“A history of France in crampons”, by François da Rocha Carneiro: the Blues historians

“A history of France in crampons”, by François da Rocha Carneiro, preface by Patrick Boucheron, Le Détour, 224 p., €18.90, digital 13

To evoke the meetings of the French football team, observers are not stingy with historical metaphors. Recently, the newspaper The Team went so far as to headline “As in 18” after a success over Germany, in a double allusion to the World Cup 2018 and the Armistice. The story of Les Bleus, the most familiar to the general public, is thus punctuated by epic successes and glorious defeats, like that of Seville in 1982. Taking the opposite view of this expected narrative, François da Rocha Carneiro selected twenty-three matches international between 1908 and 2020, mostly unknown, in order to make a broader crossing in the history of contemporary France. Wars and strikes, colonization and immigration, so many issues around which A history of France in crampons and which have long been inseparable from the stadium spectacle.

One of the main merits of the work thus consists in underlining certain permanences around the national team: the volatile passion of the public, the hyperbolic judgments of the press, as well as the identity questions on the origins of the players. This is a real red thread of this work, which clearly shows that the contemporary controversies over the African ancestry of French footballers were preceded by suspicion towards players from Belgium, then the ambivalent view of the “Ritals” and the “Polaks” between the 1920s and 1970s, not to mention the shock caused by the departure, in 1958, of Algerian players from the French team, joining the FLN in the midst of the war of independence.

International relationships

If it allows us to understand continuities, the book, pleasantly divided into brief chapters, also captures everything that separates current football from its ancestor, from the time when injured players came out without a substitute from matches played on sandy pitches, before professional status was adopted in 1932. Not without conflict, here again: evoking Vichy’s attempt to return to the supposed purity of amateurism, François da Rocha Carneiro underlines the paradoxes surrounding the social movements sketched out by the players, at the time of the Popular Front as in Knysna, during the 2010 World Cup. A leading footballer is not quite a worker like any other, to whom the right to strike would be recognized.

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