Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer in History at Macquarie University

• Introduction1 The interwar battle between amateurism and professionalism: the use of physical education and sports by the French left and right2 Building the world they wanted: bureaucrats, teachers and athletic fields in Vichy social imaginary3 Playground politics, childhood disobedience and Vichy's national revolution4 Why rugby and not soccer: Vichy anti-professionalism and the sporting environment of wartime France5 The resilience of community: agency and autonomy in wartime sporting associations6 French sporting associations and the creation of the myth of résistancialismeConclusionIndex

'Sport and physical culture in Occupied France is a vigorous account seeking to cut through what the author depicts as the mythologising and confining frameworks that depict experience as that lived narrowly in the shadow of France’s ‘dark years’ [...] what is offered is something very different: a portrait of a lively, if complex, mesh of sport and physical culture. A world of competition and enjoyment that provided a sustaining realm in which some limited autonomy was possible even under general conditions of confinement. [The book] gives us a powerful example of why sport continues to delight and appal us.'Charlotte Macdonald, History AustraliaKeith Rathbone has provided us with a ground-breaking work in the English language on French sport. His blending of work in the archive and personal testimony gives both a top down and ground level examination of the many aspects of French sporting life during the Occupation. French History, December 2022Rathbone undertook meticulous research in nearly thirty institutions in what had been the Occupied Zone, the Non-Occupied Zone and the Prohibited Zone for most of the Second World War, and his work adds greatly to studies of the history of physical culture by challenging previous assertions within the historiography of wartime France regarding the everyday lives of its population. It will become the standard text of reference for studies of sport during the last French occupation, while it can also serve as a significant comparative assessment of how civilians have attempted to maintain their sporting lives during a military occupation.Conor Curran, Sport in History'This book is a significant contribution to the history of sports, which by pushing readers to think about state power also reveals unexpected assertions of agency and exposes ideological and practical continuities between the Third Republic, Vichy, and Gaullist France... Keith Rathbone invites us to see how the analysis of wartime sports and physical culture can complicate, deepen, and enrich our understanding of everyday life and state functioning in Occupied France' Journal of Modern History