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

This chapter turns to the ways in which stadia, sport and spectators both in France and elsewhere around the globe helped generate changing place-based communities and identities. French stadia created discourses about local places through the depiction of spectators within their confines. But stadium spectatorship also helped define the national collective, through literal and imaginary voyages within France and abroad to other stadia around the world. These latter voyages generated a series of comparisons that provided French men and women with convenient benchmarks for monitoring the perceived vitality and social cohesion of France in relation to its rivals on the world stage. These comparisons predominantly reinforced a sense of French inadequacy and decline throughout 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 in Western Europe and North America publicised and promoted sporting competitions that helped create transnational communities of spectators invested in the same sporting events.