The stadium century

Sport, spectatorship and mass society in modern France

Robert W. Lewis

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526106247
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526106261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The stadium century traces the history of stadia and mass spectatorship in modern France from the vélodromes of the late nineteenth century to the construction of the Stade de France before the 1998 soccer World Cup. As the book demonstrates, the stadium was at the centre of debates over public health and urban development and proved to be a key space for mobilising the urban crowd for political rallies and spectator sporting events alike. After 1945, the transformed French stadium constituted part of the process of postwar modernisation but also was increasingly connected to global transformations to the spaces and practices of sport. Drawing from a wide range of sources,the stadium century links the histories of French urbanism, mass politics and sport through the stadium in an innovative work that will appeal to historians, students of French history and the history of sport, and general readers alike.

1

A ‘grand stade’ for Paris: stadia, urban planning and the 1924 Olympics

In March 1922, the Paris municipal council debated a measure to grant a ten-million franc subsidy for the construction of a new 100,000-seat stadium in the south-west corner of Paris, destined to serve as the principal site for the upcoming 1924 Olympic Games. The advocates of the project, notably the members of the French Olympic Committee (Comité Olympique Français, or COF) and their allies on the municipal council, argued that a monumental grand stade would boost the prestige of Paris and France. By ratifying the plan, argued city council member Paul Fleurot, the city of Paris would give the Olympic Games the ‘splendour needed for this grandiose international demonstration’.¹ The proponents of the grand stade not only suggested that the nation needed the massive stadium to symbolically demonstrate its recovery from the First World War, but also claimed that constructing such an arena would be the first step of a national policy designed to build sporting facilities for the youth of France. Finally, they argued that the spectators in attendance would be inspired to take up sport themselves after having witnessed great athletes in competition: Pierre Doumerc, the director of the Extension of Paris (an urban planning position), maintained that the grand stade was necessary to ‘bring the masses to sports’.²

Yet these arguments failed to sway the majority of the municipal council, which voted convincingly to deny funding to the proposed stadium for reasons ranging from fiscal conservatism to hostility towards large-scale sporting spectatorship in general. While Paris still hosted the Olympics in 1924 after the private Racing Club de France rescued the COF by expanding its own stadium in time for the Games, the entire Olympic experience was stamped by thwarted expectations. The COF was disappointed that the final version of the Stade Olympique was considerably smaller, at roughly 60,000 seats, than the stadium it had originally proposed. Nor was the location of the Olympic stadium in the industrial suburb of Colombes, north-west of Paris, reminiscent of the Olympia of antiquity. The British Manchester Guardian called Colombes ‘one of the least attractive of the suburbs’ around Paris, a ‘township of many factory chimneys, graveled empty spaces, and unkempt trees’.³ On the way to the stadium in 1924, a columnist for the weekly French periodical L’Illustration passed by ‘the chimneys of factories vomiting clouds of smoke’, and ‘large industrial buildings with raw blue windows that appear to be the carcasses of giant zeppelins’.⁴ While the Games themselves featured some exemplary athletic performances, they failed miserably as a commercial endeavour. Aside from the well-attended football final, no other Olympic event drew more than 31,000 spectators. Total gate receipts, even when combined with revenue from souvenir sales and restaurant concessions within the stadium, totalled less than seven million francs, which did not outweigh expenses incurred in organising the Olympics. Faced with these dismal statistics, L’Auto, the influential daily sports newspaper, concluded that the Games had been overpriced and too far away from Paris to attract the average spectator.⁵

The failure of the 1924 Olympic Games to attract large crowds and turn a profit might well be relegated to a footnote in the history of the modern Olympics, which have since become the pre-eminent global sporting spectacle, alongside the football World Cup, of modern times. But the 1924 Paris Games also proved an early flashpoint in the debates over the place of sport and spectatorship in twentieth-century France. While spectator sports like cycling, football and rugby had steadily grown in popularity from the 1890s onward, the spaces in which they took place were largely privately owned. The Olympics, because of their scale, ceremonial pomp and nationalist competitive trappings, seemed to necessitate something different: official national involvement in promoting spectator sport. This was particularly evident in the contentious discussions about the planned 100,000-person, thirty-million franc Olympic stadium, which proved divisive from the start. The stadium’s advocates argued that its construction would somehow spark a nationwide revival of French physical fitness, deemed critical in the wake of the First World War, while its detractors saw the Stade Olympique as an expensive space for parasitic mass spectatorship. Yet even the promoters of the Olympic Games themselves were leery of the crowds that they hoped to attract: they feared that the mass public was potentially disorderly and dangerous, and that it showed an alarming propensity to seek out the ‘spectacle’ of sport rather than appreciate sport’s higher moral and physical purpose. The Olympic debates – and the ultimate rejection of any substantial government subsidy for the grand stade – both revealed deep fractures over spectator sport as a matter of official public policy and urban development, and set the template for further debates that ran through the interwar period up through the late 1950s.

