Sport in Paris

Sport in Paris

Retracing the Culture of Play and Games in the City of Light (1854–2024)

Maxence P. Leconte (ed.)

PETER LANG
Oxford - Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - Lausanne - New York

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Leconte, Maxence P., 1991- editor.

Title: Sport in Paris : retracing the culture of play and games in the City of Light (1854-2024) / Maxence P. Leconte, editor.

Description: New York : Peter Lang Publishing, 2025. | Series: Sport, history and culture, 1664-1906 ; Volume no. 14 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024051590 (print) | LCCN 2024051591 (ebook) | ISBN 9781803742359 (paperback) | ISBN 9781803742366 (ebook) | ISBN 9781803742373 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Sports--France--Paris--History. | Sports--Social aspects--France--Pari--History. | Paris (France)--Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC GV610.5.P37 S76 2025 (print) | LCC GV610.5.P37 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/830944361--dc23/eng/20241209

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024051590

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024051591

Cover image: "Spectators looking over the track of the Vélodrome d'Hiver, Paris, 1926".

Credits Agence Rol, BNF/Gallica.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISSN 1664-1906

ISBN 978-1-80374-235-9 (print)

ISBN 978-1-80374-236-6 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-80374-237-3 (ePub)

DOI 10.3726/b20902

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, Oxford, United Kingdom

info@peterlang.com – www.peterlang.com

Maxence P. Leconte has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the editor

Maxence P. Leconte is Assistant Professor of French Studies and head of the French Studies program at Trinity University, San Antonio. His research primarily investigates the interplay between the rise of organized sports and modernity, as he contends that their combined influence acted as an agent of change that transformed society’s perception of the role played by corporeality (including its relation to gender, race and class) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in France, Europe and the Americas. His most recent publications, discussing themes as varied as sport and classic French cinema, sport and the history of graphic novels, or sport and transmedia storytelling, have appeared in many peer-reviewed journals.

About the book

This edited volume proposes to revisit the development of recreational and professional sporting activities in the French capital between 1854 and 2024. It comprises fifteen chapters surveying the rich and multifaceted history of athletic practices in Paris, and constitutes the first comprehensive piece of scholarship exclusively dedicated to the relationship between sport, history, and culture in the City of Light.

This collection articulates and emphasizes the sustained presence and impact of sports in Parisian lives for over a century and a half, at the same time as it encourages readers to think about sports as a form of cultural expression able to alter national, regional, and individual identity, in other words, as a form of entertainment able to shift our perception of leisure and spectatorship, an activity able to transform urban spaces and social norms. To this end, Sport in Paris proposes complementary perspectives, by not only addressing multiple sporting disciplines (tennis, football, boxing, etc.) but also stressing interdisciplinary approaches (history of the press, urbanism, health studies, literary geography, etc.).

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Maxence Leconte

Introduction: Looking Back, Moving Forward— The History and Culture of Sport in Paris

