17

RUGBY DE MUERTE, À TREIZE AND À LA VICHY

France in the 1920s was gripped by fashion fever. It was the age of Coco Chanel and the femme moderne, bobbed hair and flapper dresses. Hats, from the bell-shaped cloche to the masculine newsboy cap, were all the rage. And this insatiable demand for hats would play a part in the crisis that would tear French rugby apart in the interwar years.

In 1922, 35-year-old Jean Bourrel became the owner of the House of Tibet hat factory in Quillan, a village of some 3,000 people nestled at the foot of the Pyrenees on the banks of the River Aude. He had been the factory manager for the past decade and now at last he could put into practice his plans to capitalise on France’s mania for headwear. The factory was extended, houses built for workers and production expanded rapidly. In a short time, a third of the local population was working for Bourrel. What more could a thriving village in south-west France need?

Just one more thing. Quillan wanted the same as every other town and village in the region. It wanted la gloire du rugby.

The year after Bourrel had taken over the factory, Quillan won the third division championship. It was no mean feat for a small village with few players to triumph over bigger towns in the intensely competitive third tier of the game.

But Bourrel wanted the name of the House of Tibet to be on the nation’s lips and his commercial instincts told him that rugby would generate the publicity he craved. ‘I am sure to have more advertising by fighting for the championship of France than by putting up posters all over the country,’ he is alleged to have said.¹ He wanted the Bouclier de Brennus in Quillan.

Bourrel was a man used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted. There was only one thing for it. He would have to buy a team.

So, in the summer of 1926, it was announced that seven of the Perpignan team that had just finished as runners-up in the championship final had decided to take jobs in the Quillan hat industry and would consequently be turning out for the local rugby team. They were joined by Perpignan coach Gilbert Brutus. Players from Tarbes and Toulouse also announced their enthusiasm for millinery careers which, by happy coincidence, would enable them to play for les Quillanais. Bourrel made sure that no one would miss the connection between his business and the club by insisting that players wore his products before and after matches.

Quillan’s aggressive recruitment paid off. Less than two years later the club narrowly lost 6-4 in the final to Pau, who proudly boasted that they had 13 local players, in contrast to Quillan’s ten imports. But it was to be the 1929 battle for the Bouclier that would symbolise both the triumph of Bourrel and the deep crisis of French rugby.

The final pitted Quillan against their local rivals Lézignan. Lézignan was a town of 6,000 inhabitants whose historic antipathy to their neighbours had been deepened by Bourrel’s shameless recruitment strategy. Coached by the flamboyant former international forward Jean Sébédio, the first manual labourer to be capped by France, Lézignan played a dour forward-based game.

For most of the final it looked like the wily Sébédio would win. With his side leading 8-0 midway through the second half, the Sultan, as he was nicknamed because of his First World War service in Syria, provocatively waved a wad of cash at Bourrel and the Quillan officials in the stands, mocking their attempts to buy the Bouclier.

He had spoken too soon. Realising that relentless forward play was getting them nowhere, Quillan coach Brutus switched his side’s focus to their superior three-quarters. Three tries followed in little more than ten minutes to see them take the championship 11-8. But fighting between players and among the 20,000 spectators continued for some time after the referee’s whistle. Bourrel had won, but at what cost?

Both sides were suspended by the French rugby authorities for their conduct during the final. The violence, commercialism and contempt for amateurism on display that day summed up the crisis consuming French rugby. Over the course of the next five years, its leading clubs would break away, the national side would be expelled from the Five Nations and rugby league would be established, led by the rock of the Quillan and French pack, Jean Galia.

If rugby had once been as fashionable as the hats produced by Jean Bourrel’s factory, it was now in danger of becoming as démodé as last year’s hemlines.

La marche du rugby

When rugby returned after the war, its future could not have looked brighter. From 260 clubs in 1920 the number had grown to 880 in 1923. Huge numbers of people had flocked to watch the game. In the Five Nations in 1920, France recorded its first away win with a 15-7 victory over Ireland at Lansdowne Road. The following year the French had finished second in the table with wins over Scotland and Ireland. In 1927 a solitary try to Grenoble winger Edmond Vallet had achieved the dream of all French rugbymen, their first victory over England. The following year Wales fell for the first time, and in 1930 France finished the championship just one win away from the Five Nations title.

