsightly metal support pillars inside the Vél’ d’Hiv’ were removed to improve the view for spectators, and an ice rink was installed underneath the cycling track to accommodate ice hockey and figure skating exhibitions. As a result, during the 1930s, the Vél’ d’Hiv’ hosted everything from the annual Six-​Day bicycle races (promoted by L’Auto) to a hotchpotch of other events from boxing and wrestling to ice hockey and performances by Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie.16 L’Auto, of course, did not have complete control over sporting spectacle in France, let  alone in the Parisian basin, although its main rival as a newspaper and sporting promoter, L’Echo des Sports, was really not much of a direct competitor. Directed by Victor Breyer, L’Echo had a key operating interest in the Stade-​Buffalo, the third largest stadium in Paris (after the Olympic stadium at Colombes and the Parc) during the interwar period. Built in 1922 just outside the southern fringe of Paris in Montrouge, the Buffalo hosted boxing galas, isolated football matches (including the first night game on French soil in 1926), thirteen-​man rugby competitions and a smattering of bicycle races, all promoted by L’Echo des Sports.17 Those events notwithstanding, Breyer’s newspaper leased its office space from L’Auto, could only boast a small circulation and appeared intermittently rather than regularly throughout the period. Moreover, the Buffalo’s events were distinctly second-​tier in comparison to those at the Parc des Princes and were less guaranteed to draw a sizeable crowd. In any event, L’Echo des Sports merely added its voice to the full-​ throated chorus in the pages of L’Auto that promoted sport directly and that mediated the experience of sporting spectatorship for the French

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men and women who read about competitions in its pages. In terms of its direct reach, L’Auto attracted a loyal and steady portion of the newspaper-​reading public:  its average daily press run increased from 162,000 copies in 1920 to an interwar high of 360,000 in 1933.18 During the month of July (and the Tour de France), however, L’Auto’s readership roughly doubled: L’Auto hit an all-​time high-​water mark of 845,000 daily issues in July 1933, for Frenchman Georges Spreicher’s Tour de France victory.19 While L’Auto’s daily readership decreased to 164,000 by 1939, much of that readership had been siphoned off by newspapers that it had influenced and that now prioritised sports. Paris-​Soir, which boasted the highest circulation of any daily newspaper by the end of the interwar period (with 1.7 million readers in Paris and the provinces), featured a considerable amount of sports reporting and photography in its pages and was directed by a sports editor –​Gaston Bénac –​who had been the longtime rugby correspondent for L’Auto throughout the 1920s.20 Furthermore, other L’Auto staff writers frequently doubled as sports correspondents for other papers throughout the interwar period, writing for the daily press as well as specialised weekly publications such as Le Miroir des Sports.21 Even without direct help from L’Auto’s staff writers, sport occupied an increasingly prominent place in the columns of daily newspapers. After 1929, too, print journalists also pioneered radio broadcasts of key sporting events, notably the Tour de France.22 The world of French sport during the interwar period thus encompassed a range of spectator-​oriented competitions from the overly professional (boxing, cycling and later football) to officially ‘amateur’ contests (rugby and lower division football) to other pursuits like tennis and horse racing. It was also profoundly shaped by a mass media complex, with L’Auto at its centre, that controlled many of the spaces for sport, organised some of the competitions within those spaces and promoted all of them, and mediated the spectator experience for hundreds of thousands of French readers. And as sporting spectacle attracted increasing numbers of spectators, that public became an object of attention and concern.

The mass crowd and its discontents The sporting public manifested itself in greatest numbers for cycling, rugby and football, in crowds that ranged from 15,000 at the Vél’ d’Hiv’ to 30,000 at the Buffalo and 40,000 at the Parc des Princes for cycling and football to 50,000 for international rugby and the Coupe de France at Colombes. By the end of the 1930s, crowds in the provinces could

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reach 30,000 people in Bordeaux and Marseille and 20,000 in Reims and Le Havre. By and large, the crowds for football and track cycling everywhere were clearly imagined as being comprised of workers and lower-​middle-​class employés, as a series of cartoons that ran in L’Auto in 1921 clearly indicates (Figures  5 and 6).23 In the press, the image of the Stade de Colombes –​the de facto national stadium –​during a grand match of football was that of mass society in all of its earthy splendour. In 1930, Football (a weekly periodical published by the FFFA) poetically described the Coupe de France final as a spectacle typical of democracy. The crowd of 35,000 people, it argued, were all anonymous common folk and the twenty-​two players were humble gars du peuple (regular guys). These designations, of course, merit being nuanced; while roughly two-​ thirds of the places at Colombes were standing-​room spaces in the virages (the curved ends of the stadium) costing eight or ten francs, the most expensive loge seats in the covered grandstands cost over forty francs, well beyond the normal budget of most Frenchmen.24 Furthermore, not all of the players were likely gars du peuple; quite a few football clubs (professional or otherwise) retained a core of players with middle-​class origins in the 1930s.25 Nonetheless, the dominant narrative about football, rugby and cycling crowds was that they represented the mass public in interwar France. When President Gaston Doumergue appeared at the stade, he was thus reaching out to the masses in a ‘democratic’ fashion.26 Although neither Doumergue nor any other president was selected by direct popular suffrage under the Third Republic, his stadium appearances were clearly Doumergue’s way of endearing himself to the people he indirectly represented. The mass public at the Parc des Princes or Colombes or, for that matter, alongside the route of the Tour de France, was frequently depicted as ‘festive’ and ‘natural’. In this benignly Rabelaisian vision of the crowd, the latter might be disorderly and rambunctious at times, but was invariably good-​humoured. For the rugby final between teams from Bayonne and Toulouse in 1922, held at the Stade Sainte-​Germaine in Bordeaux, the crowds flooded the stadium as soon as the gates were opened at 10 a.m. The 20,000 spectators picnicked and waited in increasingly high spirits for the arrival of the two teams; when AS Bayonne and Stade Toulousain took the field around 1.30  p.m., the ‘human tide’ of the crowd extended almost to the touchlines of the field, in ‘good humour’ despite its long wait.27 Foreign observers commented on the festive aspect of spectatorship too. The Manchester Guardian described the ‘huge and enthusiastic holiday crowd’ that attended the France–​Wales international rugby match in 1928, with ‘great excitement’

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5  Cartoon portrait of football spectators, 1921.

6  Cartoon portrait of track cycling spectators, 1921.

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at the conclusion of the match and ‘frantic’ cheering for the victorious French.28 Beyond the stadium, the same depictions of the festive crowd resurfaced every July, during the Tour de France. When the Tour made its way through town (or the countryside), the press depicted its passage as the occasion for a local holiday. For instance, the crowd that welcomed the 1932 Tour on the northern stage between Malo-​les-​Bains and Amiens was comprised in part of miners who had taken the day off as an undeclared vacation, picnicking, dancing and generally celebrating the arrival of the race.29 But it was only a small step from carnivalesque festivity to disruptive and disorderly chaos, whether inside the stadium for football, rugby and cycling or along the roadsides of the Tour.30 Four months prior to that 1922 Bayonne–​Toulouse rugby final in Bordeaux, the France–​Scotland rugby match at the Stade de Colombes had been the scene of violent incidents. As Géo Lefebvre described the action in L’Auto, ‘boxing matches’ and fights erupted throughout the stadium between spectators jammed into overly crowded sections. When the two teams entered the stadium for the contest, the spectators were busy fighting among themselves and spilling onto the field after demolishing the barriers that separated them from the pitch.31 A decade later, Le Miroir des Sports emphasised this possible mutation from the festive to the violent in its account of the Coupe de France final between Sète and Marseille at the Stade de Colombes, when spectators fought each other and security officials for a place in the grandstands. Several hundred energetic sportsmen, among the 10,000 people condemned to remain outside, launched an assault on the grandstands in the virages after having battled the forces of order [police], penetrated then onto the track and the flanks of the field, when the iron barrier collapsed under their pressure. One can well guess that everything did not pass without damage; roughly fifteen people, bruised or semi-​suffocated, were treated at the infirmary; a woman who had been trampled had to be taken to the hospital. Finally, the spectacle of a little girl with a bloody face, carried to the emergency first-​aid station at the stadium, emotionally rattled the crowd; happily, the cut was superficial and there was more fear than harm.32

In this example, the crowd’s exuberance and enthusiasm for the match, along with a stadium that could not accommodate all of the spectators who had purchased tickets, led directly to violence. While the spectators here did not attack the referee, as they did at the conclusion of the Match Baxter, their desire to merely attend the game was a disruptive and disorderly act.

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The potential for disruptive spectatorship was, of course, also present at the Tour de France and was sometimes exacerbated by the proximity of spectators to the riders. Save for the disastrous 1904 edition of the race, when ruffians attacked the riders at night near Saint-​Etienne in an attempt to make their local champion win, the disorder was mostly born of enthusiasm for the race itself.33 Yet Tour organisers found themselves relatively powerless to keep the crowd off the road and to prevent minor acts of undisciplined spectatorship like the general chaos at stage finishes in 1910 (at Nîmes) or 1911 (at Perpignan).34 Overenthusiastic crowds also marred the stage finish in Metz in 1932 and 1937 and in Marseille in 1939, to cite three other incidents among many.35 The overarching explanation floated by the sporting press for this apparent propensity for disorder  –​whatever the venue  –​was that the French crowd lacked the requisite ‘sporting education’ to behave properly in a mass setting. As this book has already noted, the organisers of the 1924 Olympics were alarmed by the partisan behaviour of French spectators at rugby matches, but the discomfort with the crowd extended to L’Auto and other newspapers with mass readership. For L’Auto, rugby and football were the victims of their own success: the masses had not had time to follow a step-​by-​step process of sporting evolution. Neophyte spectators expressed ignorant and partisan sentiments without the least hesitation.36 Even if those new spectators were to eventually become ‘calm and reasonable’ sportsmen, L’Auto feared that they would be replaced by another batch of ignorant sportifs in even larger numbers. The task of educating the crowd would therefore be a perpetual process as more and more people flocked to stadia to watch sporting events.37 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, then, the journalists who covered French sport, who were very often the same people who organised spectator sporting events, attempted to prevent scenes like the chaotic Sète–​Marseille final, disorder alongside the route of the Tour, or even a repeat of the Match Baxter by regulating the physical environment of the stadium or the roadside and by creating a narrative about disciplined, well-​mannered spectatorship that they hoped the public would internalise. On the physical level, stadia quickly evolved into segregated spaces that constrained spectators to sit in particular sections based on their type of ticket.38 In response to repeated field invasions, where the crowd swarmed onto the pitch during or after a match, sports authorities like Frantz Reichel argued in the late 1920s that fencing (grillage) separating the grandstands from the field needed to be installed or reinforced if already present. Football acknowledged that some sportsmen might feel insulted by fencing, but it concluded that the majority of the public

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needed to be kept behind the wire barriers for the time being, as ‘universal disarmament’ was more likely than a public that behaved perfectly.39 In the case of the Tour de France, the race stages frequently finished on the track of local vélodromes up through the 1960s, depending on their local availability. This deployment of the stadium was partially due to the fact that a vélodrome finish allowed organisers to stage ‘waiting meetings’ (réunions d’attente), track cycling events on the very piste where the Tour’s riders would soon sprint out the finish, and for which admission could be charged. But vélodromes were also used because they segregated the space of the finish more effectively; crowd-​control barriers were inherently better at holding back the public than any temporary installations around a city square or on the open road.40 In the mind of French sports officials and journalists, there was a direct link between disciplined space and disciplined behaviour. Indeed, the sporting press habitually complained that French spectators needed to adapt to the cramped conditions of the stade in order to maximise the number of people who could attend any given match. In 1924, for instance, L’Auto lamented that the crowd at the final match of the Olympic football tournament between Switzerland and Uruguay at the Stade de Colombes was not nearly as large as organisers had hoped, because the crowd had not sufficiently compressed itself in the standing-​ room virages. The French public, the newspaper opined, needed to learn how to better fit within the designated space of the stadium.41 In a related vein, when Parisian officials debated a proposal by Henri Desgrange to modify the Parc des Princes in 1936, the chief architect lamented that the capacity of the stadium would be less than an identically sized space in Great Britain, because only four French spectators could realistically be expected to fit into a square metre, compared with six per square metre in Britain, not because the French were on average larger than the British, but because they were less willing to squeeze together inside the stade.42 While the stadium space, in this sense, was a disciplinary space designed to corral and contain spectators, journalists and sports officials also campaigned for the sporting education of the public inside the stadium.43 This éducation sportive, on one level, consisted of teaching the uninformed crowd the rules of rugby or football. For L’Auto and its counterparts, spectator ignorance of the basic rules of the game was a chief cause of disorderly behaviour within the stade. As one of countless examples, the regional newspaper Midi Olympique bashed the public at a match between Toulouse Olympique and Narbonne in February 1932 for ‘once more demonstrating its complete ignorance of the code of rugby’.44

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Beyond learning the rules, éducation sportive also entailed the spectator’s acquisition of a particular code of conduct inside the stadium. The ideal spectator, according to the dominant narrative, was able to control his (or more rarely her) emotions and remain self-​disciplined at all times. Writing in 1934 in Football, in the wake of ‘aggravating incidents’ concerning spectators, Maurice Pefferkorn argued that a ‘good public’ had to be passionate (chaud) and emotionally invested in a match, but also needed to be fair and even-​handed.45 Therefore, a ‘good public’ had the duty to not intervene in the match by criticising the referee or, even worse, attacking him physically. Moreover, the ideal crowd needed to maintain the (arbitrary) distinction between sport and politics in the arena, a comment apparently directed at either working-​class spectators who might sympathise with the PCF or with Italian expatriates who were either pro-​or anti-​Fascist. Pefferkorn concluded that the culture of spectatorship, if properly instilled in the spectating masses, would help spread classe and tenue (class and proper bearing or behaviour) to the public inside the stade.46 Journalists were not the only people to articulate this narrative of sporting education, which was also voiced by those businessmen whose football clubs (like Racing Club de Lens) were paternalist enterprises designated to promote worker loyalty. In Lens, as Marion Fontaine relates, the mining engineer Louis Brossard, who served as club president from the 1930s until 1957, adopted with the players and spectators a ‘tone that was at once hail-​fellow-​well-​met, paternal and moralising’, which was no doubt also ‘his tone when he addressed the miners’.47 Fontaine also notes that the first ‘supporter club’ in Lens, the Supporter Club Lensois, was primarily an elite group of spectators intent on differentiating themselves from the mass of others in the crowd. To that end, they too attempted to discipline the mass public, critiquing those who yelled at the referee or who entered the arena without a ticket.48 When they were not actively criticising those French crowds that failed to display the proper degree of ‘sporting education’, the proponents of the ideal spectator narrative praised any and all signs that the public was becoming more disciplined and orderly. In 1926, Football lauded the crowd at the France–​Switzerland international football match for its stoicism as it huddled under the main grandstands of the Stade de Colombes throughout a torrential rainstorm.49 After the rugby championship final in May 1928, Le Midi Sportif lavished high praise on the 25,000 enthusiastic, knowledgeable and disciplined spectateurs who packed Toulouse’s Stade des Ponts-​Jumeaux. Despite their reputation as hotheads, the supporters of Pau and Quillan behaved so well (both during the match and

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during the long process of entering and exiting the stadium) that they set a ‘new standard for crowd behaviour’.50 The organisers of the Tour de France did the same thing: L’Auto cheered the public in Bordeaux in 1924, which proved both enthusiastic and disciplined, and ‘intelligently obeyed’ the ‘imposing’ police forces.51 And, in 1936, L’Auto rejoiced at the discipline and the ‘progress’ of the crowd atop the Col du Galibier in 1936: no one (it quite inaccurately claimed) gave the riders a push up the climb, a common behaviour in earlier days.52 French journalists also looked across the English Channel to offer models of disciplined spectatorship. As Chapter 4 will discuss in depth, L’Auto, Le Miroir des Sports, Football and the rest of the sporting press continually idealised British crowds as well-​informed, disciplined and deferential collectives. French observers who attributed crowd misbehaviour to a lack of ‘bearing and class’ were continually amazed that the spectators in Great Britain understood sport more profoundly than their counterparts in France, even though the British football crowd was seen by the French as solidly proletarian.53 The sporting press in France suggested that crowds in Great Britain, already imbued with ‘Anglo-​Saxon’ calm, understood the action on the field better than the French because they (the British) played sports themselves. ‘When nine out of ten spectators are themselves former participants,’ wrote Football in 1926, ‘the question [of éducation sportive] is not only simplified, it is resolved.’54 In contrast, French crowds lacked the experience to watch a match properly and continually demonstrated their ‘bad humour’ towards the referee, the opposing team or even their own players.55 If the British crowds were one model, French elites in the grandstands served as another source of inspiration for the sporting press and other sports officials. As early as 1914, city and prefectural officials received invitations to certain sporting events in Paris; all councillors for the Conseil Général de la Seine and the Conseil Municipal de Paris, for instance, were granted an entry card for the 1914 cycling Grand Prix de Paris at the Vélodrome Municipal.56 They were hardly the only politicians to attend important sporting events; Doumergue inaugurated the trend of presidential attendance at the Coupe de France final in 1927. His successor Albert Lebrun continued the uninterrupted series of presidential visits, attending his eighth final in April 1940.57 The official presence of the president and other influential officials in the tribune d’honneur (honour grandstand), particularly at the cup final or international rugby and football matches, valorised spectatorship in the eyes of L’Auto and other newspapers, as it gave the public clear proof that the most politically and socially important people in France knew how to behave appropriately

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inside the stadium.58 Moreover, it connected spectatorship, at least implicitly, to membership in a shared republican political community, in an echo of the overt politicisation of spectators at Herriot’s gymnastics festivals in Lyon or Popular Front era demonstrations. All of these narratives about crowd behaviour  –​whether lamenting a lack of sporting education, praising tentative progress or holding up models of ideal behaviour –​functioned as a response to the prominence of the crowd in public life in France after the First World War, but also contained a powerful call for obedience and deference. They attempted to force the recalcitrant masses to heed the advice and authority of ‘experts’, whether they resided in the tribune d’honneur, officiated on the field, penned columns for the sporting press or ran a mine and a professional football club concurrently.59 On one hand, this was a relatively conservative vision of the qualities of the public, one later espoused by right-​wing political groups like François de la Rocque’s PSF. It was a perspective that was heavily indebted to Gustave Le Bon, who saw crowds as tractable masses easily swayed by sensitive leaders and elites, but also as entities capable of carrying out violence if not properly kept to heel.60 On the other hand, this vision of the crowd was not exclusively influenced by Le Bon and his admirers; it also incorporated an old-​fashioned nineteenth-​ century liberal emphasis on self-​improvement that suggested that individuals themselves comprised the crowd and could make it more than an anonymous mass through their own acquisition of éducation sportive. In a sense, then, the whole proscriptive narrative about the stadium public was alarmist and apprehensive, yet optimistic enough to chart a path forward that envisioned the creation of a disciplined, deferential public of sportsmen who hailed from more humble origins than the pioneers of the early twentieth century. Yet the very insistence on the necessity of internalising a code of appropriate behaviour, coupled with continuing evidence for countering trends, suggests another story. The image of spectatorship as set of acquired behaviours and skills was perpetually subverted by both the spectators, who developed their own practices inside the lived space of the stadium that circumvented the discursive and physical limits of ideal spectatorship, and the pragmatic fiscal need for organisers to cover their expenses. To generalise broadly, the French public proved hardly impartial inside the stadium, when it made it there in the first place. Erratic attendance at most regular-​season rugby and football matches aggravated the sporting press enormously. Fickle spectators not only deprived teams of necessary gate money, but also proved what the sporting press feared: all too few spectators appreciated sport for sport’s sake.

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Instead, they (spectators) were drawn only to the big matches, such as international tilts or cup finals, to the detriment of weekly club fixtures. ‘It suffices,’ wrote Le Miroir des Sports, for the ‘magical virtue of the international formula’ to assure the success of a rugby match.61 Moreover, the French public was also chastised for its desire to only support winning teams. The FFFA’s general secretary Henri Delaunay lamented in 1937 that the public ‘demands that its team be victorious. It wants its team to be at the head of the league tables, otherwise it does not bother itself, it does not come to the stadium to watch them play.’62 In terms of behaviour and comportment, crowds at spectator sporting events also developed a series of particularly partisan behaviours. While the relationship between spectatorship and narratives about place-​based identity and community is the subject of the next chapter, one should note here that organised support for specific teams institutionalised itself on a small scale throughout the 1920s with the development of ‘supporter’ groups, notably in the northern industrial areas near Germany and Belgium. These groups like the Supporter Club Lensois facilitated intercity travel for important matches and helped integrate the club within the local community, even as they remained (in their early incarnations) somewhat critical of the spectating masses.63 Beyond supporter groups, the actual practice of spectatorship inside the stadium at most rugby or football matches was an engaged, active process that involved chanting, cheering and other behaviours that earned the opprobrium of the press.64 Marion Fontaine has quite rightly noted that spectatorship (both in Lens and elsewhere in France) was, up until the 1970s, characterised by ‘passionate reactions’ and ‘excitement’, but was not as ‘ostentatious’ and visible as the organised spectator demonstrations of a later era or (perhaps) of contemporary crowds in Great Britain.65 That observation notwithstanding, yelling insults or witticisms at the players or referee –​for instance, what Patrick Mignon has described as the behaviour of the ‘ironically’ detached French spectator –​appeared to be common practice even as the sporting press did its best to discourage such behaviour.66 As but one example noted in Lyon-​Sport, a wit in the stands for a 1932 rugby match between Narbonne and Toulon in Lyon mocked a particularly corpulent player whose jersey was torn by demanding that he (the player) put on a brassiere.67 Nor did spectators refrain from injecting ‘politics’ into the stadium; in addition to the attempted PCF protest at the Stade Buffalo in 1929, discussed in Chapter  2, the 1938 World Cup also brought out displays of anti-​fascist hostility from spectators at the quarter-​final match between France and Italy at the Stade de Colombes, when some spectators reportedly threw coal at the Italians,

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and in Marseille, when other spectators whistled during the playing of ‘Giovinezza’, the Fascist hymn.68 In the context of the Tour de France, the behaviour of the crowd proved similarly disruptive: all of the praise for crowd discipline amounted to little more than whistling into the wind, as spectators continued to get uncomfortably close to riders, pushed them up climbs and milled about at the finish, despite the pleadings of the race organisers.69 Another kind of resistance to the process of éducation sportive arose when individuals tried to evade or subvert the normal process of gaining access to the stadium –​a ticket purchased through appropriate official channels or a place as a visiting dignitary in the tribune d’honneur. Sports authorities and journalists repeatedly fumed that ticket-​reselling and counterfeiting blighted important matches, and the FFFA (as one example) seemed powerless to do anything about the situation.70 The issue of resquillage  –​where spectators gatecrashed and entered the stadium without a ticket at all  –​was another means of challenging the normal and approved means of purchasing a place in the stadium. Throughout the interwar period, the resquilleur was a stock figure who populated the pages of the sporting press and was even the subject of a 1930 film by Pierre Colombier, Le Roi des Resquilleurs (The King of the Gatecrashers), which turned him into the subject of a mistaken-​identity farce.71 Despite the amusement which these stories generated, the inability of sports officials to adequately control the process by which fans purchased a ticket and obtained a seat led to scenes like the January 1937 France–​Austria football match at the Parc des Princes, where thousands of legitimate ticket holders could not enter the stadium because seats in the stadium had already been occupied, some by spectators with fake tickets and some by members of the public (it was alleged) without tickets at all.72 Crowds most dramatically defied the rhetorical injunctions towards appropriate conduct and physical constraints on their behaviour by claiming spaces of the stadium that were not intended for them or through overtly violent behaviour. In some cases, movement within the  stadium was limited to the relatively benign rush of spectators for the main grandstand after the match to catch sight of the players and the dignitaries as they departed. On other occasions, however, movement within the stadium was nearly always connected to extracurricular violence in the stands or on the pitch. The image of the pugilistic, violent crowd was normally associated with rugby and even more precisely with southern France, where reports of fights between players and spectators or between spectators themselves circulated frequently.73 Spectator violence, in this case, came to be associated with an anti-​modern provincial identity and the overriding need for

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small-​town spectators to see their local champions prevail on the pitch. As one dramatic example, Midi Olympique blamed the 1930 on-​field death of Michel Pradié, an eighteen-​year-​old forward from Agen, not on the opposing player (Jean Taillantou) who hit him with a late tackle, but on a public which prized victory above all other outcomes and thus drove the players to violent conduct.74 In fairness, spectator violence was exaggerated by the press, which wasted few opportunities to criticise crowd misbehaviour. The vast majority of matches undoubtedly passed without serious incident.75 But, violence on the field and in the grandstands was not completely imaginary and was one of the reasons (alongside tensions over tacit professionalism in France) why rugby’s ‘Home Nations’ of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland broke off relations with the French at the end of the Five Nations tournament in 1931.76 All of these kinds of spectator behaviours, from indifferent attendance to partisan enthusiasm to ticket evasion to violence, seemed to persist throughout the 1930s, no matter how ardently the press kept up its drumbeat of criticism. Spectatorship, as sports officials and journalists found, did not imbue the mass crowd with ‘class’ and ‘bearing’. Instead, the mass crowd resisted attempts to ‘improve’ it or make it behave in ways more acceptable to the press that, to a certain extent, depended on those very spectators for its existence. The quest to create a disciplined, knowledgeable sporting public thus remained perpetually a work in progress, in the same way that French political parties of all stripes persistently chased after an elusive society without divisions, what contemporary commentators called a ‘partial community of thought’ during the interwar period.77 At the same time, too, the constant handwringing over spectator behaviour or the comportment of the masses in a highly public and visible space was still counterbalanced by the reality that spectators were necessary for the financial survival, if not outright profitability, of sport, from the overtly professional cycling or football (post-​1932) to amateur rugby. Sport was not always a lucrative proposition:  in the early days of professionalism, for instance, the organisers of the football club Olympique Lillois complained that they were losing over 60 per cent of their revenue generated by gate money to taxes, insurance and covering the travel costs incurred by the other team.78 Even the sporting empire of L’Auto did not always thrive, particularly during the Depression. Desgrange repeatedly asked the city of Paris for a reduction of the Parc des Princes’s rent throughout the 1930s, arguing that the facility could not make a profit.79 And the Vél d’Hiv’, for all the success of the Six-​Day bicycle races and

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boxing matches, never recouped enough money for Jeff Dickson to pay off all the debts incurred during the 1931 renovations.80 The spectator, however inappropriately he (and more rarely she) behaved, was thus important, if only for the sake of gate receipts and fiscal solvency. At the same time that the sporting press and others criticised the mass spectator, sport itself began to make accommodations to a newer public. The FFFA, for instance, gradually realised that spectators would not pay to watch mediocre football in the relative discomfort of the average stadium. After the advent of professionalism in 1932, Football’s Gabriel Hanot acknowledged that poorly performing teams drew small crowds and that clubs needed to put a better product on the field if they wanted to attract a sizeable audience.81 Little by little, the public emerged as a collective of paying customers with certain prerogatives, particularly the right to be informed. As early as 1926, L’Auto’s Gaston Bénac noted that the public (and the press) had the ‘right to know’ what was happening during the match and about the players involved.82 Informing spectators about the players via blackboard, numbered jerseys or (increasingly) a loudspeaker became an established practice by the end of the 1920s.83 While this was arguably a small concession to the public, it nonetheless served as an admission that the spectator could not always be expected to stoically endure the stadium experience, but needed to be accommodated as a consumer as much as a potential sportsman. Thus, journalists and sporting officials railed against ‘undisciplined’ spectators at the same time that those very masses were being accommodated inside the stadium, in an early acknowledgement of their power as consumers. This was, in short, a highly public process of working through contradictory responses to the prominence of the masses in interwar society, one that simultaneously witnessed attempts to reshape and control the crowd and to accommodate it on its own terms. Still, it was one thing to grapple with the presence of working-​class and lower-​middle-​class male spectators: it was quite another to deal with the presence of women inside the stade. The narrative of éducation sportive presented a fundamentally gendered vision of the crowd, as it associated spectatorship with a specifically masculine form of self-​discipline. No doubt in response to anxieties about gender relations that became more pressing after 1918, the female spectator was ridiculed and dismissed as ignorant, irrational and physically incapable of properly participating inside the stade. And yet, the very persistence of the criticisms of female spectators, which paralleled tentative efforts to attract women as customers to the stadium, again reflected the reality that a truly mass-​spectating public was emerging in interwar France.

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Resolving the problem of the spectatrice It cannot be disputed that spectatorship in the interwar French stadium was largely a male practice. The spectators at cycling and football matches in the cartoons that L’Auto serialised in 1921 were all men; photos of the Stade de Colombes, the Stade Buffalo or the Parc des Princes on any given match day also make it clear that the stadium was predominantly a male space. The only stadium-​based sport that appeared to attract a sizeable percentage of female spectators was tennis, where the crowds were much smaller and were composed of relatively well-​to-​do French men and women. Yet women were not completely absent from football and rugby matches:  accounts of the most high-​profile events like the Coupe de France final or the rugby championships invariably described the ‘feminine elements’ that added colour and gaiety to the official grandstands.84 At the local level, as Marion Fontaine notes, the football stadium was a masculine world, but still had a slightly ‘familial’ air to it, given the presence of women who were usually the wives or fiancées of male spectators.85 Other evidence from Spain and Germany suggests that, while women were always in the minority, they comprised as much as a quarter of the crowd in San Sebastian for early twentieth-​century football matches, and a visible part of the public in Berlin for boxing events.86 But, if women were empirically outnumbered in the tribunes, they certainly occupied a prominent place in the discussions about spectatorship. Male sportswriters universally mocked women as ignorant, emotional and superficial spectators. In one example, Le Miroir des Sports published a piece in mid-​1936 ridiculing the inability of a female spectator in Avignon to distinguish between rugby and football, but noted that her ignorant comments ‘strike us by their spontaneity, and amuse us by their noble candour’.87 The very idea of women as ‘experts’ in sport was clearly a ludicrous one in this context. When Maurice Pefferkorn wrote a tongue-​in-​cheek column in Football suggesting that women be trained as referees, so that men would feel it impossible to heckle them or challenge their authority out of chivalrous politeness, its title  –​‘Scènes de la vie future, ou l’école des femmes’ –​ made the prospect sound as ludicrously far-​fetched and improbable as flying cars.88 Female spectators were not only ignorant, according to the prevailing narrative, but also only attended matches because of their romantic infatuation with the handsome male athletes on display inside the stade. Unable to appreciate sport for its intrinsic values, women focused on the players themselves. In one example, a 1934 Football column entitled ‘Sex Appeal’ (in English) described the behaviour of a female spectator

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inside the Stade Victor-​Boucquey in Lille. As half-​time was whistled, several spectators –​including a ‘gentle spectatrice’ –​seemed to be heading towards the main exit. Asked if she was leaving, ‘Mademoiselle’ replied simply that she ‘was changing sides’, as ‘Georges’ would be playing ‘over there’ in the second half. By ‘Georges’, the columnist snickered, the spectatrice meant Georges Winckelmans, the left winger for Olympique Lillois with ‘slicked-​back hair’ and a ‘harmonious appeal’.89 In this narrative, the idea that women might appreciate sport for reasons other than heterosexual attraction to the vigorous, manly athletes on display was never considered. This ignorant female spectator, who viewed male athletes as masculine demigods, was not exclusively confined to the stadium; she also appeared alongside the routes of the Tour de France.90 While watching the race, women of all ages and backgrounds often behaved in emotional or aggressive ways. In 1932, for instance, L’Intransigeant noted the presence of a dozen young girls who cried, gesticulated and inadvertently blocked the road high on the Col de Puymorens in the Pyrenees.91 Two weeks later, the same newspaper observed that the hotel shared by the French and Italian teams in Strasbourg was practically ‘assaulted’ by a ‘multitude of young charming girls’, who all hoped to catch a glimpse of their favourite riders.92 But Tour organisers explained this sort of disorderly behaviour as the result of a normal healthy attraction that the female spectators felt towards the riders. The women who swarmed the hotels of Tour cyclists, ogled them at the start, or who frantically reached out to them on climbs were depicted as simply irrational women awed by such vigorously handsome and manly athletes.93 Why did the press expend so much effort to belittle the female spectator within the stadium or alongside the route of the Tour? While women were undeniably patronised across the board in a society that still deemed them unworthy of the vote in national elections after the First World War, the response to women in the stadium was also an attempt to defuse a perceived threat. The presence of women in what had been almost exclusively a male space of performance and sociability challenged conceptions about appropriate female behaviour in public and resonated with wider anxieties about gender after the First World War. As Mary Louise Roberts has noted, gender seemed to be in flux in the wake of that disastrous conflict. Men, it was feared in some quarters, had been ‘emasculated’ by the war, physically destroyed and martyred on the fields of Flanders and France. Women, for their part, seemed to be acting in ways that blurred gender distinctions by moving more freely in public, wearing trousers, cutting their hair short and smoking cigarettes.

