The emergence of modern sport in France both coincided with and was informed by the succession of wars and revolutions that marked the country’s development over the long 19th century. Between the French Revolution of 1789 and the end of the First World War, physical leisure would be intimately associated with political upheavals and military defeats that together encouraged varieties of nationalist belligerence ultimately played out in the hecatombs of the Western Front. While patriotism and xenophobia were often at the fore in this sports interest, cultural mimetism and pacific internationalism also played their part, inspiring artists as well as athletes, as a series of sporting imports were remade in France’s image.

The first such activity was horse racing on the English model, which additionally drew upon the equestrian traditions of the Ancien Régime, attracting royal patronage firstly under the July Monarchy (1830-48) and then Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s Second Empire (1851-69). Crucially, the sport’s long association with the monarchy and aristocracy would now be combined with an authentically mass appeal in the Haussmannized leisure-scape of Paris to become France’s first modern sporting spectacle. Offering unprecedented opportunities for displays of social distinction, racing would also attract leading painters and writers, including Manet, Degas, Zola, and Proust. In 1865, the sport was to provide France with its first international champion, when Gladiateur won the Epsom Derby, exactly fifty years after the downfall of the country’s first emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. Hailed in the national press as the “Avenger of Waterloo”, the colt was cast in bronze for a statue that was erected at Longchamp the following year and dominates the country’s premier racecourse to this day.

With the fall of the Second Empire in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, two more imports would mark French sport’s development. The first of these was military gymnastics on the victorious German model, which rapidly established a popular following across the country, often in combination with patriotic rifle-shooting clubs. Both activities received state support as a preparation for military service, being closely associated with Revanchism and the project of regaining the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. In contrast to this widely practised precursor, fashionable French interest in the athletic sports (initially codified in the British school system, and including track and field events, rowing, rugby union, and association football) was initially the preserve of the social elite, epitomized by Baron Pierre de Coubertin. An educational reformer as much as a sporting pioneer, Coubertin is today remembered as the father of the modern Olympics, which were launched in Athens in 1896, and then, in a continued symbolism, came to Paris in 1900. The return of the Games to Paris in 1924 would encourage a post-war national surge in sports participation and spectatorship, with the notable support of prominent intellectuals such as Jean Giraudoux, who, in his Olympiques (1924), articulated a consciously virile concept of French masculinity for the modern age.

In 1887, Coubertin had also been the founder of the Union des Sociétés Françaises des Sports Athlétiques (USFSA), an umbrella body that sought to coordinate the development of the new games, including the activities of the country’s first sports clubs. These resolutely amateur associations were unashamedly elitist in their recruitment, as exemplified by the great Parisian rivals, Racing Club de France and Stade Français, founded in 1882 and 1883 respectively, by former pupils of the capital’s most prestigious schools. When these pioneering associations met in the country’s first-ever rugby championship final (1892), it was Coubertin himself who officiated as the match referee. His celebrated commitment to sporting internationalism was throughout combined with a patriotic zeal that is echoed by the names of these first clubs. Subsequently, French rugby would migrate from Paris, via Bordeaux, to the deep south-west of the country, where, having been popularized, democratized, and, fatefully, commercialized, it became the focus for deep-rooted local rivalries, as well as a vehicle for the expression of regionalist opposition to the cultural hegemony of Paris. Frequently articulated in quasi-ethnic terms, rugby’s identity politics transformed sporting rivalries into epic confrontations between ostentatiously virile Basques, Catalans, and Gascons, as well as the supposedly effete successors to the game’s Parisian innovators.

In contrast, French football’s evolution following its introduction by British expatriates in the later 19th century was primarily marked by its close association with the Catholic Church. Following Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), football was mobilized as part of a broader social project that sought to defend the Church against the militantly anti-clerical Third Republic (1870-1940). At the forefront of this campaign was the Fédération Gymnastique et Sportive des Patronages de France (FGSPF), a network of Catholic youth clubs established in 1903, which offered a consciously inclusive alternative to Coubertin’s elitist USFSA and played a key role in popularizing football as a mass pursuit. The new game’s expansion was facilitated by the First World War, when the geographical mobility and social interaction that it encouraged served to introduce troops from all over the country to the sport. The 1914-18 hostilities thus laid the ground for the rapid growth in the numbers of players and spectators that followed in the post-war period, and which led to the establishment of the Fédération Française de Football (FFF) as an independent governing body in 1919. On the basis of this new domestic confidence, French football would go on to play a key role in the development of the game as a global phenomenon, most obviously through the founding of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in Paris in 1904 and the launch of its premier tournament by that body’s long-serving president, Frenchman Jules Rimet, in 1930.

After the reinvented Olympic Games in 1896, and ahead of the football World Cup in 1930, French pioneers were also responsible for the creation of a third sporting mega-event in this period, the celebrated Tour de France. First run in 1903, this cycle race has long been regarded as a national lieu de mémoire or realm of memory, contributing significantly to French self-images and identities. The country’s principal sporting invention, cycle road racing was uniquely adapted to France’s geography and demography, with the pioneering long-distance races of the 1890s acting as precursors to the great national stage race. Unlike the gentlemanly sports imported from England, cycling was both openly commercial and thoroughly professional from the outset. The Tour itself was initially conceived as a means of promoting a new sports daily, L’auto, edited by former racer Henri Desgrange and owned by leading industrialist Baron Albert de Dion. The race was also deeply political: it originated out of the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), which had pitted the ultra-nationalist De Dion against Pierre Giffard, a supporter of Dreyfus and the editor of rival newspaper Le vélo. From these unpromising beginnings, the race rapidly established itself as an annual celebration of French unity and vitality, at a particularly challenging moment in the nation’s history. The race durably tapped into a variety of cultural traditions, including royal tours under the Ancien Régime, through the compagnonnages of pre-industrial craft workers in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the foundational schoolbook of the Third Republic, Le tour de la France par deux enfants (1877). Like that work, the three-week-long cycling Tour asserted a specifically post-1870 conception of territoriality, working to strengthen national self-confidence in the wake of that catastrophic military defeat, as well as the political trauma of the following year’s revolutionary Paris Commune. The race accordingly contributed to an epic narrative of social resilience and cultural specificity that would later be highlighted by the critic Roland Barthes in his Mythologies (1957) and given the popular seal of approval by comic book artists René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo in their album Le tour de Gaule d’Astérix (1965).

Like cycle road racing, tennis in France was a home-grown sporting tradition, in this case one that could be traced back to le jeu de paume, favoured by the French nobility between the 16th and 18th centuries as a form of “Real” or “Royal” Tennis, and known for the Jeu de Paume tennis court at Versailles where the fledgling Assemblée nationale took its Revolutionary oath in 1789. Two centuries later, tennis was revived in the modern British game of lawn tennis, rapidly expanding its appeal to French sportsmen and, for the first time in large numbers, sportswomen (celebrated as such in Proust’s jeunes filles en fleurs). Suzanne Lenglen, France’s first female sporting celebrity, also became the country’s first international sports star, establishing France’s reputation in the sport. Her exploits either side of the First World War paved the way for her male counterparts, most notably in the Davis Cup between 1927 and 1933. Nicknamed “La Divine”, her career combined unprecedented competitive success with intense media scrutiny, transforming her into a durably unsettling incarnation of sporting femininity. Such was her challenge to the patriarchal order of French sport that, although she died in 1938, it was only in 1997 that the Suzanne Lenglen court was opened at Roland-Garros, the national tennis centre in Paris.