The game also became further embedded in French popular culture. The 1923 championship final had been broadcast live on national radio, allowing everyone with access to a wireless to hear Stade Toulousain’s second successive final victory over Aviron Bayonnais. One hundred journalists from across France had attended les Bleus’ 1925 match against the All Blacks in Paris. The distinctive headwear of Aviron supporters, the Basque beret, was adopted by Frenchmen everywhere in the 1920s and quickly became a distinctive, if somewhat stereotyped, symbol of their nationality.

Even France’s biggest musical star, Maurice Chevalier, was keen to be associated with the game. In 1924 he sang ‘Marche Rugby’ to celebrate the sport on the eve of the 1924 Paris Olympics, which itself staged a high-profile but small-scale rugby competition. In 1928 French captain Adolphe Jauréguy and several Toulouse players played central roles in La Grande Passion, a love story set against the background of rugby rivalry. The composer Arthur Honegger even recorded a symphonic movement, Rugby, with the Paris Symphony orchestra.²

The decade was dominated by Toulouse. In 1924, la Vierge Rouge had completed a hat-trick of championships. Perpignan regained the title in 1925 only for it to return to Toulouse in 1926 and 1927. The success of Toulouse was not simply due to the skill and finesse of its first XV. The historian Jean-Pierre Bodis has identified 39 different sides playing in the city during the interwar years. In 1929 France’s first rugby weekly, Midi-Olympique, was launched there. Even so, as the right-wing writer Lucien Dubech complained, rugby still occupied more space than politics in the local newspapers.

The importance of rugby to Toulouse held up a mirror to the burgeoning popularity of the game across south-west France. By the mid-1920s there were 139 clubs in the Pyrenees and 106 in the Languedoc. The game also expanded eastwards, with Lyon, Toulon and Montferrand in Clermont-Ferrand establishing themselves in the front ranks of elite clubs. But the game’s grip was not simply extending across the nation; it was also reaching down into the working classes.

In Montferrand, the rugby club had been created in 1911 by Marcel Michelin, whose tyre factory dominated the city. In Carmaux, the Olympique de Carmaux club had been founded by the local mining company. Many other clubs were formed on the same lines. Just like Bourrel’s Quillan, their patrons saw their clubs as vehicles for advertising but also as a way of creating an esprit des corps among their employees at a time when industrial relations in France were, to say the least, fraught. Elsewhere, workers flocked to play and watch the game.

Yet, as had been the case in England in the 1880s and 1890s, this influx of players and fans who did not share the bourgeois upbringing of the leaders of the French game were viewed with concern by many. As early as 1923 the British magazine Rugby Football reported that there were 20 cases of alleged professionalism under investigation across the Channel.

The replayed 1925 championship final between Perpignan and Carcassonne was, declared pre-war international winger Géo André, ‘a match of brutes … on the terraces there were battles; and on the pitch, there was a battle royal … played in this way, rugby is more like the ancient games of the Roman circuses’.³

Although André’s views on the state of French rugby in the 1920s have generally been accepted, they should be taken with a pinch of salt. The complaints about the behaviour of players and supporters echoed those made about the north of England by supporters of the RFU, even down to the analogies with ancient Rome. The increasing strength of sides like Lézignan and Quillan, socially inclusive clubs based in small towns and villages, and their eclipse of the patrician teams in the major cities worried rugby’s traditionalists. After 1927 Stade Toulousain did not appear in another championship final. Racing and Stade Français made one losing appearance each in the 1920s. Stade Bordelais failed to enter the record books at all.

The traditionalists’ disquiet was fuelled by two-high profile deaths during matches. In March 1927 Quillan hooker Gaston Rivière died after breaking a cervical vertebra in his neck during a scrum in match against Perpignan. More shocking was the death during the 1930 championship semi-final of Agen’s 18-year-old winger Michel Pradié following a tackle by Pau’s international winger Fernand Taillantou. Taillantou immediately gave up rugby but a police enquiry led to him being fined and given a suspended jail sentence.

