Contenu du sommaire : Le football, sport du siècle

The first world cups or the beginnings of modern sport, Georges Vigarello. World cup history teaches us how deeply soccer belongs to our social development. As it is responsive to mythical investment, it easily provides support to imaginary dynamics as well as to national fanaticism. Its history, moreover, shows the formation of the link between sport and the transformation of the economie landscape, between the presence of more and more supporters at games and the growth of mass tourism. It shows above all the development of a consumption item in which practice and profit become rapidly indissociable.

The colors of the stadium, Michel Pastoureau. A historian of the Middle Ages analyzes the dominant colors of the stadium : the green of the grass, which is also that of the gambling table, the players' contrasting jerseys, the black of the umpire with his red or yellow sign of authority, the greyness of amateurs' meets and the colorful exuberance of the advertising for big games : these are the colors of the ritual.

Why is there no soccer in the United States ? The other American " exceptionalism ", Andrei S. Markovits. Soccer was rejected in the United States because of the development of sports consi- dered more in accordance with the national culture of the New World. At both Harvard and Yale in the 19th century, American football was imposed from above, out of an elitist reflex towards British imported games. The more popular baseball prevented the social extension of soccer to the population at large. Like the weakness of socialism in that " bourgeois " society, that of soccer is the second sign of a certain American " exceptionalism " pointed out at the beginning of the 20th century by Werner Sombart.

Fans and hooligans in Great Britain since 1871, Patrick Mignon. English soccer fans come mainly from the working class, which explains their sociological specificities. The hooligans, in particular, demonstrate the survival of the early urban worker violence faced with the upward mobility of the lower classes. The confrontations are not spontaneous. They resuit from a logic of conquest of the other's turf (the " ends ") and unfold like genuine premeditated battles. Regional, ethnie or religious particularities meet in an autonomous struggle parallel to the one taking place on the field.

Italian soccer : a century-long history, Pierre Milza. As an urban phenomenon characteristic of the big industrial cities of the North (Torino, Genoa, Milan), calcio remained until 1914 the prerogative of the bourgeoisie and liberal aristocracy. Between the wars, soccer became a mass sport practiced throughout Italy. It was taken over by fascism, which made it a spectator sport, a factor of " consensus ". That was the period of great international successes, but also of a growing dependence on money. After 1945, calcio became a factor of national solidarity in the framework of the city and region, slowly integrating the clubs of the South.

Saar soccer from 1947 to 1952, Pierre Lanfranchi. After the Second World War, while integration of Saar soccer to France was part of governmental objectives to win pacification through denazification and de-Germanization, it demonstrated mostly a new interference of international political issues in sport. But neither pressure nor manoeuvres were effective in winning the teams away from Germany. The Saar, without really trying to understand its deep reasons, was able to show in practice that independence could exist in the stadium and to assert the primacy of the sports ethics over the reason of State.

Is an economie history of French soccer possible ? Jacques Marseille. Through the mass of spectators attracted to stadiums and the advertising revenues from the show that it offers, the local industrial stakes which it exacerbates, the income of the clubs, soccer now has a great economie weight. The French example shows that this sport deserves to become a topic for an original economie history, dealing with the clubs as firms, and with the specifie market that soccer has structured. Its success in France was closely connected, like previously the overall industrial development of the country, to that of small groups in medium-sized cities.

The French soccer players' May'68, Alfred Wahl. Is soccer a closed world ? Far from it, as shown by the May 1968 protest movement. Under the auspices of a group of protesting journalists belonging to Miroir du Football, a handful of players occupied the premises of the all-powerful French Football Federation, with demands concerning the status of soccer players, the organizational structures and the very concept of the game. By thus shaking a rigid edifice, the " May of soccer players " had a non-negligible impact.

Immigration in soccer, Stéphane Beaud, Gérard Noiriel. Why has immigration always played an important role in the French soccer job market ? The round bail has always been an extremely important integration factor for young immigrants, though in highly diverse forms. Thinking about " national style " shows how national and patriotic reflexes corne together and fade away, and how the question of " social habitus " is easier to circumscribe in social groups and individuals who are seeking to get even with the society that takes them in.

The breakthrough of soccer in the land of rugby. The example of the French South-West and the Bordeaux area, Jean-Pierre Augustin. Rugby, which came from England, imposed itself in the Bordeaux metropolitan area and the whole South-West at the beginning of this century as a factor of regional identity. But soccer, until the spectacular successes of the Bordeaux Girondins Club in the last few years, was able to make its way by imposing the image of a major national sport in the context of a local particularity.

Writers and soccer in France. An anthology, Pascal Balmand Although soccer has not been a great inspiration to French writers, the develop-ment of literary, intellectual and artistic reactions to this popular sport reveals changes in the intellectual world. A brief anthology shows two phases. In the 1920s, writers and intellectuals saw in soccer an expression of values : the development of body and mind, or the coming together of classes and nations. The 1960s and 1970s stressed the playful and aesthetic aspects of the game, along with the scholarly studies.

Soccer new territory for the historian Alfred Wahl Although soccer represents social and cultural fact of substantial importance French historic research has long neglected it French historians lag far behind foreign particularly British historians as well as sociologists and anthropologists While ta king stock of the present situation the author shows the emergence of soccer as historical object Emphasizing the many fa cets of that history he pleads for its growth and autonomy