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Commentators feared that women were either acting as unabashedly sexual beings or were conversely destroying the markers of their own femininity by adopting a more androgynous appearance. These images of the ‘new woman’ may not have corresponded with reality, as Roberts notes, but the stakes still seemed very high: the perceived behaviour of the frivolous ‘vamp’ or, more ominously, the man-​hating ‘virago’, threatened to render France a ‘civilization without sexes’. The image of the ‘modern’ woman thus became a privileged symbol of postwar cultural and sexual anxieties, a dominant representation of change in the postwar cultural landscape.94 In light of fears about the ‘new woman’, the idea of the independent female spectator, who either imitated men by coming to the stadium or who pursued her own sexual fantasies within the stade, clearly generated its own kinds of concerns, no doubt influencing the way women were depicted in accounts of stadium crowds. By not taking the female spectator seriously, and by treating her as a harmlessly ignorant creature, journalists attempted to normalise her presence in public. Journalists also explicitly differentiated the female spectator from any potentially subversive ‘new woman’, starting with her appearance. As one telling example, Football ran a ‘Miss Football’ contest in 1937 that encouraged readers to vote on photos of the most attractive spectatrice who had attended a recent French international match in Germany.95 Football’s winner was a Mademoiselle Yvette Niay, described as an attractive sixteen-​year-​old; she was neither a ‘vamp’ nor a ‘platinum blonde’, but a brunette with a ‘slight trace of gypsy’. Her ‘timidity added to her charm’ and she was ‘gracious and cute’.96 In this contest, Football explicitly positioned the spectatrice as the polar opposite of the vamp who cut or dyed her hair, or the aggressively mannish virago. Instead, she represented an idealised virginal femininity. If the ‘Miss Football’ contest serves as evidence that the vision of the spectatrice deployed by the press was designed to counter the ‘new woman’, at least at the level of how she looked, a plethora of short stories in the sporting press created narratives about female spectatorship which inevitably reaffirmed conventional gender roles and behaviours. Two examples of this genre that merit attention here include the short story ‘Les Trois Buts’ (The Three Goals), which ran in Football in 1932, and a serialised novel, ‘Georges et la Dactylo’ (Georges and the Typist), which appeared in L’Auto in 1924. The first, by L’Auto stalwart Mario Brun (who would later serve as a key contributor to Paris-​Soir), hinges on the spectator experience of a young woman, Angèle, who goes inside the Stade de Colombes for the first time in order to witness an international football

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match. An eighteen-​year-​old ‘marvel of childlike grace’, the appropriately named Angèle is taken to the Stade Olympique by her friend Robert Ménier, a handsome, young athletic son of a rich industrialist and a key member of the French national football team who has just returned from a sojourn in the United States. After escorting Angèle to her place in the tribunes, Robert leaves to prepare for the match; she gives him her handkerchief as a talisman, and he promises to score two goals for her. When the Italians take an early lead in the match and the fickle French fans react by muttering insults and whistling their own team, Angèle worries that Robert will internalise the fans’ criticisms and lose confidence. Far from despairing, however, Robert suddenly scores not two but three goals to propel the French past the Italians for the victory. Robert’s victory is completed at the end of the story, on the drive back to Paris through the Bois de Boulogne, where he tells Angèle how he scored all three goals for her, and kisses her three times as his prize.97 ‘Les Trois Buts’ clearly renders female spectatorship acceptable only within the context of a stable heterosexual romance, and reaffirms both class and gender narratives associated with spectatorship. First, Angèle is clearly a gentlewoman-​spectator, from a socially respectable Parisian family. She is something of a sportive herself, who plays tennis on a date with Robert. Second, ‘Les Trois Buts’ makes the explicit argument that the stadium is a male space that Angèle enters only with the protection of a powerful male figure. Robert has to physically shield Angèle as they enter the stadium gates, to both carve a path through the crowd and to protect her delicate body from being crushed by the other spectators. Robert also guards Angèle at the end of the match from the lecherous advances of an old man who offers to drive her back to Paris. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, spectatorship in ‘Les Trois Buts’ is a transformative act for both spectator and player. Angèle wills Robert to great feats and falls deeper in love with him over the course of the match. Robert, for his part, transcends himself as a player because Angèle is watching him perform.98 In this context, female spectatorship is depicted as part of conventional narratives about the redemptive power of love (and no doubt an eventual marriage), which renders women more submissive and husbands better men for the experience. ‘Georges et la Dactylo’, a novella by René Pujol serialised over two months by L’Auto in 1924, articulates a similar narrative about gender in the stadium that culminates with a happy marriage and the reaffirmation of conventional male and female roles. It chronicles the adventures of automobile executive Georges Pétunier, who undergoes a dramatic personal transformation in order to impress his young typist Andrée Duillot,

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an attractive young woman who happens to be an enthusiastic rugby fan. The novella opens at a rugby match at the Parc des Princes; Andrée argues with a supporter of the other team and Georges, attempting to be gallant, slaps the man for his rudeness to Andrée, at which point the other man punches him and gives him a black eye.99 Humiliated by his ignorance about sport and his moment of physical weakness in front of Andrée, Georges resolves to become a sports enthusiast. The rest of the story follows his travails as a spectator and as a budding boxer and hurdler. In the process, he wins the affections of Andrée; the novella concludes once more at the Parc des Princes, a year after the first scene, where a now-​ married Georges and Andrée attend a rugby match. Georges spots the same man who had given him a black eye the previous year and comically knocks him out.100 On one level, ‘Georges et la Dactylo’ chronicles the relatively straightforward transformation of a ‘gentleman’ from sporting ignorant to expert. Georges first arrives at the stade as a clueless spectator, but then eventually becomes a true sportsman. Through Georges’s progression, the reader witnesses the acquisition of appropriate masculine discipline and sporting knowledge; his progress as an athlete and spectator is paralleled by his romantic conquest of Andrée. On another level, ‘Georges et la Dactylo’ voices the narrative about éducation sportive more broadly, beyond the character of Georges. When Georges questions his chief engineer, a rugby player named Vignon, about the potential for spectator violence, the latter responds that everything is getting better on that front. ‘Spectators are educating themselves,’ Vignon tells Georges; they will soon become ‘as placid at a boxing or rugby match as they are today in contemplating the rants of a Dadaist painter’.101 ‘Georges et la Dactylo’ also turns the potentially destabilising female spectator into a contented spouse. At the beginning of the novella, Andrée travels to the stadium by herself. Inside the stade, her approach to spectatorship is undisciplined and emotional. Unable to appreciate the flow of the game, she applauds every action of the Club Français players, even the most mundane and uninspired, instead of clinically watching the match in its totality. Over the course of the story, however, the petite dactylo is slowly domesticated and transformed into a more acceptable partner for Georges. By the end of the story, she neither adopts the airs of a ‘hardy pageboy’ nor pays much attention to the rugby match at the Parc des Princes, but is instead attentive to her new husband. If her version of spectatorship is gently ridiculed at the beginning of the story, her presence in the stade is normalised at the end of the story, as part of a conventional heterosexual romance narrative.

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Unlike the typical working-​class or lower-​middle-​class spectator, the woman inside the stade could not be redeemed through the hope that she would eventually turn into an athlete (or female sportsman) herself. Women’s athletics floundered in obscurity in France throughout the interwar period, thus rendering participation a more or less impossible goal. But the entire body of anecdotes and stories about female spectators normalised the female spectator in a different fashion. The spectatrice, in the pages of L’Auto and Football, became the ‘anti-​vamp’, a reassuring symbol of continuity in the postwar era. The discussions of women inside the stade, in this sense, became a space for working through and resolving anxieties about gender roles, if only in a fashion that tried to reconcile new behaviours (that is, sporting spectatorship) with older patterns of gender relations. And it is worth pointing out that L’Auto, at least, ‘solved’ the problem of female spectatorship at the Tour de France in a similar manner, repeatedly profiling the long-​suffering, nurturing wives of the racers and downplaying any other rider interactions with women as harmless flirtation; this only further underscores the ways in which stadium spectacle and the Tour de France were both part of the same process of coming to grips with potentially destabilising aspects of the modern mass crowd during the first half of the twentieth century.102 Yet, for all of the attempts to relegate women to a limited role inside the stade, the evidence suggests that those women too were able to participate as spectators and consumers in ways that journalists and sporting officials at least implicitly acknowledged. The very fact that the sporting press kept up its critique of the ‘ignorant’ female spectator might hint at the fact that women were not abandoning the stadium, but were still present, even in limited numbers. It is also suggestive that L’Auto was running serialised romance novellas: even as these reinforced traditional conceptions of gender roles, it is unlikely that these were intended solely for a male audience. They seemed, in fact, to be written for the predominantly female public that avidly consumed similar serials in the mainstream press and faithfully listened to radio soap operas by the end of the interwar period.103 L’Auto was certainly not unaware that women were attending matches and reading its pages, even in the 1920s, when it published a two-​part survey about the favourite sports of spectatrices.104 Women were even more explicitly courted as spectators and sporting enthusiasts as the 1930s unfolded:  in one instance, Olympique Lillois offered half-​price admission for women in 1934 for a match against a club team from Hungary.105 And the female reading public was clearly the target of Football’s ‘Concours du Footballeur photogénique’ (the Photogenic Football Player Competition) in 1936, which

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asked female readers to vote on the most attractive player in France by submitting a literary entry of no more than ten lines detailing the charms of their favourite athlete.106 The deluge of submissions, which all tended to emphasise the winsome physical attributes of football players like Maurice Castro from Rennes or Alex Thépot from Sochaux, might have reinforced the narrative about the physical appeal of male athletes for female spectators, but the whole competition at least solicited female input in creating that narrative.107 The discussions about female spectators, then, ran parallel to the broader debates over appropriate crowd behaviour in interwar France. The small coterie of journalists who promoted French sport proved remarkably ambivalent about the very people who were flocking to stadia and the roadsides of the Tour to watch cycling, football and rugby. As a result, those sportswriters and other sporting dignitaries, such as the businessmen who founded football clubs and who buttressed organisations like the FFFA, articulated an ideal vision of spectatorship that tried to discipline and improve the public and render disorderly masses of working-​class or lower-​middle-​class men, alongside single women, less problematic and dangerous. Yet, at the same time, they could not deny the realities of the demographic make-​up and behaviour of the modern crowd, which helped forge its own experiences inside the stadium. Slowly, sports journalists and officials began to reconcile themselves to the public of the stadium, working through and defusing some of their own anxieties about spectator behaviour in a process that only intensified after the Second World War.

Consumer culture and the transforming spectator The onset of the Second World War brought about the collapse of the Third Republic and constrained the business of sport in France, if not ongoing discussions of spectatorship. Vichy, of course, attempted to impose greater authority over French sport, reorganising competitions and weakening or eliminating professional sports. Vichy’s most dramatic action in this domain was to ban thirteen-​man professional rugby entirely, a blow that permanently handicapped the sport in France. Professional football was allowed to continue, albeit with constraints. Vichy also initially refused to authorise the Tour de France, in conjunction with German authorities who saw it as a waste of gasoline and a logistical challenge; when Vichy later tried to stage the race to salvage its flagging popularity, Tour director Jacques Goddet refused to organise the competition.108

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Yet, in spite of Vichy’s noted preference for participatory sport at the expense of sport-​spectacle, spectator sport culture became part of Vichy’s attempts to legitimise itself and prove its viability as a political entity. Invariably, the press (and Vichy officials) treated large crowds at even the much-​denigrated professional football matches as visual proof that France was finding its footing after the devastating defeat of 1940. For the finale of the Coupe de France between Olympique Red Star and F. C. Sète in 1942, a match which attracted a near-​record throng of 44,650 people to the Stade de Colombes, media coverage called attention to the size of the crowd.109 Cinema news broadcasts repeatedly panned around the stadium to demonstrate how full Colombes was for the occasion.110 The Vichy press also described the crowd behaviour at spectator events in order to legitimise difficult living conditions and to provide examples of how French men and women were coping with the war. A  sports periodical published in Vichy and Marseille noted that officials for a football club in Rennes, Stade Rennais, had begun to raffle off chickens and rabbits at the end of matches for spectators in attendance. Other articles emphasised the gaiety and cheerfulness of ‘orderly’ crowds in Bordeaux and Colombes as further proof that life, even in wartime, was acceptably normal.111 However, Vichy’s more dramatic interventions into the rhythms and structure of French sport were rolled back after 1944 and the sporting calendar quickly returned to its prewar patterns. The major sporting spaces in Paris –​Colombes, the Parc des Princes and the Stade Buffalo –​ also remained intact and in use, although the last of those three quickly began to show the effects of age and neglect. The same people, in general, remained in charge of French sport, from football journalist Emmanuel Gambardella, who became the head of the FFFA in 1948, to Jacques Goddet, Desgrange’s successor at L’Auto who managed to keep control of his sporting empire after the war. Despite some post-​Liberation headaches engendered by the fact that L’Auto kept printing during the Occupation, which caused the postwar authorities to permanently shut that newspaper down, Goddet cannily recaptured his media properties and their affiliated stadia. While under investigation for his relationship with the Germans during the war, Goddet retained control of the Parc des Princes and the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and launched a new daily sports newspaper (L’Equipe) that eventually inherited the assets of L’Auto, including the Tour de France. L’Equipe, too, would acquire the same reach as its predecessor, to the point where it was the best-​read French newspaper on Mondays and the fifth-​most popular paper in Paris.112 Not surprisingly, a 1948 police report on L’Auto’s former personnel described

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Goddet as the veritable ‘Pope’ of sport in France, controlling Parisian vélodromes and the sporting events they organised.113 In terms of spectatorship, everything seemed to be better than ever after 1945. In football, the teams that had drawn large crowds before the war –​Racing Club de Paris and Stade Français at the Parc des Princes, and clubs in Saint-​Etienne, Marseille, Reims and Lille in the provinces –​kept attracting a sizeable public, while a professional team in Lyon (Olympique Lyonnais) finally brought consistent crowds to that city’s old stadium. The final matches of the Coupe de France and international football matches drew ever larger crowds and set records for gate receipts. The 1947 tilt between France and Portugal at the Stade de Colombes drew 57,781 spectators, while the 1948 Coupe de France final pitting Lille against Lens set new records for both spectators (60,739) and gate receipts.114 In fact, the 1948 Coupe final –​the first to cross the 60,000-​spectator threshold –​was followed by four consecutive years of attendance over 61,000, with the all-​time mark of 61,722 set in 1950 for Reims’ triumph over Racing Club de Paris.115 As was the case for football, the major international rugby matches at Colombes also crested the 60,000-​spectator barrier immediately after the war, with 60,000 in attendance for France’s 15–​0 victory over England in the Five Nations competition in March 1948.116 At the local level, as Marion Fontaine notes, the late 1940s and early 1950s represented the moment when the working-​class public in the city of Lens wholeheartedly embraced football and came to see Racing Club de Lens as a direct representation of their mining community, known as the ‘Gueules Noires’ (the Black Faces).117 In the first few years of the postwar era, the focus of the commentary on spectators was less about their disorderly behaviour, even though some of this persisted, and more on the problems generated by apparent success. The surging popularity of football and rugby necessitated the construction of a new larger national stadium, according to some observers (a topic that will be addressed again in Chapter 5). The boom in crowds also revived narratives about who exactly merited inclusion within the stadium, particularly as space now appeared to be at a premium. After being unable to take his ticketed place at the Parc des Princes for a France–​England football match in May 1949 (due to the ongoing problem of gatecrashing), a Monsieur Bellon wrote to a new football weekly published by L’Equipe, entitled France-​Football, to propose that faithful ticket holders be rewarded with ‘priority tickets’ for the Coupe de France and international matches.118 This, he wrote, would only be a ‘fair compensation’ to ‘true’ paying spectators who spent large sums of money on tickets throughout the year. In a related vein, France-​Football

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proposed that spectators be allowed to finance any prospective grand stade by purchasing 10,000-​franc bonds that would also entitle the bondholder to priority access for big football and rugby matches.119 In these examples, and in other editorials gracing the pages of L’Equipe or France-​Football, only the ideal spectator who understood sport and paid his dues, literally, by attending a variety of fixtures deserved a place within the stadium, in contrast to the dilettantes who were only interested in the spectacular big matches. However, this sort of talk faded as the crowds at rugby and football matches began to diminish fairly dramatically in the late 1950s and early 1960s, even for the most high-​profile matches. The Coupe de France final drew more than 50,000 spectators for the last time in 1959, plunging to 38,000 the next year and not surpassing 40,000 again for eleven years.120 Rugby, too, suffered a gradual decline in spectators in the championship final and other elimination matches after 1955.121 In reaction to diminishing crowds, commentators focused on helping spectator sports survive financially, rather than fretting over undisciplined spectators, or even sighing wistfully for some way of rewarding true sportsmen to the detriment of the uninitiated. Even in 1950, when crowds for the Coupe de France and international rugby and football matches were still peaking, France-​Football and L’Equipe jointly sounded the alarm that clubs were struggling to meet their necessary expenses on the basis of gate receipts.122 Jacques de Ryswick pointed out that the large crowds for weekly matches involving heavyweights like Marseille, Lille or Racing Club de Paris barely compensated for the feeble attendance at other matches:  while Racing–​Lille drew 33,862 spectators to the Parc des Princes in 1949, Cannes–​Strasbourg attracted just 2,480 spectators that same season.123 Given the rarity of large crowds for most clubs, L’Equipe urged the FFFA to abandon its practice of scheduling Coupe de France matches at neutral locations, because teams could not afford to throw away any chance at making adequate gate money. Without any changes, L’Equipe fretted, clubs would increasingly have to solicit subsidies from local municipalities to remain solvent (a fear that, in fact, proved increasingly correct throughout the 1950s and 1960s).124 The decline in spectatorship was not entirely linear and was marked by peaks and resurgences for big matches throughout the 1950s. Nonetheless, the overall trends began to prompt more reflection about how to attract the public, and comparatively little time was spent fretting over crowd behaviour, save for periodic rumblings about rugby crowds in particular.125 The long-​standing tension between disciplining the crowd and the contradictory urge to court the spectator as a consumer seemed

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to resolve itself, however tentatively, in favour of the latter impulse. Several commentators urged football, for instance, to fully accept the idea  –​already present before the war  –​that the spectator was truly a ‘client’. Jean Eskenazi, writing in France-​Football in 1951, reconciled himself to the idea that football had irreversibly become an expensive form of spectacle and thus needed to consider the easily derided cochon de payant (the unsavvy paying customer) a bit more thoughtfully.126 A few years later, France-​Football opined that the players and sporting promoters alike could not forget that the game itself needed to satisfy the clientele. This did not mean that the goalkeeper, for instance, had dive to his right when the ball was kicked to his left, but it did entitle the spectator to ninety minutes of activity for the price of his ticket.127 Taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of thinking suggested that sporting officials needed to change the way sport itself was presented to the public, instead of insistently attempting to transform the spectator. Some of these efforts to attract a broader public meant acknowledging the presence of women more explicitly, although limits to this approach naturally remained present. The image of the foolishly besotted female spectator did not disappear in the first decade of the postwar period: in one cartoon from 1957, for instance, a male spectator complains to his friend that, while he found the goalie ‘worthless’, his wife (pictured ogling the goalkeeper with a telescope, and with a camera at her feet) clearly disagreed.128 The arena, too, was still imagined as a mostly male space, as witnessed in another cartoon where a harried husband, yelled at continually inside the house by his wife, escapes to yell at the players inside the stadium.129 And some observers interpreted the tentative changes in the presentation of sport in the early 1950s, notably the widespread adoption of floodlighting within the stadium, as a means of keeping the stade a masculine space.130 In a survey that ran in Football Magazine’s discussion of lighting in 1961, goalkeeper Dominique Colonna (playing for Reims) saw night matches as a boon to mothers, who now would have more uninterrupted Sundays with their families, because their husbands would likely only attend weekday matches at night as opposed to weekend day matches. A spectator identified as ‘Claude C.’ (a toolmaker from the fourteenth arrondissement) agreed: in a world where both men and women worked, the weekend was a rare occasion for couples to spend time together. Night matches, ‘Claude C.’ suggested, would give the man his fill of football during the week, so that he would be ready to devote time to his wife on the weekends.131 Yet, in other ways, women were cautiously courted as spectators. While some critics fumed that lighting damaged the integrity of the

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game, many coaches, players and spectators agreed that night matches would actually help the sport appeal to a new female audience. In that same survey of lighting that polled Colonna and ‘Claude C.’, a secretary from the tenth arrondissement identified as ‘Madame François’ suggested that a football nocturne (night match) was ‘more spectacular’, like going to the movies. She said she would be more likely to attend a night match in the middle of the week than on the weekend, when she preferred to go out to the countryside or seek entertainment elsewhere in Paris. Another spectator polled in the survey, ‘Jean-​Pierre C.’ (an industrialist living in the sixteenth arrondissement), commented that night matches would more likely attract his wife, even though she might be more interested in the lighting and the colours than in the game itself.132 In this instance, then, the awareness of a broadening paying public that had to be taken on its own terms coexisted with the image of women as inherently disinterested and fickle spectators. The contradictions of postwar attitudes towards female spectatorship were on full view in an extraordinary column that first appeared in France-​Football in 1960. ‘Reflections of a Spectatrice’, penned by a woman from Lille named Maryse Dufaux, grew out of a letter to the editor and would continue intermittently throughout the decade.133 To be sure, Dufaux’s columns only sporadically addressed the nature of female spectatorship; when they did, however, she simultaneously acknowledged the somewhat subversive nature of her column while justifying the presence of women in the grandstands in the first place. In an early column, she recounted receiving a hostile letter from a male reader who told her that ‘Reflections of a Spectatrice’ was inherently pointless, because women had nothing to say about football.134 Dufaux not only invited her readers to weigh in on this topic, but also defended female spectators, arguing that they were capable of understanding the sport just as thoroughly as men. Moreover, she maintained that female spectators possessed a more emotionally supportive outlook that helped the players: women ‘got discouraged less easily, believed [in the possibility of victory] for a longer time and forgave more quickly’.135 The evidence from the first fifteen to twenty years after the Second World War suggests that the stadium public had been divested of some of the anxieties that had been attached to it before 1939. Discussions of spectators slowly shifted from emphasising their disruptive behaviour to focusing more intently (if not exclusively) on their potential as consumers, whatever their other shortcomings. Women, as Dufaux’s example makes clear, may still have been depicted as relatively ignorant spectators, but they were at least more overtly tolerated and indeed courted

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within the stadium as a potential part of the stadium public. In this sense, the stadium public had been cautiously depoliticised:  the stakes in the debates over the crowd were lower and seemed less fraught with relevance for the health of French society as a whole in 1960 than in 1930. The apparent change in the way the crowd was envisioned within the stadium, on one hand, certainly stands as a barometer of shifting concerns in French society as a whole during this period. It is not surprising that the anxieties over the behaviour and composition of the sporting public were most pronounced during the interwar period, when fears about ‘the society of the masses’ or the ‘new woman’ were at their most acute. After the Second World War, the discourse about spectatorship and stadia reflected considerable demographic and cultural changes in France as a whole. As the relative and absolute numbers of blue-​collar workers declined in favour of an expanding service sector, for instance, so too did the most pronounced anxieties about working-​class behaviour; ironically, one exception came in Lens, where club officials kept trying to discipline and ‘improve’ the miners well into the 1950s, to no great effect.136 Overall, however, these socioeconomic changes might help explain the decline in the intensity of the ‘ideal spectator’ narrative, although the latter certainly never disappeared and indeed would acquire a new lease of life with the advent of hooliganism in the late 1960s and 1970s (a subject addressed in Chapter 5). The increased acceptance of women in the public sphere and in the world of employment, too, was also partially responsible for the decline in the intensity of ridicule facing female spectators after the war. And, as spectator sport became more and more of an overtly consumer practice, it made sense that women, increasingly recognised as powerful and valuable consumers in the postwar era, were less problematic figures within the stade.137 The subtle shift in the discourse about crowds was also connected to the actual experience of spectatorship itself. Spectator sport became an unavoidable reality in France, from the 1920s onwards, no matter how much it had alarmed certain journalists who would have preferred a smaller public of well-​behaved sportsmen. Whether they attended matches inside the stadium or simply followed the extensive coverage of sport in a media complex that encompassed daily newspapers, specialised weekly periodicals and radio broadcasts, French men and women confronted the messy reality of modern mass society through their engagement with spectator sport. The debates over spectatorship might have attested to anxieties about people without ‘class and bearing’ (to use Maurice Pefferkorn’s phrase) or the place of women in twentieth-​century French society, but they also helped subtly defuse some of those anxieties by proving that

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the crowd was, ultimately, relatively non-​threatening and hardly likely to overturn the established order of daily life. At the same time, despite gradual transformations in the discussions of spectators, much of the world of French sport remained quite stable from the end of the First World War until the early 1960s. Cycling, football and rugby remained the pre-​eminent spectator sports for a mass public. The main stadia in France  –​the Parc des Princes, Stade de Colombes and venues in Bordeaux, Marseille, Toulouse, Lyon and north-​eastern France –​had remained relatively unchanged from the era of their creation in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, spectator sport itself remained largely under the control of the same journalists and sporting organisations that began promoting it in the first decades of the twentieth century. While some competitions disappeared (the Six-​Days last graced the Parisian stage in November 1958)  and new ones were inaugurated (namely football’s European Champion Clubs’ Cup in 1955), the rhythms of spectator sport –​from track cycling and the Tour de France to international rugby and football matches to the regular-​season championships for both of the latter sports –​remained more or less the same. This chapter, then, has traced the history of stadia, sport and spectators in France between the end of the First World War and the early 1960s, an era of relative stability accompanied by subtle changes to the narratives and practices concerning the crowd inside the stade. The stadium public was continually reassessed, criticised and challenged during the period in question, and the stadium space itself played no small part in the way this sporting public was staged and corralled, even in the case of the Tour de France, which both routinely deployed stadium-​like spaces for its finishes and duplicated narratives about stadium crowds when discussing spectators along the roadside. In this regard, the stadium as a sporting space resembled the stadium as a political space, where a wide variety of actors attempted to use the stadium to mould and mobilise their own public of supporters. In similar fashion, journalists and sporting officials attempted to create an appropriately unified community of sporting spectators within the stade. But, like politicians who could never quite be sure of the loyalties of the stadium crowd, journalists found that the sporting public was also able to redefine the experience of the stadium partially on its terms at the same time that the underlying commercial pressures of sport also helped shift the definition of what constituted an appropriate crowd. In the process, the discussions of spectators and the experience of spectatorship itself not only forged a prominent and durable leisure practice, but helped French men and women grapple with and partially defuse grave anxieties about the character and composition of their society.

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While this chapter has considered the history of sport and stadia in the context of the debates over spectatorship, it has dealt only cursorily with another fundamental reality concerning stadia and the sporting public: the relation of both to ideas about place, identity and community. Stadia and spectators across France –​and Europe as a whole –​proved to be a convenient lens for focusing commentary about local, regional and national identities. As sport itself developed global networks characterised by international competitions and a burgeoning mass media that promoted them, French men and women situated themselves in Western Europe and the wider world through narratives generated around sport and its spaces. In the next chapter, the analysis turns to the plural collectivities of the stadium as they emerged over the same general time period –​from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early 1960s –​ and the implications they generated for the question of French identities, both within the Hexagone and in comparison with the rest of the world.

Notes 1 L’Auto, 2 January 1913. 2 Le Figaro, 2 January 1913; L’Auto, 2 January 1913. For another account of the Match Baxter, see Holt, Sport and Society, p. 135. 3 Hare, Football in France, p. 19. 4 Pascal Leroy, ‘La Belle Histoire des enfants de l’ovalie’, 92 Express: Le Magazine des Hauts-​de-​Seine 45 (2003): 64. 5 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens. For a small-​scale study of football crowds in Spain, see John K. Walton, ‘Reconstructing Crowds: The Rise of Association Football as a Spectator Sport in San Sebastian, 1915–​32’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 15 (1) (1998): 27–​53. 6 While Patrick Mignon’s work on football, for instance, is particularly useful for its sensitive reading of new spectator practices –​particularly hooliganism and the ultras that have emerged in certain French stadia in the last thirty years –​it ventures onto shaky ground when it attempts to explain the relative lack of passion for football in France (compared with, say, Great Britain) as the result of a ‘republican and Jacobin’ tradition that overrode particular class-​based cultures and precluded alternate forms of sociability. Mignon, La Passion du football, p. 194. 7 Jean-​Michel Cazal et al., L’Intégrale de l’équipe de France de football, 1904–​1998 (Paris: Editions First, 1998). 8 Bulletin du Racing Club de France, December 1930. See also Michaël Delépine, ‘The Racing Club vs. Arsenal Matches (1930–​1962):  A  Franco-​British Ritual, European Games or Football Lessons?’, Sport in History 35 (4)  (December 2015): 604–​17. 9 Alfred Wahl, Les Archives du football:  Sport et société en France, 1880–​1989 (Paris:  Editions Gallimard/​Juilliard, 1989), p.  230; AN, 313 AP 288, Note de

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Service, 9 May 1927. The two combined could take up to 15 per cent of the gate receipt gross. For one perspective on the net impact of the droit des pauvres and the tax on spectacles, see Allez l’O.L.: organe des amis et sympathisants de l’Olympique Lillois (hereafter Allez l’O.L.), issue 2, 1934. 10 Hare, Football in France, p. 22. 11 Wahl, Les Archives du football, p. 211. 12 Bromberger et al., Le Match de football, p. 181; Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 54. 13 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 54. 14 For the life of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ from its construction in 1910 onwards, see L’Equipe, 15 April 1959. The Vélodrome d’Hiver stood on the rue Nélaton, near the present-​day metro stop Bir Hakeim-​Grenelle. 15 For the 1924 negotiations over the lease, see Bulletin Municipal Officiel de la Ville de Paris, Procès-​Verbal, 1 December 1924. Desgrange and Victor Goddet successfully negotiated the extension by telling the Conseil Municipal that they would develop a Parc des Sports alongside the Parc des Princes, a promise that they never honoured. For the 1931–​2 renovations, see Jacques Goddet, L’Equipée belle (Paris: Robert Lafont, Stock, 1991), p. 49. 16 For the Vél’ d’Hiv’, see Andy Dickson, Du Vél’ d’Hiv’ au Palais … des sports et des arts (Biarritz:  Editions Atlantica, 1999), pp. 21–​2; Goddet, L’Equipée belle, p. 85. 17 Wahl, Les Archives du football, p. 228. The Buffalo’s most famous boxing match pitted popular champion Georges Carpentier against Senegalese fighter ‘Battling Siki’ (born Louis Mbarick Fall) for the light heavyweight crown in 1922; Carpentier was controversially defeated early in the bout. 18 Seidler, Le Sport et la presse, p. 67. 19 Goddet, L’Equipée belle, 154. 20 For circulation figures, see Claude Bellanger et al., eds, Histoire générale de la presse française (Volume 3:  1871–​1940) (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), pp. 511, 584. 21 Seidler, Le Sport et la presse, p. 64. Miroir des Sports was owned by the same group that published the second most popular daily newspaper of the interwar period, Le Petit Parisien. 22 L’Intransigeant’s Jean Antoine ushered in radio coverage of the Tour de France in 1929, broadcasting for Paris-​PTT. See Thompson, The Tour de France, p. 43. 23 L’Auto ran a contest between 1 January 1921 and 4 February 1921 where readers had to correctly identify fifteen unlabelled drawings of crowds, ranging from football matches to billiards and aviation exhibitions. The newspaper noted that it was ‘deluged’ with responses. The winner, a Madame Eyeraguibel, was described as a fervent attendee at the vélodrome and was one of two people to identify all fifteen cartoons correctly. L’Auto, 30 March 1921. 24 Football, 5 May 1932. 25 Wahl, Les Archives du football, p. 207. 26 Football, 7 August 1930.

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La Dépêche, 22 April 1922. Manchester Guardian, 10 April 1928. L’Intransigeant, 1 August 1932. This dichotomy has been summarised by Alain Ehrenberg as the ‘angelic’ and ‘diabolical’ faces of the crowd. Bromberger, Le Match de football, p. 207. 31 L’Auto, 3 January 1922. 32 Le Miroir des Sports, 8 May 1934. 33 Pierre Chany and Thierry Cazeneuve, La Fabuleuse Histoire du Tour de France (Geneva: Editions Minerva, 2004), pp. 67–​8. In 1922, Tour rider Jean Matton came to blows with a spectator who would not loan him a spare wheel, while much more recently five-​time Tour winner Eddy Merckx was punched in the liver by a hostile spectator who supported his rival, Bernard Thévenet, on the Puy-​de-​Dôme in 1975. With the advent of television coverage, protestors have sporadically used the Tour to call general attention to their grievances, as was the case when protests at the Usinor steelworks near Denain in northern France caused the cancellation of stage five of the 1982 Tour. Jean-​ François Polo, ‘A côté du Tour: Ambushing the Tour for Political and Social Causes’, in Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare, eds, The Tour de France, 1903–​ 2003: A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 246. 34 L’Auto, 17 July 1911. 35 L’Intransigeant, 30 July 1932; L’Auto, 3 July 1937; Regards, 4 August 1939. 36 L’Auto, 3 May 1921. 37 L’Auto, 3 May 1921. 38 Bale, Sport, Space and the City, p. 12. 39 L’Auto, 8 January 1927. 40 The use of vélodromes increased over time as more towns acquired their own throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In 1921, for instance, a mere three of the Tour’s fifteen stages concluded inside a vélodrome. By 1929, the race had expanded to twenty-​two stages, seven of which (Caen, Cherbourg, Charleville, Brest, Nice, Belfort and Paris) finished inside vélodromes and stades. The 1934 Tour finished at nine vélodromes or stadium-​like venues. The race hit its all-​time high-​water mark for vélodrome finales in 1959 when twelve of twenty-​two stages terminated inside a stade or vélodrome. L’Auto, 26 June 1921, special Tour de France supplement; L’Auto, 3 July 1934, special Tour de France supplement; L’Equipe, 9 January 1959. 41 L’Auto, 26 July 1924. 42 AP, Tri Briand 247, Study for the project to enlarge the Stade-​Vélodrome du Parc des Princes, 4 March 1936. 43 The image of the stadium as a space of surveillance, as noted in previous chapters, lends itself to Michel Foucault’s analysis of other disciplinary spaces, notably prisons and hospitals. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 26. 44 Midi Olympique, 15 February 1932. 45 Football, 18 October 1934. 46 Football, 18 October 1934. 27 28 29 30

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47 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 58. 48 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 88. 49 Football, 30 April 1926. 50 Le Midi Sportif, 10 May 1928. The match grossed 280,000 francs. 51 L’Auto, 1 July 1924. 52 L’Auto, 15 July 1936. 53 For the argument that British football spectators were nearly exclusively from working-​class backgrounds, see Nicholas Fishwick, English Football and Society, 1910–​1950 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), and Anthony Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1863–​ 1915 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). For a revisionist challenge to this argument, see Taylor, The Association Game, p. 138. 54 Football, 20 October 1926. 55 Football, 14 May 1931. 56 AP, Tri Briand 606, Letter from the Directeur Administratif des Services d’Architecture et des Promenades et Plantations to M. le Syndic du Conseil Municipal de Paris et du Conseil Général de la Seine, 7 January 1914. 57 Football, 18 April 1940. 58 L’Auto, 22 April 1930. The Wales–​France international rugby match on this date (a 11–​0 French defeat), for instance, attracted 50,000 paying spectators and a long list of luminaries, including Fernand Buisson (the president of the Chambre des Députés), André Maginot (the war minister), rugby officials like Octave Léry and Charles Brennus, other sports celebrities such as boxer Georges Carpentier and foreign sports officials. 59 Football, 14 May 1931. 60 Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People, p.  193. See also Barrows, Distorting Mirrors, p. 4. 61 Le Miroir des Sports, 18 February 1936. For Miroir’s history, see Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, p. 585. 62 Football, 20 January 1937. 63 For another case study of football supporter culture in this region, see Carpentier-​Bogaert et al., Le Peuple des tribunes. 64 John Walton notes a similar critical urge in the sporting press in San Sebastian, Spain, towards overly demonstrative spectators. Walton, ‘Reconstructing Crowds’, p. 40. 65 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 183. 66 Mignon, La Passion du football, p. 189. 67 Lyon-​Sport, 15 April 1932. 68 The details about coal-​throwing come from L’Humanité’s interview with Jean Beze, a spectator who attended the France–​Italy match, in a retrospective before the 1998 World Cup. L’Humanité, 26 May 1998. For whistling during the anthems, see Le Miroir des Sports, 21 June 1938. 69 This trend continued well into the postwar period. See L’Equipe, 13 July 1964. As Christopher Thompson has noted, the organisers of the Tour de France also faced a difficult task disciplining the riders themselves, who continued to

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flout the hundreds of rules put in place to try to make them more acceptable to a middle-​class public. See Thompson, The Tour de France, pp. 156–​78. 70 L’Auto, 25 March 1937. 71 Bulletin du Racing Club de France, August 1930. In the movie, a potential resquilleur enters the stadium through the player’s entrance, is mistaken for a member of the French national team and then accidentally propels the squad to victory. For a commentary on the ‘eternal’ battle between ticket taker and resquilleur, see L’Auto, 15 January 1936. 72 Le Petit Journal, 26 January 1937. 73 For instance, Midi Olympique decried ‘recent violence’ in March 1930, citing fights among spectators at a match between Quillan and Cognac in Bordeaux and violence between spectators and players for a Tarbes–​Narbonne match. Midi Olympique, 28 March 1930. 74 Midi Olympique, 9 May 1930. Pradié was not the only rugby player to perish during the interwar period; Gaston Rivière, a player for Quillan, died as the result of a rugby injury in 1927. Holt, Sport and Society, p. 137. 75 Nicholas Fishwick has observed that historians of British football have ignored the perennial ability of football to provide a cold, wet, dull and often depressing way of parting with time and money. His remarks are equally apropos for French sport. Fishwick, English Football and Society, p. 64. For the press in Great Britain and its similar tendency to make alarmist generalisations about crowd behaviour, see Taylor, The Association Game, p. 154. 76 L’Auto, 25 January 1931. For a retrospective on the rugby schism by one of the celebrated journalists of the era, see Gaston Bénac, Champions dans la coulisse (Paris: Actualité Sportive, 1944), p. 28. 77 Wardhaugh, In Pursuit of the People, p. 230. 78 Allez l’O.L., issues 2 and 3, 1934. 79 AP, Tri Briand 247, Dossier Ile de Puteaux, Ministerial assessment of the Ile de Puteaux stadium proposal, 26 December 1934. 80 Goddet, L’Equipée belle, p. 85. 81 Football, 5 April 1934. 82 L’Auto, 10 December 1926. 83 L’Auto, 24 April 1924. 84 L’Auto, 5 March 1921. 85 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 183. 86 Walton, ‘Reconstructing Crowds’, p. 44; Erik Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender and German Modernity (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 50–​98. 87 Le Miroir des Sports, 12 May 1936. 88 Football, 25 November 1943. The title of the article made a play on words invoking both the work of Georges Duhamel about America, Scènes de la vie future, and the classic Molière comedy, L’Ecole des femmes. 89 Football, 5 April 1934. 90 Vigarello, ‘Le Tour de France’, p. 905.