These two deaths led to the late 1920s becoming known as the era of rugby de muerte, rugby of death. This was a phrase coined by Dr Paul Voivenel, an influential administrator and writer on rugby who was deeply committed to elitist conceptions of amateur rugby and feared that control of the sport would slip away from the professional and business middle classes. It was in his interests to exaggerate the violence of rugby and blame it on the lower classes.

Despite bemoaning the decline of the amateur ethos, the catalyst for open revolt among the leading patrician clubs was the Fédération Française de Rugby’s (FFR) decision to introduce gate-sharing of match-day proceeds among clubs. In December 1930, Bayonne, Biarritz, Bordeaux, Carcassonne, Grenoble, Limoges, Lyon, Nantes University, Pau, Perpignan, Stade Français and Toulouse resigned from the FFR and formed the Union Française de Rugby Amateur (UFRA). They were soon joined by Narbonne and Tarbes. Collectively, these clubs believed themselves to be the cream of French rugby. And now they also believed they would be its saviours.

Yet, as was so often the case under amateurism, those who were most eager to point the finger at others were not so pure themselves. The deaths of Rivière and Pradié had occurred in matches against UFRA’s Pau and Perpignan – amateur sides both – and it was Perpignan vice-chairman Marcel Laborde who openly declared that ‘in order to keep our players amateur we have to pay them twice as much’.⁴

There was another factor that the UFRA clubs had taken into consideration: France’s impending expulsion from the Five Nations. Tensions with the British had grown in the late 1920s and matters came to a head in April 1930 when France met Wales at Paris’s Stade Colombes in the last match of the 1930 Five Nations. France had already beaten Scotland and Ireland and were one point behind tournament leaders England, who had finished their campaign on five points. A win over the Welshmen would mean an historic first championship win for the French. Fifty thousand people, France’s biggest ever rugby crowd, crammed into Colombes in anticipation of an historic victory.

It was not to be. Wales emerged battered, bruised and bloodied but 11-0 winners. French supporters took exception to the refereeing of the English Mr Hellewell, who disallowed two French tries. Hellewell felt so threatened by the crowd that he waited until play moved near to the players’ tunnel before whistling for no-side to allow himself and the players a swift exit from an increasingly agitated crowd.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In February 1931, the International Board endorsed an RFU statement that declared ‘owing to the unsatisfactory condition of the game of Rugby football as played and managed in France, neither our union or clubs under its jurisdiction will be able to arrange or fulfil fixtures with France or French clubs, at home or away’. The ban would only be lifted when ‘we are satisfied that the control and conduct of the game have been placed on a satisfactory basis in all essentials’.⁵ The ‘satisfactory basis’ was a rigorous implementation of the amateur regulations and the abolition of the championship.

If the UFRA clubs had hoped that they would be granted the right to play England instead of the FFR, they had misjudged the RFU. There was, at least for the time being, no chance of compromise, despite a plea from the future Edward VII, and the UFRA clubs rejoined the FFR at the end of the 1931–32 season.⁶ For the next decade, French rugby union had to be content with matches against Germany, Italy and Romania. But soon, the union code would not be the only kind of rugby played in France.

Le ‘Néo-Rugby’

By the end of the 1920s French rugby had come to resemble rugby in the north of England or Australia before the splits that led to rugby league and there was speculation that the FFR might open a dialogue with the British Rugby Football League (RFL). But the FFR set its face in the opposite direction and set up the Fédération Internationale de Rugby Amateur (FIRA) in January 1934.

