Rugby is long-lost France made flesh

My breakfast café in Paris has recently been plastered in rugby memorabilia. I doubt that Momo, the chubby north African who serves our coffees, grew up in south-western France worshipping the oval ball. Rather, the café has bought into a national fashion: rugby has become code for the ideal France. On paper, France’s rugby players are playing England in the Six Nations championship tonight. In truth, though, the “rugbymen” are competing against France’s national football team. At stake is “who represents France?” For once, the rugby team seems to be winning.

For years, if you were looking for the French nation made flesh, it was the national football team. Les Bleus’ victory in the world cup of 1998 is often cited as the best moment of national togetherness since the liberation of 1944, with the difference that in 1998 all Frenchmen were on the same side. The French embraced their largely brown and black team. “This is a France that wins, and is, for once, united in victory,” said President Jacques Chirac.

But when the boys from the ghetto stopped winning, they became boys from the ghetto again. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut derided the team as “black-black-black”. Many agreed. The footballers ceased to unite. As the cult magazine So Foot explains: “Too well-paid, too stupid, too ghetto – footballer, the perfect scapegoat?” As for football fans, their image could be summed up as “too poorly paid, too stupid, too ghetto”.

Football now embodies a modern urban globalised France – and not a France that wins, either. The rugby team does win: it will achieve the “Grand Slam” if it beats England. Above all, though, France. French rugby has always evoked south-western village fields. In the 1950s, as millions of French abandoned their villages, rugby was presented “as a symbol of national continuity in the midst of often traumatic change”, writes the historian Philip Dine. In the 1960s, says the historian Jean-Pierre Bodis, rustic rugbymen were favourably contrasted with the young executives and long-haired student rebels in the cities.

Rugby may always have embodied rural France, but in the past few Frenchmen outside the south-west noticed. Only in recent years has cable TV helped rugby to market itself to all of France. The game’s rural image was just what a nation anxious about globalisation was looking for. No wonder the French embraced Sébastien Chabal as their favourite rugby player. Chabal, probably a mere reserve against England tonight, is loved less for his skills than for his unkempt beard and wild eyes. A 14th-century peasant returned to life, he incarnates the eternal France. Today’s rugbymen – almost all white, mostly not millionaires – have become the French masculine ideal. As even Elle magazine has proclaimed: “Le rugby c’est fashion!”

Sales of tickets, TV rights and jerseys keep rising, particularly in the former rugby desert of Paris. Max Guazzini notes that when he took over the Parisian club Stade Français in the 1990s, there were “six paying spectators”. Now his team regularly fills the 80,000-seat Stade de France. Other French rugby teams occasionally decamp to big football stadiums, a symbol of rugby’s shouldering-aside of soccer.

Rugby though must watch out that it doesn’t get too visibly rich. What the game sells is rural purity. Now that players’ shirts are covered in sponsors’ logos, and some stars get rich, rugby is acquiring a whiff of football.

None of this means that the French en masse enjoy rugby as a sport. Most are baffled by its rules. The marketing agency Sportlab has published a telling poll: respondents preferred France’s rugby team to the football team by a margin of more than two to one. They said rugby represented their values. Yet asked which team they’d watch if both played simultaneously, most named football. But then, rugby in France is more than a mere sport. It’s the long-lost France made flesh.