On 13 September 2017, the 131st session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) gathered its 101 members in Lima, Peru, to elect the host city for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Following the withdrawal of multiple candidates, including Hamburg, Rome and Budapest, the city of Paris received the coveted prize over its last and lone opponent, the city of Los Angeles. The head-to-head between two metropolises renowned for their love of sport—two urban centers historically associated with the Olympic Games—should have made for a properly exciting confrontation. But instead, the ordeal felt like a no-contest and conveyed a rather dull, slightly un-Olympic sentiment. Why so? Just two months earlier, on 11 July, an extraordinary session had assembled all parties in Lausanne to initiate a surprising twofold process. First, the Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2024 bid committees, who were already the only ones left in the running, met with the IOC and its president Thomas Bach to review the attribution of the host cities for the 2024 and 2028 Olympics. Then, and far more importantly, the bid committees inquired whether it would be possible to pick the host for both events at the same time, with the understanding that each would inherit one of the future international competitions. Following these demands, the IOC not only proceeded to engage in advanced talks with both bid committees but also agreed to make a double selection in September. Therefore, the fate of the battle of Lima appeared to be decided before the contenders even entered the arena, or more precisely, the Convention Center of the Peruvian capital. In spite of Bach’s efforts to maintain a sense of surreptitiousness, the completion of the Lausanne session left little room for ambiguity: Paris was now clearly understood as the preferred candidate for 2024, leaving Los Angeles as the uncontested favorite for 2028. Despite the apparent lack of suspense, the French bid committee in Lima, which included Parisian mayor Anne Hidalgo and the head organizer Tony Estanguet, expressed genuine relief after the Games’ definitive assignment. Some reporters in attendance even commented that the French were nervous until the very last second.¹ Although such a degree of affectation may appear risible given the negotiations that preceded the final selection, the Parisian committee’s reaction was in fact understandable, as later underlined by several pundits. Indeed, after three costly yet failed attempts to bring the Games back to Paris in 1992, 2008 and 2012, in what became described as ‘a humiliating series of cold showers and shoulders from the International Olympic Committee’,² the Olympic flame would officially illuminate the City of Light once again, giving Parisians (and the rest of the world) a chance to celebrate the centenary of the 1924 Olympics on their home soil. In turn, the French committee’s sigh of relief was far from trivial; and for us, scholars and amateurs of sport, history, and culture, this centenary offers a timely opportunity to look back and reminisce about some riveting historical parallels pertaining to both the selection and organization of the last Parisian Olympiads and the forthcoming ones.

To begin with, the city of Lausanne had already played a significant role in deciding the fate of the 1924 Games when it welcomed the 19th IOC session three years prior. And much like the extraordinary session that occurred in Lausanne in 2017, the one that took place in 1921 also stirred some controversy, to say the least. Spurred by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, consummate Frenchman, father of the modern Olympics and president of the IOC at the time, a forceful push (or takeover) attributed the Games to Paris a mere 24 years after the French capital had hosted them for the first time. The reason behind Coubertin’s tendentious political maneuver was unequivocal. Many observers, including the Baron himself, saw in the 1900 Olympics a discernible blemish in his tireless efforts to revamp the Games and give them legitimacy.³ In his memoirs, the proud aristocrat went as far as explaining that ‘some interesting results, but far from Olympic, were obtained’⁴ in the French capital. Surely, the 1900 Games were not a complete failure, but they tend to be remembered as such. Indeed, while some observers have described them as an ‘amiable exhibition’⁵ that met most expectations at the time by successfully blending the 1900 World’s Fair with an unprecedented gathering of over 1,200 athletes in the heart of the French capital, it remains widely acknowledged that the first ‘Jeux de Paris’ were synonymous with ‘balbutiements’ [stutterings] and ‘ratage’ [bungle].⁶ In hindsight, it was not so much the mostly halfhearted reception of the international sporting event but rather the noteworthy organizational issues, particularly the inclusion of events on a sacred day like Sunday, which led the II Olympiad⁷ to be known as the ‘Farcical Games’,⁸ an unacceptable affront for Coubertin. Such an offense had to be corrected at all costs, both for his and Paris’ sakes. To salvage his honor and for what would be his last Games as the helm of the IOC, the Baron could not conceive of any other host city than Paris for the 1924 Olympics, notwithstanding the IOC’s documented preference for other candidates, including … Los Angeles. Furthermore, the 19th IOC session held in Lausanne marked the only time before 2017 during which the Olympic Committee elected two host cities simultaneously. Under Coubertin’s late but commanding impulse, Paris and Amsterdam became the chosen locations for the 1924 and 1928 Games, respectively. In his own words, Coubertin admitted that ‘[…] it was a superb coup. The decision was made to move two Olympiads into the future, one that nothing could stop the IOC from making, even though it had never been done before.’⁹ A final, and certainly more tragic nod to history, compels us to remember that before the confirmed exclusion of Russia from the 2024 Olympics, Germany was also banned from joining the 1924 Games for equally somber reasons.