However, in early 1933 the RFL was contacted by two journalists from the French daily sports newspaper L’Auto, the forerunner of L’Equipe, about the possibility of establishing rugby league in France. The RFL already had good contacts in France, partially through the cycling links of RFL secretary John Wilson, who rode for Britain at the 1912 Olympics and who knew Victor Breyer, the editor of the Parisian Echo des Sports.⁷

After months of negotiations, on 31 December 1933 the touring Australian Kangaroos met an England side on a snow-covered pitch in an exhibition match at Paris’s Stade Pershing, sponsored by Echo des Sports. The response of the crowd was ecstatic. Kangaroo captain Dave Brown was carried shoulder high from the field by spectators and the French press expressed amazement at the skills of the players of what became known as Rugby à Treize (Rugby of Thirteen).

Two days later the talismanic international forward Jean Galia, who had earlier been suspended by the FFR for allegedly offering money to players to join his club at Villeneuve-sur-Lot, signed an agreement with the RFL to bring a French team to England for a short tour in the spring of 1934. French rugby league was born.

Galia’s team arrived in England in March. The 17 players had 40 international rugby union caps between them and included such fixtures in the national side as Agen’s flying winger Robert Samatan and Bordeaux front-rower Jean Duhau. Despite never having played league before, the side acquitted itself well, even managing to beat Hull, one of the six club sides they met on tour.

Support poured into the new rugby. Everyone agreed that it was faster, more skilful and less violent than the attritional, forward-based game that had come to characterise French rugby union. In addition, league had one great advantage that French union had lost: top-class international rugby.

For French rugby, driven by the tension between its Anglophile origins and Anglophobe instincts, there was an overriding compulsion to test itself against the British. Galia, who had played in France’s first ever wins over England and Wales in rugby union, understood this perhaps better than anyone. On 15 April 1934, a week after the Ligue Française de Rugby à Treize (LFRT) was founded, France hosted England at Paris’s Stade Buffalo. Twenty thousand Parisians turned out to see a star-studded England side overcome Galia’s men 32-21.

Defeated but not disgraced, France, it was clear to everyone in the stadium, had a future in the new game. The following season England were held to a 15-15 draw in Paris and, even more sensationally, in Bordeaux France defeated a Welsh team containing Jim Sullivan, Gus Risman and two-times Lion Jack Morley 18-11.

The Welsh match saw the debut of the young half-back Max Rousie, the man who, after Galia, came to represent the soul of Treizisme. Although he had already won four French union caps, league provided the perfect stage to showcase his complete mastery of the arts of rugby. An organiser, a creator, a finisher, Rousie’s decision to join Galia signalled that league was capturing the imagination of the next generation of French rugby.

By the end of its first season the LRFT had 29 clubs, 171 in its second and 434 in the 1938–39 season. The FFR banned players, officials and even grounds associated with league. Its stodgy and politically dubious internationals against Germany, Italy and Romania held little appeal for spectators. It appeared that the FFR could do little to reverse things as it saw its affiliated clubs almost halved from 891 in 1924 to 471 in 1939.⁸

The tide did indeed seem to be turning in favour of rugby league and the crowning moment came in 1939. In February, France beat England 12-9 at St Helens, the first time a French national side had won in England. Better was to come, when 25,000 people crammed into Bordeaux’s Stade Municipal at the end of the season to see France win their first ever European Championship with a 16-10 defeat of Wales.

These rapid and almost revolutionary changes in French rugby reflected similar changes taking place in France itself. The economic depression of the early 1930s had ushered in an era of acute political and social crisis. In May 1936 the Popular Front of socialist and liberal parties won the French general election and a huge strike wave convulsed the nation.

The fact that rugby league was challenging the established order of French rugby seemed to chime with the spirit of the Popular Front. And there could be no denying that the Popular Front government extended a helping hand to the rugby rebels. Léo Legrange, the socialist minister for sport, appeared as a guest of an honour at a 1936 international match. Although Galia and his fellow Treizistes steered clear of politics, they had become identified with the Popular Front, something that their enemies would not forget.

Rugby à la Vichy

The end of the 1938–39 season saw French rugby league shining at its brightest. But the shadows were gathering. On 3 September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and France was at war. In May 1940 the German army invaded and caused a spectacular collapse of the French nation, which divided into a German-controlled occupied zone and an unoccupied zone controlled by Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist government based in the spa town of Vichy in the South of France.

