WHAT WOULD Albert Camus have made of Thierry Henry's handball, asks Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
With what pithy soundbyte would he, a one-time college team goalkeeper who claimed football taught him everything he knew about morality, have encapsulated last week’s clash between the Irish penchant for martyred indignation and the modern French propensity for self-flagellation? What would he have deemed the appropriate moral response to an unmerited win achieved by sleight of hand? Where would he have stood on video evidence? As it happened, the late writer, philosopher and Nobel laureate did return to the news pages last week. But not even the revelation that Nicolas Sarkozy hopes to disinter Camus’s remains and transfer them to the Panthéon – the Parisian mausoleum where great Frenchmen are buried – could dislodge the saga of last week’s France-Ireland match from the public mind. We may not know what Camus would have thought about it, but we do have the benefit of a great many living French philosophers’ reactions, because for three or four days they, along with every politician and pundit in France, expounded on little else.
Should the goal have stood? What malaise did this tainted victory symbolise? For a few unsettling days, these became the most urgent questions facing France. High-minded newspapers that seldom deign to find space for a sports report ran the story on their front pages. "We are all Irish" ran the headline over a piece by the scholar Jacques Attali, recalling Le Monde'sheadline the day after the September 11th attacks: "We are all Americans". The anguished soul-searching was played out in everyday life, too: several times, straight-faced strangers apologised to me on their country's behalf.
To compound French shame, TV news producers relayed pitiful images from Ireland, its people portrayed with clumsy pathos as having stoically borne the battering swell of economic storms only to find themselves submerged to the waist in filthy flood-water. And now this! Why were the French so hard on themselves? Clearly, the embarrassment had a lot to do with popular attitudes to Ireland. If Henry's hand-pass had deprived England or Germany of a place in South Africa, there would surely have been a little less guilty introspection and quite a bit more glee in the French reaction. If Ireland had consigned any big-ticket European team to the same miserable fate by the same dubious means, would it not have guaranteed whatever green-shirted anti-hero a place in the Pantheon of Cute Hoors for ever more? But the cruelty of Ireland's loss – and the dignified way the players bore it – spoke to some enduring French stereotypes about the resilient, put-upon and doughty irlandais.
“I feel Irish,” wrote Jacques Attali, “because this magnificent people, united in defeat as they would be in victory, are deprived of a sporting future which they deserved more than the lamentable French team.”
Some French commentators have been ridiculing such bien-pensant platitudes, seeing them as a symptom of a class culture that disdains “vulgar” football and holds it to moral standards that sport can never attain.
“In a certain France, in the highest levels of society, there has always been a problem with sport – whose rules and particularly its extraordinary popularity they don’t understand,” wrote sports journalist Yannick Cochennec, adding that some still see it as “a bit loutish, a bit common”.
Certainly, sport is much more compartmentalised here than it is in Ireland, and it takes a major event for it to impinge on mainstream France's conversation with itself. The big quality papers tend not to cover it at all, leaving it to the sports daily L'Équipeand the weekly magazine market in a way that would be unthinkable for papers hoping to attract a broad-based readership in other countries.
“It’s as if sport, which impassions millions of French people every day, wasn’t part of our culture, or wasn’t worthy of the interest of a certain caste, except through the prism of doping, money or cheating,” Cochennec added.
But the striking depth of masochism shown by the French in the past week may have had as much to do with a general sense of disenchantment with Les Bleus, their unloved manager and the ideal they were supposed to represent. When France won the World Cup on home turf in 1998, the victory of the great multi-ethnic team of Zidane, Thuram, Vieira and Deschamps and the national elation it provoked was hailed for its promise of a new era of tolerance and social rapprochement. 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.
Of course, what followed in the intervening years – from the National Front’s electoral gains and riots in the banlieues to the sight last week of thousands of young French-born teenagers cramming the Champs-Élysées to celebrate not France’s win against Ireland but Algeria’s over Egypt – has shown that questions of identity and belonging remain as complex and as fraught as ever in France.
The euphoria of 1998 has long since subsided; so too will the current bout of national brooding. Will that augur a consensus that there are limits to professional sport’s power as national prophet and moral tutor; that football is, after all, just a game? Don’t count on it.