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Sacrés
Bleus! Coby Lubliner
When I was young and tried to be clever,
I came up, after spending a postdoctoral year in France,
with a line that I enjoyed throwing away: “The only
generalization you can make about the French is that you
can’t generalize about the French.”
I am no longer young, though I still try
to be clever. But I now understand that my boutade
requires an explanation, which in a way negates it. The
reason you can’t generalize about the French, I find
myself forced to argue, is that they’re too
individualistic; but that in itself is a generalization,
so... At any rate, as I reread an essay that I wrote last
November, I find several statements that can be construed as
generalizations about the French.
These contradictory thoughts were going
through my mind when I saw les Bleus, France’s
national football (soccer) team which won the 1998 World Cup
and the 2000 Europe Cup, ignominiously eliminated from the
2002 World Cup (for which it qualified automatically as
defending champions) without scoring a single goal.
Team sports, soccer in particular,
don’t loom nearly as large in France’s mass
culture as they do elsewhere in Europe. With the exception
of Michel Platini, France’s athletic heroes have been
her tennismen (and “tenniswomen”),
boxers, skiers, bicyclists and the like. Streets, schools
and sports centers are named for the likes of Henri Lacoste
or Suzanne Lenglen, Marcel Cerdan or Jean-Claude Killy,
Louison Bobet or Jacques Anquetil.
Now, one might argue that a bicycle race
like the Tour de France – by far the most important
event on the French sports calendar – is really a race
among teams. But a team of anonymous riders whose job it is
to help propel its star to victory is not the same as a team
of more-or-less equal participants (though some may be more
equal than others) working together for victory. It is more
like the team of lawyers who compiled the Code
Napoléon, or the team of engineers and workers
who built la tour Eiffel. (While the naming of
inventions for their creators happens everywhere, it is
endemic in France, where the hot-air balloon was dubbed
montgolfière, the early photograph
daguerréotype, the tire-mounted light-rail
vehicle micheline, and so on.)
The relatively low position of soccer in
French life is the reason why so few of the best players
work professionally in France (on this year’s national
team, only five out of 23); they can earn vastly higher
salaries in England, Germany, Italy and Spain (where
Zinedine Zidane, France’s undisputed superstar, is the
world’s highest-paid player, earning over ten million
dollars with Real Madrid). By contrast, these four
countries’ national teams consist almost entirely of
players in their national leagues.
But what is even more striking about
les Bleus is how few of them are indigenous French;
well over half are immigrants or colonials, or sons thereof.
The diverse racial makeup of the 1998 championship team
– whites, blacks and North Africans
(blanc-black-beur) – was a source of
pride and joy to progressive-minded French people who
previously might not have paid much attention to le
foot, but who were happy to brandish the banner of the
successful team as a symbol of French unity against the
divisive nativism preached by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
I spent the Cup season of 1998 traveling
around southern Europe, watching matches in hotel rooms,
bars and cafés from Barcelona to Istanbul. I made a
point of booking my flight from Sofia to Paris for July 13,
the day after the Cup finals (which I saw in Blagoevgrad),
to avoid any possible riots that might have happened if,
say, England or Germany had been finalists. What I found,
on the eve of Bastille Day, was a France in the throes of
euphoria.
I had visited France at least a dozen
times in the forty preceding years. I have almost
invariably enjoyed my visits, and I regard myself as an
unabashed Francophile. Unlike many other travelers, I find
the French pleasant to be around. But never before had I
found them as pleasant as in that summer of la
Coupe. They celebrated their team’s victory with
humor and grace. At a July 14th parade in the lovely
medieval town of Fougères in Brittany, the folk
dancers seemed far more prominent than the military band,
and people joked that “We are the Champions”
should replace the Marseillaise as the national anthem.
It was only the year before that the
leftist alliance (la gauche plurielle) led by the
socialist Lionel Jospin had won the parliamentary elections.
As elsewhere in Europe (and in North America), this leftist
government was not only far more concerned about the
environment, working people and civil rights than the
rightist one that it succeeded, but it was also more
friendly to immigrants and minorities, and it responded to
the already strong movement of solidarity with undocumented
immigrants (les sans-papiers) by legalizations on a
large scale.
Well, that was then. Since then, an
anti-immigrant wave has been sweeping across Europe,
directed most intensely against those of Muslim background
(who are the overwhelming majority of immigrants in France),
and toppling socialist-led governments even in such
progressive bastions as Denmark and the Netherlands. But
nowhere else was the shock as violent as in France, where Le
Pen came in second in the presidential election and knocked
Jospin out of political life.
France’s fate in the first round of
the World Cup could not have fitted the Le Pen scheme
better. The two teams that defeated France and went on into
the second phase, leaving France in the dust, were, first,
all-black Senegal – as if to justify Le Pen’s
claim that he is not a racist, but only wants the immigrants
(especially Africans) back in their home countries (never
mind that the overwhelming majority of the Senegal team, 21
out of 23, live and play professionally in France, whether
as “legal” immigrants or as dual citizens) –
and, second, all-white Denmark. The tie came with the
racially mixed, and also eventually eliminated, Uruguay
team.
What struck me about les
Bleus’ performance was the dispirited way in which
they played. Zidane – whose sensational goal against
Bayer Leverkusen gave Real Madrid the European
Champions’ League title in mid-May – was injured
in a pre-Cup game, and did not play in the first two
matches. In pre-competition analyses, however, the French
team – ranked first in world standings – was
considered to be strong enough to field two teams, and such
stars as Lizarazu (of Bayern Munich), Henry (of Arsenal),
Desailly and Petit (both of Chelsea), and Thuram and
Trezeguet (of Juventus), not to mention the great goalie
Barthez (of Manchester United), should have been able easily
to carry the team at least into the second round.
A collection of great players, however,
doesn’t always make a great team, as Barcelona and AC
Milan have shown in recent years. The French team was
clearly built to work around Zidane, and a Zidane in top
form: when he rejoined the team for the third game, clearly
not fully recovered, France suffered its worst defeat (2-0
against Denmark).
But I find it
hard to discount another
possibility: that the spirit of pride in France’s
ethnic diversity, which the team has symbolized, was dealt a
fatal blow by Le Pen’s performance in the elections,
and that this blow was inevitably felt by the players.
July 26, 2002
© 2002
by Jacob Lubliner
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