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91 L’Intransigeant, 16 July 1932. 92 L’Intransigeant, 28 July 1932. 93 Thompson, The Tour de France, pp. 105–​8. 94 Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes:  Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–​1927 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 10. 95 Football, 3 March 1937. 96 Football, 14 April 1937. 97 Football, 30 June 1932. 98 Football, 30 June 1932. 99 L’Auto, 23 March 1924. 100 L’Auto, 30 March 1924. 101 L’Auto, 30 March 1924. 102 Thompson, The Tour de France, p. 120. 103 Nord, France’s New Deal, p. 246. 104 L’Auto, 16 December and 18 December 1926. 105 Allez l’O.L., issue 4, 1934. 106 Football, 8 July 1936. 107 Football, 19 August 1936. 108 Thompson, The Tour de France, pp. 78–​9. 109 The 1942 final attracted the second-​largest crowd in the history of the Coupe de France to that point, trailing only the 1939 fixture, which had drawn 52,400 spectators for a match between popular powerhouses Racing Club de Paris and Olympique Lillois. Statistics taken from Hubert Beaudet, La Coupe de France: Ses vainqueurs, ses surprises (Saint-​Cyr-​sur-​Loire: Editions Alan Sutton, 2003). 110 Newsreel footage of the Sète–​ Red Star match originally was broadcast on 22 May 1942. Consulted by the author at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). 111 Sport:  La Vie en Plein Air (Vichy/​Marseille), 27 November 1942. See also Sport: La Vie en Plein Air, 14 May 1943, and Tous les Sports, 26 July 1941. 112 Seidler, Le Sport et la presse, p. 101. 113 Officially, Goddet was the overall editor (and co-​majority shareholder) for L’Equipe, the co-​race director of the Tour, the president and general director of the company running the Parc des Princes, and the vice-​president of the group in charge of the Vélodrome d’Hiver. See Goddet, L’Equipée belle, p. 150. For Goddet’s wartime activities and the police assessment of his behaviour, see APPP, BA 2335, Journal ‘L’Auto’, 20 April 1948. 114 France-​Football, 27 March 1947; France-​Football, 12 May 1948. 115 For Coupe de France, see Wahl, Les Archives de football, p. 309, and Beaudet, La Coupe de France. For Championnat crowds, see (for instance) the discussion of Marseille–​Reims, France-​Football, 2 November 1948. 116 Pierre Lafond and Jean-​Pierre Bodis, Encyclopédie du rugby français (Paris: Editions Dehedin, 1989). 117 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 137.

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118 France-​Football, 24 May 1949. France-​Football, described by Edouard Seidler as a ‘supplement’ to L’Equipe, sold 120,000 to 180,000 copies per week at its peak. Seidler, Le Sport et la presse, p. 101. 119 France-​Football, 31 March 1948. 120 Beaudet, La Coupe de France, pp. 196–​7. 121 Midi-​Olympique, 4 June 1963. 122 France-​Football, 3 January 1950. 123 France-​Football, 3 January 1950. 124 L’Equipe, 7 January 1953. 125 See Midi-​Olympique, 1–​6 February 1966, for another bout of criticism of spectators who voiced their displeasure with the referee for the France–​ Ireland Five Nations rugby match. 126 France-​Football, 26 June 1951. 127 France-​Football, 24 August 1954. 128 France-​Football, 27 August 1957. 129 France-​Football, 15 January 1957. 130 Floodlighting itself had emerged in stadiums as early as the mid-​1920s, but became much more widespread by the early 1950s. 131 Football Magazine, May 1961. 132 Football Magazine, May 1961. 133 Jean-​Paul Callède, ‘Les Journalistes de sport en France:  une profession qui s’ouvre aux femmes?’, in Jean-​Paul Callède, ed., Le Journaliste et le sport: responsable(s) ou otage(s) (Pessac: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 2006), p. 167. 134 France-​Football, 29 November 1960. 135 France-​Football, 10 January 1961. To put Dufaux’s column in context, it is also worth noting that female journalists made episodic appearances in other sporting publications in the 1960s. Midi-​Olympique printed an article by a female spectator, Brigitte Baillet, about the 1963 rugby match between France and Wales entitled ‘A Woman in the Furnace’, while Huguette Debaisieux covered Tour de France from a ‘female perspective’ for Le Figaro in 1966. Midi-​Olympique, 29 March 1963; Thompson, The Tour de France, p. 123. 136 Thompson, The Tour de France, p.  178; Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 179. 137 Rebecca Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 58.

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4 Stadium travels: spectatorship, territorial identity and global connections, 1900–​60

On 18 February 1922, L’Auto published an instructive map of France (Figure 7). It pictured a nation divided by a heavy diagonal line –​a ‘line of demarcation’ –​running roughly from south-​west to north-​east, from Bordeaux through Paris to Lille.1 To the north and west of this dividing line, the map identified the cities with clubs that had qualified for the quarter-​finals of the Coupe de France in football: Rennes, Rouen, Lille, Tourcoing, Paris and Bordeaux (Paris itself supplied three clubs:  Red Star, Racing Club and Stade Français). On the southern and eastern flanks of its diagonal divider, the map displayed the ten cities –​Biarritz, Bayonne, Dax, Lourdes, Tarbes, Toulouse, Béziers, Carcassonne, Perpignan and Grenoble  –​with teams that had advanced to the final pools of the regular-​season rugby championship. With the exception of Grenoble, an outlier nestled in the Alps, the rugby qualifiers all hailed from south-​western France. The map thus differentiated between a pays du football (land of football) largely comprised of the industrial north, Paris, Normandy and Brittany, and a pays du rugby (land of rugby), particularly the area near the Pyrenees and the border with Spain. Of course, L’Auto was simplifying the sporting geography of France in the early 1920s; the entire southern and eastern portions of the country were not exclusively devoted to rugby, as the map seemed to suggest. In actuality, football was entrenched in the south-​east (from Montpellier through Marseille to Nice) and the industrial east (notably Alsace, Lorraine and the Doubs). The map also obscured the reality that Paris, in the northern part of the country, still boasted several teams that competed in the top-​flight rugby championship and remained the site of almost all major international rugby

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7  Map of a France divided between soccer and rugby, 1922.

matches. In its general scope, however, L’Auto’s map accurately reflected the division between football and rugby, both as those sports were practised and as they were watched, throughout the interwar period; that division would begin to blur only in the 1950s, when the success of the French national rugby team helped it gain new support beyond its traditional south-​western base. The map, which certainly paralleled the historical divide between a ‘modern’, industrial northern France and a ‘traditional’, agrarian south, evoked the connection between place and sporting identity in a powerful fashion.2 In delineating between a pays du football and a pays du rugby, the newspaper turned sporting preferences into a marker of local or regional distinction. To live in Toulouse or Perpignan in the south-​west,

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the map suggested, entailed playing or watching rugby, while residing in Lille or Rouen apparently meant that one prioritised football. At the same time, the map also implicitly made the argument for a broader collective that encompassed both rugby watchers and football supporters. Sporting France, by the logic of the map, comprised local communities of sporting enthusiasts, whether they embraced the round ball or the oval one. However, this was not the only way that sport was tied to place-​based communities and identities in early twentieth-​century France. Two weeks before it published its image of two ‘sporting Frances’, L’Auto printed a more textual map in the form of a page-​length chart of all the vélodromes in France and around the globe, from England to Italy to the United States. The reader was implicitly invited to compare the technical details of the vélodromes inside France with their foreign counterparts; the Parc des Princes in Paris set the standard for European vélodromes (along with the original Olympic stadium in Berlin) with a 666-​metre cycling track.3 This was hardly the only set of comparisons directed abroad by French daily newspapers and the specialised sporting press, which provided their readers with a steady stream of pictures, cartoons and articles about stadia and spectators in Great Britain, Italy, Germany, the United States and other assorted locations beyond the frontiers of France, from the early decades of the twentieth century onwards. L’Auto and its counterparts, in short, not only generated intense discussions about the nature and identity of the public in twentieth-​century France, but also cultivated a complex set of narratives that linked sport, stadia and spectators to territorial identity. Stadia were occasionally discussed in ways that emphasised their uniquely local architectural characteristics; more frequently, however, they created discourses about local places through the depiction of spectators within their confines, or the athletes who took the field in front of them. These local identities certainly reinforced traditional stereotypes about different regions of France, but also highlighted the ways that regional identity, rather than detracting from a cohesive national identity, actually helped forge a ‘French’ spectating public. Yet that sense of national identity inside the stadium was also framed through the constant comparisons generated in the French press between French stadia and crowds and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe and around the globe. While these comparisons highlighted technical differences between sporting spaces and provided colourful travel narratives about foreign spectators, they also functioned as convenient benchmarks for monitoring the perceived vitality and social cohesion of France in relation to its rivals on the world stage, in ways that predominantly reinforced a sense of French inadequacy and decline throughout

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the interwar period, if not necessarily after the Second World War. At the same time, however, the comparisons with the wider world testified to the global character of sport itself in the first half of the twentieth century, as a mass media complex that included newspapers, specialised periodicals and radio in Western Europe and North America publicised and promoted sporting competitions that helped create transnational communities of spectators invested in the same sporting events.4 Stadia and spectators, then, were at the centre of overlapping narratives about place, community and identity throughout the twentieth century in France. These narratives were certainly shaped by political circumstances, such as the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany or the growing influence of the United States in Europe after 1918. But discussions of stadia and spectators also contributed in their own right to the process by which French men and women created mental maps of France and the world, just as they helped the French grapple with the challenges posed by urbanisation and the place of leisure in society. After all, not all French men and women came into regular contact with people from outside their own region, or with those who hailed from Germany, Italy, Great Britain or the United States, during the course of their everyday lives. Moreover, while travel and tourism were certainly on the rise, at least domestically, the mass explosion of leisure tourism would not happen in France until well after the Second World War. Many French men and women, however, were exposed to different regions or countries inside the stadium, whether in person or through the mediatised narratives in the sporting press and over the radio. Given the visibility of the sporting press, and the way that sports came to enjoy an ever-​increasing prominence in dailies like Paris-​Soir or Le Petit Parisien, stadia and spectators offered French men and women a tangible means of making sense of their nation, world and century. The relationship between sport and identities rooted in place has already been explored by a variety of historians and sociologists, taking their cues from the insight of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger that spectator sport has functioned as one of the ‘invented traditions’ key to the creation of twentieth-​century nationalism.5 Indeed, recent excellent scholarship on football, rugby and cycling has explored the relationship between sport and local and national identities in France.6 This chapter builds on that work about place-​based identity and community by concentrating on stadia and spectators from the second decade of the twentieth century until the late 1950s. But it also offers a set of new perspectives on the topic. For one, it integrates the stadium directly into this history: physical spaces themselves contributed to the kinds of place-​based

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narratives created around sport. Second, it also compares stadium-​based sport and the kinds of territorial identities it generated to those produced by the Tour de France; this approach highlights broad overarching similarities between the two, just as the analysis in the previous chapter foregrounded the related discourses about spectatorship produced inside stadia and along the roads of the Tour. Third, it breaks new ground by examining French perceptions of foreign stadia and spectators as a kind of ‘travel narrative’, in the process emphasising the global nature of sport in the first decades of the twentieth century. As Rudy Koshar has argued, the act of travel –​and the explicit comparison between what is familiar and ‘normal’ and that which is different and ‘foreign’ –​is productive of identity, not only for people as individuated and gendered beings, but as producers and consumers, citizens of a national political community and individuals with experiences in common with travellers of other nations.7 While relatively few French men and women travelled to England, Italy or other nations for sporting events, many thousands exercised what John Urry has called ‘imaginary mobility’ by listening to the radio or reading the sporting press about stadia and spectators abroad.8 In this sense, stadia helped French spectators, readers and radio listeners create literal and virtual travel narratives; the stadium’s place as a ‘node’ within global networks of sport offered those French men and women a ubiquitous and relatively universal set of points of reference for constructing their own place-​based identities, assessing the degree to which their nation functioned as a unified geographic whole, and for determining how it in turn compared with its counterparts elsewhere in Europe and the world.9

Local and national spectator identities in interwar France From the point of view of architects and politicians in the period between the two world wars, the stadium was connected to local identity predominantly when it reinforced narratives about civic progress. To be sure, on a few occasions, the stade seemed to fit within local architectural traditions. As one example, L’Illustration admired the way in which the architect of the new municipal stadium in Caen (in 1924) had integrated local ‘Norman’ architectural details into the grandstand.10 Early plans for the Stade-​Vélodrome in Marseille, for their part, drew praise for the architect’s efforts to ‘harmonise’ the stade with the setting and the local climate.11 The majority of the time, however, the stadium –​at least when built by local municipalities –​was less a marker of regional distinction and more a symbol of modern progress and development. Edouard

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Herriot, for instance, not only believed that his Stade Municipal symbolised his administration’s commitment to physical fitness, but also maintained that the stadium gave Lyon the right to rival Paris as the chief city in France.12 The connection between stadia and a sense of self-​proclaimed progress on the local level was also evident in the three major southern cities of Bordeaux, Toulouse and Marseille, where municipal officials embarked on projects to build sports parks and stadia in the 1930s. In Toulouse, the Socialist authorities crowed in 1931 that they were in the process of creating a park for sports and hygiene (including a large-​scale stade) that would be the envy of all other French cities.13 In Marseille, the local press boasted in 1937 that the new grand stade-​vélodrome (also built by a Socialist mayoralty) was the most handsome and impressive edifice of its kind in France.14 Finally, in Bordeaux, the city acquired the privately run Parc Lescure in 1932, and Mayor Adrien Marquet (a Socialist before drifting to the more authoritarian neo-​Socialists in 1935) pushed for the construction of a new and improved stadium, which was finally inaugurated in 1938 in time for the football World Cup.15 While the stadium was thus sometimes a source of local civic pride in its own right, it was more frequently rooted in a specific sense of place through its spectators and their daily experiences within its confines. The earliest and most dramatic example of this phenomenon occurred in south-​western France in conjunction with the diffusion of rugby. Even before the outbreak of the First World War, the successes of rugby clubs from the south-​west, notably Bordeaux’s Stade Bordelais Université Club (SBUC) and Toulouse’s Stade Toulousain, were appropriated and retranslated by local journalists and spectators as a positive assertion of local singularity.16 SBUC was the first non-​Parisian club to win the French rugby championship, a feat it accomplished in both 1904 and 1905. By 1912, however, Stade Toulousain had usurped its neighbour’s claim to regional supremacy, when the Toulousains capped an undefeated season by defeating Racing Club de France for their first rugby title.17 On the eve of that 1912 final at Stade Toulousain’s own Stade des Ponts-​Jumeaux, a private facility which had been built in 1907, Toulouse’s local sports paper, Le Journal des Sports, framed the match as a combat between Paris and the provinces. Its columnist sarcastically referred to Stade Toulousain as wearing the ‘colours of provincial France, of inferior France’ against the ‘France that counts for its spirit and talent: Paris, our heart, our brain, our model, our master’. In this context, the rugby final was the battleground for ‘smaller actors wrestling for the prestige of the entire nation’.18 After Stade Toulousain’s victory, the same columnist exulted in the ‘triumph of the Provinces’, noting that the crowd in attendance represented all

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the distant corners of southern France (the Midi) from Tarbes through Bayonne and Bordeaux.19 Thus Stade Toulousain’s matches at Ponts-​ Jumeaux, in this example, bolstered both local pride and a broader sense of a regional identity, mobilising and assembling spectators from all across the south-​west within the confines of Toulouse’s stadium. After the First World War, rugby became even more firmly associated with the Midi. Stade Toulousain won another five championships between 1918 and 1928, and the annual regular-​season championship final invariably took place at either the Stade Sainte-​Germaine (and later the Stade Lesclure) in Bordeaux or the Stade des Ponts-​Jumeaux in Toulouse until 1957. But for the press centred in Paris, rugby’s connection to the spaces and the people of the south-​west was not always depicted in positive terms. L’Auto and other national papers frequently described both the players and the spectators associated with south-​western rugby in terms lifted from stereotypes about the unruly, violent Méridionaux (residents of the Midi).20 As one of many examples, L’Auto ran a cartoon in April 1922 entitled Rugby-​Carambolage (Rugby Pile-​up), which depicted an out-​of-​control match surrounded by unruly spectators battling each other and the police. In the cartoon, one delighted spectator comments to an onlooker, ‘In packs, exactly! We don’t play any other way in the Midi!’21 The perceived violence of south-​western rugby set a standard for the rest of the nation: L’Auto opined in 1921 that the ‘new partisans’ of rugby in southern cities like Tarascon and Perpignan had rendered rugby matches extremely ‘stormy’ and ‘rowdy’. Conveniently ignoring that Parisian crowds had attacked the referee during the infamous Match Baxter in 1913, L’Auto declared that violent rugby crowds had recently spread from the south-​west to regions north of the Loire.22 If the Parisian press painted with a broad brush and saw the entire south-​west as a territory for rugby violence, local journalists in Toulouse rejected the association between their particular city and poor behaviour, while deploying those same stereotypes about rowdy Méridionaux to differentiate between Toulousains and other rugby players and spectators from smaller towns across the region. The Toulousain press argued that local spectators at the Stade des Ponts-​Jumeaux, in fact, were highly knowledgeable, even more so than their Parisian counterparts. If the local crowds had a fault, wrote a columnist for Midi Olympique in 1931, they were ‘demanding’ and ‘difficult’ and were satisfied by only quality rugby as opposed to a mere victory.23 In contrast, it was the rugby du clocher (‘clock tower’ or village rugby) that produced violence and regrettable incidents. The tendency to reject Parisian criticism of their city and to displace that critique onto other villages in the area was also evident in

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Midi Olympique’s response to an incident of spectator violence in 1929. The sports newspaper bridled at an unspecified Parisian paper’s note that a referee was ‘lynched’ by a ‘stupid and cruel’ crowd in Lézignan, a small town west of Narbonne. While tacitly acknowledging that a rugby crowd had indeed attacked a referee, Midi Olympique carped that this incident had taken place in Pézenas, not Lézignan. In addition, it sniped that the Parisians had placed Pézenas to the south of Lézignan, instead of the north, where it was actually located. ‘Parisian sports journalists,’ the paper complained, ‘so adept at not making mistakes when it comes to criticising that which is reprehensible to the south of the Loire’ were less skilled at geography.24 Indeed, the paper’s main complaint was that the Parisians continually disparaged the entire Midi as violent, when, as the Toulousains stressed, disreputable activities only took place in specific localities well beyond their city. In this instance, stadia and spectatorship offered a means of defining and contesting identities rooted in a sense of place. For Parisians, at least those who wrote for the sporting press and other dailies, sport south of the Loire was associated with a stereotypical southern proclivity for violence and disorder. In Toulouse, in contrast, the behaviour of rugby players and spectators served as a statement of local pride and, somewhat ironically, as a means of distinguishing the city from other parts of the southern countryside. Spectatorship at the Stade des Ponts-​Jumeaux, in fact, was interpreted by the Toulousain press as a sign of superiority in relation to Paris, both in terms of spectator knowledge and discipline and in the local team’s sheer ability to play rugby.25 Rugby’s centre of gravity remained concentrated in the south-​west throughout the interwar period, although the stranglehold of big clubs like Stade Toulousain or Aviron Bayonnais (in Bayonne) was challenged by clubs from smaller southern towns like Quillan as the 1930s progressed.26 Fifteen-​man rugby itself also faced a short-​lived challenge from thirteen-​man rugby or rugby à treize (rugby league in Great Britain), a faster, more offensive-​minded version of the game, during the 1930s. This alternate rugby code, however, was still mostly practised in the south and south-​west.27 Meanwhile, football’s strongholds emerged in Brittany, the northern Pas-​de-​Calais (Lille and Lens), Provence (Marseille), Paris, the eastern Doubs (Sochaux-​Montbéliard) and the area of central France around Saint-​Etienne and Lyon. In the north and north-​east, in particular, football eventually implanted itself as a working-​class spectator sport in areas dominated by the mining, automobile and textile industries, although (as Marion Fontaine notes) those working-​class spectators were hardly exclusively committed to football in the period before 1945;

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they also pursued all sorts of other leisure pursuits ranging from pigeon-​ breeding to bicycling to attending weekly dances.28 In any case, these regions were also marked by the presence of large numbers of immigrants from Italy, Belgium and Poland.29 Football arguably functioned here as a kind of common cultural code, solidifying local communities and aiding the integration of foreigners into French society.30 In Marseille, football likewise integrated a highly diverse, largely working-​class population. In the words of Christian Bromberger, the strong labour traditions of Marseille provided a ‘compost’ (terreau) that fertilised the implantation of football in that city. Marseille also attracted migrants from Italy and North Africa in large numbers. Not surprisingly, Olympique de Marseille, the main football team in the city, was one of the first professional football teams in metropolitan France to regularly employ players of Arab descent, with three (including the celebrated Moroccan-​born Larbi Ben Barek) selected to its 1938 team.31 The association between football, its stadia, and the local communities of spectators was most visible in those regions during the ‘derby’, a term borrowed from English to describe the clash between teams from rivalling cities in the same general area (like Sochaux and Strasbourg), from the same metropolitan conurbation (such as Roubaix, Lille, Fivès and Tourcoing) or the same city (like Racing Club and Stade Français in Paris). While these matches never acquired the scale of similar derbies in Great Britain, they were still characterised by an ‘animated’ and ‘passionate’ public that asserted its local loyalties.32 As one example, in advance of the Sochaux-​Strasbourg derby in November 1934, special trains from Strasbourg transported approximately 1,200 spectators to Montbéliard. The Strasbourgeois paraded from the train station to the Stade de la Forge behind their flag, with certain enthusiasts playing traditional Alsatian tunes on the accordion. The supporters of Strasbourg were not the only ones to travel to Montbéliard for the match; the restaurants in the town were ‘assaulted’ by automobile travellers from ‘all points’ of Alsace, the Doubs, the Haute-​Saône and Switzerland. During the match itself, distinct bands of spectators differentiated themselves via their costume and their cheers. The supporters of Racing Club de Strasbourg wore blue and white scarves, while the Sochaux supporters wore yellow and carried yellow megaphones bearing the inscription ‘Allez! Sochaux!’33 Communal identity, in the case of the derby, was solidified both through the practice of spectatorship, featuring costumes, chants and songs, and travel, as well as the meditated diffusion of the match via the press and the radio by the early 1930s. The physical voyages of club supporters, while again on a much smaller scale than the travelling groups of

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supporters in Great Britain during the same period, also helped crystallise a sense of local belonging. The Coupe de France, in particular, generated multiple voyages between different provincial cities and from those provincial cities to Paris and back again. Supporter trains transported thousands of spectators to key matches during the Coupe, particularly for the final in Paris at the Stade de Colombes. Allez O.L., the newsletter of the supporter club for Lille’s flagship team, Olympique Lillois, stressed the importance of this mobile spectatorship when it proclaimed, in 1934, that it was the duty of all Lillois to be in Paris for the Coupe semi-​final against Sète on 8 April.34 At times during the interwar period, in fact, the Coupe de France final itself was a glorified derby, a regional showdown that took place in Paris. The 1933 title match, for instance, pitted two teams from Roubaix –​Excelsior Athlétic Club and Racing Club –​against each other at Colombes. The match retained the flavour of a local match, as spectators from both teams descended on the capital via four special trains chartered for the occasion.35 Those spectators from the involved cities who could not make the match, or those members of the general public interested in sport, could make the trip virtually by reading the exhaustive previews and summaries of the match in the national and local press. By the early 1930s, they could also follow the fixture via radio, which covered football with particular frequency; in fact, newspapers like Football often printed a handy listening guide for their readers that identified the regional broadcasting stations that would broadcast the event, and that provided a small diagram that divided the playing field into eight numbered sections, which would theoretically aid the listener in tracking the action during the match.36 As much as stadia and spectatorship, as experienced in person and as mediated through the press and radio, affirmed a local sense of community, they also helped contribute to a national sporting identity. In the case of football, the local partisans of Roubaix or Lille culminated their season at a locale (the Stade de Colombes) that functioned as France’s de facto national stadium. Spectators who travelled physically to the cup final, read about the travels of other spectators or listened to the radio broadcasts made a journey that connected them to Paris, whether they hailed from Lille, Roubaix, Marseille, Sète or Rennes. The Coupe de France final, too, was imbued with national symbolism, given the annual presence of the President of the Republic at the match after 1927. This fusion of local specificity and national identity also occurred in the context of the national rugby team’s matches at Colombes, as the team itself was largely composed of players from the south-​west, who in turn attracted fellow southerners to cheer them on inside the stade. For

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France–​Scotland, the opening match of the Five Nations competition in January 1930, Midi Olympique’s Marcel de Laborderie remarked that the grandstands at the Stade de Colombes were jammed with Méridionaux who wanted to witness the ‘frolics’ of their compatriots, ‘so numerous on the French team’. While the spectators waited several hours for the match to begin, they improvised their own musical entertainment, singing traditional airs like the ‘Montagnards’ and the ‘Toulousaine’.37 The organisers at Colombes often accommodated this southern crowd, playing typical songs from the Midi over the public address system before matches (even those that did not feature the national team) to make the crowd feel as if it were at home.38 And the southern character of this ‘national’ crowd was also evident to foreign observers, as the Manchester Guardian noted in 1920 that the crowd for France–​Wales was mostly ‘men from the Midi’, particularly ‘black-​eyed mountaineers’ (Basques), alongside the ‘young sporting men of Paris’.39 The interplay between multiple kinds of place-​based identities inside the stadium showcases what other scholars have identified as the critical role of local and regional difference in constructing national identity under the Third Republic. Anne-​Marie Thiesse, for instance, has highlighted the centrality of petites patries, or local departments, to the forging of national consciousness after 1877. The national and the local, she argues, were deemed perfectly compatible; the nation was the harmonious assembly of different constituent territorial and cultural parts.40 The act of travel within France, too, has been linked by Patrick Young to the process of republican nation-​building, as tourists began to ‘discover’ the regions of France as part of a broader whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.41 The sporting spectators of the 1920s and 1930s were thus ‘discovering’ different visions of France: they could travel to matches themselves, read about stadia and crowds in the newspaper or listen to radio broadcasts of major matches held in Paris or the provinces. These disparate activities, which were certainly rooted in local specificity, helped constitute a national sporting community that loosely unified all French sporting enthusiasts and spectators. The territorial narratives generated by discussions of stadia and spectators also resembled those produced by the Tour de France during the same time period, with both valorising a national identity founded on a sense of regional diversity. The Tour, of course, was explicitly designed to showcase the different geographic regions of France, as its itinerary, initially limited to the populated river corridors along the Rhône, Garonne and Loire, soon delineated the frontiers of France:  the Vosges and the Alps on the eastern frontiers, the Pyrenees in the south-​west, and the

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Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines to the south, west and north-​ west.42 As the Tour carried the riders to the diverse extremities of the nation, observers called attention to France’s geography, which provided what L’Intransigeant called a spectacular mise-​en-​scène (staging) for the race.43 But the French landscape was not just merely the backdrop for the Tour; it also shaped the competition itself, through the geographic obstacles that the riders had to surmount, particularly the mountains of the Pyrenees and the Alps. Furthermore, in the pages of the press, the race itinerary became part of what Christopher Thompson has called an ‘annual lesson’ in French geography, with press commentary on the route closely resembling the tourist narratives in popular guidebooks like the Guides-​Joanne or the Guides Bleus.44 The race, in this sense, served a pedagogical function in ‘teaching the nation about itself ’, presenting French men and women with the image of a nation united through its topographic diversity.45 However, while the Tour’s different regions were more distinct from each other than, for instance, stadia in Lyon and Marseille, the discussions of local identity associated with Tour spectatorship closely resembled those that focused on stadium crowds. The organisers of the Tour depicted the spectators along the roadside as a picturesque collection of regional stereotypes, whose very heterogeneity constituted French unity.46 In L’Auto and the mainstream press alike, the Tour’s spectators were seemingly plucked from an ethnographic museum. Crowds in the Midi were enthusiastic and exuberant; Breton spectators were religious; Basque men wore berets, while their young women had large eyes and beautiful white teeth.47 Radio coverage of the Tour, which began when a team from L’Intransigeant and Match aired live broadcasts in 1929, also reinforced this notion of quaint regional peculiarity.48 To add ‘local colour’ to the race in 1932, for instance, radio broadcasts included songs performed in the Béarnais patois when the race passed through Pau, and Catalan music when it stopped in Perpignan.49 At the same time, the race coverage in the press and over the airwaves emphasised that, despite its regional diversity, the crowd was united by its passion for the race. As Desgrange noted in 1911, the race organisers felt ‘profound joy’ at hearing ‘bravo!’ in all the regional languages of France, from Flemish to Breton, Provençal and Basque.50 Like football or rugby spectators, the crowds at the roadside of the Tour also seemed to cheer more ardently for certain riders:  they were particularly partial to competitors from their own region. Desgrange and L’Auto, in fact, consciously called attention to the regional origins of the French riders, even though most of them lived and trained in Paris, in

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an effort to forge a tighter bond between spectators and racers.51 But the spectators at the roadside were not necessarily always locals taking the day off to watch the race. The Tour de France increasingly drew tourists from outside of the regions on the race itinerary, particularly after the First World War. As more and more comfortably middle-​class French men and women acquired automobiles over the course of the interwar period, the Tour became a tourist destination, initially for a more affluent clientele.52 In 1924, for instance, L’Intransigeant described a well-​dressed ‘Parisian’ public on the Col d’Izoard in the Alps, where the women wore grey wool travelling costumes and looked as if they belonged on an ‘avenue in the Bois [du Boulogne in Paris] around 10 a.m.’.53 By 1936, the crowds had swollen dramatically; during that year’s Tour, the Col du Galibier in the Alps was lined with ‘thousands of autos parked one behind another’.54 And the proliferation of cheaper means of transportation, notably bicycles and motorcycles, along with the advent of paid vacations under the Popular Front in 1936, further diversified the kind of tourist crowd on display at the roadside.55 The ‘thousands’ of automobiles along the Galibier in 1936 were accompanied by ‘motorcycles everywhere on the snow’, evidence for a fairly heterogeneous crowd even at one of the race’s more remote locations.56 In another anecdotal indicator of crowd diversity, the left-​wing magazine Regards noted the juxtaposition of the ‘shorts of the pretty cyclotourist’ in Brittany alongside the ‘heavy dress of the (female) farmer from nearby’ in 1938.57 Both stadium-​based sporting spectacle and the Tour, then, facilitated a kind of spectator displacement that simultaneously emphasised a local sense of place and a broader national community. Like the Coupe de France, too, cycling benefitted from the ‘imaginary mobilities’ generated by press and radio coverage. By 1932, radio broadcasters were recording key moments of the race in the mountains and chiming in with regular updates during each day of racing to give the listeners continuing coverage throughout the morning and afternoon. Letters to the editor in L’Intransigeant revealed in 1932 that radio listeners felt that they were actually at the summit of a difficult climb like the Col d’Aubisque in the Pyrenees or that they were truly able to witness the finish of the stage.58 As one self-​described ‘enthusiast’ put it: ‘Who among us didn’t tremble in unison with all of the spectators at the finish of a stage while listening, second by second –​why do I say “while listening?” –​while truly seeing the so powerfully calculated effort of our brave racers.’59 The virtual displacement facilitated by the radio clearly created a connection to place and people for the listener at home, reinforcing once again the territorial implications of spectatorship, both inside and outside of the stadium.

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The spaces of sport and their spectators  –​from the stadia for football and rugby to the roads and vélodromes of the Tour –​thus ultimately emphasised both regional particularity and an overarching sense of what it meant to be ‘French’. But national identity in the context of sport and stadia was also constructed in other ways. If collective identity, as it has been argued, often derives from a process of differentiating between ‘Us’ and the ‘Other’, comparisons between what was French and what was foreign in terms of stadia and spectators permeated the interwar press.60 The press did not merely scrutinise the fields and the grandstands of French stades for those who belonged within the national community and those who were excluded from it; L’Auto and its counterparts also devoted considerable attention to stadia and spectators abroad. Through both physical travel beyond French frontiers and imaginary displacement via the radio and the press, French spectators took advantage of the transnational qualities of sport in the first half of the twentieth century to make comparisons that ultimately called attention to French deficiencies rather than strengths, and fortified a sense of inadequacy regarding France’s position in Europe that certainly continued unabated up through the Second World War.

