The French team’s World Cup humiliation is viewed at home as far more than a sporting failure, with many seeing parallels with France’s racial divisions
'THE NIGHTMARE is finally over." In the deluge of communal self-laceration and anguished contempt that swept across France after the national team's inglorious exit from the World Cup this week, Le Figaro'sheadline on Wednesday morning came closest to capturing the sense of weary relief that seemed somehow to override the fury.
It was hard to find a Frenchman that day who wasn’t pleased his dysfunctional team had been knocked out. After three abject performances, a last-place finish in their group, a bout of infighting, an expulsion, a player walk-out and the sight of their vilified manager losing the last shreds of his authority in the unforgiving glare of the world’s media, France was mortified. At least now there were no more depths to plumb, no more indignities to endure.
And yet France’s nightmare may yet have some distance to run. President Nicolas Sarkozy, furious about the damage to France’s reputation, has convened high-level meetings and promised to take action. Resignations are expected at the football federation, and the internecine fighting that split the camp in South Africa is sure to resume in the press. Then there’s the arduous, delicate task facing the incoming manager, Laurent Blanc, who must assemble a cohesive squad from the shards left behind after the implosion.
But the deepest trauma exposed by the past week's events is only tangentially connected to football. For years Les Bleushave found themselves carrying the weight of some of modern France's biggest complexes about race, class and national identity. When France won the World Cup on home turf in 1998, the victory of the great multi-ethnic team of Zidane, Thuram, Blanc and Deschamps unleashed the sort of national euphoria the country hadn't seen in decades. The success of the "Black-Blanc-Beur" (black-white-north African) generation was hailed for its promise of a new era of tolerance and social rapprochement between France and its minorities, and as thousands flocked to the Champs-Élysées to chant the name of the team's Franco-Algerian talisman, that hope even gained a shorthand: L'effet Zidane.
Every country likes to find grand metaphors in sport (didn’t the Irish economic boom kick off on a pitch in Cagliari in 1990, after all?), but since news broke that the French players had gone on strike last weekend, France has been engaged in a bout of existential soul-searching.
OF COURSE, THEhope that 1998 would herald the sort of social reconciliation that has eluded France since the decolonisation years was not to be fulfilled. Just four years later, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, stunned the political class by reaching the final round of the presidential election, while in 2005 the crisis in the poor, predominantly immigrant banlieueson the edges of France's major cities erupted in a wave of riots. All the evidence shows that, despite government promises, these suburbs and the prospects for their inhabitants have drifted farther from the rest of the country over the past five years. And with unemployment rising and public spending cuts about to begin, the optimism of 1998 seems a distant memory.
The current French squad has become a convenient mirror for these changed times. “France is contemplating the spectacle of her own disunity and inexorable decline,” said the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who saw the team’s implosion as a metaphor for the country’s ethnic and religious divisions and the vulgarity and criminality plaguing society. “We dreamed with the team of the Zidane generation; today we are more likely to want to vomit with this generation of scum.”
Finkielkraut's comments have been condemned by anti-racism groups – black and Arab players from the banlieuesare in a majority on the French team – and ridiculed by others for failing to take into account all the obvious factors behind France's demise: a group of players inferior to the 1998 generation, a weak manager and a poorly run federation.
Nonetheless, the same term – racaille, or scum – has appeared in anonymous quotes attributed to members of the ruling centre-right UMP bloc in the press this week, recalling its controversial use by Sarkozy, while he was interior minister in 2005, in relation to unruly young people in the suburbs. Le Pen said the embarrassment was "deserved" and scorned "a political desire to impose an image of France which – for now anyway – is not that of France."
If his objection was to the scarcity of white players on the team, Le Pen’s point was intended as an inversion of the common complaint that France still projects an image of itself as an all-white country and fails to recognise its own diversity.
Finkielkraut’s comments have gained such prominence partly because speculation has been rife for weeks that the squad has been riven by factions that divide along cultural lines. When he described men such as Nicolas Anelka, Franck Ribéry and William Gallas behaving in a “shameful manner, notably with Yoann Gourcuff”, everyone knew he was referring to the view that a group of working-class players who grew up in tough suburbs ostracised the articulate, middle-class Breton playmaker. Such was their resentment towards Gourcuff – built up by an adoring media as Zidane’s successor – that Anelka and Ribéry even refused to pass to him in the opening game against Uruguay. But while Gourcuff’s closest friends in the squad, Hugo Lloris and Jeremy Toulalan, are also white, the dividing line seems to be class more than colour. (Ribéry is white, after all, but grew up in a council estate in Boulogne-sur-Mer and is idolised by the north African community, partly because he has converted to Islam.)
The left’s stance on the debacle, informed by the popular view that the players are overpaid, spoilt and cut off from society, has been to cast last week’s events as an indictment of a vulgar, narcissistic and individualistic culture that threatens cherished French principles such as solidarity and fraternity and whose shining exemplar, it suggests, is President Sarkozy himself. “It is individualism, selfishness, every man for himself, with the only value of human success being how much you get at the end of the month,” said Jérôme Cahuzac, a Socialist MP.
THE CRITICISM HASalso stung communities in the banlieues, who find it hypocritical for politicians to try to gain ground by berating young players for their behaviour in French colours at a time when politicians' extravagance – including exclusive Cuban cigars and liberal use of private jets at the state's expense – are making the news every week. "Everyone condemns the working-class areas," lamented Fadela Amara, the cities minister, who grew up on a rough estate with her illiterate Algerian parents.
"There's an air of doubt around the fact that people of immigrant origin are capable of respecting the nation. I think every democrat and every republican will be the loser in this ethnicisation of the criticism of Les Bleus."
To see how French football reflects society’s problems, says Vikash Dhorasoo, a former French international and now a thoughtful commentator, you need look only at the clear separation between the players and the elite, entirely white officialdom of the French federation. “French football is ghettoised, just as divided as the rest of society,” he says. “The poor suburban kids are on the field. The elite civil servants and business bosses run the game.” When things go wrong, as they did so spectacularly this week, it’s these young men who are singled out for blame by the media, politicians and supporters.
“Why do we ask so much of them?” Dhorasoo asks. “A society where the football player becomes an example and a model for young people, isn’t that a sick society? What about our professors, our politicians, our intellectuals and resisters of all kinds? Where have they gone?”