In addition to the powerful historical parallels between the Parisian Olympiads of 1924 and 2024, the continued social, cultural, and urban influence of the Games on the City of Light functioned as a strong point of emphasis for the Parisian committee. Boasting an impressive resume of preexisting sports venues, such as the Stade de France, the Parc des Princes, the Bercy Arena or the Roland-Garros stadium, the delegation in charge of representing the French capital also assured that more than 95% of the sites featured in the ‘Jeux de Paris’ in 2024 would be kept intact and made available to the public for permanent or temporary use after the completion of the Games.¹⁰

By doing so, the French committee wished to remind the world that the past, the present and the future of the city of Paris owed much to the Olympics and its rich history. After consideration, this argument deserves to be expanded upon even further. Specifically, we could contend that not just the Olympic movement, but more generally sport’s practice and consumption, contributed to shaping the social, cultural, urban and even political landscapes of the French capital as we know it today. If this argument holds true, could we therefore posit that sport’s exponential and multifaceted growth around France, Europe, and the world over the past two centuries was in part influenced by the city of Paris? To defend these two complementary viewpoints is the aim of the present volume, the first to retrace the history and culture of sport in Paris between the nineteenth century and the present day. Indeed, by reading sport as a heuristic device, this collection of essays strives to help us reconsider the profound impact produced by physical activities connected to organized play and games on gender dynamics, class disparities, race relations, and high and low culture, each observable across different eras, yet all located within the city of Paris and its suburbs.

Positioning itself on a broad analytical and theoretical spectrum within the study of history and culture, Sport in Paris: Retracing the Culture of Play and Games in the City of Light (1854–2024) first proposes to recognize the increasing importance of local identities and events in our understanding of global trends. This ‘glocal’¹¹ approach is all the more relevant given the universal nature of our main subject, physical activity and games, as featured in recent academic works connecting local or regional sport studies to wider problematics; here, we may think of examples such as Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (University of California Press, 2004) by Andrew Morris and Joseph Alter (eds.), Played in Glasgow: Charting the Heritage of a City at Play (Malavan Press, 2010) by Ged O’Brien and Simon Inglis (eds.), Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2014) by Raanan Rein, DC Sports: The Nation’s Capital at Play (Arkansas University Press, 2015) by Chris Elzey and David Wiggins (eds.), or Sport and Apartheid South Africa: Histories of Politics, Power, and Protest (Routledge, 2022) by Michelle Sikes et al. Concurrently, this volume also underlines the value of returning to the ‘center’ by focusing on a singular geographical location, a deliberate decision meant to help us rethink the customary opposition between center and periphery, which remains especially potent in a French context. Instead of embracing the tropes of division put forth by this dichotomy, our collection of essays chooses to highlight the multifaceted nature of individuals, disciplines and stories constitutive of the rich sporting fabric produced in and by the French capital, to demonstrate that Paris, as a political, cultural and urban center, can be synonymous with multiplicity, inclusion and diversity. Finally, using the French capital as the main locus in this volume not only underlines the importance of the relationship between sport and microhistory but also reveals the ties between this project and the recent geographic turn in sports studies. According to Natalie Koch, if the ‘wide ranging intersections between “sport” and “the city”’¹² have managed to capture the attention of scholars devoted to urban studies and human geography in recent times, it is primarily because of the remarkable influence that both sport and city have in shaping each other’s destiny. This reciprocal influence, in turns, allows us to rethink—or rather remap—our perception of a metropolis like Paris as a space fashioned by organized games and play but also as a place which ‘influenced the development of organized sport and recreational athletic pastimes […]’ a place ‘where sport became rationalized, specialized, organized, commercialized, and professionalized’ to reuse the words of historian Steven Riess.¹³

However, since the relationship between sport and city space is not unique to the French capital, it appears legitimate to question what made their combined evolution in the City of Light so distinctive. Here, I suggest that an answer can be formulated by examining a critical concept at the center of this project: the progressive shift from tradition to modernity in sport and in Paris.