Stadia, sport and transnational comparisons Even within French borders, stadia showcased those who could be classified as ‘French’ and those who were ‘foreign’. The athletes themselves were subjected to frequent scrutiny, particularly in a sport like football, where approximately 30 per cent of professional players in France in the 1930s were classified as foreigners. After an initial wave of British players from the 1890s through to the 1920s before the advent of professionalism, Yugoslavs, Austrians and Hungarians dominated foreign recruiting until the late 1930s, when more players began arriving from Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America.61 Some of the foreign players, notably the Hungarian András ‘André’ Simonyi and the Austrian Auguste ‘Gusti’ Jordan, were later naturalised as French citizens and selected for the French national team, while others were more transitory and returned home after a few years. The subject of the nationality of players was clearly a subject for discussion, sometimes in a more flippant vein; L’Auto joked that ignorant spectators sometimes called for the ‘denationalisation’ of players who did not perform up to their exacting standards.62 The lines between ‘foreign’ and ‘French’ were more ambiguous when it came to players who hailed from the French colonies. By and large, these

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men were simultaneously considered part of the national community and treated differently on the basis of their racial heritage. Raoul Diagne, for instance, was the son of well-​known Senegalese politican Blaise Diagne; much to his father’s chagrin, he pursued a career in football and became a key defensive player for Racing Club and the French national team in the mid-​1930s. An even bigger star was the Moroccan Larbi Ben Barek –​ known in France as the ‘la Perle Noire’ or ‘the Black Pearl’ –​who played for Olympique de Marseille and the French national team before and after the Second World War.63 Yet both Diagne and Ben Barek were depicted in terms that often emphasised their foreign qualities over any ‘French’ characteristics.64 Diagne was named by one female reader of Football in 1936 as her favourite player because he ‘made one dream of plantations, cabins hidden in the brush, jungle dances, and escapes beyond the known world’.65 Ben Barek was exotified in a similar manner: one notable cartoon in Football from January 1939 joked that he had helped 40,000 Parisians learn the language of the chleuhs –​a derogatory term for North Africans –​during the ninety minutes of a football match. Their ‘language learning’ consisted of shouting ‘Ben Barek! Ben Barek!’ over and over.66 A secondary caption noted that Ben Barek’s acts of prestidigitation with the ball caused the crowd to ‘have their eye’ on the Empire. The casually racist use of the term chleuh to describe Ben Barek, as well as the implicit humour in the suggestion that French spectators would ever learn Arabic, made it clear that athletes from the colonies were only tenuously and patronisingly included in the national collective.67 But, watching players on French teams was not the only way that spectators inside French stadia came into contact with foreigners inside the stade. Foreign rugby teams circulated around France in the 1920s and 1930s, for tours like those undertaken by New Zealand’s ‘All Blacks’ in 1925 and the Australian ‘Waratahs’ in 1927, and for the normal matches in the Five Nations competition. Foreign football teams, ranging from international sides like England or Belgium to club teams like Arsenal, also made regular appearances on French soil. During these competitions, French commentary not only focused on the players themselves, but turned, too, to the communities of foreign spectators also in attendance. Indeed, newspapers frequently noted the large presence of ‘expatriates’ in the grandstands for these types of matches. In 1930, for instance, Racing Club staged an end-​of-​season tournament at the Stade Buffalo that included MBK Hungaria, a prominent club team from Budapest. Football noted that the grandstands were packed for the team’s two games, due to the loyal support of the Hungarian community in Paris. The Hungarians were clearly identifiable in the grandstands due to their

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rhythmic clapping and cheering, as well as their attire. Football noted that Paris was on its way to becoming ‘another New York’, where large immigrant populations of Italians, Germans and Hungarians ‘assured the financial success’ of cycling races and football matches which featured representatives of their homelands.68 Football did not mention, however, that MBK Hungaria was a club team funded by Budapest’s heavily assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie that mobilised fellow Jews wherever it travelled across Europe.69 The Hungarian colony in the grandstands at the Stade Buffalo was thus almost certainly Jewish as well as central European, further differentiating it from other spectators in attendance. Inside France, then, pockets of visibly ‘foreign’ spectators occasionally made their presence felt within the stade. They were also certainly present along the roads of the Tour de France, where Italian spectators in particular were frequently condemned for ‘incessant jingoism’ and ‘nearly unbearable’ behaviour.70 In part, the negative depictions of Italian spectators stemmed from their visibility in France and their prominence at the race. Italians represented the largest immigrant community in interwar France, with close to 800,000 transalpins (as they were known) living on French soil in 1931.71 In addition, in the years before 1939, the Tour always traversed the frontier districts bordering Italy, with their high concentrations of Italian immigrants. But prominence alone does not explain the association of Italians with wildly undisciplined spectatorship; the race also passed through the frontier areas near Spain and Belgium, and those foreign spectators were depicted in largely positive terms as ‘festive’ and ‘stoic’ respectively.72 More significantly, the Tour tapped into stereotypes about unruly ‘Latin’ characteristics, as well as prevailing hostility and suspicion directed at Italians elsewhere in France. The French police viewed the political rivalries of Italian expatriates in France with alarm, fearing that Italian anti-​Fascists were overly left-​wing and that Italian Fascist sympathisers were Mussolini loyalists intent on promoting irredentist nationalist claims to Nice, Savoy and Corsica. Indeed, rivalries between pro-​Fascist and anti-​Fascist Italians in France sometimes manifested themselves at the Tour, as was the case when Italian spectators clashed with each other during Ottavio Bottecchia’s victory in 1924.73 By the 1930s, too, Italian immigrants were often scapegoated by the right for taking French jobs during a period of economic crisis.74 The Italians at the Tour were thus automatically suspect: even though French spectators undoubtedly voiced rabidly nationalistic sentiments at the roadside as well, it was the Italians who were consistently relegated to the ranks of ‘troublesome’ spectators, much like the boisterous Méridionaux who fomented rugby violence or the undisciplined Parisians who stormed the field after a match.75

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Both stadium spectatorship and the Tour de France, then, produced narratives that re-​evaluated the contours and composition of the national community, and that delineated its limits. The Tour, however, was less useful as a benchmark of comparison for developments in countries beyond French frontiers in the years before the Second World War, as its itinerary remained by and large a circuit of France, even as it took the riders close to the boundaries of the nation and across those borders into Switzerland.76 Instead, the most dramatic comparisons between French and ‘foreign’ in a sporting context took place outside the Hexagone, when French journalists and spectators travelled to stadia abroad. Their encounters beyond French frontiers, and the mediatised depiction of those voyages in the French press and over the radio, turned the stadium into a recognisable benchmark of comparison in regard to Western Europe and North America. Stadia abroad, in fact, attracted a small yet not inconsequential coterie of French visitors. They drew professional interest on a few occasions from politicians and bureaucrats: the Socialist mayor of the Parisian suburb of Puteaux, Georges Barthélémy, travelled with his assistant Hubert Hérouville to Berlin in 1937 to examine the stadia and playing fields there, while Pierre Laval, at the time acting in his capacity as mayor of Aubervilliers (another Parisian banlieue), sent two of his assistants to England in 1936 for similar purposes.77 The vast majority of stadium travellers, however, made their trips for sporting events, often in the company of their compatriots. The supporter club for the French national football team, which was created by Football’s editor Marcel Rossini in 1933, negotiated special group travel packages to London, Brussels and Amsterdam, among other destinations, for international football matches. This sort of sporting tourism was not a cheap proposition; the cost of the overall travel package for a 1933 match between France and England in London, for instance, was well over 200 francs.78 Yet despite the price tag, 2,000 people made that trip to London, with another thousand travelling to Brussels for the France–​Belgium match in 1935.79 And the travellers did get to travel in ‘good conditions of comfort’, according to Football, and ended up spending less than if they had attempted to make arrangements for tickets, travel and lodging on their own initiative.80 The physical voyage of the tourist-​spectator abroad was, in turn, diffused and reproduced for ‘virtual’ spectators through the press and through the proliferation of radio broadcasts. Journalists, of course, provided a steady drumbeat of commentary about stadia and spectators abroad. Their message was certainly amplified by radio, which not only covered the Tour and major clashes in the Coupe de France, but

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also brought action from Naples or Edinburgh into the living room of the French spectator who wanted to follow the match as it happened, but could not physically travel to the match itself. International football and rugby matches were regularly retransmitted by Parisian and regional radio (PTT) posts. On at least one occasion, in 1935, radio mediated international travel for spectators already inside a French stadium, when the 10,000 spectators who had arrived at the Parc des Princes in advance of a match between a composite Parisian squad and a team from Prague listened to a radio broadcast (played over the Parc’s public address system) of the first half of the France–​Italy football match in progress at the Stadio Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) in Rome.81 French spectators thus travelled physically and virtually, via the same media complex that often facilitated actual voyages, to foreign stadia. They encountered a tourist landscape that was at once familiar and exotic: it featured the same kind of sites that one could find in France, but it also underscored the differences travellers encountered between foreign stades and spectators and their counterparts in the Hexagone. Like other kinds of tourists who tended to frequent certain tourist locales, sporting tourists repeatedly voyaged to a handful of countries that elicited particular interest throughout the interwar period. Great Britain topped the list as the most popular foreign destination and proved a constant if relatively unthreatening point of reference for the French; the same could not be said, however, for Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States, which elicited nervous comparisons throughout the interwar period for divergent reasons. Given its place in the history of organised sport, Great Britain was not surprisingly the target of the highest volume of French comparisons throughout the interwar period. The French repeatedly commented on the proliferation and size of British stadia, and on the correspondingly large numbers of well-​behaved spectators inside them. The stadium at Wembley, for instance, was lauded in the French press for its sheer scale. L’Auto ran architectural drawings of the stadium in 1922, when it was under construction, noting that it was projected to contain 125,000 spectators and had no equivalent in Great Britain except for Hampden Park in Glasgow.82 The rugby stadium of Murrayfield outside of Edinburgh, completed in 1925, likewise earned praise from L’Auto’s Gaston Bénac, who noted that the ‘colossal’ concrete grandstands, designed for 80,000 people, were built up to the edge of the playing field; no running track separated the field from the grandstands inside this stadium uniquely dedicated to rugby.83 Not only impressed by the size and design of British stadia, the French sporting press, including L’Auto, Le Miroir des Sports and Football,

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repeatedly and obsessively contrasted the attendance figures and gate receipts of football matches in the United Kingdom with French ones throughout the interwar period. The sporting press frequently pointed to the single-​elimination football tournaments in France and England, the Coupe de France and the Football Association (FA) Cup, as the best indicators of the sporting gap between the two. As one typical example, Le Miroir des Sports compared the quarter-​final rounds of the two competitions in 1934: while the four French fixtures (Sète–​Amiens, Lille–​Tourcoing, Roubaix–​Rouen and Marseille–​Rennes) attracted a mere 59,645 spectators, one FA Cup match alone between Manchester City and Stoke drew 84,569 fans. The best-​attended French quarter-​ final, Roubaix–​Rouen (played 90 kilometres from the latter city in Le Havre), drew 24,009 spectators, far below the most poorly attended FA Cup fixture of Leicester versus Preston (38,605). To compound the sense of English superiority, the French press also noted how much more money English matches generated; in this instance, the four FA Cup tilts grossed 1.45 million francs, almost triple the French total of 567,814 francs.84 The superior crowd totals in Great Britain, or so the French press argued, resulted from better tactics of stadium crowd control and the spirit of the British crowds themselves. The British stadium was continually portrayed as an efficient, crowd-​managing marvel, thanks to the system of turnstiles installed at the gates. Football marvelled that gate receipts in Britain were always high because all the spectators in the grandstands had to pay to enter, whereas French stadia were filled with non-​paying resquilleurs.85 British crowds, according to French viewers, also displayed sporting erudition and self-​control. The festive public of the FA Cup final was an annual subject for fawning articles in the French press, as evidenced by the following passage from Le Miroir des Sports concerning the 1938 final between Preston and Huddersfield: The demonstrative, turbulent, good-​natured crowd, within which the yellowing grey of raincoats (here and there not very clean, and from time to time frankly disgusting) dominates, this crowd that takes over the capital on Saturday morning, which sees Downing Street and the Changing of the Guard, and which is formed of Londoners, workers from Yorkshire and miners from Lancashire, loses all at once its diversity of temperament and thought to commune in perfect unity and harmony in the singing of a religious hymn like ‘O Lord, abide with me’ or the national anthem ‘God Save the King’. There are neither unbelievers nor staunch members of the trade unions: there is one public reunited for a communal demonstration of sport, under the lofty presidency of the King and the Queen.86

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The British crowd was both festive and deferential, disciplined in the context of the match and in regards to its social betters. Le Miroir des Sports concluded that the French had yet to advance to the same point in ‘development’ as the British, but would eventually reach such a stage.87 The French commentary on British crowds, like tourist narratives in general, presented a particular and somewhat distorted vision of the tourist destination in question, one that called attention to the popularity of sport in Great Britain and appeared to offer evidence for social harmony in that country. But, while football was indeed massively popular, the interwar era in Great Britain was far less of a halcyon era of spectator tranquillity than the French supposed; spectators in British stadia used offensive and vulgar language, for instance, and invaded the pitch after matches.88 French observers also paid little attention to the more uncomfortable aspects of the British stadium experience, where most spectators stood throughout the match in the ‘terraces’ on raised banks of earth turned muddy by the frequent rain. Those spectators also tolerated a poor view of the action on the field, little or no protection from the elements and a complete lack of adequate toilet facilities.89 In terms of social harmony, too, the French sporting press seemed oblivious of the reality that Great Britain was hit far harder and earlier by the Great Depression than France, and was beset by sharp labour conflicts during the interwar period. In short, the French sporting gaze directed at Great Britain ignored both stadium realities and social cleavages to repeatedly promote an image of British social harmony and, conversely, a portrait of French fractiousness and indiscipline. The sporting press was thus vocally Anglophilic during a period when French society was increasingly divided between admirers of Great Britain and those (particularly on the right) who voiced their frustration at perceived British perfidy regarding German reparations payments and foreign policy in general.90 Such irritation notwithstanding, Great Britain was a fellow democracy, a key wartime ally and a fairly unproblematic target of comparison for the French. But French travellers also confronted the role of stadia and spectator culture in nations that seemed to pose more of a challenge to the French way of life, notably Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union and even the United States. In general, stadia and spectators in these four countries elicited admiration from French commentators who admired the resources invested in sport and physical fitness, and who read stadia and spectators as proof of a certain social dynamism that appeared to be lacking in France. At the same time, French observers also voiced their alarm at the way stadia and sport in those nations attested to militarisation, rampant nationalism and (in the

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case of the United States) what certain commentators saw as unabashed commercialism. Among the dictatorships of Europe, Fascist Italy received the highest amount of praise and positive coverage in the French sporting press (save in the publications of the far left), particularly in the early 1930s. L’Auto, Football and Le Miroir des Sports frequently published pictures of Italian stadia and commentaries on those spaces. As one example, in a preview of the 1934 World Cup, which was to be held in Italy, L’Auto’s Maurice Pefferkorn singled out the new Stadio Mussolini in Turin as the largest and the most modern of all Italian stadia. The stadium was remarkable for its size (it could accommodate 70,000 people), its twenty entrances and the fact that it was constructed entirely out of reinforced concrete.91 The architectural periodical L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui also praised new Italian stadia, including the Stadio Mussolini, the Stadio PNF in Rome and the Stadio Giovanni Berta in Florence, in a special issue in 1934. The periodical deemed the modernist Stadio Berta, designed by engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, to be particularly innovative: it argued that the ‘svelte’ and ‘clear’ framework of the stadium, the ‘spiritual’ construction of its staircases and the ‘slender profile’ of the awning of the main grandstand had ‘entered into the repertory of classic constructions in reinforced concrete’.92 Stadium construction in Italy was seen not only as a sign of a willingness to embrace modernist architectural principles, but was also interpreted as an indicator of the Fascists’ apparent commitment to physical education and sport. The government had created 3,280 new fields in 1930, according to L’Auto. Two thousand of these fields belonged to general clubs, while 800 were the property of sports clubs, eighty were under military control and 400 were administered by the Fascist youth organisation, the Opera Nazionale Balilla.93 The emphasis on youth offered proof (according to Le Miroir des Sports) that the Fascists were using sport to orient their country fearlessly towards the future; meanwhile, Football hailed the enthusiasm Italians demonstrated for football as spectators to be evidence that Mussolini’s regime had managed to make its citizens healthier and more active.94 This latter interpretation was not entirely accurate, given the Fascist regime’s own ambivalence towards football (calcio) as a spectator sport and its unsuccessful attempts to replace the game with a hybrid of football and team handball called volata.95 Yet these tourist narratives connected to stadia in Italy, all accuracy aside, generated favourable impressions of Mussolini’s regime and gave credence to the Fascists’ own strident narrative that they were successfully creating a new breed of Italians.96

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However, the portrait of Italy, seen through its stadia and spectators, was not unambiguously positive. The crowds inside Italian stadia were perceived to be even more undisciplined and violent than those Italian spectators at the roadside in France. Football, for example, described the atmosphere at a 1938 match between France and Italy at the Stadio Partenopeo in Naples as ‘Vesuvian’ while Gabriel Hanot, writing in Le Miroir des Sports, was unable to resist a similarly inspired quip, calling the crowd ‘volcanic’.97 Hanot harshly criticised the deafening ambiance in Naples, akin to nothing he had seen in his thirty-​five years as a sportsman and journalist. The 50,000-​strong Neapolitan crowd was passionate to the point of ‘incivility’; Hanot wrote that the French were ‘first whistled at upon their entrance to the field, and then again when they saluted the crowd’.98 It may not be a coincidence that Italian stadia were heavily praised in 1934, when Fascist Italy was regarded relatively positively by all but the left-​wing press. Nor is it terribly surprising that Italian spectators were sharply criticised in 1938, at a moment when diplomatic relations between France and Fascist Italy had dramatically deteriorated as a result of the latter’s bellicose behaviour, notably its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and its support for Francisco Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War after 1936. Mussolini’s drift into a tighter alliance with Nazi Germany also hardly improved matters.99 But, in any event, the more negative impressions did not erase the previous praise that had been bestowed upon Italy: narratives about the regime’s embrace of sporting ‘progress’ and modernity thus coexisted with criticism of stereotypically undisciplined spectators. The descriptions of Italy’s eventual Axis partner, Nazi Germany, as a locale for sporting tourism were similarly ambivalent, with praise for facilities and crowds tempered by a sense of alarm at German militarism. The French sporting press had, in reality, few occasions to compare French stadia and crowds with their counterparts in Germany before 1933. In contrast to France and Italy, which had played each other in football as early as 1910 and which continued to compete against each other after the First World War, France and Germany had little sporting contact until their respective rugby teams took the field at the Stade de Colombes in 1927. This match was followed later that year by a track and field meet between the two nations at the same stadium.100 The first international football match between the two nations did not take place until 1931, when the French prevailed 1–​0 in front of 50,000 spectators at the Parc des Princes; on that occasion, L’Auto cautiously praised the ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘well-​behaved’ German contingent in the grandstands.101 While

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the Manchester Guardian reported a different total attendance figure than L’Auto, it found the match noteworthy as well, claiming that 40,000 French and Germans had ‘rubbed shoulders’ inside the grounds and that the police encountered no difficulties with the crowd, save for turning thousands away once the stadium had filled to capacity.102 These sporting encounters, however, took place in France. Most of the direct observations of German stadia and spectators occurred after the 1933 Nazi seizure of power. Two months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, L’Auto’s Mario Brun visited Berlin with his wife to watch an international football match between France and Germany. Brun, the author of ‘Les Trois Buts’ discussed in Chapter 3, was impressed by the behaviour of the German crowd leaving the stadium.103 While it took over an hour to completely evacuate the stadium through a single exit after the match, the spectators remained stereotypically calm and disciplined. ‘It was truly remarkable’, wrote Brun, to ‘see this immense crowd docilely obey the injunctions of the police without demonstrating, without forcing the barriers, stopping as a block when it needed, dividing itself in two parts and letting another group of spectators pass through the middle’.104 An even more pivotal moment for evaluating German stadia and spectators came three years later, with the 1936 Summer Olympic Games. Although the Games had been awarded to Germany while the latter was still a parliamentary republic in 1932, the Nazi regime embraced the Olympics as a unique opportunity for self-​promotion.105 The Nazis devoted significant resources and publicity to the sites for the Games, particularly the massive Berlin Olympic Stadium completed in 1936.106 The stadium was, by all accounts, an impressive space; writing in Le Miroir des Sports, Géo André marvelled at all of the technological trappings, including its mobile cinema cameras, electric lights and timing devices, central heating and loudspeakers. In his words, a ‘modern demon’ had taken refuge in an antique stadium.107 L’Auto, too, praised the ‘imposing’ stadium with its special arrangements for cinema cameras and its palatial accommodations for the press gallery.108 Yet, while the French press admired the facilities constructed for the Olympic Games and usually praised German spectators, it also criticised the Nazis for turning the 1936 Games into a theatrical, politicised celebration of the regime. The closing ceremonies of those Games concluded with an immense light show, where twenty projectors created a ‘cone of light’ over the stadium, while the assembled spectators below ‘religiously’ sang the Nazi party anthems.109 Writing in L’Auto, Lucien Dubech opined that sport and the Olympic Games had only a ‘very distant’ relationship with the ‘theatrical’ performance of the opening ceremony:  sport,

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according to Dubech, was ‘annexed, exploited, swallowed and overwhelmed’.110 The spectacle and the overtly militaristic nationalism of the Germans also disgusted L’Auto’s editor-​in-​chief Jacques Goddet, who fumed that the ‘disfigured Games’ were a ‘grandiose demonstration for a national political regime’.111 Their vocabulary was, perhaps surprisingly, nearly identical to that of the French political party that was most vocally anti-​Nazi in the years before 1939, the French Communist Party. In its coverage of the Games, the party newspaper L’Humanité lambasted the ‘pollution’ of the Olympics with Hitler’s noxious brand of ‘international sport propaganda’, and complained about the militarism present inside the Olympic Stadium.112 Grudging admiration for Nazi stadia thus coexisted with disgust at Nazi politics and apprehension about the militarism that was being cultivated across the Rhine. But the ambivalence went even deeper: some French observers, largely right-​wing sympathisers, conceded that however odious Nazism might have been as a political ideology, it was producing results inside the stade. Robert Perrier, who would later prove to be an active pro-​German collaborator during the Second World War, argued in the pages of L’Auto that the Olympics demonstrated that the Germans –​especially their leaders –​understood the importance of sport. The Reich had shown the assembled nations ‘on what scale one must now consider the Games’.113 Writing a year later in the conservative L’Echo de Paris in 1937, Jean Routhier lamented that the French capital lacked a ‘modern sporting enclosure’ like the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. The Germans, he noted, ‘knew how to benefit from the Olympic Games, to erect an incomparable city of muscle that one will envy for years to come’. Moreover, the Nazis ‘know what they want and do not content themselves with bastard solutions’.114 Finally, everyone could agree that the Germans had enjoyed great athletic success during the Games, in contrast to the French, whose performances appalled a wide cross section of the press: even L’Humanité called French results in track and field an ‘unmitigated disaster’.115 Overall, the physical and mediatised encounters with German stadia and spectators ended up painting a picture of a disciplined, militarised society that seemed to be unabashedly ‘modern’ and resolute, even if that resolve had alarming implications for the French. A similarly ambivalent set of narratives characterised the depictions of the stadia and spectators in the Soviet Union. Sporting contact between France and the USSR, like other sorts of travel between the two nations, was heavily controlled and regulated.116 Communist visitors to the Soviet Union predictably raved about the extensive facilities that had been constructed for sport.117 On

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the more rare occasions that representatives of the mainstream sporting press travelled to the USSR, they came away impressed, if slightly alarmed. During a visit in August 1934, L’Auto’s Robert Perrier marvelled at the size of Dynamo Stadium in Moscow and the apparent enthusiasm of the Soviets for sport. Even a mid-​week track and field exhibition between Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov, wrote Perrier, attracted 40,000 people to the stadium: the crowd was an ‘inextricable mélange’ of people, including grimy barefoot beggars, coquettish women, young bare-​chested men wearing Tatar headpieces, sailors, Red Army soldiers in their khaki uniforms and leather hats, bureaucrats and Party officials, workers in vest coats and women in shawls and white hats.118 Striking a less complimentary note several days later, Perrier still marvelled at the turnout he witnessed for sporting events, yet opined that sport in the Soviet Union was ‘intensely militarised’.119 Two years after Perrier’s visit, Le Miroir des Sports echoed his critique of Soviet militarism when Dynamo Moscow visited Paris for an exhibition match against Racing Club at the Parc des Princes, complaining that the ‘discipline’ the Soviets demonstrated in parading into and out of the stadium in single file around the field seemed both too war-​like and too ‘spectacular’ to be justified.120 Images of the stadium as a physically impressive yet problematic site for the militarisation of society thus linked Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union when they were depicted in the French sporting press. Meanwhile, the sporting spaces of other smaller European nations, from Ireland to Czechoslovakia, made cameo appearances in the French press during the interwar period, but never so frequently as the ‘big three’ of Great Britain, Italy and Germany. Yet the final major nation whose stadia and spectators featured prominently in the interwar pages of L’Auto and its counterparts  –​the United States  –​was beyond Europe’s frontiers and provoked a different set of ambivalent responses. Most American stadia constructed before the Second World War, save for a few exceptions like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, were built by private entrepreneurs or ambitious private and public universities.121 In the French press, the American stadium was thus usually interpreted as a symbol of relentless commercial modernity or as a manifestation of American affluence. Outside the pages of the sporting press, the stadium was integrated into the most influential French critique of American life in the interwar period, Georges Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future published in 1930. Duhamel saw the American stadium as a ‘concrete crater’ filled with ‘shrieking girls’, ‘student amateur bands’ and the ‘unleashed crowd’.122 That sporting public, he wrote, was a ‘monotone horror’; spectators

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were merely in attendance to become ‘intoxicated’, to ‘count themselves numerous … [and] to taste the mysterious delights of big herds, schools of fish and swarms of ants’.123 For someone like Duhamel, the stadium concretised the image of America as a wasteland of mass culture and the crassly commercial society of the masses.124 Reviewing Duhamel’s book for Football, Maurice Pefferkorn agreed that the crowds in American stadia proved that American sport was plagued by media hype and advertising; it was, he argued, a symptom of the Taylorisation, rationalisation and the ‘taste for the colossal and grandiose’ that characterised American society at large.125 However, this critique of America, even as articulated by one of the regular staff writers for Football (and also L’Auto), was a relative outlier in the pages of that newspaper and the French sporting press as a whole. Readers of L’Auto, Miroir des Sports or Football were far more likely to encounter large photographs of American stadia than attacks on American commercial culture. For instance, L’Auto and Miroir des Sports both devoted features and photographs to the Rose Bowl just outside Los Angeles, a venue that Henri Desgrange’s publication described as ‘magnificent’ and ‘one of the most handsome stadia in the world’.126 This kind of positive narrative was echoed elsewhere: while touring the United States in 1928, Racing Club de France member Alain Petit wrote that he ‘understood why America is so rich in athletes and swimmers. Everywhere, in truth, there are admirable stadia; beyond Soldiers [sic] Field in Chicago, which can contain 120,000 people, but does not belong to the University [of Chicago], there are numerous university stadiums where matches attract 80,000 to 85,000 spectators’.127 Stadia and the spectators within their confines, in these examples, were evidence of American dynamism and wealth, rather than soulless commercialism. As depicted in these travel narratives, then, the stadia and spectators of Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States were linked by several common themes, even as they clearly differed in other critical ways. At the very basic level, each nation appeared to boast impressive facilities and spaces for sport. The French sporting press, which was generally centrist to somewhat conservative in its political orientation, read stadia in the three major dictatorial regimes of continental Europe as proof that the Fascists, Nazis and Soviets were actively committed to sport and were willing to intervene dramatically to render their people more active and healthy. In the case of the United States (and to a certain extent Great Britain), the plenitude of stadia and spectators could, at the very least, be interpreted as proof of national wealth and an abundance of resources devoted to sport, if often by private actors rather than public

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ones. These relatively positive assessments were counterbalanced, but certainly not outweighed, by the more disturbing aspects of stadium culture in those countries: Italian spectator indiscipline, German and Soviet militarism and American commercialism. But even those negative and alarming details reinforced the perception that those four nations were dynamic, energetic and oriented towards the future rather than the past. The inescapable conclusion to all of these comparisons was that the French simply could not measure up to any of their major European counterparts or the United States, at the level of stadia and spectatorship and, by extension, as societies as a whole. The comparisons with Great Britain cast the French as undisciplined and fractious, in relation to their better behaved and more decent British neighbours. The analysis of stadia and spectators in the authoritarian powers of Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union contrasted vigorous government action in those countries with French inaction; while German and Soviet militarism might have been distasteful to the observers writing in Football or L’Auto, it was nonetheless evidence for a kind of martial spirit and resolve. When sporting travellers, literal and figurative, alighted in America, the dominant image of wealth and plenitude highlighted what was lacking in France. In short, foreign stadia and spectators, when they appeared in the French sporting press throughout the interwar period, almost invariably made the French look inadequate in comparison. This sense of inadequacy associated with stadia and spectators was also undeniably linked to the poor performances of French teams against foreign competition. In rugby, the French struggled against their opponents from the ‘Home Nations’ of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Against those foes, France won only thirteen of seventy-​four matches between 1906 and 1931, after which point the FFR was expelled from the Five Nations competition for issues of violence and under-​the-​table professionalism. Similarly, the French national football team mustered a thoroughly mediocre mark against foreign competition before the Second World War. Overall, the national squad went 48–​93–​16 (a winning percentage of 30 per cent) between 1903 and 1942. While the French were more or less on equal terms with the Belgians and Swiss, they lagged far behind against England and Italy, two key points of comparison abroad. England, the self-​professed masters of the game, managed fifteen victories in seventeen tries against the French between 1906 and 1939. The French mark versus Italy, for its part, was 3–​10–​5, with all three victories arriving before 1914. After the First World War, the French mustered two notable draws (in 1932 and 1937), but lost all of their other matches to the Italians.128

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Overall, the discussion of foreign stadia and spectators, coupled with the actual results of the sporting contests themselves, generated a composite set of narratives about place, identity and community. The photographs and articles about stadia in the pages of L’Auto, Le Miroir des Sports, Football and other publications provided an ongoing geography lesson for the reader. But these accounts did not simply chronicle stadium construction or spectator behaviour in Great Britain, Italy or Germany; they also raised unsettling comparisons about national character, social cohesion and the ability of the state to cope with the obstacles that it confronted. By and large, the evidence that was presented to the average reader of the sporting press suggested that France was faring badly when held up for comparison with other nations. Moreover, the travel narratives about stadia seemed to foreshadow the future as well as reflect the present: as Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union built stadia, so often depicted as spaces of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’, they were positioning themselves in opposition to a France that seemed unable (at least in the eyes of the sporting press) to respond the challenges that would come in the future. Yet, even as the discussions of stadia generated largely unflattering narratives about France, one must also remember that the act of making comparisons abroad was in itself a significant development. Spectator sporting practices and their spaces in Western Europe and North America were already linked together through what can only be described as a form of sporting globalisation, even in the earliest decades of the twentieth century. As Eric Reed has noted, historians have tended to locate globalisation, particularly in terms of sport, predominantly in the decades after the Second World War, where new forms of mobility (for example air travel) and communications (from the telephone to the internet) reduced barriers of time and space and increased the mobility of people and ideas around the globe.129 While the sporting landscape of the first half of the twentieth century certainly was not nearly as tightly interconnected as it has become in the twenty-​first century, it nonetheless linked athletes, journalists, officials and spectators around the world through a series of standardised competitions and the burgeoning mass media complex (particularly newspaper and radio) that promoted them. The impact of this early globalisation extended beyond France. If French men and women were more aware of developments beyond their national frontiers in the realm of sport, the same principle applied for people living elsewhere in Western Europe and North America. Readers in Belgium, for instance, could follow their national football team abroad when it travelled to France or when foreign teams came to the Stade du Centenaire (later known as the Stade Heysel) in Brussels. The two main

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daily sports newspapers in that country, Les Sports and Sportwereld, also cited material from L’Auto and extensively covered developments in France from the earliest decades of the twentieth century onward.130 In Great Britain, too, the daily press (from the middle-​class-​oriented Manchester Guardian to the working-​class-​oriented Daily Mirror and Daily Express) also paid attention to sport in France and elsewhere in Europe. Most of the time, of course, this attention came in conjunction with English-​speaking teams competing in France. These included (but were not limited to) national rugby union teams from any of the ‘Home Nations’, Australia or New Zealand; national or club rugby league teams, who competed at the Stade Buffalo after 1934; national football teams from England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland playing against the French at Colombes; club matches like those of Arsenal against Racing Club; or track and field competitions at Colombes.131 But the British press also covered other moments in the life of French stadia and spectators, from the France–​Germany football match in 1931 to the stadium debates in the mid-​1930s in advance of the 1938 World Cup.132 And, like their Belgian counterparts, British newspapers also turned to L’Auto as the voice of authority about French sport in the interwar period.133 All of this stands as evidence, if somewhat impressionistic in character, for the ways in which sporting networks connected Europeans in the interwar period, even as Europeans attached particular meanings framed by national considerations to the contests and spaces within those sporting networks. Certainly, the international dimensions of sport in the early twentieth century weighed more heavily in some places than in others. It is undeniable, for instance, that the French paid far more attention to events in Great Britain than the reverse; as Michaël Délepine has noted, the French press always attached much more importance to the annual match between Arsenal and Racing Club than did the British press, which was much more perfunctory in its coverage of matches against what it perceived to be a mediocre French opponent.134 Notwithstanding those disparities in coverage, however, those British journalists and readers were participating alongside their French counterparts in a broader process of forging transnational communities surrounding sport. Thus, even as French men and women experienced sport’s inter-​European and international dimensions in specific ways conditioned by living in France and consuming French forms of mass media, they were nonetheless part (by default) of a growing community of what Eric Reed has called ‘deterritorialised’ sporting spectators, one that would only continue to expand and (in the process) weaken some forms of local and national sporting communities as the century progressed.135

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Postwar comparisons and the birth of ‘la France qui gagne’ If one shifts the focus away from emerging transnational communities of sport and spectators and back to the particular narratives that linked place, identity and sport in France, it is evident that the years after 1945 witnessed both change and continuity. While some of these narratives remained relatively constant in the decade after the Second World War, others understandably began to shift, influenced by both physical changes to sporting spaces and other changes to the postwar world. In the first decade after the war, stadia and spectators continued to generate narratives about regional distinction in France, much as they had before the war. Football remained embedded in northern and north-​eastern France, along with pockets in the south and the west:  two of the powerhouse teams of the 1950s were Stade de Reims and Lille Olympique Sporting Club (LOSC), both in the north.136 Football supporters, too, continued to travel to regional destinations and to the Stade de Colombes or the Parc des Princes for matches in the Coupe de France, although never in astronomical numbers; the real boom in supporter travel would come in the 1970s, with the success of AS Saint-​Etienne in European competition.137 Rugby, for its part, remained rooted in the south-​west, even as its appeal broadened throughout the 1950s, thanks to international successes and an early willingness to embrace television coverage much more enthusiastically than football. The process of distinguishing between ‘French’ and ‘foreign’ in the context of stadia and spectators, however, was more susceptible to political developments and understandably evolved after the Second World War. The postwar sporting press still obsessed over the differences between French and British stadia and crowd behaviour, in much the same way as it had done before 1940. In a column comparing the crowds at Wembley and Colombes in 1949, Jacques de Ryswick argued that the British sporting public was much larger and more harmonious than its French counterpart.138 Yet elsewhere the stakes involved in sizing up foreign stadia and spectators were arguably not quite so high in the 1950s as they were in the 1930s, when the very future of France seemed to be on the line. This was certainly the case in comparisons with Italy; the sporting press, for instance, lauded the impressive new stadium for 95,000 people in Rome (built in 1953)  and the 115,000-​seat stadium in Naples (completed in 1959), without treating them as proof that postwar Italy was overtaking France.139 Save for obvious differences created by a changed political landscape shaped by the Cold War and decolonisation, the biggest divergence

