DAlready placed in the shadow of the Olympic Games, the Euro football tournament in Germany is a little more eclipsed, in France, by the electoral context. Football may be “the most serious trifle in the world”according to the ethnologist Christian Bromberger, and “much more than a question of life and death” – in the words of former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly – the situation in the country is “more important than tomorrow’s match”assured Kylian Mbappé before the Blues entered the continental competition.
We would have preferred to focus on the contribution of Ousmane Dembélé in attack or on the complementarity of the central defense, but these conditions prevent us from really enjoying this lovely sporting interlude that a final phase is usually.
When the tournament ends, the far right could be in power in France. The Blues being among the favorites, we can imagine them in the final in Berlin, Sunday July 14, and wonder what echoes would be sent The Marseillaise, before kick-off, if Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally (RN), were to occupy Matignon. And in the event of a coronation, we would have a very strange national holiday.
The French team is often described as the last means of bringing the country together, however ephemeral these moments of Eucharist may be, which, since post-1998, we have known should not be given greater significance. than that of beautiful images.
Reappropriation of the blue-white-red flag
A people, however, needs these images, and without being fooled by them, the feeling of thus forming a nation was sweet to us. We prefer this national gathering, because “the imagined community of millions of people seems more real when it is reduced to eleven players whose names we know”estimated the British historian Eric Hobsbawm.
In the stands, we reappropriate the blue-white-red flag, relieved of the connotations it has taken on elsewhere, we shout the anthem without wanting to attack a neighboring (country) other than by a crossfire in the small net. With Antoine Griezmann, during the 2018 World Cup, we exclaimed laughing: “Long live France and long live the Republic!” »
Sports chauvinism seems the last, harmless avatar of the nationalisms of the past, in a joyful form turned towards ourselves, necessarily bringing tolerance as sport remains, at least in principle, hostile to discrimination.
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For a long time, simply by playing, the French team has been playing against racism, which had made it a target for the National Front since the ethnic counts carried out by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1990s. His party then, constantly exploited the French team – with a peak at the time of the disastrous 2010 World Cup –, in particular to stigmatize the “French paper” unassimilable. In recent years, thanks to its good results, the Tricolores have, however, become primarily a football team again, and less of an outlet for identity obsessions.
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