Arts & Sciences

The sport that galvanizes the most molten enthusiasm throughout the world outside the United States is soccer, or football, as it is universally dubbed. Every four years, in mimesis of the cadence but especially the prestige of the Olympics, a world's soccer cup competition is held, involving teams from all the continents and hundreds of millions of zealous fans; in many countries, the stakes far transcend the usual gratifications afforded by the symbolic violence of nation-to-nation confrontation on the playing field.

To the surprise of most aficionados, the host country for the 1998 World Cup, France, won the event by triumphing in the final over the reigning champion, Brazil. By scrutinizing French reactions to this dazzling victory, in the context of deep-seated and widely felt anxieties over the changing nature of French society and of France's place in the world, I hope to illuminate certain aspects of what is commonly called l'angoisse identitaire, or identity anguish.

While identity politics in the American sense (see D. Greenwood's article in this newsletter) has been slow to take form, the questions of "Frenchness" have haunted the public arena at least since the mid 1980s. To the extent that identity bespoke the construction of social ties, the process of social integration, a manner of self-representation, and relations of domination and subordination and of inclusion and exclusion, it was one of the major preoccupations of the historical hour. Until relatively recently, French identity seemed to be something automatic. It was the product of hard-won and well-tuned republican institutions, such as the school and the army, the ORTF (publicly run broadcast media), and, in its own way, the family. It was the standard trajectory of young people to be socialized into the values and norms of the nation, to speak the same idiom as well as the same language, to resonate to the same memories (preferably glorious souvenirs) and, at least in principle, to share the same sacrifices.

There were more and more signs, however, that the process was no longer working as it once had mechanically, discreetly, efficiently. The institutions themselves seemed to reveal signs of wear; they also encountered resistance and friction. Even as the institutional consensus around the republic of the center continued to harden, the unspoken consensus around what constituted Frenchness seemed to unravel. Identity anguish became the emblem and metonym for a constellation of worries about the place of France, the face of France, the future of France. As Paul Thibaud of L'Esprit remarked, "Today the French have the feeling, after having played a grand role in History, that they are no longer capable of sustaining it." He had in mind a decline in self-esteem vis-a-vis exogenous challenges: above all, the insidious specter of creeping Americanization and the assimilationist price or absorption into a new Europe dominated by the Deutschmark, and marked by strong incentives to surmount national habits and to renounce chunks of national sovereignty.

But the decisive catalyst in the crystallization of identity anguish seemed to be endogenous, or at least to have a specifically French character. It was the change in the sociocultural and ethnic character of French society, the cumulative impact of the waves of in-migration, summoned to sustain the glorious decades of postwar growth, subsequently swelled by significant clandestine infiltration, upon a backdrop of a devastating and protracted rate of unemployment. In its crudest expression, often orchestrated and exploited by the rightist extremists of Jean-Marie Le Pen's party, the National Front, this meant dark-skinned, mostly non-Christian people taking up jobs, public housing, and hospital beds at the direct expense of so-called native or authentic French, appropriating a disproportionate share of welfare benefits, and adamantly resisting acculturation by practicing their traditional ways that clashed with French custom and sometimes French law. If on the one side the tide of anomie exploded in scapegoatism and racism, on the other it manifested itself in pervasive self-doubt, individual and collective, and in fear.

The World Cup, at least initially, did not seem to be a harbinger of better times. It seemed perfectly consistent with the mood of national depression that a strike of Air France pilots threatened not only to ruin the tourist boom that the Cup was expected to generate, but would tarnish French prestige in the eyes of the world. Once the strike was finally settled, other problems darkened the horizon: first a massive ticket fraud and then the horror and tragedy of soccer hooliganism in Marseilles and in Lens, where a gendarme was beaten into a coma. On the playing field, the expectations concerning the French team were mitigated at best. The press had serious doubts about the capacity of the coach, Aime Jacquet, to choose the right blend of players. Favored by an easy draw which magically appears to have blessed every home team in previous tournaments the French team won its early matches, and then beat Italy in a thrilling game settled by overtime goal-kicks to enter the semifinals. Lilian Thuram, a defenseman born in Guadeloupe, became a hero overnight when he saved France from the pesky Croatians in the semifinal with two electrifying goals. Crowds numbering hundreds of thousands in the capital and tens of thousands in the provinces took to the streets, faces and bodies painted in tricolor, brandishing flags and posters, on the eve of the final against Brazil, the favorite. The surprising final victory of the French, assured by two magnificent headers effectuated by the playmaker, Zinedine Zidane, a beur from the northern Marseilles projects that house thousands of North Africans, among other immigrant groups, unleashed a spasm of jubilation that Serge July styled "a national communion without precedent since the first days of the Liberation." More than a million people flooded the Champs-Elysee in joyous rapture and national affirmation. The bleus, as the French team was traditionally called, seemed in a single blow to have driven away the "blues" from French consciousness.