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between the prewar and postwar narratives about foreign stadia and spectators was the scope of the comparisons, as new stadia proliferated around the globe. In Europe, stadia in Sweden and Spain graced the pages of L’Equipe and France-​Football quite frequently throughout the 1950s. Gabriel Hanot, for instance, lauded the Swedish public at the Rasunda stadium in Stockholm for being ‘dignified and objective’ in 1953, in terms very much reminiscent of the interwar era; he openly wished that the French public could rival the ‘exemplary comportment’ of the Swedes.140 When Sweden hosted the football World Cup in 1958, France-​Football offered a preview of that competition with a full-​page photo essay depicting all of the stadia in use for the competition that was supplemented by brief facts about Swedish geography, economics and history.141 Spain also attracted a great deal of positive attention, at least for its successful football teams and new stadia. The Spanish club Réal Madrid emerged as the pre-​eminent club team of its era, winning the new European Champion Clubs’ Cup five years running, from the tournament’s inception in 1955 until 1960. It played its matches in a new stadium, first completed in 1947 as the Nuevo Estadio Chamartín and then remodelled and renamed the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in 1954; the finished project, as France-​Football noted, was capable of accommodating 125,000 spectators.142 (Equally impressed by the stadium was the British Daily Mirror’s Bob Ferrier, calling it a ‘towering Sierra-​high four-​decker’ filled with ‘120,000 Spaniards who ask nothing more than unconditional surrender’.)143 Réal’s main rival was FC Barcelona, which played its own matches at what was officially called the Estadio del FC Barcelona but was better known as the Camp Nou, or ‘New Field’. Completed in 1957, the stadium could hold 95,000 people. France-​Football marvelled at the innovative architecture of the new stadium; the periodical was particularly enamoured of the stadium’s perfect sightlines, made possible by the reinforced concrete canopy that covered the grandstands without any visible supporting pylons.144 The stadia of Sweden and Spain, alongside those of Great Britain and Italy, were also more directly accessible in the postwar era, as French men and women (alongside their fellow Western Europeans as a whole) took advantage of cheaper means of transport and greater disposable income to go on vacation, in what André Rauch has called the ‘great surge’ of leisure travel in the 1950s.145 Few French tourists, however, probably made it to more far-​flung destinations that graced the pages of the sporting press with regularity, such as South Africa, Brazil and Argentina. Still, the reading public could travel virtually, at least, to South Africa with the French national rugby team in 1958, when it

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shocked the 100,000 spectators in attendance at Johannesburg’s cavernous Ellis Park with a 9–​5 victory over the mighty Springboks, who suffered their first loss in an official test match on home soil since 1896.146 Latin American stadia and spectators were even more frequently the subject of similar sporting travelogues. This was not without good reason:  the 1940s and 1950s, as Christopher Gaffney notes, were characterised by the unparalled construction of immense state-​funded stadia in Brazil and Argentina that were more ‘products of political ideologies than functional urban design’.147 France-​Football marvelled at the dimensions of the immense new Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, built for the 1950 World Cup; the stadium could nominally hold 155,000 people, including 90,000 in the upper deck alone.148 In Argentina, France-​Football’s Gabriel Hanot found at least seven stadia larger than France’s biggest stadium at Colombes; perhaps in an attempt to make his French readers feel better, Hanot snidely noted that the roads leading up to the stadia were abominable, like almost all other roads in South America.149 Spectators in Latin America, however, were another story entirely. Stadia in Brazil, Argentina and other South American nations were constantly depicted as the sites of chaos and disorder in the grandstands. During the World Cup final between Brazil and Uruguay in 1950 at the Maracanã, for instance, thousands of people ‘assaulted’ the stadium, with the latecomers forcibly pushing their way in to join an astronomical crowd of nearly 200,000 people and the spectators already in place trying to push back in an effort to ward off people entering their section.150 Later in the decade, L’Equipe criticised the typical Argentine fan, who was ‘more indisciplined and less master of his nerves’ than his counterpart in Europe.151 Such words echoed tragically in 1964, when 320 people were killed in a panicked stadium crush in Lima, Peru. In the wake of that catastrophe, L’Equipe argued that football in ‘underdeveloped’ countries was often an ‘outlet’ for ‘other kinds of social violence’, although Jacques Ferran did point out that ‘fanaticism and nationalism’ were neither exclusively Peruvian nor South American.152 Postwar stadium comparisons, then, certainly still showcased the cities around the world which boasted both large, modern stadia and vibrant spectator culture. Some observers found the construction of new foreign stadia worrisome and a signal that France’s international reputation was eroding further after the Second World War; as the next chapter will demonstrate, the Fifth Republic (after 1958) made a push to build a 100,000-​seat stadium precisely as a means of boosting French prestige and rivalling other world capitals which already boasted stades.153 By the

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same token, however, the narratives surrounding foreign stadia in the postwar world did not emphasise French inadequacy to quite the same extent as they did in the 1930s, perhaps because it was difficult to consistently envision Spain, Brazil or Argentina, to take three examples, as a threat to France’s place in the world, no matter what politicians might have pronounced publicly. French sportsmen themselves were also increasingly successful on the world stage in the late 1950s, injecting a more favourable point of comparison into postwar sporting travelogues. In 1958, the national rugby squad famously triumphed in South Africa, returning home to a heroes’ welcome at Le Bourget airport outside Paris. In that same year, the French national football team captivated the public with its successful run to the semi-​finals of the World Cup, held in Sweden; over five million French spectators tuned in to the television (itself a new development) for the semi-​final loss to Brazil.154 These performances by French teams inside foreign stadia, in fact, were taken by President Charles de Gaulle as evidence for a revival of French prestige around the world, and as the marker of a new fighting and victorious France, ‘la France qui gagne’.155 As the evidence from the 1950s suggests, the place-​based communities generated by stadia and spectators shifted, to a certain extent, as a result of both external political changes and developments within the world of sport itself. In any case, throughout the period considered here, stadia and their spectators helped French men and women forge a mental map of their nation and the world beyond French frontiers that changed over time in some regards, but remained relatively steady and constant in others. While geographic narratives concerning stadia and spectators were hardly the only way that French spectators came to understand their own nation and its place in the world, they were not insignificant and should not be discounted simply because fewer people travelled to local and international sporting contests in France than in, for instance, Great Britain. Nor were these territory-​based communities any less important than those generated by the Tour de France; indeed, stadia and their spectators proved a more useful point of comparison abroad than the critiques of foreign spectators created by the Tour. Local and national identities, as articulated inside the stadium, were born out of practice: the spectators who attended local matches or who travelled to others in Paris or London created their own overlapping forms of territorial identity. Even more importantly, the reach of the sporting media complex gave weight and relevance to its narratives about place, stadia and spectatorship before and after the Second World War. While it would be simplistic to assume that the readers of L’Auto, Miroir des Sports and Football

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automatically internalised the narratives that they consumed about local and national places, it would also be unrealistic to assume that those discussions had no impact on French readers whatsoever, considering how frequently they appeared in print or over the airwaves. At a very concrete level, too, stadia and spectators abroad had a direct impact on French government policy at several specific moments: as one example, the minister of national defence reacted to the tempestuous France–​Italy match in Naples in late 1938 by urging the minister of foreign affairs to prevent French athletes from competing again in Italy, given how poorly they had been received.156 Stadia and spectatorship, then, contributed to the way French men and women thought about place, community and identity during the first half of the twentieth century. They not only offered a proving ground for envisioning and staging the mass public and working through the central tensions of twentieth-​century mass society, as was demonstrated in Chapter  3, but also helped situate that public geographically. Stadia and spectators proved a useful benchmark for assessing regional distinction; because stadium-​based sport was increasingly a globalised phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century, too, they gave French men and women the chance to reflect on national identity as well. And, because stadia and the spectator sports that flourished within them were undoubtedly hallmarks of a certain technological and commercial modernity, they positioned developments in France in relation to notions of progress and modernity, as well as space and territory. At the level of stadia, at least, there were very few new developments in France itself compared with its international neighbours until the mid-​1960s. By the end of that decade, however, dramatic changes were starting to take place –​in France and elsewhere around the world –​that directly concerned stadia and spectator sport. In the ensuing decades, culminating with the completion of the Stade de France in 1998, the stadium’s place in French public policy and urban planning was transformed. Stadia were also inextricably connected to new developments in the world of sport, from the growing influence of television to new debates over spectators to the overall globalisation of sport by the end of the century. The next chapter of this book turns to the series of ruptures in the world of stadia and spectatorship from the late 1950s to the present that accompanied the dramatic transformations and modernising impulses of postwar France, and that intensified the globalisation of sport and its practices during that same period.

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Notes 1 L’Auto, 18 February 1922. 2 For the longer lineage of the ‘two Frances’, see Roger Chartier, ‘Les Deux Frances: histoire d’une géographie’, Cahiers d’histoire 23 (4) (1978): 393–​415. 3 L’Auto, 2 February 1922. 4 For the role of the mass media in creating this early kind of sporting globalisation, see Reed, Selling the Yellow Jersey, pp. 10–​12. 5 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 17. 6 For rugby, see Dine, French Rugby Football, p. 4. For football at the local level, see Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, and Bromberger et  al., Le Match de football, p. 216. For football and the national team, see Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare, eds, France and the 1998 World Cup:  The National Impact of a World Sporting Event (London: Frank Cass, 1999). For cycling, see Thompson, The Tour de France, pp. 59–​67, and Eric Reed, ‘The Tour de France in the Provinces:  Mass Culture and Provincial Communities’ Relations with the Broader World’, French Historical Studies 30 (4) (2007): 623–​49. 7 Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 9. 8 For the concept of ‘imaginary mobilities’, see John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies:  Mobilities for the Twenty-​ First Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 49. 9 The notion of the stadium as a ‘node’ in networks of global sport and modern capitalism here is drawn from Christopher Gaffney, Temples of the Earthbound Gods: Stadiums in the Cultural Landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 4. 10 L’Illustration, 26 July 1924. 11 ADBR, 3 O 58/​93, Memorandum entitled ‘Construction d’un stade-​vélodrome et d’un palais des sports’, 21 April 1933. 12 Lê-​Germain, ‘La Politique sportive de la ville de Lyon’, p. 235. 13 Bulletin Municipal de la Ville de Toulouse, 1931, pp. 441–​51. The stadium itself was built gradually and was only completed in 1949. 14 Le Petit Provençal, 11 June 1937. 15 Coustet, ‘Le Stade municipal’, pp. 149–​65. 16 Jean-​Paul Callède, Histoire du sport en France du Stade Bordelais au S.B.U.C. (Bordeaux:  Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 1993), p. 54. 17 Lucien Remplon, Ombres noires et soleils rouges: histoire du rugby au Stade Toulousain (Toulouse: Editions Gazette, 1998), p. 40. 18 Le Journal des Sports, 30 March 1912. 19 Le Journal des Sports, 1 April 1912. 20 Anne-​Marie Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France: l’exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1997), p. 38.

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21 L’Auto, 18 April 1922. 22 L’Auto, 3 May 1921. 23 Midi Olympique, 9 January 1931. 24 Midi Olympique, 22 November 1929. 25 Rugby was not just connected to Toulouse through the play of Stade Toulousain. Spectators in Toulouse also supported another fifteen-​man club, Toulouse Olympique Employés Club (TOEC), and a thirteen-​man rugby team, Toulouse Olympique XIII, that proved highly popular in the city in the late 1930s. While TOEC, founded in 1913, did not defeat Stade Toulousain on the field until the 1934–​35 season, the clashes between the two drew large crowds and were the source of frequent commentary in the regional press. See Remplon, Ombres noires et soleils rouges, p. 47. 26 Dine, French Rugby Football, p. 73. 27 Thirteen-​man rugby was introduced in France by Jean Gallia, a former TOEC player, in 1931 as traditional rugby became increasingly oriented towards what its critics called le jeu dur (the tough game) and was mired by scandals over under-​the-​table professionalism. Already popular in northern England as rugby league, rugby à treize faced enduring hostility from the governing body of the fifteen-​man sport, the FFR, which not only refused the treizistes access to stadia used by its own clubs, but also threatened to blacklist stadia (like the Stade Buffalo in Paris) that permitted thirteen-​man rugby to use their spaces. In Toulouse, the thirteen-​man club Toulouse Olympique XIII constructed its own stadium, the Stade des Minimes, in 1937. Thirteen-​man rugby was abolished under Vichy, and struggled to regain its former popularity after the Second World War. For the struggle over stadium access between thirteen-​man and fifteen-​man rugby, see Lyon-​Sport, 18 March 1937. 28 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 79. 29 Carpentier-​Bogaert et al., Le Peuple des tribunes, p. 46. 30 Marion Fontaine has suggested that the link between football and social integration has been exaggerated by other scholars. She argues instead that the prominence of football players of Polish descent in France in the 1950s reflected a process of integration that had already happened, rather than attesting to the role of football in facilitating that integration. Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 154. 31 Christian Bromberger, ‘L’OM, un club au diapason de sa ville’, Marseille: Revue Culturelle 184 (1998): 98. 32 Football, 18 February 1943. 33 Football, 1 November 1934. 34 Allez l’O.L., issue 4, April 1934. 35 Football, 4 May 1933. 36 Football, 28 February 1935. 37 Midi Olympique, 3 January 1930. 38 L’Auto, 28 March 1937. 39 Manchester Guardian, 18 February 1920.

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40 Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France, p. 3. For a related articulation of this idea, see Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France:  Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 27. 41 Patrick Young, ‘La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire: The Touring-​ Club de France and the French Regions, 1890–​1918’, in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford:  Berg, 2002), p.  170. See also Patrick Young, Enacting Brittany:  Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871–​ 1939 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 42 The Tour first penetrated the Vosges in 1905, the Pyrenees in 1910 and the Alps in 1911. 43 L’Intransigeant, 10 July 1932. 44 Thompson, The Tour de France, p. 64. 45 Vigarello, ‘Le Tour de France’, pp. 887–​92. 46 Thompson, The Tour de France, pp. 60–​2. 47 Thompson, The Tour de France, p. 62. 48 For early radio broadcasts, see Thompson, The Tour de France, p. 43. 49 L’Intransigeant, 20 July 1932. 50 L’Auto, 2 July 1911. 51 Thompson, The Tour de France, pp. 60–​2. 52 Automobile ownership in France skyrocketed from 107,535 vehicles in 1914 to 836,449 in 1926 and 1.5  million by 1930. Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin:  Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-​ Century France (Baltimore, MD:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p.  257. This growth was stimulated in part by the used automobile market, which constituted 68 per cent of all automotive transactions in 1935. Jean-​Louis Loubet, Histoire de l’automobile française (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001), p. 136. 53 L’Intransigeant, 13 July 1924. 54 Regards, 30 July 1936. 55 Over seven million bicycles were licensed in France in 1926; that figure reached nine million by 1938. Christopher Thompson, ‘The Third Republic on Wheels: A Social, Cultural and Political History of Bicycling in France from the 19th Century to World War II’ (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1995), p. 30. 56 Regards, 30 July 1936. 57 Regards, 14 July 1938. 58 L’Intransigeant, 20 July 1932. 59 L’Intransigeant, 20 July 1932. 60 Carpentier-​Bogaert et al., Le Peuple des tribunes, p. 145. 61 Alfred Wahl and Pierre Lanfranchi, Les Footballeurs professionnels des années trente à nos jours (Paris:  Hachette, 1995), p.  79. The heightened immigration on the field paralleled the waves of immigration in France in the 1920s and 1930s, although the geographic distribution was different:  most of the immigrants to France during this period came from Italy and Eastern

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Europe as opposed to the Balkans or South America, the regions of origin for most immigrant football players. See Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot:  Immigration, Citizenship and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 8. Players from France’s African colonies, whose presence increased by the end of the 1930s, were not technically immigrants during the interwar period. 62 L’Auto, 24 February 1926. 63 Paul Darby, Africa, Football and FIFA:  Politics, Colonialism and Resistance (London: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 12. 64 Dubois, Soccer Empire, p. 37. 65 Football, 22 July 1936. 66 Football, 25 January 1939. 67 Despite the racism evident in the treatment of Diagne or Ben Barek, the French national squad was the first European side to include players of African or Arab descent. As a point of comparison, the first black player to appear in an international match for England was Viv Anderson in 1978. See Taylor, The Association Game, pp. 374–​90. 68 Football, 12 June 1930. 69 For a journalistic account of MBK Hungaria’s history, see Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World:  An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), pp. 42–​4. 70 For complaints about Italian spectators, see Lyon-​Sport, 28 July 1933; Regards, 25 July 1935; Regards, 4 August 1938. 71 Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers en France, 1919–​ 1939 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), p. 38. 72 For an example of Spaniards singing and dancing at the roadside of the Tour, see L’Intransigeant, 16 July 1932. 73 See L’Intransigeant, 13 July 1924; L’intransigeant, 20 July 1924. 74 Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers en France, pp. 141–​2, 386. As a point of comparision, Belgians in France  –​who declined in numbers over the interwar period, from 349,000 in 1921 to 195,400 in 1936 –​were viewed far more favourably as having been fellow victims of German occupation during the First World War. Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers en France, pp. 38, 140. 75 Indeed, Italian riders complained of being manhandled by the French crowd in the Pyrenees in 1938 and 1949. Chany and Cazeneuve, La Fabuleuse Histoire, p. 349; La Dépêche, 21 July 1949. 76 The Tour first crossed onto foreign soil in 1907 when it went through Alsace and Lorraine, which at the time were under German control. (It also ventured into Switzerland that year.) The race would not visit another foreign country, save for brief forays through Switzerland, until after the Second World War. For the itineraries of the Tour, see Paul Boury, La France du Tour: le Tour de France, un espace sportif à géographie variable (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), pp. 112–​13. 77 Rab, ‘Culture et banlieue’, p. 519. 78 Football, 26 October 1933. The French lost the match badly by 4–​1.

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79 Football, 14 December 1933; Football, 18 April 1935. 80 Football, 14 December 1933. 81 Le Haut Parleur: journal pratique, artistique, amusant des amis de la radio, 24 February 1935. The author thanks Rebecca Scales for the citation. 82 L’Auto, 11 January 1922. 83 L’Auto, 28 January 1925. Most British stadia were smaller than Wembley or Murrayfield, but many could accommodate at least 60,000 people, the theoretical capacity of France’s largest stadium (Colombes), despite occupying a relatively small land footprint. 84 Le Miroir des Sports, 13 March 1934. 85 Football, 3 May 1934. 86 Football, 3 May 1938. 87 Football, 3 May 1938. 88 Eric Dunning, Patrick Murphy and John Williams, The Roots of Football Hooliganism: An Historical and Sociological Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1988), p. 99. 89 Taylor, The Association Game, p. 141. 90 Robert Gibson, Best of Enemies:  Anglo-​French Relations Since the Norman Conquest (Exeter: Impress Books, 2004), p. 240. 91 L’Auto, 6 April 1934. 92 Imbert, ‘Les Stades, leur architecture’, pp. 32–​4. 93 L’Auto, 9 January 1930. 94 Le Miroir des Sports, 5 June 1934; Football, 6 July 1933. 95 Fascist attempts to replace calcio with volata were greeted by the public with indifference at best; the regime was forced to grudgingly endorse the calcio that impassioned average Italians and to try to capitalise on its popularity. Paul Dietschy, ‘Les Matchs du Stadio Mussolini: sport, football, et politique à Turin sous le fascisme’, Cahiers d’Histoire 38 (2) (1993): 153–​74. 96 For an acerbic analysis of the way that the Fascists largely failed to create revolutionary ‘new men’ and ‘new women’, starting with Mussolini’s own family, see R. J.  B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy (New  York:  Penguin, 2007), pp. 250, 347–​9. 97 Football, 7 December 1938; Le Miroir des Sports, 6 December 1938. 98 Le Miroir des Sports, 6 December 1938. 99 For general attitudes towards Fascist Italy, see William Shorrock, From Ally to Enemy: The Enigma of Fascist Italy in French Diplomacy, 1920–​1940 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988), p. 108. For deterioriating relations between France and Italy after the invasion of Ethiopia, see Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 304. 100 On that occasion, a German commentator writing for a track and field magazine noted approvingly that the stadium boasted an impressively modern public address system; the author also commended the Parisian public for possessing a ‘disarming sporting honesty’. AN, 313 AP 288. J. Hell, ‘La Victorieuse Lutte France-​Allemagne’, translated from Start und Zeil:  Monatsschrift der Deutschen Sportbehörde für Liechtathletik, September 1927.

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101 Football, 5 March 1931. 102 Manchester Guardian, 16 March 1931. 103 Football, 30 March 1933. 104 Football, 30 March 1933. 105 Duff Hart-​Davis, Hitler’s Games (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), p. 11. For a review of the responses of different nations to the 1936 Olympic Games, see Arnd Krüger and William Murray, eds, The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics, and Appeasement in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 106 For the official Nazi perspective on the Games before they began, see Olympia 1936: eine nationale Aufgabe (Berlin: Reichssportverlag GMBH, 1935). 107 Le Miroir des Sports, 18 August 1936. 108 L’Auto, 17 July 1936. 109 L’Auto, 17 August 1936. 110 L’Auto, 4 August 1936. 111 L’Auto, 17 August 1936. 112 L’Humanité, 28 July 1936 and 29 July 1936. The PCF spent much of the run-​up to the Games attempting to mobilise an international boycott of the Games and promoting an alternative ‘Popular Olympics’ oriented towards working-​ class athletes in Barcelona. The Popular Olympics were short-​circuited, however, by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Alfred Senn, Power, Politics and the Olympics Games (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1999), p. 56. 113 L’Auto, 14 February 1936. Perrier collaborated actively with the Germans in 1940, returning to Paris to restart L’Auto. He also served as the editor-​ in-​chief of Aujourd’hui, a noxiously Anglophobic and pro-​Vichy daily newspaper under the German occupation. See Jacques Marchand, Jacques Goddet journaliste d’abord: quarante ans à la tête d’un quotidien sportif et du Tour de France (Biarritz: Atlantica, 2002), p. 93. 114 L’Echo de Paris, 6 May 1937. 115 L’Humanité, 9 August 1936. 116 For the limited contact between Soviet and French athletes, see Léon Strauss, ‘Le Sport travailliste français pendant l’entre-​deux-​guerres’, in Pierre Arnaud, ed., Les Origines du sport ouvrier en Europe (Paris:  Editions L’Harmattan, 1994), p. 220. More middle-​class travellers reached the Soviet Union in the mid-​1930s on visits facilitated by several Soviet agencies in an attempt to diffuse a more positive image of life under Communism. Sophie Coeuré, La Grande Lueur à l’est: les Français et l’Union Soviétique (Paris: Seuil, 1999), p. 150. 117 The official newspaper of the Jeunesse Communiste, L’Avant-​Garde, frequently published stories and pictures about Soviet athletes and sporting facilities. As one example, see L’Avant-​Garde, 22 August 1934. 118 L’Auto, 7 August 1934. 119 L’Auto, 11 August 1934. 120 Le Miroir des Sports, 7 January 1936. 121 Robert Trumpbour, The New Cathedrals: Politics and Media in the History of Stadium Construction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), p. 20.

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122 Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930), p.  189. In its English translation, Duhamel’s work was titled America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future. 123 Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future, p. 186. 124 For the French wariness towards the United States in the 1920s and particularly negative impressions of American technological and economic prowess, see Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 10. 125 Football, 4 September 1930. 126 See L’Auto, 17 January 1924; Le Miroir des Sports, 12 April 1932. 127 Bulletin de Racing Club de France, 30 June 1928. 128 The Italians boasted one of the world’s best football sides during the period; they captured the World Cup in 1934 and 1938. France would not defeat Italy in football again until 1984. Statistical records for the French national football team are extracted here from Cazal et al., L’Intégrale de l’équipe de France. For rugby, statistical details are extrapolated from Lafond and Bodis, Encyclopédie du rugby français. 129 Reed, Selling the Yellow Jersey, p. 3. 130 For an example of L’Auto cited in the Dutch-​language Belgian press, see Sportwereld, 15 November 1925. 131 See, for instance: Manchester Guardian, 18 February 1920 (Wales v. France in rugby union); Daily Mirror, 13 January 1928 (Australian rugby union on tour in Bordeaux, Toulouse and Paris); Yorkshire Post, 9 May 1935 (rugby league between Castelford and US Lyon-​Villeurbanne at the Stade Buffalo); Daily Express, 26 May 1938 (England v.  France in football); Daily Mirror, 19 November 1934 (Arsenal v. Racing Club de Paris). 132 See Manchester Guardian, 16 March 1931 (France v.  Germany); Yorkshire Post, 18 March 1935 (debates over the grand stade). 133 See Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1923 (citing L’Auto about rugby violence); 23 January 1925 (about the All Blacks’ rugby tour of France). 134 Delépine, ‘The Racing Club vs. Arsenal’. 135 Reed, Selling the Yellow Jersey, p. 3. 136 For the relationship of football to identity in Lille, see (for example) L’Equipe, 2 February 1952. 137 Wahl, Les Archives du football, p. 315; Mignon, La Passion du football, p. 214. 138 France-​Football, 24 May 1949. 139 L’Equipe, 21 May 1953; France-​Football, 27 December 1960. 140 France-​Football, 9 June 1953. 141 France-​Football, 9 July 1957. 142 France-​Football, 27 January 1953. 143 The Daily Mirror, 13 May 1955. 144 France-​Football, 24 September 1957. 145 André Rauch, Les Vacances (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), p. 23. 146 L’Equipe, 18 August 1958.

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147 Gaffney, Temples of the Earthbound Gods, p. 36. 148 France-​Football, 20 August 1949. 149 France-​Football, 27 May 1958. 150 France-​Football, 2 August 1950. 151 L’Equipe, 7 January 1953. 152 Police had fired tear gas into the crowd, which was enraged by a controversial refereeing decision at the end of the game. Spectators fled to the exits and were crushed against the gates, which were locked to prevent people from sneaking into the match. L’Equipe, 26 May 1964. 153 Archives Nationales de France (Fontainebleau) (hereafter ANF), 19770227, Article 22, Note on the plan for the construction of a stadium for 100,000 spectators in Paris, Prefect of the Seine, 2 May 1959. 154 L’Equipe, 25 June 1958. 155 Dine, French Rugby Football, p. 122. 156 AN, F60 436 (Présidence du Conseil), Letter from the Minister of National Defence to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, dated 16 June 1939. This letter admittedly was written as European war loomed on the horizon.

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5 Postwar modernisation and the stadium, 1945–​98

When the Parc des Princes stadium reopened its doors in May 1972, after five years of renovation and reconstruction, it was immediately lauded for its aggressively modern appearance. L’Equipe, the influential daily sports newspaper, praised the ‘superb, imposing, luminous’ Parc as an ‘oval cathedral of grey concrete’ that was ‘pure and clear like the sky of the Ile-​de-​France’.1 The chief administrator of the city of Paris, Jean Verdier, wrote that the spectator would be awed by the new 50,000-​seat concrete stade, ‘impressed by the audacity of [its] technique, the concern for the perfection of its lines and by what appears to be a veritable challenge to the laws of equilibrium’.2 Verdier regretted that the famous pink cycling track of the old Parc des Princes had been eliminated in the remodelled version of the stadium. Yet, he added, the Parc still survived, ‘like the Phoenix of legends, in a brilliant and incomparable work that carried with her the hopes of the ardent youth of France and a new testament to the prestige of Paris’.3 The new Parc des Princes was indeed a technological marvel. Designed by architect Roger Taillibert and built by the Bouygues construction group, the new Parc shared little with the facility that it replaced, other than its name and its location. The vélodrome track which had hosted the annual finish of the Tour de France since 1903 had been sacrificed to refashion the stadium as an enclosure dedicated exclusively to football and rugby. The ramshackle old grandstands of the vélodrome had been supplanted by two levels of seating that encircled the field, while enormous prefabricated concrete forms (portiques) soared upwards to form the vertical ‘ribs’ of the stade.4 The roof of the Parc completely covered the

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8  The reconstructed Parc des Princes, 1972.

grandstands without any visible supports that would block the view of the spectators. As a sign of its integration within modern Paris, Taillibert’s stadium was perched on the new périphérique, the highway ringing the city that travelled through a tunnel under part of the Parc. Finally, the new stadium was conceived for both the spectators within its confines and those watching matches on television; the architect integrated lighting and areas for television cameras into the roof of the stade (Figure 8).5 The destruction of the old vélodrome and the reincarnation of the Parc des Princes as a modernist palace came at the end of a period of nearly thirty years of impressive growth and urbanisation in France after the Second World War. Between 1945 and 1975, a period later dubbed the ‘Thirty Glorious’ (Trente Glorieuses) by demographer Jean Fourastié, France transformed dramatically.6 In the words of historian Rosemary Wakeman, a ‘whole conjuncture of spatial, economic, and sociocultural changes [took] place throughout France’ during the postwar years that were understood by contemporaries as ‘modernisation’.7 This modernising France was increasingly prosperous, populous and urbanised. Its GDP quadrupled, while automobile ownership, to take another metric of affluence, increased fifteenfold over those three decades.8 It was also

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booming demographically: its population soared from forty-​two million to fifty-​six million, fuelled by a higher postwar birth rate and increased immigration in the 1960s and 1970s.9 As the population grew, French men and women moved from the countryside to urban agglomerations; 75 per cent of the population was considered urban by 1975, in contrast to the 50 per cent who had lived in French cities in 1945.10 Urban space, not surprisingly, became a critical terrain for grappling with and representing the transformations of postwar France. As Wakeman suggests, the changes to cities and city life not only commanded the country’s attention during the Trente Glorieuses, but also necessitated a ‘radical rethinking of French identity’.11 Cities like Paris, Toulouse and Lyon embraced modern approaches to architecture and urban design as solutions for chronic housing problems and to combat an overall sense of urban neglect and decline. In the process, architects and government officials transformed cities with sweeping state-​driven plans for urban expansion and development that encompassed everything from new planned residential communities of prefabricated concrete apartment complexes to roads and commuter railways. The Parc, in this light, functioned as a concrete manifestation of this period of intensive urban change, from its starkly modernist design to its direct proximity to the new périphérique highway, one of the most significant infrastructural modifications to Paris in the 1960s. It also projected claims for French technological and scientific mastery in an era when these attributes were increasingly central to conceptions of French prestige and power. During the postwar era, but particularly after the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the French state robustly promoted a series of massive technological programmes (grands projets), such as the Concorde supersonic aircraft and a network of nuclear power generators, that showcased French technological prowess and that attempted to project an image of renewed French grandeur.12 This embrace of science and technology provoked speculation that France had apparently transformed itself into a ‘technocratic’ regime, one where high-​level administrators and engineers, for better or for worse, played an important role in shaping society.13 The links between Taillibert’s stadium and the world of technocratic grandeur was very real: the new Parc des Princes was read by both its supporters and its critics alike as a manifestation of that technocratic planning imperative so prevalent in postwar France. Thus, the Parc des Princes was a symbol for its era, the stadium par excellence of the Trente Glorieuses. But it functioned as more than a concrete manifestation of widespread modernisation and urban change after the Second World War; it demonstrated how transformations to sport

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and its spaces constituted another aspect of postwar modernisation itself, a process of change that did not end with the rebuilding of the Parc, but continued all the way through to the end of the century and the construction of the Stade de France in 1998. In the years after 1945 –​but particularly from the early 1960s onwards –​French sport and its spaces changed dramatically, as leisure choices expanded for French men and women. The reconstruction of the Parc, and the eventual construction of the Stade de France a quarter century later, both testified to a re-​evaluation of the spectator experience, and an ongoing attempt to reinvent mass spectatorship as a more comfortable, appealing and democratic activity. Indeed, spectatorship certainly changed in the years after 1960, as supporter culture mobilised more people behind certain successful clubs, at the same time that stadium spaces (like the Parc) were being refashioned, and while football in particular grappled with a new kind of fan violence (hooliganism) in the 1970s and 1980s that threatened the appeal of live spectatorship altogether. During these decades, French sport in general began to move haltingly into a new era, one eventually reshaped by television broadcasting, from the revenues that it generated to the virtual spectatorship it facilitated. Stadia themselves not only reflected these kinds of changes, but also themselves came to be re-​evaluated by politicians who gradually reached a consensus about the symbolic qualities of the stadium as well as its concrete potential for transforming the urban environment. To this end, stadium construction became construed as a driver of urban renovation as a whole, at least in the case of the Stade de France at the end of the century. In short, the changes to the sporting status quo between the early 1960s and the end of the century constituted an undeniable part of the changes to postwar France as a whole. But the modernisation of the world of sport and stadia was not a uniquely French phenomenon. Indeed, developments in France, from changes to spectator culture, sport and the function of stadia as instruments of urban planning, increasingly aligned themselves with developments in North America and Europe in the years between the end of the Second World War and the completion of the Stade de France. The spectator experience within the stadium was being re-​evaluated beyond French frontiers, while television money and security concerns about the emergent problem of hooliganism transformed sport everywhere in the 1980s. Stadia, too, became globally valuable as urban spaces in similar ways, as urban icons and landmarks, as the necessary kinds of facilities to host what Maurice Roche has called ‘mega-​events’ like the football World Cup and the Olympic Games and as venues that offer particular potential for urban reconstruction in post-​ industrial societies.14

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This chapter thus argues for the stadium’s place within a concretely French narrative about postwar modernisation, but also points to the ways those processes were ultimately grounded in a transnational framework. It is by no means a comprehensive history of the transformations that took place in France in the second half of the twentieth century, nor does it have space to offer a complete narrative of all of the changes that have characterised global sport since the 1960s. Instead, it limits its focus to urban transformation in postwar France, specifically Paris, and the place of sport and stadia within that process, before analysing the events that produced the Parc des Princes. It then lingers on the Parc’s reconstruction as a barometer of both postwar urban change and the fundamental refashioning of sporting spaces and sporting practices, before following the trajectory of this postwar modernisation through the completion of the Stade de France in 1998, and concluding with an examination of the acceleration of the global convergences at the level of sport and its spaces that paralleled the construction of the new Parc and the Stade de France.

