Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency and Everyday Life. By Keith Rathbone

Abstract

As Keith Rathbone outlines in his Introduction, scholarly interpretations of les années noires continue to evolve in response to new research and changing attitudes. A first wave of historiography depicted the Pétain administration as the ‘Good France’, a political shield pragmatically defending the nation against the depredations of the Nazis. This gave way to the ‘Bad France’ position, ushered in by Robert O. Paxton’s seismic study of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), which detailed the shameful specifics of wartime collaboration. Since the 1990s, the ‘Poor France’ viewpoint has prioritized the civilian population’s struggle for survival. Following Robert Gildea, Rathbone opts instead for an emphasis on ‘Innovative France’, foregrounding the creativity as well as the complexity of individual and associative responses to the authoritarian État français and its project of Révolution nationale. Drawing incisively on a wealth of archival material, Rathbone builds a compelling narrative of plurality and diversity in the reactions of players, spectators, clubs, and federations to drastically changed circumstances within the sporting sphere. A tiny minority opted for direct resistance, as exemplified by the very special cases of Jewish sportifs from Paris to Algiers. More typically, a tactics of selective application, strategic conciliation, and special pleading made it possible to subvert Vichy’s agenda to the benefit of local stakeholders. These ranged from professional football in the industrialized north-east to rugby union in the predominantly rural south-west — without, for all that, wholly exculpating those responsible for the infamous decision to outlaw rugby league. Crucially, this monograph provides compelling evidence for an understanding of Vichy’s sports policy as characterized by continuities at least as much as by changes. Thus regarded, the regime’s substantial investment in physical culture was unprecedented in its scale, but its success depended on attitudes and structures inherited from the Third Republic and expressed most explicitly by the Front populaire of 1936–38. By this mechanism, an established pre-war consensus served to legitimize the wartime administration’s commitment to biopolitical management, bringing together such personally and politically contrasting figures as Léo Lagrange and Jean Borotra, and even Jean Zay and François de La Rocque. The resulting support across the spectrum created the conditions for Vichy’s paradoxical sporting ‘golden age’, as the numbers of participants and spectators boomed. As Rathbone shows, the regime’s approach to female participation was authentically inclusive, albeit consciously designed to reinforce traditionally conceived gender roles. Vichy’s mass mobilization of sportsmen and sportswomen provides evidence of its national potency, but also offers the key to its local fragility, which made possible the diverse instances of agency and autonomy that Rathbone deftly teases out from his primary materials. The resulting analysis opens by wondering how the number of registered football players in France jumped from 160,000 in 1940 to 240,000 in 1944. It concludes by explaining why a sports-inflected myth of resistance was required to enable post-war administrations to maintain the personnel, policies, and infrastructures developed under Vichy, and which would only come fully to fruition in the new France of the Fourth and Fifth Republics.