Pour le sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature. Edited by Roxanna Curto and Rebecca Wines

Abstract

Four decades on from Richard Holt’s pioneering Sport and Society in Modern France (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981), few would dispute the assertion by Roxanna Curto and Rebecca Wines that ‘the study of sports is viewed as serious academic business’ (p. 13). More specifically, their Introduction to the present volume highlights the contention by the influential Allen Guttmann that ‘the French were probably the first moderns to make sport into a major literary theme’ (cited p. 13). The thirteen essays that follow offer ample evidence of this creative preoccupation, maintaining the editors’ distinguishing focus on aesthetically significant writing, while also underlining an admirable inclusivity as regards themes and genres. This approach enables the diverse contributions productively to juxtapose the stylistics of running and writing in the novels of Dominique Braga (Thomas Bauer) and Jean Echenoz (Curto), the aesthetics of mountaineering from the Romantics to the clubs alpins (Pierre-Olaf Schut), and some surprisingly subversive depictions of sport and gender in Le Petit Nicolas (Cynthia Laborde). The volume’s targeting of a broadly conceived ‘physical culture’ further allows the inclusion of premodern athletic practices, exemplified by the noble jeu de paume, from the medieval and early modern periods (John McClelland) to the fiction of Prosper Mérimée (Corry Cropper). This broad historical sweep notably includes the Vichy regime’s suppression of rugby league, through a thoughtful reassessment of the writings of rugby union’s most zealous advocate, Paul Voivenel (Keith Rathbone). Such production belongs to a tradition of consciously literary sports commentary, exemplified elsewhere by Henri Desgrange (Wines), Antoine Blondin, and even Roland Barthes, whose 1955 essay on ‘Le Tour de France comme épopée’ was destined to become a cornerstone of cultural studies in his celebrated Mythologies (Ruadhán Cooke). These interrogations of territorial implantation and literary representation together address the complex articulation of professional sports and modern masculinities. They thereby complement the later studies of association football in — and between — France and Algeria, as part of the volume’s broader engagement with the negotiation of sporting identities, an ongoing process in which the 1998 and 2018 FIFA World Cup competitions constitute watershed moments. So, on the one hand, Zinedine Zidane remains the ‘overdetermined’ signifier of the triumphant multiculturalism of 1998 in both literary texts and arthouse cinema (Luke Healey), his parting coup de boule in 2006 notwithstanding. While, on the other, Kylian Mbappé, as player and persona, encourages a critical examination both of the cultural significance of French victory in 2018 and of the durability of the republican model of citizenship. The centrality of football and boxing in banlieue literature (Marshall L. Smith) in turn provides a stimulating counterpoint to the analyses presented here of soccer culture in postcolonial Algerian texts (Christa Jones) and of combat sports in Senegalese novels from the 1960s to the 1980s (Christopher Hogarth). Whether or not sport has entered the mainstream of French and francophone studies remains a moot point, but this fascinating collaboration argues persuasively for taking physical culture seriously, not only as a social barometer but also as a literary field in its own right.