Disappearances and revivals In the first two decades after 1945  –​well before the renovation of the Parc des Princes –​French cities were engaged in a flurry of modernising projects. Across the nation, urban problems were visible and pressing. Housing was a chief concern: at least two million people lacked it at the end of the war and the existing building stock was grossly out of date.15 But housing was not the only priority for postwar planners. The challenge, more broadly, was to adapt the ageing buildings and infrastructure of cities like Paris to what Rosemary Wakeman has called the ‘currents of modern life’.16 Throughout the 1950s, the watchwords were ‘demolition’ and ‘reconstruction’, particularly in association with older industrial and commercial spaces, which were in the process of being torn down and refashioned.17 As Wakeman notes, Paris was being recreated as a ‘dynamic city of material well-​being and wealth, of prestige and modern glamour’.18 The process of demolition did not spare sporting spaces, few of which were very glamorous by the mid-​1950s. Most of the sporting infrastructure in France, after all, dated back to the 1920s and 1930s, and much of it had aged badly. The impulse to get rid of ageing buildings of any kind in Paris during the 1950s helped precipitate the demolitions of two formerly iconic stadium spaces, the Stade Buffalo and the Vélodrome d’Hiver. While both were sacrificed to the modernising urban imperatives of providing housing and office space respectively,

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their fate was also determined by the ways they embodied a particular kind of prewar sporting identity that was increasingly less relevant in France after 1945. The Stade Buffalo, for its part, had fallen on hard times after the war. It had been purchased by a textile magnate from Amiens named Jean Leroy, who treated it with indifference, and the municipality of Montrouge acted on its own initiative to repair the roof of the stadium in the late 1940s in order to prevent potential spectator injuries.19 Used less and less frequently for cycling, the Stade Buffalo was still the venue for a few left-​wing anti-​war rallies and the odd rugby and football match in the late 1940s and early 1950s.20 But, by 1950, the Stade Buffalo was mostly used for novelty sporting events such as motocross and stock-​car racing, a far cry from its prominent role in the 1920s and 1930s.21 Given its decline as a sporting space, the Buffalo was a tempting target for redevelopment. A group headed by architect Fernand Pouillon purchased it in January 1955 with the intention of turning it into apartments.22 Pouillon and his associates then had to circumvent government regulations enacted under Vichy designed to protect sporting spaces and fields; the Stade Buffalo could not be demolished while it was still classified as a stadium. Some back-​channel negotiations produced the technical changes to the stadium’s status and Pouillon’s group destroyed the old vélodrome and began construction on the new Résidence du Stade Buffalo in 1957, completing the project a year later.23 The disappearance of the Stade Buffalo was hardly a seismic shock to the sporting landscape of Paris and its passing barely registered with the public. The only trace of the Buffalo saved for posterity was its old memorial to cyclists killed during the two world wars, which was quietly transferred to the tiny municipal stadium in Montrouge (Figure 9). The destruction of the much more prominent Vélodrome d’Hiver a year later, however, was marked by a public process of celebration and memorialisation. When the facility was scheduled for demolition in the spring of 1959, to be replaced by commercial office buildings, the press published waves of nostalgic tributes to the ‘good old Vél’ d’Hiv’ (le bon vieux Vél’ d’Hiv’). Vél’ d’Hiv’ director André Mouton engaged in a similar kind of process of commemoration and celebration: announcing his intention to let his arena ‘die in beauty’, he scheduled a series of events in track and field, wrestling, cycling and boxing to showcase both current champions and the legends of previous decades.24 Spectators at the last cycling event at the Vél’ d’Hiv’, on 17 April, witnessed rising young star Roger Rivière destroy the arena’s long-​standing record for kilometres ridden in an hour, before old champions Henri Contenet, Eugène Christophe, Toto Grassin, André Leducq and Joseph ‘Jef ’ Scherens, among others, took a final turn

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9  Monument to cycling war dead from the Stade Buffalo.

on what L’Equipe called ‘our good old track at Grenelle’.25 In a similar manner, the final boxing ‘gala’ on 11 May, hours before the demolition began, featured a series of boxing matches as well as a tribute to the great champions of previous decades, including Marcel Thil, Gustave Humery, Eugène Criqui and the great Georges Carpentier.26 At the end of the evening, the ageing boxers climbed into the ring’s spotlight, introduced

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individually over the loudspeaker by longtime public address man Georges Berretrot for the final time. With this moving ‘farewell of the gods’, the Vél’ d’Hiv’ was consigned to ‘legend and the imagination which has already embellished it’, according to L’Equipe’s Jacques Marchand.27 This commemorative discourse surrounding the Vélodrome d’Hiver’s destruction, of course, was notably selective. It celebrated the golden age of the arena, when the Six-​Day cycling races and boxing tilts attracted famous actresses, athletes, artists, writers and government ministers, as well as the working-​class spectators who filled the upper decks of the arena.28 Outside of the sporting press, the nostalgic farewells to the Vél’ d’Hiv’ also recognised its role as a site for politics. L’Humanité, for instance, reminded its readers of the great ‘party demonstrations’ and ‘grand sports meetings’ that had taken place at the arena on the rue Nélaton.29 Absent from the commemorative dialogue in 1959, however, was any recognition of the more unsavoury past of the Vél’ d’Hiv’, particularly the notorious July 1942 round-​up, or rafle, of Parisian Jews by French police and the German occupiers. This selective memorialisation of the arena’s history was all the more ironic, considering that the last boxing match of the evening –​before the tribute to the ageing heroes –​ featured reigning world bantamweight champion Alphonse Halimi, a French Algerian Jew who boxed with the Star of David embroidered on the left side of his boxing shorts.30 L’Equipe’s Marchand did not exactly ignore Halimi’s boxing costume:  he simply quipped that Jehovah, like Carpentier, was one of the ‘divinities of the ring’ present for the Vélodrome d’Hiver’s farewell.31 If the irony of Halimi’s presence at the final gala went unnoticed (or ignored), this was hardly surprising given the overall culture of official memory surrounding the Second World War after 1945, which was notably silent over French collaboration and the fate of France’s Jews in the Holocaust.32 The twin demolitions of the Stade Buffalo and the Vélodrome d’Hiver thus eliminated two spaces firmly associated with the interwar period in service to modernising imperatives, namely creating new housing and commercial spaces. Their destruction was understandable: both facilities were in deteriorating condition, and neither catered well to the perceived needs of postwar spectators. As a Socialist member of the Paris municipal council named André Weil-​Curiel put it in June 1959, the Vél’ d’Hiv’  –​ which had been originally built in 1910 before a partial reconstruction in 1931 –​responded to neither the ‘technical needs of modern spectacles’ nor a public that increasingly desired comfortable facilities.33 It did not help that one of the main activities at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in the 1950s –​track cycling –​was also declining in popularity (a fact noted by Weil-​Curiel),

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and was at any rate associated firmly with the Paris of the 1930s, not the 1950s. As a column in L’Auto had opined in 1947, when the Six-​Day races returned to the Vél’ d’Hiv’ for the second time after the war, what was being revived was the ‘glimmering ambiance of yesteryear’ and an environment that reminded observers of prewar days in every detail, from the cigarette-​induced fog in the air to the attire of the waitstaff at the ringside restaurant to the man at the loudspeaker (Berretrot).34 Removing the Vél’ d’Hiv’ and the Stade Buffalo did not simply destroy two old spaces: it also targeted the kind of collective identity associated with them, a sensibility that was increasingly less relevant to Paris in the 1950s. In the first fifteen years after the war, sporting spaces were thus predominantly part of the processes of postwar modernisation and urban transformation through the way they were removed from the landscape, not added to it. Still, they were not entirely absent from discussions about reshaping the postwar city. The proposals for a grand stade that had periodically surfaced during the interwar period returned intermittently between 1945 and 1958. Serious proposals for a grand stade or an Olympic park west of the Champs-​Elysées or in the Bois de Vincennes were floated in 1945 and in 1950, as part of ambitious plans (quickly ignored) for creating new leisure spaces in Paris.35 Soon thereafter, however, the Paris municipal council –​in the hands of centre–​right politicians  –​approved a general proposal for private entrepreneurs to build a stadium in the Bois de Vincennes in late 1956.36 Likewise, the National Assembly passed a mostly symbolic resolution in February 1958 that ‘invited the government’ to construct a stadium for 100,000 people in the Bois de Vincennes.37 However, the push to build a grand stade in Paris gained new life with the advent of the Fifth Republic later in 1958. Although new president Charles de Gaulle was hardly an avid sportsman, his energetic high commissioner for sport and youth, famed mountaineer Maurice Herzog, championed the grand stade throughout his tenure as part of broader initiatives to ‘reinvigorate’ France. In a press conference in late 1958, Herzog listed the stadium as part of a campaign for the ‘demographic, economic and political’ renovation of the nation, to be accomplished through the mobilisation of French youth.38 But the stade also fit with the Gaullist concern over France’s declining global prominence. Herzog, and others involved in promoting the grand stade over the next seven years, noted that France suffered in comparison with the thirty nations that already had Olympic-​sized stadia, some of which were located behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe or in underdeveloped nations in Latin America.39 According to Herzog, Paris could no longer afford to

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lag behind other capitals which boasted stades, critical for high-​profile competitions like the Olympic Games or the football World Cup.40 The stadium, from the point of view of a Gaullist state that had intensified a general push for modernisation that had arguably commenced under Vichy and continued during the Fourth Republic, became a tool for augmenting French grandeur and the nation’s place on the world stage. But the plans for a grand stade faced a double handicap: they were not integrated in any significant way into emerging plans for reshaping the Parisian basin and still engendered substantial political opposition. Beginning in 1960, the state initiated a new set of plans to modernise and transform Paris under the direction of special administrator Paul Delouvrier. These plans, and those that followed them, attempted to manage the growth of the city and address housing shortages (in part through the construction of ‘new towns’ outside the city) while simultaneously improving communications and transport.41 Construction of a multilane expressway ringing the city (the périphérique) began in 1960, while efforts to improve public transport connections between the city centre and its suburbs eventually produced the first stages of the suburban commuter train network, the Réseau Express Régional (RER), in 1969.42 The grand stade, however, remained separate from all of these discussions, just as the proposed stadium itself was relegated to forestland at the periphery of the city. Few people involved in discussions over the stadium seemed troubled by this, with a notable exception being the Prefect of the Seine, Raymond Haas-​Picard, who predicted in late 1964 that the grand stade would not be built if its planning could not be tied to either that of the périphérique or the RER.43 The proposed Gaullist stadium, while it certainly had its vocal champions, also faced resistance from its traditional foes on the left.44 Supporters of the stadium, such as Auguste Marboeuf-​Regnault (a member of de Gaulle’s Union Nationale pour la République, or UNR), defended it as evidence for a French desire to be at the ‘head of the Europe of tomorrow’ in all domains. The capital, he argued, required a proper stadium so that the Parisian public could attend sporting competitions worthy of international renown.45 Yet critics of the stadium saw a 100,000-​seat stadium as a wasteful and unnecessary diversion of resources that were needed elsewhere to rejuvenate France.46 Socialist André Weil-​Curiel (who had criticised the ageing Vél’ d’Hiv’ back in 1959)  contended that the stade would only demonstrate the kind of grandeur found in ancient ruins, as it would surely fall into disuse. In rhetoric that might well have been lifted straight from the debates over the grand stade in 1922, Weil-​Curiel also maintained that France needed arenas for athletes, not spectators and

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spectacular events: those people who periodically came to the stadium were parasites seeking to ‘aid [their] digestion and to smoke a cigar’.47 The grand stade was thus debated in terms of the prestige and priorities of the postwar modernising French state, but any kind of consensus –​whether about the stadium’s ideal place in the urban landscape or the prospect of state support for large-​scale spectator sport and its spaces –​was elusive, just as it had been in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, the plans for the Gaullist grand stade collapsed in February 1965 due to persistent opposition by the Ministry of Finance over the cost of the project and some concerns over potential environmental damage to the Bois de Vincennes.48 Meanwhile, French spectator sport continued to plunge deeper into what contemporary observers all suggested was a slow and steady decline. It manifested itself most dramatically in attendance for football matches, as noted in Chapter 3; the average crowd at a professional fixture declined from 11,140 spectators in 1952–​53 to 8,732 ten years later.49 As clubs relied almost entirely on gate receipts and the occasional subsidy or tax break from the local government for their financial health, it was hardly surprising that clubs were accumulating large financial deficits.50 In Paris, the professional game collapsed almost entirely, as historic clubs like CA Paris, Stade Français and Racing Club all disappeared from the pro ranks; the situation was equally dire in the provinces, where former powerhouse clubs like CORT (Roubaix-​Tourcoing) and LOSC (Lille) abandoned professionalism by the end of the 1960s.51 The national government was not unaware of these developments and recognised them as constituting an ongoing ‘crisis’ for French sport, but declined to intervene dramatically in what it saw as the activities of a largely private organisation, namely the FFFA.52 In the first two decades after 1945, then, as France (and Paris specifically) began a process of intensive change, sporting spaces and spectators were linked to that modernisation in relatively limited ways. Old sporting spaces were sacrificed, like many other ageing and dilapidated buildings in the capital, while new sporting enclosures were still discussed in the same terms as they had been in the 1920s. Meanwhile, the sports that had filled stadia up through the peak of the 1950s struggled to adapt to a new postwar landscape, where increasingly prosperous consumers had other choices about their leisure activities and neglected uncomfortable stades. And yet, postwar urban modernisation and changes to sporting spaces and its practices would begin to intersect in more meaningful ways in the second half of the 1960s, through the renovation of the Parc des Princes and the aftermath of that process; the new Parc would come to stand as a barometer of urban transformations as a whole, but would

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also encapsulate and anticipate the changes to sport and leisure practices that were themselves a constitutive part of postwar modernisation.

Rebuilding the Parc That the reconstruction of the Parc des Princes was even being discussed in the mid-​1960s was partially an accident and partially the result of pent-​up municipal exasperation at the venerable Jacques Goddet at L’Equipe and his administrative control over the old Parc. What was accidental was the fact that the Parc was threatened by the trajectory of the new périphérique, which was going to cut directly through a corner of the stadium. Something needed to be done about the old stadium, if only temporarily; city and state officials initially planned to simply dig a tunnel for the highway under the Parc and then rebuild the old vélodrome more or less unchanged.53 At this very moment, however, the city of Paris had much more freedom to manoeuvre than it would have enjoyed in the past, because it had taken de facto control over the Parc in 1963 due to ongoing disputes with Goddet. The city had long been dissatisfied with the contract that Jacques Goddet’s father Victor Goddet and his business partner Henri Desgrange had negotiated back in 1924, when their Société Anonyme du Parc des Princes had signed a forty-​year lease on the land for the Parc. Municipal frustration stemmed mostly from a sense that Paris was not getting an appropriate cut of the revenue generated by football matches at the stadium, but attempts to revise the terms of the contract in the city’s favour had proved largely unsuccessful over the decades. Thus the municipal council refused to renew the Parc’s lease in 1963, mostly in hope of resolving a long-​standing fiscal irritation.54 It is worth noting, however, that Paris’s actions did not happen in a vacuum; the city of Saint-​Etienne took over management of the formerly private Stade Geoffroy-​Guichard in 1965, as part of a broader general trend where provincial municipalities slowly became more involved in subsidising and supporting their local professional clubs.55 In any case, acquiring effective control over the Parc des Princes gave Paris a much freer hand to act as the périphérique approached the stadium’s walls in December 1966. At this juncture, Auguste Marboeuf-​ Regnault –​a long-​time supporter of just about every proposal for a grand stade in the 1950s and the 1960s –​offered a plan for the future Parc that had been shelved nearly two years previously. Acting with the support of the FFFA, Marboeuf (as he was often identified) proposed that the city of Paris rebuild the stadium from scratch as a facility for track and field, football and rugby. Marboeuf argued that the old vélodrome no longer

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satisfied spectator and athletic demands in Paris: he pointed to declining attendance at track cycling events, and contended that Paris ‘was not sufficiently rich in fields to ossify, for the benefit of cycling, an arena that could be better utilised for other sporting activities’.56 In contrast, he proposed his vision of a modernised 60,000-​seat Parc des Princes with an Olympic track for athletics events, arguing that this would be much more ‘profitable’ for the city.57 The proposal for the new Parc drew howls of protest from powerful sectors of the sports world, particularly the French cycling federation and L’Equipe. The former called the idea of rebuilding the stadium without the vélodrome track ‘catastrophic’, while the latter denounced the plan as a ‘hasty decision’ based on the absence of reflection or long-​term thinking.58 But the proposal failed to generate much political opposition, and the city council went ahead and approved a revised plan the next year that dropped the athletics track from the design, dedicating the stadium exclusively to football and rugby.59 And, while the exact rationale behind the council’s overall decision to rebuild the Parc was not articulated clearly after the fact, Marboeuf ’s arguments in favour of the transformed Parc made sense. After all, the municipal council had to take some sort of action on the Parc, because construction on the périphérique, which traversed the old stadium, could not be postponed indefinitely. Due to legal constraints designed to protect sporting infrastructure, too, the city was prevented from tearing down the Parc without replacing it with a sporting space, at least somewhere else in Paris.60 Moreover, it was obvious that, if the city were now in charge of the Parc, it was logical for Paris to make the stade as attractive to paying customers as possible. This was something that the left and the right could agree on: back in 1963, when the city had municipalised the facility, the Communists had actually argued that it might be acceptable for the city to manage a stadium that had professional athletes, since it could then consecrate some of the revenue it gained towards supporting amateur sport.61 This was hardly a ringing endorsement of Parisian involvement in the business of sport, but it functioned as a tacit admission that such support might be both inevitable and generally acceptable, at least in comparison with building a new stade olympique, a proposal that was still unpalatable for much of the left. Finally, eliminating the old Parc des Princes already had a precedent in the demolition of the Vélodrome d’Hiver in 1959: track cycling, as practised at both venues, was clearly a sport of the past and an inappropriate symbol for modern Paris.62 In any event, the municipal council’s endorsement of the reconstruction of the Parc des Princes marked the first concrete move to synchronise

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urban modernisation with the development of new stadia in Paris. The city council, however, had relatively little to do with the actual stadium built at the Parc des Princes: that can only be credited to Roger Taillibert, who was hired for the project in late 1967, after demolition on the old stadium had already begun.63 Taillibert, who had attracted attention for his modest sports facilities in Deauville and at Font-​Romeu in the Pyrenees, chose to build the stadium in concrete rather than steel or stone; the concrete itself was subjected to a special process (crossed pre-​stressing) that reduced its weight while increasing its strength.64 The stadium was designed to have two levels of seating, with 23,000 and 27,000 spectators on each level respectively. An overhanging ring-​shaped roof, supported by approximately fifty portiques (or column-​like structures called ‘bents’) that ranged from 22 m to 33 m high, covered the seats, while leaving the field itself exposed to the elements.65 Among its other design innovations, the stadium featured floodlighting integrated into its canopy, a giant advance over the primitive light towers which had been retroactively added to old stadia to permit night matches. Moreover, it also featured hanging platforms for television cameras and glassed-​in sections for television commentators, in stark contrast to any comparable stadia in France at the time.66 It took nearly five years for Taillibert’s vision to come to fruition, as the stadium project encountered numerous setbacks, induced by everything from subterranean water on the building site to the ‘events’ of May 1968 to financing delays. When it was completed in May 1972, the overall cost of the project had soared to eighty-​seven million francs, a price tag that was nearly double the initial estimates of 45.5 million. Yet the new Parc was still greeted with favourable reviews that lauded its place in the pantheon of new constructions in Paris. Four months before the stadium’s formal inauguration, L’Equipe raved that ‘it is uncontestably the most modern, the most handsome and the most comfortable [stadium] in Europe’.67 The Prefect of Paris exulted that the Parc was an ‘incontestable success’ on both technical and aesthetic fronts.68 Le Figaro, for its part, praised the ‘well-​turned-​out urban stadium’ for its perfect visibility on the interior and the obvious attention paid to the press, radio and television inside the stade.69 The most substantial complaints about the actual appearance and the function of the stadium, as it turns out, concerned the lack of parking in the neighbourhood around the stadium, an ironic fate for an arena built over part of a multilane expressway.70 The new Parc des Princes, then, was certainly lauded as a modern technological accomplishment, a perfect manifestation of the urban modernising spirit of the early 1970s. In this sense, it concretely embodied

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the postwar modernist style that was so visible elsewhere in French office buildings and new prefabricated housing complexes. But the Parc also incarnated postwar modernisation in the way it staked a claim for France’s importance on the world stage through engineering and so-​ called ‘technocratic’ planning.71 The stadium was read as a feat of French engineering and technological prowess worthy of emulation:  Verdier boasted that the stade was a ‘prestigious prototype’ that set the standard for architects on both sides of the Cold War divide and that attracted Soviet, Canadian, American and Brazilian observers, among others.72 When the Parc was criticised for its parking situation and its cost overruns, it was assailed precisely because it seemed to embody problematic aspects of postwar planning and modernisation writ large. The PCF and sympathetic left-​wing newspapers like L’Aurore castigated the cost overruns of the stadium as the work of a ‘dominating and blindly self-​assured technocracy’.73 Communist delegate André Sibaud went further, accusing the Prefecture of Paris of colluding with Bouygues to secure the latter a more favourable contract; Sibaud maintained that true authority over the stadium remained not with the politicians, but with ‘technocrats, engineers and architects’.74 Yet while there was not a lot of specific criticism targeted at the Parc beyond these general laments, it was completed at a moment when resentment was growing towards other, arguably more unattractive building developments during the presidential administration of Georges Pompidou (1969–​74). These included the fifty-​nine-​storey Montparnasse tower (also completed in 1972) and a planned automobile expressway on the Left Bank. In fact, it was these urban projects that fostered a reaction against technocratic and modernist planning and catalysed the growing sentiment that Paris needed its own independent mayor in order to better defend its own interests. One should keep in mind that Paris, in 1972, was still administered directly by the state through the Prefect of Police and Prefect of Paris, the latter acting in consultation with the municipal council.75 In this case, the pressure for legal reform to the status of Paris eventually led the presidential administration of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (elected in 1974) to grant Paris an autonomous mayor selected by the municipal council, beginning in 1977.76 Although it did not seem to mobilise the same kind of passions as the other projects completed during Pompidou’s presidency, the Parc was thus produced at a moment when debates over urban modernisation were helping transform urban governance in Paris. In short, the refashioned Parc incarnated both urban renewal and the triumph of technocratic modernism, for good or for ill, at least according

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to contemporary observers. But the Parc also mattered for the way in which it was also a symbol of sporting modernisation and the ways that it either heralded or foreshadowed changes to sporting spaces and practices in twentieth-​century France. In this domain, the most important contribution of Taillibert’s Parc des Princes was the way it reimagined the place of the spectator inside the stadium. Every spectator was assured a seat; every seat was identical in its dimensions and featured an unobstructed view onto the pitch. Taillibert’s stadium also removed the fencing that separated spectators from the pitch at other European stadia, in an attempt to improve visibility.77 Moreover, every spectator was protected from inclement weather, thanks to the roof. For Taillibert, it was a ‘social choice’ to bestow an identical seat on everyone in the stadium.78 He wrote that his overall approach to seating (and building the stadium in general) was an attempt to ‘respond to the needs and desires’ of the community; his architecture was intended to reflect the contemporary concerns of Parisian spectators themselves.79 This orientation towards the needs of the spectator, at least in terms of built space, was fundamentally novel. French (and European) stadia in the 1970s still almost universally featured exposed standing-​room sections and often restricted spectators with fencing and other barriers; one of the only European exceptions was the so-​called ‘all-​seater’ Nya Ullevi stadium in Gothenburg, Sweden, built in advance of the 1958 football World Cup.80 The vast majority of French and European stadia continued to offer a relatively uncomfortable spectator experience. In an era when French men and women had increasing choices about their leisure time, from automobile excursions to the cinema to staying at home and watching television, the stadium was clearly behind the times. As the author of a 1968 memorandum in the Ministry of Youth and Sports argued, stadia needed to compete with the lure of ‘other distractions’ like the cinema, primarily by adapting and expanding the comfort they offered their spectators.81 Taillibert’s stadium clearly tried to respond to those concerns by treating the spectator as a fully fledged consumer. At least on paper, it democratised the leisure experience and attempted to make the stadium a more attractive choice for the men and women in the grandstands. As it transpired, the all-​seater model proved the template for future stadia in France and in Europe, although it was not accepted instantly as a standard design.82 The next major new stadium built in France, the Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes (inaugurated in 1984), was not an all-​seater. Taillibert’s hopeful insistence on creating an egalitarian community inside the stade, too, was eventually subverted by ticket-​pricing policies that duplicated the effect of the old differentiation between expensive

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seats in the tribunes and cheaper tickets in the standing-​room virages. And Taillibert’s stadium was short-​sightedly criticised several years after its inauguration by none other than the head of the international football federation (FIFA), João Havelange, precisely because of its seating arrangements. When the Parc hosted the notorious European Cup final between Leeds and Bayern Munich in 1975, an occasion marked by the violent behaviour of irate Leeds fans who destroyed seats in the stadium, invaded the pitch and smashed windows outside the stade in protest over the final result, Havelange actually complained that Taillibert’s modern stadium had facilitated the violence. The seats (for Havelange) merely gave the English supporters something to throw on the pitch and the lack of a fence separating spectators and players allowed for a pitch invasion.83 With the benefit of hindsight, Havelange was quite wrong in his critique: it is doubtful that the all-​seater stadium somehow encouraged fan violence. More importantly, the all-​seater model would become the default design in Great Britain (and elsewhere in Europe) after the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, England, when ninety-​six Liverpool supporters in an antiquated standing-​room ‘pen’ were crushed to death against a closed gate. The official inquiry into the disaster, known as the Taylor Report, later recommended that all major British football stadia adopt the all-​seater design, thus retroactively validating Taillibert’s model nearly two decades after the fact.84 The example of violent spectatorship at the Parc des Princes in 1974 might suggest that Taillibert’s stadium fell short of its aspirations to reshape the spectator experience. The truth is more complicated: European football, in particular, was forced to grapple with a new kind of problematic spectatorship –​hooliganism –​that first surfaced in Great Britain in the 1960s and was characterised by football supporters attending matches in order to inflict damage on other supporters or property.85 Save for the incursions of British fans on French soil, however, this kind of violent spectatorship was largely absent in France, at least in the decade after the construction of the Parc.86 That period did witness, however, the greater diffusion of football ‘supporter’ culture, which was given a huge boost by the success of AS Saint-​Etienne on the national and international level. The ‘Verts’ of Saint-​Etienne, who featured iconic French star Michel Platini in the early part of his career, captured the Coupe de France on four occasions between 1970 and 1977 and famously made it to the European Cup final in 1976, where they lost narrowly to Bayern Munich. In the process, they turned the Stade Geoffroy-​Guichard into what one British journalist called ‘one of the noisiest’ stadia he had ever experienced, mobilised a new generation of supporters and generally triggered

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heightened enthusiasm for French football.87 By the end of the decade, new football supporter groups were flourishing in places like Paris, Lens, Saint-​Etienne and Marseille. Partisans of the new Paris Saint-​Germain club (PSG), which began play at the Parc des Princes in 1973, were explicitly courted by low ticket prices and modelled themselves after English supporters in Liverpool, while groups in Marseille drew inspiration from the Italian ‘ultras’, known for their flamboyant displays within the stadium.88 The Parc des Princes thus preceded significant shifts in mass spectator culture in France that, very broadly speaking, concretised football spectatorship (in particular) as a consumer practice that was recognised as such by authorities, even as the latter were leery about new kinds of violence making their appearance in the stadium. One could also argue that the post-​Parc era reflected an increasing sort of specialisation for both spaces and sporting practices. The Parc itself was a dedicated enclave for football and rugby that hosted the occasional rock concert but was kept more or less off limits for other kinds of demonstrations or political rallies.89 At the same time, professional football became a more distinct and specialised activity in its own right. The Charter of Professional Football, issued one year after the completion of the Parc, ‘regularised’ the professional game, giving players more security to pursue it as a full-​time career.90 The legal status of clubs, too, began to change in 1975 in a way that made it easier for them to function as commercial organisations. At the same time, new personalities from the world of business transformed the sport: the arrival of entrepreneurs at the helm of football clubs, such as clothing magnate Daniel Hechter at PSG or Bernard Tapie at Olympique de Marseille, dynamited the business practices of professional football. These new bosses were devoted to ‘modernising’ their clubs and raising their profile into national and international brands rather than simply football teams that commanded local and regional loyalties.91 With its dedicated spaces for television and lighting, the new Parc des Princes also heralded the role television would come to play in modernising French sport in the coming decades. French football authorities had resolutely resisted television coverage since its debut in the 1950s, fearing it would have a negative impact on crowd attendance; rugby, in fact, had gained in popularity in the 1950s because it was less fearful about embracing television broadcasts for parts of international matches.92 This pattern of resistance to television on the part of football, in particular, continued after the Parc’s construction:  live television coverage of regular-​season matches was limited to thirty minutes a week up until the 1980s.93 In that decade, however, television and the money it generated dramatically

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reshaped French sport. The French television market fractured, with the creation of cable television giant Canal+ in 1984, followed by TV5 and M6 in 1986, and the privatisation of the state broadcaster Télévision Française 1 (TF1) in 1987.94 This brought waves of money in terms of fees paid to broadcast matches: television revenue for French football increased fourfold between 1970 and 1990. In the process, gate receipts –​the traditional primary source of revenue for any club –​were no longer so critical for financial survival. They formed (on average) only 30 per cent of football club revenue in 1988, down from 80 per cent in 1970.95 By the turn of the century, football and rugby (which had officially welcomed professionalisation in 1995) drew, respectively, only 15 and 12 per cent of their revenues from gate receipts; the rest came from television, sponsorship arrangements and some lingering municipal subsidies.96 The power of television also played a role in the way that professional cycling –​the sport that had lost out with the demolition of the old Parc des Princes –​was able to readapt after 1972. As this chapter has argued, track cycling had been declining in popularity throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a fact that had justified the demolitions of both the Vélodrome d’Hiver and the vélodrome incarnation of the Parc des Princes. While the Tour de France remained tremendously popular in the 1960s, it was still wedded to an anachronistic vision of the race’s last day of racing. The Tour had traditionally ended on the track of the Parc des Princes; even after 1967, when the Parc was no longer an option, race organisers routed the final stage to the relatively tiny Vélodrome Municipal –​which could only accommodate 15,000 spectators at the most –​on the eastern fringe of the city in the Bois de Vincennes. After seven years of anticlimactic finishes at the old vélodrome, marked by ongoing disputes between organisers and the police over crowd control issues, the Tour’s leaders broke with tradition in 1975, opting to end the race on the most celebrated avenue in France, the Champs-​Elysées.97 The finish on the Champs has since been an unshakeable element of the Tour; the final stage is now witnessed by upwards of two million spectators in person (and millions more on television), with a backdrop that confirms the uniquely French characteristics of the race.98 In this sense, the forced eviction from the Parc, combined with the way that the race embraced television, actually helped the Tour (if not track cycling) transform its own image and reinforced its status as a global sporting ‘mega-​event’. The new Parc des Princes, then, was not only a convenient symbol of postwar urban modernisation in general, but specifically produced transformations to sporting practices and spaces in France and anticipated significant future shifts that were all a constitutive part of postwar

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changes as a whole. It also confirmed a new consensus over the political, symbolic and practical utility of the stadium itself. In Paris, the city finally followed the lead of provincial cities like Saint-​Etienne, Lens and Nantes, who had been actively funding their local professional football teams since the 1950s, if not before. Paris began to financially support PSG in the 1970s, particularly after Jacques Chirac became the city’s first elected mayor in 1977.99 Even more dramatically, politicians across the spectrum were slowly accepting the general principle of state support for professional sport and its spaces, and the utility of hosting large competitions as a means of boosting French (or alternatively Parisian) prestige internationally. This new outlook was on display when the French state, under Socialist president François Mitterrand, poured over 100 million francs into hosting football’s 1984 European Championship; this sum paid for the renovation of stadia in Marseille, Lyon, Saint-​Etienne, Lens and Strasbourg, and for the complete construction of another (the Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes), to stand alongside the Parc as venues for the competition. In the process, the Ministry for the Economy and Finance overrode Vichy-​era statutes that prohibited the state from giving substantial subsidies to ‘spectacular’ institutions.100 Thus the Parc des Princes certainly incarnated postwar urban modernisation, but was just as significant for the space it occupied at the epicentre of ongoing transformations to French sport itself. It heralded changes already underway and anticipated others that would arrive in ensuing decades. Those transformations, in turn, made it possible for French politicians to revive discussions about a grand stade in the late 1980s. When they did, the old debates from the 1920s had largely been resolved and the stadium itself came to acquire a new meaning as an urban space.

