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The Stadium Century: Sport, spectatorship and mass society in modern France

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fh/cry045

1477-4542

Philip Dine,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

While scholarship on French sport may have entered the academic mainstream, studies to date have tended to prioritize practices and representations, rather than locations. The geography of French sport has thus lagged somewhat behind its history, albeit with important exceptions, such as the work of Jean-Pierre Augustin. Robert Lewis’s contribution to redressing this imbalance is consequently to be welcomed, offering a concise guide to a built environment that is both complex and characterized by a fundamental paradox. For the outstanding French innovation in the sporting sphere remains cycle road racing, epitomized by the annual carnival of the Tour de France, which by its very nature is largely independent of stadiums. In fact, this study begins and ends at the Stade de France, where the country’s Black- Blanc-Beur footballers won a historic first World Cup in 1998, prompting spontaneous celebrations on a scale unseen since the Liberation. As for the purpose-built stadium, its construction emerges as a popular-cultural riposte by Jacques Chirac, for many years the mayor of Paris, to the high-cultural grands travaux of his predecessor as President of the Republic, François Mitterrand. Its highly politicized location in the north-eastern banlieue of Saint-Denis was additionally intended to attract investment to the disadvantaged suburb. The new venue was thus far removed, geographically and socially, from the city’s historic sporting hub in the prestigious 16tharrondissement, where the race courses of the Bois de Boulogne had been joined in turn by the Parc des Princes, the Stade Jean-Bouin and the Roland-Garros tennis complex.