Almost the entire Republic will be present on Thursday November 14 for the Football match between France and Israel, the sporting stakes of which are not major, but which have a political character. A look back at these moments when politics eclipsed sport…
The football match between France and Israel organized tomorrow evening at the Stade de France, as part of the Nations League, takes a political turn. Many political figures are announced, including the current President of the Republic and his two predecessors as well as the Prime Minister, to mark the fight against anti-Semitism. An exceptional security system has also been put in place. Paris Match looks back on four moments when politics literally eclipsed sport, since the year 2000.
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Israel-France, in March 2005
That year, the French team played its qualifier for the next Football World Cup in Israel, and the national anthem was performed under a bronca. In question, the comments of the star goalkeeper of the France team, Fabien Barthez, a few days before the match in Tel Aviv. “When I see what’s happening there, I wonder why we’re going to play there,” declared the world champion. But it’s the man and the father who speaks, not the player”. However, this meeting took place two years after the second intifada, at a time of relative appeasement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Barthez’s words shocked the local population who gave him a chorus of whistles every time he touched the ball that day… In the end, a draw between the two teams. France qualified for the World Cup, then failed in the final in 2006…
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2002, Lorient-Bastia, final of the Coupe de France
The image remained a highlight of Jacques Chirac’s second seven-year term. Just re-elected, the President of the Republic leaves the official platform momentarily after the national anthem, whistled by part of the Stade de France, during the final of the Coupe de France football, on May 11, 2002. “Is it whistling? I’m leaving! » can we read on the lips of the Head of State. Corsican supporters were quickly targeted even if Jacques Chirac was careful not to designate them as responsible, in an intervention on TF1 at the same time. “This is unacceptable and unacceptable, I will not tolerate harm to the values of the Republic and those who express them,” he thunders live, hoping to avoid a scenario similar to that of France-Algeria, seven months earlier.
After an intervention, on the microphone, by the president of the French Football Federation Claude Simonet, at the request of the Elysée, the president finally returned to his seat without greeting the players on the pitch before kick-off, as is tradition. wanna. The President of the Corsican Assembly José Rossi subsequently publicly condemned these whistles, explaining that “It is not through excessive demonstrations that Corsica will be given credibility in terms of image and responsibility, particularly vis-à-vis island projects aimed at the recovery of the island. Here again, the affair caused a lot of noise and provoked a lively political controversy. The former presidential candidate and ex-Minister of the Interior Jean-Pierre Chevènement saw in these whistles the mark of defiance of the “independenceists”. On the field, the match was delayed by twenty minutes, particularly disturbing the Corsican players, who ultimately lost the final…
A decade later, a young Bastia supporter present in 2002 testified in the Team, putting the scope of these acts into perspective. “Everything started when the microphone announced the presence of the national gendarmerie band (which was playing the anthem, editor’s note). […] So, when we heard the word gendarmerie, we all started to whistle, he says in the sports daily. They were mocking whistles to taunt, there was no hatred.”
In 2001, the pitch of the Stade de France was invaded
On October 6, 2001, the Marseillaise was whistled by part of the public before the kick-off of the France-Algeria match. The friendly match was then largely dominated by the France team before supporters invaded the pitch. Imagined after the victory of the Blues at the 1998 World Cup, this match was to celebrate the reconciliation between the two countries and multicultural France.
“We dreamed of a ‘Black-White-Beur’ France, but we knew that this was not the reality. This France walked on crutches” explains the then Minister of Sports, the communist Marie-Georges Buffet, twenty years later, in the columns of Marianne. Present that evening with Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and other members of the government, she noted the absence of right-wing elected officials, including President Jacques Chirac. Some close to the former head of state claimed a posteriori that he had learned, thanks to General Intelligence, that the Marseillaise would be whistled and preferred not to go to the stadium.
“(That evening), it was a real bronca,” Marie-Georges Buffet confides to Marianne, in 2021. Immediately, it’s History that goes back. It’s colonization, it’s October 17, 1961, the Algerians drowned in the Seine, the difficulties of integration. I look at Claude Simonet, we are worried. The match begins. France quickly leads: 1-0, 2-0, 3-0…4-1. And in the 76th minute, a young girl entered the field with an Algerian flag…” Hundreds of others will follow, the minister takes the microphone to reason with the supporters but is booed, projectiles are even thrown from the presidential stand , hitting and injuring another minister, Élisabeth Guigou… Match stopped and national scandal.
The affair took a political turn in the following days, with the right questioning the government of the plural Left in the National Assembly. All this a few months before the 2002 presidential election, where Lionel Jospin will be a candidate. The Prime Minister remained inside the stadium when the whistles sounded.
2023, Macron and humiliation in global vision
Emmanuel Macron is the president of the successful Paris Olympics. But he was also entitled, perhaps even more than his predecessors, to unpleasant moments, inside a stadium, whistled several times. The most notable, in any case the one where the boos were heard by hundreds of millions of ears, was just before the opening match of the Rugby World Cup organized in France, between the Blues and the Nouvelle -Zealand, September 8, 2023. “The values of the oval” went from the locker rooms to the pitch without passing through the stands. A little groggy and visibly marked by this mark of public disaffection, Emmanuel Macron then resumed the thread of his inaugural speech. The fifteen of France were not disturbed by this bronca, largely winning the match against the All Blacks.
Emmanuel Macron, for his part, once again suffered a small global humiliation a year later, during the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games, proving if it was still necessary that the sporting arena in France is not “sacred”, sometimes becoming a more or less controlled space for public expression.