The Stade de France: revalorising the stadium at the end of the century In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the campaign to build a grand stade in Paris suddenly resurfaced after a hiatus following the completion of the Parc. This was largely due to Jacques Chirac in his capacity as mayor of Paris (from 1977 to 1995), prime minister (from 1986 to 1988)  and president (from 1995 to the stadium’s eventual completion in 1998, and onward until 2007). Chirac’s tenure as mayor was marked by a new bout of urban demolition and rebuilding in Paris, much of it carried out by the national government under Mitterrand, who was responsible for the prestige building projects known as the grands travaux. These

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included the refashioned Louvre Museum with its new glass-​and-​steel pyramid entrance, designed by noted Chinese-​American architect I. M. Pei; the Grande Arche de la Défense, a modernist arch that capped the visual axis which ran west from the Place de la Concorde through the Arc de Triomphe along the Champs-​Elysées; and the complex of cultural buildings at the Cité de la Musique, built on the grounds of the old slaughterhouses in the north-​east corner of the city.101 Chirac quickly developed a building agenda of his own that prioritised sporting spaces, as he realised the possibilities they offered for burnishing both the image of his city and his own political reputation. He thus pushed for the construction of an all-​purpose indoor sporting arena along the Seine in the eastern twelfth arrondissement, which saw the light of day as the Palais-​Omnisports de Paris-​Bercy in 1984. He also oversaw the modernisation of the facilities at Roland-​Garros, the old tennis stadium on the west side of the city just north of the Parc des Princes, and encouraged the renovation of the small university stadium at the city’s southern periphery, the Stade Sébastien-​Charléty, where distance runner Michel Jazy had set world records in the 1960s.102 When Chirac became prime minister (in addition to mayor) in 1986, he used his even more visible political position to call for a grand stade for Paris as the centrepiece of a bid to host the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. While the bid eventually failed, it produced several preliminary studies for the grand stade that proposed situating it either in the Bois de Vincennes or north of Paris in Tremblay-​en-​France, near the Roissy-​Charles de Gaulle international airport.103 When Chirac left the prime minister’s office after his party lost its parliamentary majority in May 1988, he used the mayor’s perch in Paris to formally announce a campaign to build a grand stade in November 1988. In a press conference designed to showcase Paris’s support for a proposed French bid to host the 1998 football World Cup, Chirac pointed to his municipality’s ongoing ‘politics of investment’ in sport over the previous decade, but noted that the ‘absence of a grand stade of 80,000 seats’ prevented Paris from posing its candidature effectively for global competitions like the Olympics or the World Cup.104 A new ‘convertible ecological stadium’, in Chirac’s words, would contribute to the ‘international brilliance’ of France and its capital. Soon afterwards, Chirac appointed Jacques Perrilliat, a former chief of staff for Pompidou, as his ‘Monsieur grand stade’ to advance the project further; by April 1989, Perrilliat’s report concluded that, while a new stadium could not actually be built inside the city limits of Paris itself, due to environmental concerns about the Bois de Vincennes, the city would still support building it wherever it was implanted.105

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The campaign to build a grand stade then turned into a rivalry between centre–​right Paris and the national government, which by 1989 was in Socialist hands. While Gaullist proposals for an Olympic stadium had been met with hostility from the left in the 1960s, a Socialist prime minister (Michel Rocard) now tasked another Socialist parliamentary deputy (Jean Glavany) with addressing the stadium question. Glavany, in fact, noted that a grand stade in the Parisian basin was a ‘necessity, even an obligation’.106 To let Paris take the lead on the project, he warned, was not a good idea: the state would certainly save money in such an event, but would surrender any political advantage gained from overseeing a ‘popular project’ to the city and its ambitious mayor.107 For Glavany, the grand stade needed to be considered as another one of the grands travaux: it was an ‘exceptional investment’ of national scale that needed ‘exceptional and urgent financing’.108 Glavany then headed up a commission that surveyed potential sites for the grand stade; based on its recommendations, Michel Rocard announced in February 1991 that the new stadium would be built in the ‘new town’ of Melun-​Sénart, twenty-​five kilometres to the southeast of Paris.109 The designation of Melun-​Sénart as the site for the grand stade marked the first moment in any of these discussions when the stadium was directly conceived as an agent of urban transformation. Melun-​Sénart (more often labelled simply as Sénart) had been the last of the ‘new towns’ constructed in the 1970s: these were planned communities built outside of Paris in an attempt to relieve population pressures at the centre of the city. These communities, however, never really grew in the manner that original planners had hoped. Situating the stadium at Sénart was intended as a concrete step that would help attract investment and development to that community, ‘rebalancing’ the eastern part of the greater Parisian metropolitan area to counter the growth elsewhere in the region.110 In language borrowed from the world of sport, the Sénart stadium was described as form of ‘doping’, a catalyst to the development of the region through state investment in infrastructure and transport, particularly through the improvement and creation of commuter railways and high-​speed train facilities.111 However, the choice of Sénart drew immediate opposition from the city of Paris, its allies among the sporting federations and the influential sporting press, particularly L’Equipe. Paris made its displeasure known: Jacques Perrilliat sniped that there had been a desire to marginalise Paris in the selection process, and that Chirac, as mayor, had no interest in supporting a stadium that could not be a factor in either urban development or economic promotion.112 Chirac himself later denigrated Sénart as too distant from Paris; he opined that it was a ‘technically

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debatable’ choice that would not attract spectators.113 The sporting federations were also unhappy: the head of the associated Olympic federations (the Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français) whined that his organisation’s preference for an installation in the ‘urban tissue of Paris’ or its nearby suburbs had been ignored.114 The attacks on Sénart were articulated in the pages of L’Equipe over the ensuing two years; Glavany, as the man responsible for defending the government’s grand stade plan, wrote a scathing letter to the sporting daily in mid-​1992, attacking it for ‘ceding to a political campaign’ of the Mayor of Paris in dismissing Sénart so frequently and vocally.115 The critiques of Melun-​Sénart, however, never dissipated and were compounded by the inability of the state to find a private consortium willing to take on the task of constructing and running the stadium after its completion. As doubts mounted about the viability of the project, alternative proposals recirculated. While the choice of Sénart was upheld by one of Rocard’s successors as prime minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, after some internal review in December 1992, Sénart’s critics never abandoned their opposition. It was not really surprising, then, that the whole question of the grand stade was reopened in April 1993, soon after the centre-​ right returned to national power with a majority in parliament. By June, new prime minister Edouard Balladur’s government was investigating the legal ramifications of breaking its agreement with Sénart, which it would later do by declaring the deliberations to find a group to build and manage the stadium ‘unfruitful’.116 In late September 1993, Balladur announced his preference for building the stadium in an entirely new location north of Paris –​the Plaine du Cornillon in Saint-​Denis, on land that was owned by the city of Paris but that had previously been developed by the electric utility Gaz de France. That choice was made official in October 1993, much to the delight of sporting federations and Chirac, and the consternation of the supporters of Sénart.117 The choice of Saint-​Denis for what would end up being the Stade de France ended nearly five years of political jockeying over the location of the stadium that had (generally) pitted Chirac and his allies in the French sport federations against the Socialist governments under Rocard and Bérégovoy, who envisioned the stade as a continuation of the 1970s-​ era planning schemes for decentralising and ‘rebalancing’ the Parisian metropolitan area. The whole debate, with its duelling proposals for a new grand stade at the periphery of Paris and its general rivalry between politicians on opposite sides of the spectrum, bore a superficial resemblance to many of the discussions that had preceded it, beginning in the 1920s. But the convoluted process that led to the selection of Saint-​Denis

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also represented a significant departure from those earlier debates and reflected the changes that had followed the completion of the Parc des Princes in 1972. Most critically, stadia were now seen by almost everyone in a new light: they were not simply perceived as prestige building projects, like the Parc, but potential motors of urban redevelopment and economic growth. The new attitudes towards stadia and their place in the urban fabric were clearly manifested by the newly elected Communist mayor of Saint-​ Denis itself, Patrick Braouezec. His long-​standing predecessor Marcelin Berthelot had firmly resisted previous appeals to build a stadium in Saint-​Denis, in an effort to stave off new development in the hopes of luring heavy industry back to the city. Berthelot, in fact, once complained that a stadium was only ‘capable of creating nuisances’.118 In 1991, however, Berthelot was succeeded by Braouezec, who gradually came to the conclusion that the stade would force the national government to ‘nudge’ efforts to attract economic investment to Saint-​Denis and nearby communes like Aubervilliers and Saint-​Ouen.119 Braouezec thus accepted the idea of situating the grand stade in Saint-​Denis, but demanded state improvements to transportation infrastructure in exchange. The state was obligated to extend the subway and RER lines into Saint-​Denis and to cover over the portion of the multilane express highway (the A1) which bisected Saint-​Denis and separated the neighbourhood around the stadium (the Plaine Saint-​Denis) from the city centre. For Braouezec, constructing the stadium would at the very least help Saint-​Denis obtain infrastructural improvements that it might not have acquired otherwise. In addition, the stadium was intended to stimulate urban development in Saint-​Denis in other ways. At a very basic level, it was replacing a blighted industrial site, a former Gaz de France tar-​processing plant. As an attempt to redevelop this kind of polluted brownfield site, the Stade de France thus fit a particular pattern of late twentieth-​century urbanism in Paris.120 Its construction certainly paralleled the conversion of the old slaughterhouses at La Villette (in the 1980s) into the Cité de la Musique, a complex that included a music museum, conservatory and performance spaces; it also strongly emulated the redevelopment of the old industrial area on the left bank of the Seine in the thirteenth arrondissement into the new Bibliothèque Nationale, the last of Mitterrand’s grands travaux.121 The Stade de France, however, was also envisioned as an engine of economic growth in its own right. It would, of course, attract crowds of visitors to the area, but was also seen as an anchor for other kinds of urban redevelopment; as part of the project, retail establishments and office space were to be built alongside the stadium.122

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All of these aspirations surrounding the Stade de France were a far cry from the envisioned role of the Parc des Princes when it was reconstructed in 1972, illustrating the perceptual shift concerning stadia that had occurred in the ensuing quarter century. In another contrast to the Parc, the Stade de France itself was generally not perceived to be as groundbreaking architecturally as its smaller predecessor. The new stadium, with its ellipsoidal design, partially retractable grandstands and oval roof, was certainly warmly praised in general terms upon its debut in 1998, by the French press (as noted at the outset of this book) and foreign journalists alike. Writing in the British Mail on Sunday, Roger Bray called the new stadium a ‘triumph of light and space’; the Guardian’s Jon Henley praised the ‘high-​tech beauty’ of the Stade de France, a ‘sophisticated mix of glass and concrete crowned by a soaring “floating” roof that covers all the stands’.123 However, from a technical point of view, contemporaries were reluctant to suggest that the stadium designed by architects Michel Macary, Aymeric Zublena, Michel Regembal and Claude Constantini was a terribly novel architectural landmark. At the time that the Macary–​ Zublena design was shortlisted for consideration, alongside competing plans for a rectangular, fully retractable stadium, Le Monde opined that the Macary–​Zublena plan was hardly a ‘worthy challenger’; it was a ‘lesser’ dossier in terms of both quality and price.124 The most that could be said about it, wrote Francis Rambert in Le Figaro, is that it represented a ‘return to Olympism’ rather than an ‘affirmation of modernity’.125 Yet, while the specific values and aspirations assigned to the Stade de France thus diverged from those bestowed upon the Parc des Princes in the early 1970s, both stadia elicited critiques of the general planning processes that produced them. Critics of the Parc had assailed the way that the stadium was built as ‘technocratic’ and questioned whether it unduly benefitted private commercial interests; certain politicians on the left raised similar concerns about the Stade de France. Jean Glavany fumed that the choice of Saint-​Denis reflected the ‘arrogance of technocrats’ and the ‘imperialism’ of Paris.126 Other critics pointed to the way the process of designing and building the stadium benefitted private actors, specifically the consortium that was eventually awarded the contract to build and administer the Stade de France. Once again, Bouygues –​the powerful construction firm that built the Parc des Princes –​was involved, this time as part of a joint venture along with Dumez (Lyonnaise des Eaux) and SGE (Générale des Eaux), the two other giants of the French construction industry. The Bouygues–​Dumez–​SGE group sponsored four initial designs, including both of the two final proposals, a development that raised eyebrows about the potential fairness of the entire process.

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Complaints were voiced very quickly after the selection of the Macary–​ Zublena plan; the other finalist, architect Jean Nouvel, filed a protest with the European Commission alleging that the bids had been skewed to the advantage of his competitors. Nouvel specifically objected to the fact that, while the architectural jury had preferred his project, Balladur had gone against that decision to select the Macary–​Zublena plan.127 Nouvel’s protest would eventually be upheld by the European Commission in 1997, although this decision failed to alter the results of the architectural competition or award Nouvel the contract. Beyond the concern generated over the lack of transparency in the process of building the Stade, others protested the complicated entanglement of public and private interests in the financing and eventual use of the stadium itself. The state, in fact, contributed nearly half of the 2.67 billion francs required for the stadium’s construction.128 Yet the bulk of the benefits derived from using the stadium seemed to reside with the private operating consortium, not the state. Of particular concern to sceptical observers was the financial guarantee offered to the group, which included a controversial ‘compensation clause’ that required the state to pay up to sixty-​eight million francs (later twelve million euros) per year if it (the state) failed to attract a resident high-​profile football team to use the stadium as its permanent home.129 In essence, this guarantee made French taxpayers responsible for subsidising spectator sport and the other commercial spectacles like rock concerts and theatrical performances inside the Stade de France, a practice that continued until late 2013 when the contract between the state and the consortium was revised to eliminate the compensation clause.130 In this regard, the Stade de France  –​even more than the Parc des Princes  –​was critiqued for manifesting an overly close relationship between the French state and private economic actors. Some observers labelled this as corruption:  Balladur’s preference for the Bouygues-​ led consortium was (some alleged) a favour in return for support that the Bouygues-​owned TF1 television channel had given him during the 1995 presidential election.131 More broadly, however, this was consistent with the model of ‘state-​enhanced’ capitalism in late twentieth-​century France, where the government consistently boosted certain private actors.132 In this particular domain –​unlike its impact on urban renewal –​ the stadium’s specific functions and its nature as an urban space was less important than the planning and economic processes that it seemed to concretise.133 The Stade de France thus played its own distinct role in the process of late twentieth-​century urban modernisation in Paris:  the stadium

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space was valorised in new ways as a vehicle for urban renewal and was critiqued for the problematic aspects of that modernising process that it incarnated. However, outside of discussions about its relationship to urban planning, the Stade de France  –​like the Parc des Princes  –​was also implicated in an ongoing effort to transform French spectator sports themselves by broadening their appeal and disassociating them from the potential of hooligan violence, which was on the wane in the 1990s but never absent from European stadia. The Bouygues–​Dumez–​SGE consortium had announced, as early as 1990, that a grand stade needed to attract a new public for ‘spectacular’ events, ‘festivals’ to be experienced with friends or with family.134 The Macary–​Zublena design, for its part, was explicitly intended to be a ‘polyvalent’ space that could be reconfigured for a variety of sporting events and musical concerts, thanks to its partially retractable grandstands.135 Aymeric Zublena admitted that it would be ‘naive’ to think that ‘architecture would resolve the problems of society and bring happiness’, but also claimed that ‘certain architectural [forms] could provoke the sense of rejection, of conflict, of clashes that can, in turn, produce violence’.136 The Stade de France, he hoped, would not inspire violence, but rather ‘conviviality’ between spectators and between the stadium itself and its environs, all while being cognisant of the very real security needs in a modern stadium.137 The Stade de France, then, was made possible by shifting attitudes towards the value of spectator sport, and the urban spaces that made sport possible. Some of those attitudes were already present in the early 1970s at the time of the construction of the new Parc des Princes, while others had emerged during the ensuing quarter century. But, like the Parc, the Stade de France has only partially lived up to the varied aspirations that surrounded its creation. It has been relatively underused, at least in comparison with the hopes of sports officials when it was originally constructed. Efforts to attract a permanent resident professional football club have failed. The most likely candidate for a move  –​Paris Saint-​Germain –​has been unwilling to leave the Parc des Princes; the city of Paris, which is invested in keeping PSG at the Parc, has proved hostile to the idea of moving the club. Without a resident club, however, the Stade de France is essentially consigned to hosting special football and rugby matches and musical events, and lacks a persistent core of spectators that might be present at other stadia. Given this somewhat irregular pattern of use, it is still unclear whether the stadium itself has been as much of a stimulus for urban renewal in Saint-​Denis as politicians might have initially hoped. The Stade de France has also been the site of moments of ‘turbulent’ and difficult spectatorship, from the infamous

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incident in 2001, when spectators (largely of North African descent) at an exhibition match between France and Algeria whistled the playing of the ‘Marseillaise’ and invaded the pitch, to the infamous banderole affair in 2008, when supporters of PSG deployed a homophobic banner during the final of the single-​elimination football tournament for the top three divisions of French football, the Coupe de la Ligue (French League Cup).138 At the same time, however, the stadium has lived up to expectations in a limited sense, simply by being a showcase venue for large-​scale international competitions. The Stade de France was, of course, the scene for the galvanising triumph of the 1998 World Cup. But it has also been the centrepiece of the 2003 World Track and Field Championships and the 2007 Rugby World Cup, and anchored the Parisian bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, an effort promoted by Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë that nearly brought the Games to the French capital.139 Moreover, it was the marquee stadium for football’s 2016 European Championship (or ‘Euro 2016’), hosting the opening match, the final game and five other contests. While some of these events could have taken place at the Parc des Princes, others would not have been awarded to France without the Stade. The grand stade, in this sense, has done at least in part what its supporters hoped it would do: make spectator sport a more visible and central part of French life at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, capping a half century of change in that regard.

Global networks and French connections The second half of the twentieth century witnessed dramatic transformations to French politics, culture and society; spectator sport and its spaces were integral to this process of change. As this chapter has suggested, the reconstructed Parc des Princes stadium came to stand as a manifestation of the changes sweeping the Paris basin in the early 1970s. But the Parc des Princes also heralded the shifting structures and practices of spectator sport in the decades after the Second World War. Spectator sporting spaces were refashioned and reimagined as a reflection of changing patterns of leisure and consumption in France. Spectator sports like football and rugby, too, were themselves reshaped by a variety of forces, ranging from concerns about hooliganism to a massive influx of television-​ generated revenue. And, by the end of the century, with the construction of the Stade de France in 1998, stadia had been reassessed as urban spaces:  they were optimistically viewed as potential motors for urban redevelopment and as anchors for highly symbolic international sporting

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competitions that projected positive messages about French national prestige and sporting identity, even though it was unclear if they were actually capable of living up to the aspirations that had been attached to them. But, while this transformative process was particular to France, it was taking place alongside similar developments in other parts of the world over the second half of the twentieth century. The Parc des Princes, for instance, was not the only new stadium constructed in the early 1970s redesigned for greater spectator comfort and interpreted as a symbolic manifestation of postwar change and transformation. In Western Europe and North America, new stadia were built in the 1960s and 1970s that not only symbolised the aspirations of the cities that built them, but also attempted to render spectatorship more pleasant and convenient. This ‘second generation’ of stadia (to use architect Rod Sheard’s periodisation) in North America was headlined by the innovative Houston Astrodome, the world’s first air-​conditioned and domed stadium, which was touted as the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ upon its completion in 1965. The Astrodome was also envisioned by its boosters as a concrete manifestation of Houston’s rise to national and international prominence.140 In Western Europe, the first all-​seater stadium (as noted above) was constructed in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1958, while another all-​seater facility was being built at the exact same moment as the Parc des Princes. The Olympic Stadium in Munich, built in advance of the 1972 Olympics Games, was an impressive architectural accomplishment, described by historians Kay Schiller and Christopher Young as the ‘most ambitious building project in the history of the Federal Republic [West Germany]’.141 The most stunning feature of the stadium, designed by architect Günther Behnisch and engineer Frei Otto, was a glass and acrylic roof designed to symbolise the ‘transparency’ of a rebuilt postwar West Germany and its figurative distance from the Nazi regime that hosted the Berlin Olympics in 1936.142 While the Parc thus carried its own particular meaning as a more spectator-​friendly enclosure and as a manifestation of postwar change and French engineering prowess, stadia in other countries were being designed with similar (if not identical) considerations in mind in the 1960s and early 1970s. Just as stadia themselves around the world were being re-​envisioned at the time of the Parc des Prince’s reconstruction, the kinds of sporting transformations experienced in France from the 1960s onwards were also happening, with differing degrees of intensity, in other parts of the world. In Great Britain, for instance, football attendance went through a slump

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in the 1960s that resembled the French experience, only to rebound in the 1980s. Moreover, British football –​like its French counterpart, and like football elsewhere in Western Europe for that matter  –​would be completely transformed by the influx of television revenue in the 1980s and 1990s. In many parts of Western Europe, the all-​seater stadium  –​ as a concession to both spectator safety and as an attempt to refashion the spectator experience in general  –​became increasingly prevalent, particularly in the first decade of the twenty-​first century. At the same time, of course, anxieties about hooliganism –​which were more muted in France than elsewhere –​drove the trend towards closed-​circuit television surveillance in stadia from the 1980s onwards across Great Britain and Western Europe.143 If spectator sport generally changed in Western Europe as a whole, and not simply in France, in the decades after the Second World War, the late twentieth-​century re-​evaluation of the stadium as a space for urban redevelopment and promotion evidenced by the Stade de France was also not a uniquely French process. Rod Sheard has argued that new ‘fifth generation’ stadia built across North America, Europe and Oceania attempted to revitalise decaying or economically stagnant areas (such as warehouses, docks and railheads) of older post-​industrial cities and became iconic symbols in the process.144 In Australia, for example, the new stadium for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney was built on the site of the disused Homebush Bay abattoir and was envisioned as the anchor for a redevelopment project that included park space and residential areas, while the 53,000-​seat Telstra Dome in Melbourne was intended to revitalise the former shipping area (the ‘Docklands’) at the western edge of the city centre.145 Other new stadia in Wellington, Baltimore, San Francisco, Denver, Lisbon and Cardiff were likewise intended to stimulate urban development in formerly blighted industrial parts of those cities. Like the Stade de France, new stadia completed in the early twenty-​first century in locales ranging from Australia to Eastern Europe to South Korea to South Africa were built specifically to facilitate global ‘mega-​events’ like the World Cups and the Olympic Games. These new facilities all shared similar characteristics, too: they were all-​seater facilities with roofing, frequently suspended via tensioned cables or other structures, that covered the grandstands and spectators entirely.146 Their construction reflects an emerging global consensus over the utility of sport and its spaces as a means of self-​promotion in what Maurice Roche has described as a ‘world of global inter-​city comparisons and economic competition’, despite an awareness of the costs of stadium construction and hosting sporting competitions.147

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The reality that sporting spaces and practices in France increasingly resembled those of their global counterparts was not lost on the French. At some points, most notably after the construction of the Parc des Princes, French observers boasted that foreigners were paying attention to French accomplishments. At other moments, particularly during the discussions that led to the construction of the Stade de France, French officials monitored stadium developments abroad with great interest. From 1990 to 1994, French officials made multiple visits to foreign stadia in North America and Europe; Jean Glavany visited the newly completed Toronto Skydome in 1990, while other bureaucrats toured stadia in Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, Barcelona, London and Brussels.148 While it is unlikely that the design of the Stade de France reflected any particular lessons learned inside those foreign stadia, those visits abroad suggest that the French grand stade project –​even in its earliest stages –​ was inherently implicated in a process of global comparison between France and the rest of world. Building the Stade de France, from this perspective, gave Paris (and France) a kind of sporting ‘common denominator’ that linked it to London, Barcelona, Brussels and other cities around the globe. Thus spectator sport and its spaces in France in the decades after the Second World War, and particularly after the 1960s, experienced significant transformations and ruptures that were part of the overall experience of postwar modernisation. These ranged from the developments discussed in this chapter, namely the shifts in spectator sporting practices themselves and the reassessment of the stadium’s place within both sport and the urban landscape, to others highlighted earlier in the book, such as the depoliticisation of the stadium space after 1945. Yet many of those developments were not unique to France; in the latter decades of the century, in fact, a process of sporting globalisation was accelerating, as the global linkages and interconnections present in the world of sport in the first half of the twentieth century continually intensified. Sporting spaces and practices increasingly resembled each other without regard for national boundaries; the so-​called 1995 Bosman ruling, whereby the European Court of Justice effectively lifted certain employment restrictions that limited the international movement of professional football players, was only one manifestation of these globalising tendencies.149 International sporting competitions, ranging from the Africa Cup of Nations in football to the Rugby World Cup, continued to grow in scale and importance and took place within a global network of increasingly similar-​looking stadia, often built by the same handful of international architectural and engineering firms. The narrative about France traced here, then, showcases

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the way that sporting spaces and practices in France converged with their counterparts abroad, as the practices and spaces for global sport in general were themselves becoming standardised and more tightly interconnected. However, the global convergences in the world of sport at the end of the twentieth century still do not render the particular history of sporting spaces and spectator sport in France any less significant or relevant. The construction of the Stade de France certainly gave France an Olympic-​ sized stadium that resembled other large 80,000-​seat stadia around the world; the stadium was also envisioned as a potential space for urban reconstruction and renewal, just like many other stadia at the turn of the twenty-​first century. Yet the Stade de France, as its name suggests, was very much a French space: as this book has highlighted, its completion in 1998 represented the culmination of debates that had been circulating in France since the 1920s, and that had followed their own particular course during the intervening decades. The long-​awaited grand stade was not simply an imitation of part of a global template; it was shaped by French discussions over public policy, urban planning, spectator sport and national prestige. Likewise, the changing seating arrangements for spectators and accommodations for television inside French stadia, from the era of the Parc des Princes onwards, were similar to developments elsewhere around the globe, but they too were framed by the longer French legacy of coming to grips with the mass crowd inside the stadium, whether in the context of mass politics or spectator sport. And even the fact that French stadia and sport increasingly resembled sporting spaces and practices elsewhere at the turn of the twenty-​first century did not diminish the very fact that comparisons to foreign stadia and spectators had their own particular historical meaning in the French context, even as the terms of those comparisons had changed by the end of the century. In short, the history of stadia and their spectators in France at the end of the twentieth century –​while connected to a global narrative –​was and still remains a history of the contested emergence and transformation of modern mass society in twentieth-​century France.

Notes 1 L’Equipe, 26 May 1972. 2 Verdier’s official title was the Prefect of Paris. AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 145, Article draft, Jean Verdier, 3 May 1972. 3 AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 145, Article draft, Jean Verdier, 3 May 1972. 4 Roger Taillibert and Marc Emery, Roger Taillibert:  Architecte  =  Architect (Montreal: Editions Hurtubise HMH, 1976), p. 12.

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5 Roger Taillibert and Alain Orlandini, Roger Taillibert:  réalisations (Paris: Somogy, 2004), p. 8. 6 Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979). 7 Rosemary Wakeman, Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse, 1945–​1975 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 3. 8 Wakeman, Modernizing the Provincial City, p. 3. 9 Michael Bess, The Light-​Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–​2000 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 15. 10 Marcel Roncayolo et al., eds, La Ville aujourd’hui: mutations urbaines, décentralisation et crise du citadin (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1985/​2001), p. 162. 11 Wakeman, Modernizing the Provincial City, p. 6. 12 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 2. 13 Hecht, The Radiance of France, p. 12. 14 Maurice Roche, Mega-​Events and Modernity:  Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 10. For the stadium as urban icon and catalyst for urban renewal, see Rod Sheard, The Stadium:  Architecture for the New Global Culture (Singapore:  Periplus, 2005), p. 158. 15 Only one out of every hundred residential buildings in Paris in 1954 had been built after 1939. Roncayolo et al., La Ville aujourd’hui, p. 24. 16 Rosemary Wakeman, ‘Nostalgic Modernism and the Invention of Paris’, French Historical Studies 27 (1) (2004): 139. 17 Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City:  Paris, 1945–​ 1958 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 59–​61. 18 Wakeman, The Heroic City, p. 61. 19 Bovet, ‘Les Riches Heures’, p. 36. The author thanks Patrick Vauzelle for providing further details on the stadium’s postwar fate. 20 See L’Equipe, 12 January 1952, for Racing versus Pau (fifteen-​man rugby) and L’Equipe, 15 January 1953, for Sochaux (reserves) versus CA Paris in the Coupe de l’Amitié in football. 21 See L’Equipe, 12 May 1953. The first stock-​car races in France were promoted by Andy Dickson, the son of the legendary promoter Jeff Dickson and the long-​time sports editor of Le Parisien after the Second World War. Andy Dickson, interview with the author, Paris, France, 17 June 2008. 22 Jacques Lucan, ed., Fernand Pouillon architecte: Pantin Montrouge Boulougne-​ Billancourt Meudon-​la-​Fôret (Paris: Editions du Pavillion de l’Arsenal, 2003), p. 120. 23 Fernand Pouillon, Mémoires d’un architecte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), p.  310. Pouillon was arrested for fraud after his Comptoir National du Logement (CNL) collapsed in bankruptcy in 1961. He then fled France while awaiting trial and lived in hiding in Italy for nearly two years. He returned to France and served several months in prison before being released and pardoned by Georges Pompidou.

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24 L’Equipe, 12 November 1958. 25 L’Equipe, 18 April 1959. 26 L’Equipe, 12 May 1959. 27 L’Equipe, 12 May 1959. 28 For one classic description of this diverse public inside the Vél’ d’Hiv, see L’Auto, 8 April 1930. 29 L’Humanité, 13 May 1959. For an account of one of those rallies commemorating the death of Stalin on 10 March 1953, see Roncayolo et  al., La Ville aujourd’hui, p. 689. 30 L’Equipe, 12 May 1959. For Halimi’s career as a prizefighter, see L’Humanité, 28 June 1997. 31 L’Equipe, 12 May 1959. 32 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 10. The arena’s past did not resurface in mainstream public discourse, save for glowing tributes to its sporting heritage, until 1986, when then prime minister (and mayor of Paris) Jacques Chirac inaugurated a memorial stele that marked the former site of the stadium. Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany Since 1989 (New  York:  Berghahn Books, 2005), p.  53. A  free-​standing memorial to the Vél’ d’Hiv’, featuring seven seated figures on a banked curve meant to resemble the vélodrome track, was unveiled near the site of the former arena in 1994. 33 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 29–​30 June 1959. For the life of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ from construction in 1910 onwards, see L’Equipe, 15 April 1959. For its renovation in 1931, see France-​Football, 14 May 1931. 34 L’Auto, 19 March 1947. 35 For the 1945 proposal, see Wakeman, ‘Nostalgic Modernism’, pp.  139–​40. For the 1950 plan and its aftermath, see L’Equipe, 3 November 1952; L’Equipe, 7 January 1953; L’Equipe, 13 January 1954; and L’Equipe, 20 May 1954. See also Leroy, ‘Le Roman-​feuilleton du Grand Stade’. 36 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 28 December 1959. 37 Journal des Débats, Assemblée Nationale, Session on 13 February 1958. 38 ANF, 19770709, Article 1, Press conference of the Haut-​Commissaire de la Jeunesse et des Sports (Maurice Herzog), 17 December 1958. For other efforts to mobilise youth in postwar France, see Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the New Wave:  Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 39 As one example, the Soviet Union constructed the Luzhniki stadium complex in south-​western Moscow in the mid-​1950s. See Alexandra Köhring, ‘“Sporting Moscow”: Stadia Buildings and the Challenging of Public Space in the Post-​War Soviet Union’, Urban History 37 (2) (2010): 253–​7 1. 40 ANF, 19770227, Article 22, Note on the plan for the construction of a stadium for 100,000 spectators in Paris, Prefect of the Seine, 2 May 1959. 41 Paul Delouvrier’s official title was the ‘General Delegate’ to the District of the Region of Paris from 1961 to 1969. He helped oversee the 1960 overall regional

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plan, the Plan d’aménagement et d’organisation générale (PADOG), which gave way in 1965 to the Schéma directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région d’Ile-​de-​France (SDAURIF). Jean Bastié, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: Paris de 1945 à 2000 (Paris: Association pour la Publication d’une Histoire de Paris/​ Diffusion Hachette, 2001), p. 278. 42 Bastié, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, p. 352. 43 ANF, 19770227, Article 22, Letter from Herzog to Charles de Gaulle, September 1964. 44 For the triumphant press conference held by Parisian municipal officials in early December to announce the imminent construction of the stade, see L’Equipe, 5 December 1963. 45 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 17 December 1964. 46 As an indicator of the close correlation between national prestige and the stadium, one debate over the grand stade in the Conseil Municipal de Paris quickly transformed into an argument about defence spending and which political group was most blameworthy for the military collapse in 1940. Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 17 December 1964. 47 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 17 December 1964. 48 ANF, 19770227, Article 22, Letter from Maurice Herzog to Charles de Gaulle, September 1964. See also Leroy, ‘Le Roman-​feuilleton du Grand stade’, and Gravelaine, Le Stade de France, p. 16. 49 Wahl and Lanfranchi, Les Footballeurs professionels, p. 169. 50 Wahl, Les Archives du football, p. 274. 51 ANF, 19770189, Art. 3, ‘Tour d’Horizon sur le football international et sur la grande misère du football français’, 21 November 1967. See also Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 205. 52 As one typical example, the introduction to an internal report within the Ministry of Youth and Sports in late 1968 renounced the idea of public authorities involving themselves in the operations of a private organisation, the FFFA. ANF, 19770189, Art. 3, ‘Note à l’attention de Monsieur le Directeur du Cabinet’, 9 December 1968. 53 L’Equipe, 11 March 1965. 54 Municipal authorities had engaged in acrimonious legal wrangling with the Société Anonyme since 1937 over the issue of rent and the share of gate receipts from football. Paris finally succeeded in doubling the Parc’s rent in 1958, although the new terms of the lease were still considered favourable to the Parc. Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 16 January 1964. 55 Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, p. 208. 56 L’Equipe, 21 December 1966. 57 L’Equipe, 21 December 1966. 58 L’Equipe, 21 December 1966. 59 AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 145, Mémoire from the Prefect of Paris to the Conseil de Paris, 1 July 1968. 60 This was the same law, in fact, that had temporarily slowed the demolition of the Stade Buffalo in 1955.

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61 Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 16 January 1964. Contrary to the wishes of the PCF delegates, the stadium was instead leased on a short-​term basis to the FFFA. 62 Marboeuf also argued that the Parc des Princes was worth converting into a football stadium because it was considerably closer to the core of the city than Colombes, which was ageing badly by the mid-​1960s. He also noted that nearly thirteen million francs had already been committed to building the sector of the périphérique that traversed the Parc; it would thus simplify the financing of the Parc’s renovation if it coincided with a project that already had funding allocated for it, and that in addition had to be completed as rapidly as possible as a question of public utility. See Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 19 July 1971, and also Roger Taillibert, Construire l’avenir (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1977), p. 22. 63 Taillibert, Construire l’avenir, p. 21. 64 In normal prestressed concrete, the concrete mould is poured around high-​ strength steel tendons, which are stretched in one direction. In crossed prestressed concrete –​used at the Parc –​steel tendons within the concrete mould are stretched in two directions. Taillibert, Construire l’avenir, p. 27. 65 Taillibert, Construire l’avenir, p. 21; Taillibert and Emery, Roger Taillibert, p. 8. 66 Taillibert and Emery, Roger Taillibert, p. 9. 67 L’Equipe, 3 February 1972. 68 AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 145, Note from the Prefect of Paris to M. Galy-​Dejean, special envoy to the General Secretariat of the President of the Republic, 30 March 1972. 69 Le Figaro, 10 May 1972. 70 L’Aurore, 31 May 1972. 71 Hecht, The Radiance of France, p. 37. 72 AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 144, Letter from the Minister of Infrastructure and Lodging to the Prefect of Paris, 23 November 1970; AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 145, Interview with Francis Bouygues in Les Informations, 1402, 27 March 1972. 73 L’Aurore, 31 May 1972. 74 AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 145, Prefecture of Paris, ‘Report on the Progress of Operations’, February 1972; Bulletin Municipal Officiel de Paris, 19 July 1971. 75 Bastié, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, 653. For the relationship between the Prefect of Paris and the Conseil Municipal until reform in the late 1970s, see Haegel, Un maire à Paris, p. 29. 76 Combeau and Nivet, Histoire politique de Paris, p. 250; Jean-​Pierre Renaud, Paris, un état dans l’état (Paris: Editions l’Harmattan, 1993), p. 40. 77 AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 146, Georges Bregou, ‘Le nouveau stade du Parc des Princes’, Chantiers Cooperatifs, 25 January 1972. At the insistence of the Prefect of Police, a small ‘anti-​fanatic’ moat separated the grandstands from the pitch. 78 Taillibert, Construire l’avenir, p. 22. 79 Taillibert, Construire l’avenir, p. 35.

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80 Sheard, The Stadium, p. 109. 81 ANF,19770189, Art. 3, ‘Note à l’attention de M. le Directeur du cabinet’, 9 December 1968. 82 On a technical level, the use of crossed prestressed concrete decisively influenced a horde of new stadia (many in North America) built in the 1970s, including Taillibert’s own Olympic stadium in Montreal, built for the 1976 Games. For a history of Taillibert’s work in Montreal, which was plagued by delays and cost overruns, see Paul Charles Howell, The Montreal Olympics: An Insider’s View of Organizing a Self-​Financing Games (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2009). 83 For Havelange’s comments, see L’Equipe, 30 May 1975. 84 Bale, Sport, Space and the City, p. 50. 85 See Taylor, The Association Game, pp. 311–​19, for an overview of the scholarly debate over the emergence of hooliganism in the 1960s. 86 Patrick Mignon has broadly generalised that hooliganism is a barometer of a ‘passion for football’ that he finds historically lacking in French society. Mignon, La Passion du football, p. 10. 87 Peter Corrigan, ‘The French Renaissance’, Observer, 6 March 1977; Bromberger et al., Le Match de football, p. 232. 88 Bromberger et al., Le Match de football, p. 247. 89 Municipal and national authorities periodically turned down the requests of groups seeking to use the Parc for political purposes. AP, Perotin 101/​77/​9 144, Letter from Maurice Le Moan to the Prefect of Paris, 26 March 1974. 90 Wahl, Les Archives du football, p. 282. 91 Wahl, Les Archives du football, p. 272. 92 Pierre Chazaud, ‘Le Sport et les medias au XXe siècle: de la culture de masse à la médiatisation du sport’, in Pierre Arnaud, ed., Le Sport en France:  une approche politique, économique et sociale (Paris:  Documentation Française, 2000), p.  141. For rugby and television before the Parc, see, for instance, France-​Football, 29 March 1960. 93 Wahl, Les Archives du football, p. 326. 94 Pierre Chaix, Le Rugby professionel en France: enjeux économiques et sociaux (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), p. 126. 95 Wahl and Lanfranchi, Les Footballeurs professionnels, p. 218. 96 Chaix, Le Rugby professionel en France, p. 102. 97 APPP, FA/​SP 5, Tour de France, Review of the 1968 finish by police superintendent Jacques Laurent addressed to the Directeur-​Général de la Police Municipale, undated. 98 Eric Reed, ‘The Economics of the Tour, 1930–​ 2000’, in Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare, eds, The Tour de France, 1903–​2003:  A  Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 108. This is not to argue, however, that the Tour as a whole was anti-​modern before the 1960s. 99 David Ranc, ‘Local Politics, Identity and Football in Paris’, Modern and Contemporary France 17 (1) (2009): 51–​65.

