Cosmopolitanism united by electricity and sport: James Gordon Bennett Jnr and the Paris Herald as sites of internationalism and cultural mediation in belle époque France

Abstract

Proprietor and director of the Paris Herald newspaper, James Gordon Bennett Jnr (1841−1918) was a key agent in the development of international sporting competitions during the belle époque, promoted and mediatised by the Herald. This international newspaper, managed by an American representative of a growing upper-class society of affluent expatriates in Europe, was a key site of ‘internationalism’, merging its owner’s fascination with sport and technological progress, especially in mechanised sport, with the facilitation of an ‘imagined community’ of the leisured elite who attended and participated in these prestigious sports events and recognised shared values in the newspaper itself. The study of Bennett and the Paris Herald using Geyer and Paulmann’s theoretisations (2001) of ‘sites of internationalism’, and Lamizet’s conceptualisations (2000a, 2000b) of ‘cultural mediation’ and of the ‘passeur culturel’ (2005) reveal how sport and the media interacted during the 1890s and 1900s in the Herald in the development of internationalised sport and society.