The analogy with the Liberation was only the beginning of the hyperbole that World Cup commentary would spawn. "France is back," the press cried out in rare unison, left and right. "Sunday, France came out of the depression which has gripped her for a decade," sighed the writer Pascal Bruckner, with relief. "Soccer is the French nation," he pursued. Serge July depicted the unexpected Cup triumph as a "formidable marker" of myriad unacknowledged achievements of French society. Such extravagant hyperbole was a treacherous marker of French society's perplexity vis-a-vis many of the challenges of changing times and its fantasy wish to escape overnight from the painful business of working through these problems. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was one of the rare killjoys to remark that "in pontificating on our virtues...we have exacerbated our own state of confusion."

In the febrile spirit of the hour, the Nouvel Observateur advanced that "soccer had permitted the French to realize their oldest dream, fraternity." Journalists, mantra-like, chanted that coach Aime Jacquet and/or Zinedine Zidane had "done more for integration" than ten or twenty years of reform effort, "than all the speeches and all the decrees." The dynamic France of the future could no longer be described even normatively in monochromic terms, for the tricolor team was multicolor: it comprised, in addition to eleven players of original French stock, as the formula goes (including two Basques who may not quite have seen themselves as 100 percent French), an Algerian (Kabyle) born in Marseilles, a Guyanian, a Kanak from New Caledonia, a Senegalais born in France, a Nigerian, two Guadeloupians, a mixed Guadeloupian and Martiniquais born in France, and three players of more or less recent immigrant origins rooted in Portugal, Armenia, and the Kamoulk. Epitomized, the conclusion was that France won because the team was multiracial, a conclusion that LÕExpress translated into overzealous sociological caricature: "All the French identified with this team because it was multiracial." The apparent paradox on which virtually all commentators grounded their argument was that if the World Cup cast into relief the real, incontrovertible multicolor visage of France, even more importantly it elicited social "cohesion." Given the widespread, consensual hostility, left and right, for the garish, divisive, pathogenic multicultural made-in-USA, it was absolutely necessary for the French team to be at once, in the words of Le Monde, "the symbol of the diversity and of the unity of the country."

In the end, what the Cup victory reveals is the play of an overheated discourse on the event and its meaning. On the one hand, it would have amounted to a sort of civic and emotional treason to have resisted the tsunami of expansive enthusiasm. On the other hand, the frenetic haste with which commentators and witnesses drew sweeping conclusions about the state of France, the state of mind, and the renaissance of the French dream bespeaks a deep malaise about the nationÕs identity, its future social morphology and dynamics, and its cultural trajectory. Of course the victory did come at just the right time: France desperately needed a big lift, and the psychological consequences of the win were manifestly bracing, at least in the short run. But this powerful and generous elan generated a commensurately intense moment of mystification. Instead of a single, cohesive community, the Cup victory engendered another version of unitary and uniform thinking, la pensee unique, that consensual and quasi-official thought that has been so much derided and so much reinforced in recent years. The triumphalism masked and at the same time highlighted chronic anxieties-about how to deal with the Other; how to live together; how to adapt old institutions to new times and conditions; and how to reconcile democracy and republic, liberty and equality, competition and solidarity, diversity and unity, ethnocentrism and universalism, multi-culturalism in fact with uniculturalism in theory, Judeo-Christian and Islamic values, unemployment and public order.

The opportunity for lucid reflection fell immediately prey to the siren call of self-satisfaction. It seems a shame that France could not extract something more durably edifying from this extraordinary moment of national ecstasy.

This article is a much-truncated version of the spring 1999 inaugural faculty lecture of Cornell's French Studies Program.

Steven L. Kaplan is the Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell. He has published widely in French and English on eighteenth-century France, food and foodways, the French Revolution and its bicentennial in 1989, and on contemporary French culture. The French government recognized his contributions to French scholarship in 1996, when he was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.