Nowhere has this been more so than in France, where a veritable crisis has been caused by the utter failure of the national team. That team played lamentably badly, failed to win a single match, lost against the most mediocre opponents, was eliminated from the competition at the first hurdle, and worse still behaved abominably.
In 1998, the French team won the World Cup and there was a burst of national euphoria as a result. The team of 1998 was composed of blancs, beurs, noirs – that is to say, whites, Arabs, blacks – and this was taken, briefly, as evidence of the success of France as a multicultural and multiethnic society. Huge crowds greeted the successful team as it paraded in the modern equivalent of a Roman triumph. Preposterous triviality could go no further.
Twelve years later, when the French team lost miserably in the same competition, the opposite sentiments were widely expressed, at least in the newspapers and on the air. The team was now predominantly black and Arab; anyone who knew France only through its national football team would place the country somewhere between North and Equatorial Africa. One prominent white in the team, a spectacularly ugly and thuggish-looking man, so ill-educated that he could barely string a few words together, let alone a sentence, in his native language, had converted to Islam. Another white in the squad, a blonde Breton who was notably better-educated than his colleagues, had to be excluded from the team because none of the others would co-operate with or pass the ball to him.
When the Marseillaise was played before a match started in which the French were to play, the team refused to sing it or accord it any respect. While it is perfectly normal for many Frenchmen not to know all the words – which is probably as well, since they are horribly bloodthirsty, and include the hope that the impure blood of aristocrats may irrigate the ploughed furrows of the peasantry – almost all know at least the first four lines. The players appeared to be expressing their disdain for the country they supposedly represented and that had enabled them to become multi-millionaires by the age of 20. At the root of their resentment would not be injustice, but remembered slights, real or imagined.
A player named Anelka then insulted the team manager because the manager criticised the performance at half-time. The words used by Anelka were so gross that I will not translate them; the manager excluded him from the team and sent him home. Outraged by this assault on their inalienable right to freedom of speech, the team went on strike and refused to train for a day. It was hardly surprising that even sixth-rate teams were able to beat them.
Whereas the victory in 1998 was taken as proof of the success of French society, the defeat in 2010 was taken as proof of precisely the opposite. How was it that the country had raised up a generation of resentful, ill-mannered, ungrateful and thoroughly spoilt youths, who weren’t even very good at what they had been paid enormous sums to do? (One of the better-behaved and more dignified of them, a man called Thierry Henry, is paid more than $20,000,000 a year, before his advertising and publicity revenue.)
Of course, if the team had been successful, if it had repeated the success of 1998, no one would have raised these questions, and euphoria rather than depression would have been the mood of the moment. As it was, the team was the best propaganda possible for Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the Front National.
A parliamentary enquiry is to be held about the state of French football; the president himself has expressed his concern. Many people have said that debacle reflects the state of French society. Against all this, one writer in Le Monde did manage to point out in a short article to the effect that football is only a game, after all, and the whole spectacle a trivial one; but the opposite view of its importance prevailed.
I confess that I was surprised by how the French showed themselves as stupid about football as the English. It is true that the behaviour of the French team was used as a metonym for the horrible, resentful culture of the suburban housing projects that surround every French town of any size; but it was hardly necessary for the French team to have behaved so badly or to have lost for the latter to be widely known. It is also true that if you compare the faces of the English football team of, say, the 1950s with those of the team today, you will see the decline in civility of English society as a whole. But what really mattered to people in France was victory or defeat in the sporting contest, not the state of society. Football was more important to them than anything else, and a victory – or at any rate, a more dignified defeat – would have anaesthetised their thoughts about the country’s social problems.
It seems to me very odd, and not at all reassuring, that a country such as France, with a practically unrivalled history of achievement in all the major fields of human endeavour, should have been precipitated into an orgy of self-examination by something as trivial as a failure in a football competition, when it is utterly indifferent to questions of incomparably greater importance: for example, why it is completely incapable, after a continuous and millennial history of wonderful architecture, of erecting a decent building, one that is not an eyesore? (It is not alone in this, of course.) I have never seen this question so much as raised, let alone answered, though I do not think any reasonably alert person could drive through France without asking himself it.
