Made in France

This chapter considers a selection of the key touchstones for nostalgic reminiscence in French sport, including the Tour de France cycle race and Saint-Étienne football club, and analyses what these reveal in regards to public memories of, and hopes for, sport and society generally. In this analysis, the ‘legends’ and ‘epics’ of France’s sporting past are frequently set against a backdrop of a utopian era of industrial triumph and working-class solidarity, distinct from the globalized information age of today. Nostalgia for this era, and its associated champions, values and aesthetics are increasingly being mobilised to promote sporting events and sell sportswear today.

Plutocrats, Paranoia, Platoche

The Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund of the Persian Gulf Emirate, has chosen Paris as the primary sporting destination for its oil-generated wealth, purchasing the Paris Saint-Germain football club and Paris Handball through Qatar Sports Investment (QSI). QSI’s general director is also in charge of Al-Jazeera Sport, which, through the subscription channel beIN SPORT, presently holds broadcasting rights to the French football league. In this fashion, Qatari investors make use of their association with the Paris ‘brand’ – the city’s international reputation as the ‘city of light’ and its related cultural capital – to project a positive image of Qatar globally. This wielding of ‘soft power’ ultimately serves to legitimise Qatari investment in non-sporting domains and appropriates elements of France’s sporting landscape to further its geopolitical aims.

Adventure Capitalists

The popularity of the Paris-Dakar rally in the 1980s drew on both a growing market for new adventure sports in France and nostalgia for colonial-era narratives of desert exploration. Since its inception, the event has provided a spectacle of motorised speed, physical suffering, technical prowess and logistical expertise, set against a backdrop of splendid scenery. The race has also been criticised for transforming some of the poorest locations in the world into a playground for a (predominantly) Western and wealthy elite and for the death toll that it has incurred in its wake. Such criticisms followed the rally along its various African itineraries and on its transposition to South America in 2009. In its early versions, the Paris-Dakar was the vehicle for the nostalgic re-enactment of French colonial-era exploits in Africa, and the subject of virulent criticism for its neo-colonial connotations and material effects. The contemporary ‘Dakar’ emerges in this analysis as a demonstration of the ‘deterritorialising’ potential of the sports-media nexus, with its opponents attesting to its contribution to the global disenfranchisement of local communities.

Football’s Françafrique

As television revenues boosted the financial rewards to clubs and players since the mid-1980s, European football has become one of the very few routes for (a very small minority of) young Africans to access previously unimaginable wealth. Linguistic affinities and pre-existing networks have facilitated the flow of African talent to France in a process accelerated by the plethora of ‘academies’ set up in Africa. Whilst abiding representations of immigration in French sport focus on the glorious achievements of star sportspeople, and on the communal and national pride generated by their accomplishments, a growing body of literature concentrates on the disappointment, failure and exploitation of sporting migrants. This chapter demonstrates how ‘la Françafrique’, the asymmetrical nature of exchanges that characterises France’s neo-colonial relationship with its former colonies in Africa, functions in a sporting context. The role of certain French institutions and individuals in African football is demonstrated to be a factor in the ‘extraterritorialisation’ of African football. The contemporary directions and forms of sports-related migration are also shown to inflect a series of ‘psychodramas’ that have afflicted French football in recent times.

Monuments Men

Recent years have seen a proliferation of sport-themed cultural, artistic, commemorative and pedagogical productions that interpret and illuminate identitarian debates in France, particularly in relation to immigration and ethnic diversity. This chapter analyses a series of these exhibitions, monuments and texts, demonstrating the relevance of sport in the contemporary commemorative landscape. It points to evolutions in the processes of memory-making globally, and explores how the mediatisation and aesthetics of sporting practices may relate to these developments.

Introduction

The representative examples and resources analysed in this book are drawn from 30 years of French sport, from the mid-1980s to the present day, with the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984 considered a pivotal moment in the global evolution of sport as practice and spectacle. In France, this event marked a shift in attitudes towards professional sports as the American model of structuring, financing and mediatising sports became increasingly influential, subsequently facilitated by numerous other factors including deeper European integration and the fall of the Soviet Union. Domestically, 1984 is also remembered in sporting circles for the landmark success of the French ‘rainbow nation squad’ in football’s European Championship, and the creation of a new television channel, Canal+, that invested heavily in sport. These factors combined to make the mid-1980s a watershed in the development of the sporting landscape in France, the impact of which resonates to the present day. This book ends its study in 2017 with the presidential elections of that year marking a profound shift in the politics of the Fifth Republic and with Paris’s nomination as host of the 2024 Olympics set to henceforth dominate the future evolution of France’s sporting landscape.

Conclusion

In France, conflicts over nationhood in a globalised world are refracted through competing visions and models of the role of sport in society. The first model holds that sport has intrinsic virtuous qualities and acts as a space for the development and performance of Republican values. This model contends that the sport should be organised by and for the people through the democratic institutions of the State. The second vision recognises sport as primarily a form of entertainment for the masses, dictated by television corporations and media outlets, with sports stars constructed primarily to further commercial imperatives. In the back-and-forth between these rival visions, a range of issues are played out in the sporting sphere, from France’s postcolonial heritage to its post-industrial future, through concerns over Americanisation, corporatisation, immigration and commemoration.

American Dreams

As a sport that originated in North America, basketball is a privileged site for the study of transatlantic sporting exchanges. In France, since the mid-1980s, basketball has evolved as a practice and spectacle in line with changes in the game in the United States, and particularly in the foremost professional league of the NBA. Particular attention is paid to the basketball craze of the early 1990s, when clothing companies and the NBA attracted a new public to the sport in France. This had consequences for the demographics of basketball, the meanings associated with the sport, the style of play, and ultimately for the game in America, as increasing numbers of non-American (and especially French) players now populate the NBA. Basketball emerges in this chapter as an important example of French responses to American-led commercialization of sport and American-led globalization more generally.