Rugby league in France: Old men and utopians

This is the fourth and penultimate part of a series about French rugby league.

The first three parts can be found here. This part is about what happened to French rugby league during World War 2.

The extent to which French rugby league was adversely affected by the war and the policies of the war-time government, which ruled the south of France from the town of Vichy, is contested.

There’s not much point in arguing about it now. It’s 75 years since the Vichy government bit the dust. While it undeniably hurt French rugby league, it’s not a sufficient excuse for how far the game fell.

The Vichy government was assembled from the scattered remnants of the French government, who fled Paris after it fell to the Germans in June 1940.

Virtually unlimited power was vested in a small cabal of politicians and officials, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain. The regime swiftly sought an alliance with the German occupiers in the north to protect its power in the south.

Pétain established a deeply conservative agenda. Sport was seen as an important part of correcting what he saw as the decadence and weakness of a population so easily overrun by fitter, stronger and more disciplined Germans.

Professional sport did not fit within this ethos. Professionals played only for material gain, they did not aspire to any social or moral values; to a chivalry imagined to be engendered by pure sport.

The ideological purity and harmony of opposition to a status quo rarely survives contact with power.

Football, cycling and pelota were all openly professional at the time. Rugby union was an amateur sport only in the fevered imaginings of its governing body.

(Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Vichy knew all this. Jean Ybarnégaray, the first Vichy Minister for Family and Youth, was a pelota and rugby union aficionado with connections in both sports. Something had to give.

Professional sports were given three years to transition to amateurism. Inevitably, pelota seemed a protected species, while rugby union’s hypocrisy continued largely unchallenged.

Football was strongest in the occupied zones and professional cycling, including the Tour de France, largely ceased during the war.

Rugby league was to be the example. In August 1940, Ybarnégaray announced that: “The fate of Rugby League is clear, its life is over, and it will be quite simply deleted from French sport”.

While Ybarnégaray’s ministry was short-lived, the framework he set lived on.

The Vichy ‘Sports Charter’ of December 1940 re-affirmed the government’s commitment to amateurism. Consultation about the charter’s implementation was limited to ‘major’ sports. Obviously, that did not include rugby league.

Mike Rylance concluded the following:

“[Rugby union] would waste no time telling [the government] that rugby league was no more than a professional version of the orthodox game, that it was played by those who had been banned from union for professionalism, that it was run by those who sought only financial profit.”

Rugby league was not considered a sport in this paradigm. It was a mere and temporary schism from the pure form of the game, started by an apostate, Jean Galia, who was motivated purely by his own avarice.

Rugby league and rugby union would reintegrate, with many of league’s players and assets to be absorbed by union.

There was bolshy resistance from some, most notably the Basque official, Dr Georges Déjeant, who railed as follows:

“Rugby union belongs to a generation that is dead… Why go backwards? Why listen to these old men who want to see the lost rugby of their rediscovered adolescence. Why follow these utopians who make the vain claim to revive a game which they themselves have killed, several times over.”

Such resistance was futile and may even have hardened Vichy resolve.

While the two codes were officially reintegrating, school children were, for a time, permitted to play rugby league to develop their skills for rugby union.

In December 1941, this arrangement was brought to an abrupt end. Marshal Pétain decreed that rugby league would be dissolved and its remaining property transferred to the National Sports Committee.

The game stayed alive and was reborn thanks to true believers like Dr Déjeant. Until France’s liberation from the Germans and Vichy, rugby league officially no longer existed.

Source material
Rylance, M (2012), The Forbidden Game: The untold story of French rugby league, League Publications Ltd
Dauncey, H (2012), French Cycling: a Social and Cultural History, Liverpool University Press.