Under Pétain, France underwent a ‘National Revolution’ and pursued a policy of ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’ (work, family, fatherland) that reasserted right-wing France’s traditional values. One of those values was a belief in amateur sport and the Vichy regime declared its intention to outlaw professionalism.

In theory, the Vichy ban extended to all professional sports, including soccer. But the other sports continued as amateurs and only rugby league was outlawed whether amateur or professional. Vichy’s minister for family and youth, Jean Ybarnégaray, was unequivocal. ‘The fate of rugby league is clear. Its life is over and it will quite simply be deleted from French sport,’ he declared in August 1940.⁹

Ybarnégaray commissioned a report on the state of rugby and how it should be reorganised. Paul Voivenel, the man who in the 1920s had first come up with the term rugby de muerte, argued that rugby had fallen victim to ‘moral decadence’ and that the professionalism of rugby league was a betrayal of the moral and educational principles of the game. The Treizistes would be compelled to rejoin the FFR.¹⁰

On 10 October 1940, the LFRT was summoned to the ministry’s office and informed that it was expected to help ‘re-establish the unity of rugby’. Three days later, on a Sunday evening following the first weekend of matches of the 1940–41 season, an announcement was made on national radio by Commandant Joseph ‘Jep’ Pascot, the former France and Perpignan fly-half of the 1920s who was now Vichy’s director of sport. He declared that, on the basis of the Voivenel report, the LFRT would be dissolved into the FFR. All rugby league’s assets, players and clubs were to be transferred to rugby union.

The ultimate responsibility for the rugby league’s fate lay in far more celebrated hands than those of Pascot. Jean Borotra, the ‘Bounding Basque’ who won five grand slam tennis titles in the 1920s, including two Wimbledon championships, had been appointed Vichy’s Commissioner for General Education and Sports in July 1940. A youthful rugby player for Aviron Bayonne, Borotra oversaw Vichy sports policy until he fled the country in 1942. A fervent believer in the amateur ethos of sport, it was he who gave Pascot the authority to ‘delete’ rugby league. Interviewed shortly before his death in 1994, Borotra admitted his role in the ban to English historian Mike Rylance: ’Pascot couldn’t have done that without my authority.’¹¹

Rugby league ended immediately with Pascot’s announcement, but it would be another year before the decision would be signed into law. On the morning of 19 December 1941, Pétain issued a decree that was unique in the history of world sport. He announced that rugby à treize had been banned by the government. Its playing was to cease, its offices closed and its assets confiscated by the government. The decree read:

Art. 1 – The association known as Ligue Française de Rugby à Treize, whose headquarters are at 24 Drouot Street, Paris is dissolved, authorisation having been refused it.

Art. 2 – The property of the dissolved association, under the terms of the preceding article, is transferred without modification at the National Sports Committee, which assumes all responsibility for it and which will be represented in the liquidation proceedings by its secretary-general Mr. Charles Denis, Officer of the Legion of Honour.

Art. 3 – The Secretary of State for National Education and Youth is charged with the execution of this decree which will be published in the Official Journal.

Rugby league had become another victim of the Vichy regime’s spirit of revanchisme, or revenge. Pétain and his supporters wanted to settle their grievances against those they believed had taken France away from its rural, patriarchal and traditional past, whether they were socialists, Jews, trade unionists, popular frontists or the merely liberal-minded. And in their long list of retribution they also included those who had rebelled against the authority of French rugby.

For men like Borotra and Voivenel, who believed deeply in the amateur, elite traditions of pre-First World War French rugby, the campaign against league was a necessity. But for Jep Pascot, it may have been something more.

Pascot had been the fly-half in the great Perpignan team that had lifted the Bouclier de Brennus in 1921 and 1925. Just days after his side lost the 1926 final against Toulouse, seven Perpignan players were lured away by Jean Bourrel’s Quillan, thus setting in train the revolution that led to rugby league. The Perpignan club was devastated and would not recover for a decade.

For Pascot at least, Vichy’s settling of scores with rugby league was not just ideological. It was personal.