A highly readable history of sports in the City of Light

Kristian Gerner
Department of History, Lund University

Sport in Paris is volume 14 in the series “Sport, History and Culture”, edited by Richard Holt and Matthew Taylor at De Montfort University, Leicester. In a postscript they declare:

The series includes both new and established areas of research into the class, age and gender dimensions of sport as well as its political and ideological aspects, including nationalism, imperialism and post-colonialism. The editors wish to encourage economic and transnational studies of sport as well as new work on ethnicity, sports literature and material culture.

The approach is broad. Sport here appears to be a fundamental dimension of European and North American history from the 1850’s on. Sport stands out as the epitome of ‘modernity’, as a ubiquitous marker of the modern world, of the present era. And Paris becomes the locus of “modernism” in history.

The 15 chapters of Sport in Paris do not deal with sport competitions and results per se. The different authors are not all primarily historians of sport. Many highlight the salience of social class, gender and race concerning both athletes and the public. A manner to characterize the broad approach is to present the affiliation and research field of some of the authors and the headings of their chapters. The different chapters are characterised by a colloquial and rather redundant style of writing. They do show the wide transnational character of the sample of authors, thus reflecting the ambition behind the series “Sport, History and Culture” as declared in the postscript.

Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff and Christelle Bertho, who write about “France and the United States: Paris as a Land of Welcome, Adoption, and Opportunity for ‘American Basketball, from the YMCA to the NBA”, are, respectively, “a sports diplomacy expert, historian, and consultant working at the intersection of global sports, communications and diplomacy”; and “a trained architect”, whose “interest revolves around the history of French-American friendship with a focus on the American presence in Paris at the turn of the century”;

After almost a century as a seemingly aristocratic relic which in reality promoted modern ways of life, sport became perceived as part of the normal order in society at large – and of mainstream history and sociology.

David A. Chapman, author of “Wrestling at the Fête Foraine: Force and Farce at the Fair (1850–1950)”, “is a Seattle-based independent scholar who has written many books that have focuses mainly on the iconography and history of the developed body (both male and female)”;

Corry Cropper and Pratima Prasad, authors of “Reinventing Le Sport: Eugène Chapus, Identity and the Parisian Elite”, are, respectively “professor of French at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah”, “/a/n avid cyclist, when he’s not teaching, he splits his time between reading to writing”; and “a scholar of French romanticism and colonialism, a Professor of French and Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston”;

Rachel Ozerkevich, author of “Public Participation and Amateur Exclusivity: Revisiting the Depiction of the 1900 Paris Games in the Illustrated Sports Press”, is “Assistant Professor of Instruction of Physical Culture and Sports Studies in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin”.

Thanks to its focus on Paris, the city which housed the Summer Olympic Games in the years 1900, 1924 and 2024, the different chapters illuminate the increasing prominence of sport in the public mind in European and North American society during the 20th century and the early 21st century.

Whereas several of the individual chapters are very detailed stories of a colloquial nature, the conclusions are distinct and good summaries. A casual reader would get the essence of the stories by glancing through the conclusions. This said, it must be underlined that each chapter is a good read in itself.

Chapters 1 to 3 can be characterized as tales about the prehistory of sports in the modern sense. Cropper and Prasad in chapter 1 shows how in 1854, when Eugène Chapus, a French citizen from a colony, published the book Le Sport á Parisand launched the newspaper Le sport: Journal de gens du monde, sport became a codeword for civility:

… for Chapus sport was code for a Parisian upper-class lifestyle that could be described, defined and imitated. Sport was an avenue that led to social acceptability for members of the growing upper-middle class, and, it would seem, for at least one author from Guadeloupe. Chapus turned to sport to find his own niche in Parisian society. In a very real sense, his story serves as the archetype of French sport and national assimilation, as it continues to ply out in France today. (26).

The initiator of the modern Olympics, the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin managed to have the first games taking place in Athens in 1896. He then managed to have the second Olympics to take place in Paris in 1900. Rachel Ozerkevich notes that “as an aristocrat and a Frenchman”  Coubertin wanted to let Paris arrange the games in order to bolster the prestige of France in sports. He could use the opportunity to capitalize on the Exposition Universelle which was held in the French capital in 1900. Maybe unwittingly, Coubertin acted in the tradition of Chapus. The Baron thought that the modern Olympics would attract “an international group of elite youth interested in sports,” Ozerkevich observes. She adds that Coubertin and the organizers in Paris thought that viewers also should be upper-class; this because France “had a long and contentious history of mass demonstrations and political upheavals.”

As is well known, the participants in the Olympic Games had to be amateurs (nominally) until the 1980s. In her chapter “Paris and la Petite Balle Jaune: Two Centuries of Jeu de Paume, Royal Tennis and Lawn Tennis in the City of Light” Roxanna Curto, Associate Professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa, shows that whereas tennis was eliminated from the Olympic Games after the 1924 games because of unruly crowds, spectators walking on the courts and poor security, it was re-admitted as an exhibition sport in 1984 and as a medal sport in 1988. The ironic twist is that at this time international tennis had become mainly professional and the Olympics at last began accepting professional athletes. After almost a century as a seemingly aristocratic relic which in reality promoted modern ways of life, sport became perceived as part of the normal order in society at large – and of mainstream history and sociology.

Among remaining chapters in Sport in Paris especially noteworthy for their focus on gender and race, and the US-French connection are “The Fémina-Sport Club in Interwar Paris: All sports for All Women” by Florys Castan-Vicente, “a socio-historian of sport and gender, Associate Professor at the University Paris Saclay”; “Carpentier vs. Siki: The Black Boxer’s Pyrrhic Victory in Paris, Capital of the French Colonial Republic” by Stepane Hadjeras, who “holds a PhD in contemporary history [ —]  Passionate about Boxing, Stéphan Hadjeras is also a qualified English boxing trainer”; and “‘Thanks to the Palais des Sports, Paris will be the Sports Capital of Europe’: L’Auto, Jeff Dickson and the Vel d’Hiv (1909-1959)” by Sebastien Moreau and Sylvain Ville, respectively “PhD in contemporary history from the University of Paris”, and “Lecturer at the University Picardie Jules Verne”.

Vel d’Hiv is infamous for the Roundup (Rafle du Vél d’Hiv), a mass arrest of Jews by French police in July 1942, during the Nazi occupation of Paris. In “The City of Light” of all places, a Velodrome became a Nazi concentration camp!

As noted above, three times Paris has been hosting the Summer Olympic Games The chapter “Paris and the Olympic Games: A Comparative History” by Pierre-Olaf Schut (Professor of sports history at Gustav Eiffel University in Paris) demonstrates how the games in 1900 were merely a sideshow of the Universal Exhibition the same year. The games were spread over a period of six months and “practically invisible”. In 1924 the games received limited support from the authorities. In 2024 the setting was completely different. The Olympic Games had “become a global event, generating the largest television audiences worldwide”. This fact is an eloquent demonstration of how sport has become an important dimension of history – and of the writing of history.

Copyright © Kristian Gerner 2025