Contenu du sommaire : Cultures sportives et cultures politiques. Le cas des chefs d'Etat et de gouvernement dans le monde au XXe siècle

From Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama, most US presidents have established close ties with sport. They either put on public display their ability and taste for sport, or used it as a political prop to mold their persona as the nation's close and manly leader. The article first questions the significance of sporting culture in the presidents' biographies laying emphasis on its media use. It then argues that the essence of the “sports president” is a construct that needs reexamining from the standpoint of the vulnerable presidential body, PR fiascos or Olympic policies. Following the inquiries of the new presidential studies (Zelizer, 2002), the third part is devoted to the intersections between sport, the daily reality of executive power and the formative years of US presidents.

“Body and Sporting Cultures of Women in Power, from Golda Meir to Angela Merkel”The aim of this paper is to study the making and the use of the body and sporting cultures of four women, each Head of their respective state. Golda Meir (1898-1978), Indira Gandhi (1917-1984), Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) and Angela Merkel (born in 1954) are three generations of women in three different moments of the history of sport: its emergence at the end of the 19th century, its development in the Interwar period and its massification since the 1960s. The analysis of several biographies and press reviews shows that their social background and education built both their vision of sport, which were in fact their father's one, and their body culture, influenced by their mother. Women in power did not escape from gender stereotypes, which apply in sport and political areas. Whereas they did no or few sport, they improvised as supporters when political reasons required it.

Although in the first half of the twentieth century Italian leaders would frequently flaunt their sporting skills – from Victor-Emmanuel III's horse riding to Pius XI's mountaineering or Benito Mussolini's aried sports – this attitude was much less frequent in the decades that followed. The standard posture then became that of the keen amateur – as illustrated by Pius XII, Silvio Berlusconi or Giulio Andreotti. It remains that over this period, sport increasingly became an affair of state, with the potential to reinforce the power's legitimacy.

This paper analyses the sport culture of the seven French Presidents of the Vth Republic, born between 1980 and 1955. It tries to relate their physical education to the educational, sports, cultural and political background of their times – so distinct that only successive and juxtaposed pictures can be drawn. During their infancy, as well as during their primary and secondary education, their social and educational background, and their inherited political culture have interacted with their sport and physical culture. The paper therefore questions the link between political leadership and physical activities and tries to show how their sport culture has been (or not) a political asset.

“Politics on the Ground: Argentinean Heads of State and Sports Culture from the 1880s to the 1990s” This article offers an analysis of the sport culture fostered by Argentinean heads of state between the 1880s and the 1990s. Sport became a widespread social and cultural phenomenon that was central in mass media, and statesmen did not remain indifferent to it. The organization of the Football World Cup in 1978, under the most violent dictatorship Argentina ever knew, is still remembered as an example of how sports can be utilized by powerful leaders in quest of legitimacy. However, the links between Argentinean politicians and sports were much more diverse and should not be reduced to the limited scope of the World Cup. As sportsmen, regular spectators or promoters of sports, Argentinean heads of state revealed how complex sporting culture was throughout the 20th century.

The sport culture of several major leaders of the independence of Africa was forged during the colonial era. If football has been used by missionaries to attract and retain at school unruly children as Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, learning a large sample of sports made a Nnamdi Azikiwe, or, to a lesser extent, a Nelson Mandela two true Anglo-Saxon sportsmen. However, when sport inspired and was used in the struggle for independence and freedom, its values were quickly forgotten. Sportsmanship in politics preached by Azikiwe quickly came to a sudden end, while Mobutu put sports values in the service of his ruthless dictatorship.

The paper examines how sport has been utilised by Arab rulers, including Presidents, Kings and members of Royal families, for internal politics as well as for place branding and public diplomacy. The paper alludes alsoto the sport practice and hobbies of Arab leaders aimed at promoting healthy life style, maintaining Arab sport traditions, and for media and public relations.

The instauration of communism forced many Romanians to choose the path of exile, to choose “freedom”. The multiple waves of émigrés mobilised and organised themselves in order to recreate their home society abroad, in order to fight against the Romanian communist regime. Romanian exiled in Paris created cultural and political organisations, published newspapers and novels and tried to change their home country's image abroad. This study argues that the Romanian political exile activities played an important part in the fight against communism.

“Champion and Politician: Being komsorg in the National Soviet Team (1962-1982)” This article highlights how the komsorg emerged as an agent of social and political control inside Soviet sports teams during the Brezhnev era. Sportsmen served as ambassadors for the Soviet Union in the world's sports arenas and stadiums; therefore, their political education was a constant concern among leaders of the Soviet sports movement and the Communist Party. This question became increasingly important by the end of the 1950s, as a result of the Soviet Union's expanded participation in worldwide sporting events, and in the wake of international scandals. These incidents tarnished the image of Soviet sportsmen, who were accused of suffering from “star syndrome”. To solve this problem, the leaders of the sports movement, including the Soviet Committee for Sports and sports societies, the Party and the Komsomol, decided to strengthen the political education of athletes beginning in the early 1960s. One way they believed they could more effectively control the behavior of athletes was by strengthening the role of the komsorg, a champion or member of the team who served as the model of a well-educated and properly politicized Soviet sportsman. The komsorg was charged with organizing the team's political education during training camps before the Olympics, disciplining and shaping the team from the inside.

Relocated in the non-occupied zone from June 1940 till November 1942, the French liberal newspapers Le Temps and Le Figaro first supported the Vichy Regime. In the test of an authoritarian regime, these two newspapers adopted two different positions, reflecting the ambivalence of the liberalism ideology about modernity.

The reviews of Jean Chesneaux's book (Du passé faisons table rase?) by the French historians attest of two opposite ways of conceptualizing and making the history of the labour movement. The academic one stands against another one, characterized by its radicality and its political commitment, by its epistemological vandalism. The article highlights the intellectual controversy between The Annales and the Révoltes logiques group, and therefore draws the intellectual landscape of the history discipline in the 1970s.

The letters of Marguerite and Jean-Richard Bloch are part of a large archive's Collections, which shed some new light on the French intellectual life from one war to another. Gathered in a big notebook with other testimonies of their journey, hidden during WWII, they were given to the “Bibliothèque nationale de France” in the nineties.