This chapter discusses the ‘stadium crisis’ surrounding the 1924 Olympic Games as a useful point of departure for understanding the history of stadia, sport and spectators in France. It begins by tracing the multiple historical developments that made debates over an Olympic stadium possible in the first place: the evolution and diffusion of physical culture practices, from military gymnastics to cycling to the Olympic movement, in the last decades of the nineteenth century; growing concern over the health of cities and their inhabitants in the early twentieth century; and the brutal trauma of the First World War and its impact on public policy. The chapter then turns to the heated debates over the grand stade as a planned urban space, an arena for sport and a problematic locale for assembling the mass public. It concludes by considering the longer legacy of the ‘crisis’ over the Olympic stadium during the final years of the Third Republic; the grand stade, as it turned out, ultimately cast a long shadow, even without being constructed during this period.

Gymnastics, sport and spectacle before the First World War

Across Europe, the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of modern physical culture practices, from regimented individual gymnastic exercises to competitive codified games that departed from their more informal and often violent early modern antecedents.⁶ Gymnastics and competitive sports represented the two primary forms of organised physical activity in nineteenth-century Europe, with the former dominant on the Continent and the latter increasingly prevalent in Great Britain. The gymnastics movement, for its part, began to grow in popularity at the beginning of the nineteenth century: one of its notable pioneers was a Prussian teacher named Friedrich Jähn. An ardent nationalist who resented the Napoleonic occupation of the German-speaking lands, Jähn sought to restore the moral and physical powers of his compatriots and to recreate a sense of ‘tribal’ community through collective gymnastic exercises. Ironically, the gymnastics groups inspired by Jähn, called Türnen, were actually banned for several decades in post-Napoleonic Prussia on the grounds that they promoted a potentially destabilising challenge to the monarchy. Nonetheless, by the early 1840s, the gymnastics movement had gained a solid foothold in much of German-speaking Europe. In the ensuing decades, gymnastics blossomed throughout central and northern Europe, whether in the form of individualised ‘medical’ gymnastics – also called ‘Swedish’ gymnastics – or the collective, mass gymnastics envisioned by Jähn and popularised by a wide variety of groups, such as the celebrated Bohemian sokols, who performed their exercises in front of large crowds.⁷

In France, gymnastic exercises dominated organised forms of physical culture in the aftermath of the 1870 collapse in the Franco-Prussian War, and became linked to both the new Third Republic and forms of military preparation. Thanks to the so-called ‘Georges law’ of 27 January 1880, which mandated that gymnastics were required in all public boys’ schools, physical fitness practices slowly gained a permanent foothold in France.⁸ The explosion of physical fitness instruction, in the form of primary school drill groups (battalions scolaires) and conscriptive societies for recruits in preparation for joining the military, transformed gymnastics into a ‘public and collective practice’ (in Pierre Arnaud’s words) that was indelibly linked to republican citizenship.⁹ Military gymnastics were not limited to supporters of the Third Republic: Catholic groups also turned to similar kinds of exercises as a means of both contesting the reach of the secular Republic and rendering French society more healthy.¹⁰ In any case, whether practised by republicans or Catholic critics of the parliamentary regime, gymnastics acquired relatively significant support in France by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, when approximately 200,000 French men, concentrated among the urban bourgeoisie, belonged to some sort of gymnastics federation.¹¹

Beyond French frontiers, the main nineteenth-century challenge to the supremacy of gymnastics as a form of physical culture came from Great Britain, where an organised and codified set of games and sports had emerged by the 1830s and 1840s. Closely associated with public schools like Eton, Harrow and Rugby, sports like association football and rugby were tied to a set of institutional values associated with the rising middle classes: combativity, manliness, Christian piety and patriotism.¹² By the end of the nineteenth century, games and sports also found support from those who envisioned them as the ideal moral and physical preparation for young men embarking in the service of empire.¹³ Games culture, from cricket to football to rugby, also attracted an audience: by the mid-1880s, crowds of 10,000 or more commonly flocked to football matches, particularly in Scotland and northern England. This growth in popularity certainly helped explain the formal emergence of professional football in Great Britain in 1885.¹⁴ In order to accommodate this new public – and to profit from it by restricting access to the spectacle and charging admission – entrepreneurs and clubs developed specialised enclosures and stadia across the United Kingdom, beginning with cricket, athletics and horse racing in the mid-1870s, and spreading to football soon thereafter.¹⁵

English-style sports in France remained marginal and a distant second to gymnastics in popularity until the last decade of the nineteenth century, and the earliest dedicated sporting enclosures (like Longchamp or Auteuil in the Bois de Boulogne at the western fringes of Paris) were devoted to horse racing, not football or rugby. Still, sports slowly gained a foothold in France. British expatriates in Paris and the provinces certainly helped disseminate certain team sports, while Anglophile sporting clubs like Racing Club de France or Stade Français in Paris were founded in the 1880s by students from elite Parisian secondary schools. These clubs initially featured athletics, rowing and rugby,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A ‘grand stade’ for Paris: stadia, urban planning and the 1924 Olympics
• 2 ‘A civic tool of modern times’: politics, mass society and the stadium
• 3 Sportsmen or savages? Stadium sport and its spectators, 1900–60
• 4 Stadium travels: spectatorship, territorial identity and global connections, 1900–60
• 5 Postwar modernisation and the stadium, 1945–98
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index