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100 ANF, 19840750, Article 2, Letter from Edwige Avice, Minister of Leisure Time, to Laurent Fabius, Minister of the Economy and Finance, 4 March 1982. 101 Susan Collard has challenged the common perception that Chirac always opposed Mitterrand’s policies; she contends that Chirac pragmatically sought to use the national grands travaux as ‘focal points’ for further development by the city. Susan Collard, ‘Politics, Culture and Urban Transformation in Jacques Chirac’s Paris, 1977–​1995’, French Cultural Studies 7 (19) (1996): 24. 102 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Press Conference for Jacques Chirac, 22 November 1988. See also Bastié, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris, p.  663. Chirac, according to long-​time Parisien sports editor Andy Dickson, pushed the Palais-​ Omnisports de Bercy project because he supported proposals to revive the Six-​Day bicycle races in Paris, which Chirac remembered from his childhood with affection. Andy Dickson, interview with the author, Paris, France, 17 June 2008. For the renovation of the Stade Charléty, see Henri Gaudin and Bruno Gaudin, Le Stade Charléty (Paris: Les Editions du Demi-​Cercle, 1994). 103 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, ‘Compte-​ rendu de la reunion interministérielle’, 18 March 1988. 104 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Press Conference for Jacques Chirac, 22 November 1988. 105 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Report from Jean Glavany to François Mitterrand and Michel Rocard, ‘Sur la construction d’un grand stade en région parisienne’, July 1989. See ANF, 1990227, Art. 1, Letter from Jacques Perilliat to Jean Glavany, 15 May 1990. 106 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Report from Jean Glavany to François Mitterrand and Michel Rocard, ‘Sur la construction d’un grand stade en région parisienne’, July 1989. 107 ANF, 19900227, Art. 1, Letter from Jacques Chirac (Mayor of Paris) to Prime Minister Michel Rocard, 12 May 1989. 108 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Report from Glavany to Mitterrand and Rocard, July 1989. 109 Dauncey, ‘Building the Finals’, p. 111. 110 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Communiqué from the Prime Minister [Michel Rocard], 8 February 1991. 111 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Letter from Jean-​Louis Charbon to Prime Minister Pierre Beregovoy, 17 August 1992. 112 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Letter from Jacques Perriliat to Jean Glavany, 6 May 1991. 113 Le Figaro, 2 December 1992; Le Figaro, 24–​25 January 1998. 114 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Letter from Nelson Paillou to Michel Rocard, 19 February 1991. 115 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Letter from Jean Glavany to J. P. Courcol, Director-​ General of L’Equipe, 8 July 1992. 116 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Fax from Jacques Dersy (Director of the Cabinet for Michèle Alliot-​Marie, Minister of Youth and Sports) to M. Graillot, 29 June 1993.

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117 ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Communiqués from the Prime Minister to the press, 29 September 1993 and 19 October 1993. 118 Marie-​ Hélène Bacqué and Sylvie Fol, Le Devenir des banlieues rouges (Paris: Editions Harmattan, 1997), p. 90. See also Le Figaro, 24–​25 January 1998. Jacques Perrilliat’s 1989 report noted the potential of the site at the Plaine du Cornillon, but also lamented the ‘hostility of the mayor’. ANF, 19990227, Art. 1, Report from Jacques Perrilliat to Jacques Chirac, April 1989. 119 Bacqué, ‘Le Stade de France à Saint-​Denis’, pp. 129–​30. 120 When the Stade de France was under construction, in fact, engineers had to remove polluted topsoil and trap hydrocarbon-​laced groundwater underground at the site to prevent it from percolating up through the stadium turf. Le Figaro, 5 March 1996. 121 Annette Fierro, The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle, Paris 1981–​ 1998 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 227. Efforts to convert the area around the BNF, which began with the completion of the library in 1996, came to encompass a new university quarter and commercial district. For the origin of that project, see Yves Hervaux, Le Paris d’un Maire: 1977–​1995: la métamorphose (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), p. 204. 122 Bacqué, ‘Le Stade de France à Saint-​Denis’, p. 132. See also Peter Newman and Melanie Tual, ‘The Stade de France:  The Last Expression of French Centralism?’, European Planning Studies 10 (7) (2002): 831–​43. 123 Mail on Sunday, 12 April 1998; Guardian, 29 January 1998. 124 Le Monde, 29 July 1994. 125 Le Figaro, 5 October 1994. 126 Le Monde, 29 April 1995. 127 Nouvel also protested that the Balladur government apparently revised the terms of the proposed contract between the time of the bidding and the moment for the final signatures on the agreement. Le Figaro, 24–​25 January 1995. 128 The state contributed roughly 1.267 billion francs to the construction of the Stade de France, while the other 1.405 billion came from private funds raised by the Bouygues–​Dumez–​SGE consortium, notably through American and Swiss bank loans. Libération, 3 May 1995. 129 Libération, 3 April 1998. 130 L’Equipe, 28 June 2012; Le Parisien, 19 September 2013. 131 Dauncey, ‘Building the Finals’, p. 119. 132 See Vivien A. Schmidt, ‘French Capitalism Transformed, Yet Still a Third Variety of Capitalism’, Economy and Society 32 (4) (2003): 526–​54. 133 High-​level corruption and bribery scandals would come to symbolise the Chirac era in Parisian politics. See Le Figaro, 20 November 2007. 134 Gravelaine, Le Stade de France, p. 18. 135 Le Figaro, 24 January 1995. 136 La Croix, 7 October 1994. 137 Le Parisien, 6 October 1994.

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138 Geoff Hare, Football in France:  A  Cultural History (Oxford:  Berg, 2003), p. 137; L’Equipe, 12 October 2006; Le Figaro, 30 April 2008. 139 L’Equipe, 7 July 2005. 140 Sheard, The Stadium, p. 107; Houston Sports Association, Inside the Astrodome: Eighth Wonder of the World! (Houston, TX: Houston Sports Association, 1965), pp. 8–9. 141 Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 110. 142 The roof is a ‘tensile and membrane’ structure, consisting of 8,000 three-​by-​ three metre plexiglass tiles, supported by 436 km of steel cables connected to fifty-​eight cast-​iron pylons. Unlike the case of the Parc, however, not all seats inside the Olympic Stadium were covered by the roof. See Schiller and Young, The 1972 Munich Olympics, pp. 109–​10. 143 For the slump in the 1960s, see Taylor, The Association Game, p. 194; for television, see Taylor, The Association Game, p. 345. For stadium security and hooliganism, see Bale, Sport, Space and the City, pp. 25–​39. 144 Sheard, The Stadium, p. 116. 145 Glen Searle, ‘Uncertain Legacy:  Sydney’s Olympic Stadiums’, European Planning Studies 10 (7) (2002): 845–​60; Sheard, The Stadium, p. 145. 146 Anthony King, ‘The New European Stadium’, in Sybille Frank and Silke Steets, eds, Stadium Worlds:  Football, Space and the Built Environment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), p. 20. 147 For new stadia in Warsaw, Kiev and Bucharest, see Falk Jaeger, ed., Next 3 Stadia: Warsaw, Bucharest, Kiev (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2012); Roche, Mega-​Events, p. 10. 148 For the North American trips, see ANF, 19990227, Art. 5, Letter from Roderick Robbie (RAN Architects) to Jean Glavany, 11 June 1990; ANF, 19990227, Art. 2, ‘Visite d’équipements sportifs en Amérique du Nord’, 30 December 1991; ANF, 19990227, Art. 5, ‘Visite de grands stades anglo-​saxons’, April 1994. Officials also visited Olympic facilities in Barcelona and the Stade Constant Vanden Stock in Brussels, built originally in 1917 and renovated in 1983. ANF, 19990227, Art. 5, Letter from R. Debecker, Compagnie d’Entreprises CFE, to François Kocsciusko-​Morizet, 18 January 1994. 149 Taylor, The Association Game, p. 340.

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The construction of the Stade de France has certainly not ended the debates over stadia in modern France. Much to the surprise of many people, the French rugby federation (FFR) announced its plans in late June 2012 to build its own 82,000-​person stadium south of Paris, in the suburb of Evry-​Essonne, at the site of the old hippodrome of Ris-​ Orangis. The FFR initially projected that the stadium could be ready by 2017 at the earliest and 2030 at the latest; as of late 2015, the FFR hoped to use the projected stadium as the centrepiece for its bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup.1 The new stade, in the words of FFR president Pierre Camou, would be a ‘modern, multifunctional stadium’ with ‘exceptional comfort’ for spectators.2 According to the FFR, the new stadium would also be designed to make rather than lose money; the federation has argued that it lost at least 160 million euros between 1998 and 2008 because of the terms of the contract that tied it to the Stade de France for major international matches.3 Building its own stadium would certainly allow the FFR alone to benefit from gate receipts, television rights and sponsorship arrangements. But the FFR’s project has been greeted with everything from scepticism to downright hostility. Economists question whether the FFR could actually build its own stadium with entirely private funding (as it has proposed) and support it on the basis of rugby, concerts and theatrical spectacles. The consortium running the Stade de France, for its part, has argued that the Parisian region cannot sustain two grands stades. And the national government was predictably lukewarm about the idea of a new stadium siphoning off revenue from the Stade de France, at least in the years before the infamous ‘compensation clause’ in the contract between the state and the consortium was eliminated in 2013.4

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Outside of Paris, other stadia have been equally front and centre as part of discussions about urban redevelopment and commercial sporting spectacle. The 2016 European Championship, which featured matches in nine cities in France, triggered the construction of four new stadia and renovations to several others. In Lyon, the powerful owner of the professional football club Olympique Lyonnais, Jean-​Marie Aulas, pushed ahead with plans to build a new 62,000-​seat enclosure –​dubbed alternately ‘OL Land’ or the ‘Stade des Lumières’ –​in the Lyonnais suburb of Décines-​Charpieu. After a host of delays and legal challenges, the project received the green light in February 2012, with the mayor of Décines signing the construction permits for preliminary work.5 The new stadium, known officially as the Parc Olympique Lyonnais, opened in 2016, and is situated at the heart of an entirely new complex that is slated to include hotels, offices and a ‘leisure zone’ of other sporting spaces. The stadium here has been tied to both improved commercial prospects for Aulas’s football club and urban renovation at the periphery of Lyon, and hosted six matches during Euro 2016, the first major international football tournament in France since the fateful 1998 World Cup. The northern city of Lille has also experienced its own long-​running stadium crisis, dating back to 1999, when discussions intensified about renovating the ageing Grimonprez-​Jooris stadium, home of Lille Olympique Sporting Club (LOSC). Businessman and film producer Michel Seydoux, the owner of the club at the time, first attempted to build an entirely new stadium before rallying to the idea of restoring the old arena, a proposal that drew fierce opposition from historic-​preservation groups. In 2005, however, French courts rejected the renovation plans; in response, the club turned to the suburb of Villeneuve d’Ascq as the site for the new 50,000-​seat ‘Grand Stade Lille Métropole’, completed in 2012. The new stadium, since renamed the Stade Pierre-Mauroy, has been defended as a boon to the local economy and to the urban development of Villeneuve d’Ascq through infrastructural improvements.6 But the whole process of building a new stadium in the Lille métropole clearly rankled some observers; as highly unscientific evidence, the comments section of an article on the regional newspaper Nord-​Eclair’s website included remarks from several readers who bemoaned the skyrocketing cost of the stadium to be borne by voters, who had been ‘lied to and tricked’ by politicians.7 The stadia in Lille and Lyon, along with other new stadia in Bordeaux and Nice, the renovations to stadia in Marseille, Saint-​Etienne, Lens and Toulouse, and the proposed rugby stadium south of Paris all demonstrate the prominence of this particular space in contemporary France as a site for urban renewal, consumption and spectatorship. This book

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has traced the way that vision of the stadium came into being over the course of the twentieth century. As a physical space, the stadium was initially discussed and contested as a manifestation of French national prowess and as a means of revitalising national health and fitness. By the second half of the century, it had evolved into a symbol of modernisation and, eventually, a means of reshaping urban space. The stadium was also transformed as a space for spectatorship: in the first half of the century, it proved the crucible for attempts to shape French men and women into politicised citizens and was at the centre of debates and practices aimed at producing a deferential public of sporting spectators. Over the course of the century, however, the stadium crowd was steadily depoliticised and dedramatised to eventually become (if not always smoothly) a mass ­public of consumers. Moreover, the history of the stadium, as this book has demonstrated, has been more than simply an alternative means of approaching the history of French sport. Multiple historical narratives converged inside the stade, including (but not limited to) the histories of urban modernisation, mass politics, consumer culture and globalisation. Stadia played their changing part in the physical reshaping of French cities; they also functioned as the ‘prime container’ for urban crowds, whether the latter were mobilised for political demonstrations or solicited and corralled for sporting events. In the process, stadia produced shifting narratives about identity and community; they provided a means of focusing and resolving anxieties about discrete groups (like workers or women or southerners) and offered a space for tying those specific entities to broader communities, like ‘spectators’ at large or the ‘French’ as a whole. Throughout the century, too, stadia –​as nodes of emerging global sporting networks –​ gave French men and women a concrete means of understanding their relationship to other societies in Europe and around the globe. By the end of the century, many of the characteristics that had differentiated France from its neighbours in this domain had ultimately been flattened by a set of worldwide convergences at the level of stadia and spectator culture. In short, this book has situated the history of the stadium as part of process of forging modern mass society in France. That the stadium would function in this sense might have surprised at least one observer of French sport and stadia in the early twentieth century; in 1924, the poet and playwright André Obey saw the new Olympic stadium at Colombes as a space that was ‘solitary, antique and immortal’.8 Even at the time Obey penned those words, of course, he was taking poetic licence to ignore the way the stadium was integrated into a growing industrial suburb and,

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more broadly, a burgeoning set of new sporting practices. And, over the course of the century, the stadium has been ever more tightly associated not with distant antiquity, but with the modern, mutable metropolis and its inhabitants. To return to the words of Bruno Frappat that opened this book, if the Stade de France stands as an appropriate symbol of the twentieth century, then stadia and the practices and discourses that they concretise and enable are unlikely to diminish in importance inside France –​or beyond its frontiers –​in the twenty-​first century.

Notes 1 L’Equipe, 28 June 2012; see also the Grandstaderugby.fr website (accessed 24 October 2015). 2 Le Parisien, 29 June 2012. 3 According to the contract it signed in 1998, the FFR had to give 2.8  million euros per match to the consortium operating the Stade de France for every match under its auspices that is played in the stadium. That contract was revised in 2013, lowering the amount that the FFR paid per match until 2017. L’Equipe, 28 June 2012; Le Parisien, 19 September 2013. 4 L’Equipe, 28 June 2012; Le Parisien, 19 September 2013. 5 Press release from Olympique Lyonnais, 27 April 2012. 6 Nord-​Eclair, 17 August 2012. 7 Nord-​Eclair, 17 August 2012. 8 Obey, L’Orgue du stade, p. 76.

213

Bibliography

Archival sources Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris (APPP) Archives Départementales de la Haute-​Garonne (Toulouse) Archives Départementales des Bouches-​du-​Rhône (Marseille) (ADBR) Archives Départementales du Rhône (Lyon) Archives Municipales de Colombes (AMC) Archives Municipales d’Ivry-​sur-​Seine (AMIS) Archives Municipales de Lyon (AML) Archives Municipales de Marseille (AMM) Archives de Paris (AP) Archives Municipales de Saint-​Denis (AMSD) Archives Municipales de Toulouse (AMT) Archives Nationales de France (AN) Archives Nationales de France (Fontainebleau) (ANF) Archives of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Lausanne, Switzerland Fondation Le Corbusier Forum des Images (Paris) Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA)

Periodicals L’Ami du Peuple L’Aurore L’Auto L’Avant-​Garde La Croix Daily Express

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Daily Mail /​Mail on Sunday Daily Mirror La Dépêche L’Echo de Paris L’Equipe L’Equipe Magazine Le Figaro Football Football Magazine France-​Football La Génie Civile Le Haut Parleur: journal pratique, artistique, amusant des amis de la radio L’Humanité L’Illustration L’Intransigeant Le Journal des Sports Libération Lyon-​Sport Manchester Guardian /​Guardian Midi Olympique Le Midi Sportif Le Miroir des Sports Le Monde Observer L’Oeuvre Le Parisien Paris-​Soir Le Petit Journal Le Petit Marseillais Le Petit Parisien Le Petit Provençal Le Progrès Regards Sport: La Vie en Plein Air Sportwereld Sud-​Est Sports Tous les Sports La Vie au Grand Air Yorkshire Post 92 Express: Le Magazine des Hauts-​de-​Seine

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Walton, John K. ‘Reconstructing Crowds:  The Rise of Association Football as a Spectator Sport in San Sebastian, 1915–​32’. The International Journal of the History of Sport 15 (1) (1998): 27–​53. Wardhaugh, Jessica. In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–​39. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Weitz, Eric. Creating German Communism, 1890–​1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Wharton, Steve. Screening Reality:  French Documentary Under German Occupation. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2006. Whitney, Susan B. ‘Gender, Class, and Generation in Interwar French Catholicism: The Case of the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne Féminine’. Journal of Family History 26 (2001): 480–​507. Whitney, Susan. Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Young, Patrick. Enacting Brittany:  Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871–​1939. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Young, Patrick. ‘La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire: The Touring-​ Club de France and the French Regions, 1890–​1918’. In Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure. Oxford: Berg, 2002, pp. 169–​90

Internet sources Courmont, Barthélémy. ‘L’Inquiétante américanisation de la vie politique française’. Centre d’Etudes Transatlantiques. 17 January 2007. Available at: www. centretransatlantique.fr/​pdf/​bct1.pdf (accessed 7 July 2008). Website for the planned rugby grand stade:  Grandstaderugby.fr (accessed 24 October 2015).

Unpublished sources Bobet, Guillaume. ‘Le Public et le spectacle sportif dans les stades de football en France, 1918–​1998: les incidents du 29 décembre 1929 au stade Buffalo de Montrouge’. Master 2 thesis, Université Panthéon-​Sorbonne-​Paris 1, 2009. Lê-​Germain, Elisabeth. ‘La Politique sportive de la ville de Lyon au temps d’Edouard Herriot (1905–​ 1957)’. PhD dissertation, Université Claude-​ Bernard-​Lyon 1, 2001. Kssis, Nicolas. ‘La Municipalité ouvrière et le milieu sportif:  tutelle ou complementarité’. Paper presented at ‘Les Associations et le champ politique au XXe siècle’ conference at the Sénat in Paris, Salle Clemenceau, 16–​17 November 2000. Rab, Sylvie. ‘Culture et banlieue: les politiques culturelles dans les municipalités de la Seine (1935–​1939)’. PhD dissertation, Université de Paris Diderot-​Paris 7, 1994.

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Thompson, Christopher. ‘The Third Republic on Wheels: A Social, Cultural and Political History of Bicycling in France from the 19th Century to World War II’. PhD dissertation, New York University, 1995.

Interviews Author interview with Andy Dickson in Paris, 17 June 2008.

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Index

Note: ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Action Française 64 Argentina (stadia and sport) 158 Arsenal Football Club 90, 141, 155 AS Saint-​Etienne 91, 156, 185 Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française (ACJF) 64 Aulas, Jean-​Marie 210 Battalions scolaires 18 Bale, John 6, 14n18 Balladur, Edouard 191, 194, 207n127 Barbier, Pierre 68, 82n85 Bayonne (rugby) 94, 127 Behnisch, Günther 197 Belgium print media 154–​5 spectators 142 Bellan, Léopold 30–​1 Bénac, Gaston 36, 93, 105, 144 Ben Barek, Larbi 135, 141 Bentham, Jeremy 62 Bérégovoy, Pierre 191 Bergson, Henri 20 Berlin (stadia and sport) 57, 72, 149–​50 Berretrot, Georges 176–​7

Bibliothèque Nationale de France 192 bicycling decline of track racing 181, 187 early history 19–​20 see also Six-​Day bicycling races; Tour de France Bloch, Jean-​Richard 63 Bordeaux (stadia and sport) 56, 90, 94, 96, 100, 132–​3, 210 see also Parc Lescure; Stade Sainte-​Germaine Borotra, Jean 65, 67 Bosman decision 199 Bottecchia, Ottavio 142 Bouygues construction group 169, 183, 193–​5, 207n128 Braouezec, Patrick 192 Brazil stadia and sport 157–​9 World Cup finalist (1998) 1 Breyer, Victor 92 Brevet Sportif Populaire 55 Brevet Sportif National 65 Brossard, Louis 99 Brun, Mario 108–​9, 149 Burrin, Philippe 59

228

228

index

Camp Nou (Barcelona) 157 Carcopino, Jérôme 68 Carpentier, Georges 121n17, 123n58, 175 Castellane, Jean de 25 Chirac, Jacques 188–​91, 202n32 Cité de la Musique 189, 192 Clary, Justinien Comte de 25, 32 Cleveland municipal stadium 151 Club Français 19, 52 Colombes description 16, 28, 40n4 Olympic stadium involvement 33–​4 public transit access 36 see also Stade de Colombes; Olympic Games Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français (CNOSF) 191 Comité National des Sports (CNS) 25, 32 Comité Olympique Français (COF) 15, 26–​8, 30–​2, 35–​6 Communist International Youth Week 53–​4 Compagnie des Mines de Lens 91 Conseil Municipal de Paris 15, 24, 29–​31, 176–​7, 180–​1, 183 Constantini, Claude 193 Cornudet law 24, 43n44 Coubertin, Pierre de 19, 21–​2, 25, 51 Coupe de France (football) comparison with Football Association Cup 145 finals 36, 87, 89–​90, 93–​4, 96, 100, 113–​15 travel destination 136, 156 see also football in France; Stade de Colombes Croix de Feu 59–​60, 64, 81n76 De Gaulle, Charles 69, 159, 177 Delaunay, Henri 102 Delouvrier, Paul 178 Denais, Joseph 31 Desgrange, Henri 20, 28, 32, 37, 45n96, 64, 86, 91–​2, 98, 104, 121n15, 138, 180

Diagne, Raoul 141 Dickson, Jeff 92, 105 Doriot, Jacques 53, 77n23, 83n103 Doumergue, Gaston 94, 100 Dufaux, Maryse 117 Duhamel, Georges 151–​2 Dumez (Lyonnaise des Eaux) 193, 195, 207n128 Dynamo Stadium (Moscow) 151 éducation sportive (sporting education) 87, 97–​101, 103, 105, 110 European Champion Clubs’ Cup 119, 157 European Championship (football) 189, 196, 210 Excelsior AC Roubaix 136 Fascism (Italy) politics 59, 73, 79n49, 84n120, 165n99 stadia and sport 57, 147–​8, 152, 165n95, 165n96 see also Italy (stadia and sport) Faure-​Dujarric, Louis 33, 38 FC Barcelona 157 Fédération Française de Football Association (FFFA) 26, 90, 105 Fédération Française de Rugby (FFR) 90, 153, 162n27, 209, 212n3 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) 26, 185 Fédération Sportive du Travail (FST) 53 Fencing installed in stadia 87, 97, 184–​5 Fête de l’Humanité 54 see also Parti Communiste Français Fête de Jeanne d’Arc (Marseille) 68–​9 see also Vichy France Fête de la Jeunesse 51, 56 see also Lyon Fête du Serment de l’Athlète 66–​7, 69 see also Vichy France Fête du Travail 67 see also Vichy France

229

index Figuères, Léo 58, 74 First World War (demographic impact) 23, 107 Five Nations tournament 87, 89–​90, 104, 114, 137, 141, 153 see also rugby in France; Stade de Colombes Fleurot, Paul 15, 31, 44n62 Fontaine, Marion 13n11, 88, 99, 102, 106, 114, 134, 162n30 Fontenay, Maurice de 31 Football Association Cup 145 Football Club de Sochaux-​ Montbéliard 91, 135 football in France decline in attendance 179 immigration 135, 140, 163n61 international competition 89–​90, 114, 143–​4, 153 professionalisation 90–​1 regional characteristics 127, 134–​5, 156 see also Coupe de France Football (newspaper) 88, 94, 97, 99–​100, 105–​6, 108, 111–​12, 136, 141–​3, 145, 147–​8, 152 Fortuné d’Andigné, Pierre-​Marie 31 Foucault, Michel 14n18, 62, 76n10, 80n66, 83n108, 122n43 Fourastié, Jean 170 France-​Football 114–​17, 157–​8 French Communist Party see Parti Communiste Français French Revolution 42n37, 58, 63, 73, 82n98 Gambardella, Emmanuel 35, 113 Garnier, Tony 23, 50 Gaz de France 191–​2 gender anxieties (post-​1918) 107 Germany (stadia and sport) 57, 148–​50 see also Nazism (Germany) Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 183 Glavany, Jean 190–​1, 193, 199

229

globalisation and sport 11, 154–​5, 160, 199 Goddet, Jacques 91–​2, 112–​14, 125n113, 150, 180 see also L’Auto Goddet, Victor 20, 91–​2, 121n15, 180 grand stade (major stadium) early Fifth Republic proposals 158, 177–​9 interwar proposals 26–​33, 37–​40 proposals under Jacques Chirac 189–​91 see also Olympic Games; Stade de Colombes; Stade de France grands travaux 188–​90, 206n101 Great Britain (stadia and sport) 18, 100, 144–​6, 155, 198 Grut, Torben 22 Guadeloupe 69 Guichard, Geoffroy 91 Gymnase Japy 54, 59 gymnastics 17–​19, 40n9, 51 Halimi, Alphonse 176 Hampden Park (Glasgow) 22, 144 Hanot, Gabriel 105, 148, 157–​8 Havelange, João 185 Hechter, Daniel 186 Hénard, Eugène 23 Henie, Sonja 92 Héraud, Marcel 30 Herriot, Edouard 10, 23, 50–​52, 76n12, 131–​2 Herzog, Maurice 177 Hillsborough disaster 185 hooliganism 172, 185, 195, 198, 205n85, 206n86 Houston Astrodome 197 Interallied Games 24–​5 Italy (stadia and sport) 57, 72–​4, 102,  135, 142, 147–​8, 153, 156, 160 see also Fascism (Italy) Ivry-​sur-​Seine 52, 78n25

230

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index

Jähn, Friedrich 17 Jeunesse Communiste (JC) 53, 78n27 see also Parti Communiste Français Jeunesee Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC) 63–​4, 80n71 Jooris, Henri 91 Jouhaux, Léon 74 Lagrange, Léo 38, 55–​7 Lamirand, Georges 68 L’Auto discussion of stadia and spectators 16, 25, 32, 35, 86, 88, 94, 96–​8, 100, 104–​6, 109–​11, 127–​9, 138, 140, 144, 147–​55 dissolution 113 origins and influence 20, 91–​3, 104 see also Desgrange, Henri; Goddet, Jacques; L’Equipe Laval, Pierre 143 Le Bon, Gustave 7, 101 Lebrun, Albert 100 L’Echo des Sports 92 Le Corbusier [Charles-​Edouard Jeanneret-​Gris] 37, 46n101, 75 Lefebvre, Henri 6, 8 L’Équipe 113–​15, 157–​8, 169, 175–​6, 180–​2, 190–​1 see also L’Auto L’Humanité 52–​4, 59, 61, 71, 150, 176 Le Troquer, André 30 Lille (stadia and sport) 210 see also Lille Olympique Sporting Club (LOSC); Olympique Lillois Lille Olympique Sporting Club (LOSC) 156, 179, 210 Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum 151 Lyon (stadia and sport) 10, 23, 50–​2, 210 Macary, Michel 193–​5 Maison de la Mutualité 54, 59 Mallet-​Stevens, Robert 37 Manoir, Yves du 36

Maracanã Stadium (Rio de Janeiro) 158 Marboeuf-​Regnault, Auguste 178, 180–​1, 204n62 March, Werner 74 Marquet, Adrien 56, 132 Marseille (stadia and sport) 55–​7, 132, 135 see also Olympique de Marseille; Stade-​Vélodrome (Marseille) ‘Match Baxter’ 86 Maurras, Charles 64 MBK Hungaria 141–​2 ‘mega-​events’ 172, 198 Melbourne (Telstra Dome) 198 Melun-​Sénart 190–​1 Messiaen, Olivier 68 Midi Olympique 98, 104, 133–​4, 137 Mignon, Patrick 13n11, 102, 120n6, 205n86 Miroir des Sports, Le 93, 96, 100, 102, 106, 121n21, 145–​9, 151–​2 Missoffe, Michel 31 Mitterrand, François 188–​9 Montherlant, Henry de 20 Montparnasse tower 183 Montrouge 92, 174 see also Stade Buffalo Mouton, André 174 Muhr, J. Allan 26 Munich Olympic Stadium 197 Murrayfield (Edinburgh) 144 Musée Social 23, 42n38 National Assembly (France) 28 Nazism (Germany) 57, 149–​50 Nervi, Pier Luigi 147 Nouvel, Jean 194, 207n127 Obey, André 34, 211 Olympic Games Berlin (1936) 149–​50 initial decades (pre-​1924) 21–​2 Paris (1924) 15–​17, 25, 35–​6, 98

231

index Sydney (2000) 198 Olympique Lillois 91, 104, 111, 136 see also Lille Olympique Sporting Club (LOSC) Olympique Lyonnais 114, 210 Olympique de Marseille 57, 135, 141, 186 Otto, Frei 197 Palais-​Omnisports de Paris-​Bercy 189, 206n102 Panopticon 62, 70 Parc Lescure (Bordeaux) 56, 132 Parc des Princes original vélodrome (1897) 19–​20 political demonstrations and rallies 60, 62–​3, 64 reconstruction (1967-​72) 169–​7 1, 181–​4 relations with Paris (1960s) 180–​1 renovation (1931-​32) 72 sporting venue 86, 92, 98, 103, 104, 114, 119, 129, 144, 148, 185 Paris administration and urban planning 22–​4, 27–​33, 169–​73, 178, 180–​1, 183, 188–​94 perceptions of provincial France 132–​4 see also Conseil Municipal de Paris; grand stade Paris municipal council see Conseil Municipal de Paris Paris Saint-​Germain (PSG) 186, 188, 195 Paris-​Soir 93, 130 Parti Communiste Français (PCF) 47, 52–​3, 55, 59–​63, 77n20, 150, 166n112, 183 Parti Populaire Français (PPF) 69–​70, 83n103 Parti Social Français (PSF) 60, 62, 64–​5

231

Paté, Henry 25 Pefferkorn, Maurice 99, 106, 147, 152 Perilliat, Jacques 189–​90 Perrier, Robert 150–​1, 166n113 Pétain, Philippe 65–​6 Peugeot, Jean-​Pierre 91 physical education 24, 51, 65 Pingusson, Georges-​Henri 37 Poincaré, Raymond 25 policing (stadia and spectators) 48, 54, 59–​60, 62–​3, 71, 96, 100, 142, 149, 176 Pompidou, Georges 183 Popular Front 38, 46n103, 47–​8, 55–​60, 62–​5, 73, 139 Pouillon, Fernand 174, 201n23 Pouthier, Albert 37 pro-​natalism 23 Pujol, René 108–​10 Racing Club de France 15, 19, 21, 31–​2, 36, 38, 90, 132, 141 see also Racing Club de Paris Racing Club de Lens 88, 91, 99, 114 Racing Club de Paris 90, 114–​15 Racing Club de Roubaix 136 radio broadcasting 136, 138–​9, 143–​4 see also Tour de France Réal Madrid 157 Reed, Eric 154–​5 Reichel, André 52 Reichel, Frantz 26–​8, 31–​2, 36, 86, 97 Regembal, Michel 193 Réseau Express Régional (RER) 178 Resquillage (gate-​crashing) 103 Rimet, Jules 26–​7, 31 Ris-​Orangis stadium plan 209 see also Fédération Française de Rugby Rivière, Roger 174 Roberts, Mary Louise 107 Rocard, Michel 190–​1 Roche, Maurice 172 Rocque, François de la 59, 64, 101

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index

Roland-​Garros tennis stadium 90, 189 Rose Bowl 151–​2 Rossini, Marcel 143 Royal, Ségolène 71 rugby in France international matches 86–​7, 89–​90, 114–​15, 153 origins 19–​21 regional identity 127–​9, 132–​4, 137–​8 violence 103–​4 see also Fédération Française de Rugby; Five Nations tournament rugby league 90, 92, 112, 134, 162n27 Ryswick, Jacques de 115, 156 Saint-​Denis 1, 52, 191–​2 see also Stade de France Santiago Bernabéu stadium (Madrid) 157 Schaeffer, Pierre 68 Seydoux, Michel 210 SGE (Générale des Eaux) 193, 195, 207n128 Six-​Day bicycling races 89, 92, 119 sokols 18 South Africa (stadia and sport) 157–​9 Soviet Union (stadia and sport) 150–​1 Spain (stadia and sport) 142, 157 Stade de la Beaujoire (Nantes) 184 Stade Bordelais Université Club (SBUC) 132 Stade Buffalo demolition 173–​4 political demonstrations 47, 52, 58–​60, 70–​1 sporting venue 75n1, 92, 141–​2, 155 see also Parti Communiste Français, Popular Front Stade Charléty (Paris) political demonstration 71 renovation 189 Stade de Colombes construction 33–​4, 38

religious gatherings 64, 84n109 sporting venue 90, 94, 96, 98–​9, 102, 106, 113–​14, 119 travel destination 136–​7 Stade Félix Bollaert (Lens) 91 Stade de France 1, 192–​6 Stade Français 19, 52, 92, 114, 126, 135, 179 Stade Geoffroy Guichard (Saint-​ Etienne) 91, 180, 185 Stade du Matin (Colombes) 21 Stade Municipal (Lyon) 23, 50–​1 Stade Pershing 25–​6 Stade des Ponts-​Jumeaux (Toulouse) 99, 132–​4 Stade Sainte-​Germaine (Bordeaux) 94 Stade Toulousain 94, 132–​3 Stade de l’Unité (Saint-​Denis) 53 Stade-​Vélodrome (Marseille) 56–​7, 131–​2 see also Marseille (stadia and sport); Vichy France Stadio Giovanni Berta (Florence) 57, 147 Stadio Mussolini (Turin) 57, 147 Stadio Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) (Rome) 144, 147 supporter clubs (football) 102, 136, 143, 185 Supporter Club Lensois 102 Sweden (stadia and sport) 157, 184 Taillibert, Roger 169, 182, 184–​5 Tapie, Bernard 186 Tastes, Lionel de 31 technocracy in France 183, 193 Télévision Française 1 (TF1) 187, 194 television and sport 122n33, 156, 159, 186–​7, 196, 198, 209 Ténéveau, Jean 29–​30 ‘Tennis Court Oath’ 58 Thompson, Christopher 19, 123n69, 138 Thorez, Maurice 47 Toronto Skydome 199

233

index Toulouse municipal sports park and stadium 56, 132 rugby 132–​4 see also Stade des Ponts-​Jumeaux; Stade Toulousain Tour de France communist critique 52 Galibier climb 100, 139 finish on Champs-​Elysées 187 finishes in vélodromes 98, 122n40 origins and organisation 20, 89 spectators 96–​7, 103, 107, 137–​9, 142 travel narrative 137–​9 travel and identity 137–​9, 143 Trente Glorieuses 170–​1 urban planning and development 22–​4, 28, 170–​3, 183–​4, 190–​2, 198 Union Nationale pour une France plus Grande 37 Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA) 19, 51 United States (stadia and sport) 151–​2 Universal Exposition (1937) 37, 55 Vélodrome Buffalo (1897) 19, 41n19 Vélodrome d’Hiver demolition 173–​4, 176

233

political rallies 63–​4, 69 rafle (roundup) of Parisian Jews (1942) 70, 176, 202n32 sporting venue 20, 91–​2, 104, 113, 121n14, 177 Vichy France sporting policies 65–​7, 112–​13 political demonstrations 66–​9 Vidal, Gaston 28 Villeneuve d’Ascq 210 Weil-​Curiel, André 176, 178 Wembley Stadium (London) 144 Wilson, Woodrow 25 women as spectators fiction 108–​10 general 105–​12 post-​Second World War 116–​17 World Cup (football) France (1938) 38, 102 France (1998) 1 Italy (1934) 57, 147 Sweden (1958) 157, 159 Ybarnégaray, Jean 29 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 24 Zublena, Aymeric 193–​5

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