It is barely an hour’s drive from Orthez to Mont-de-Marsan. On the banks of the Gave de Pau river, Orthez is a small medieval town nestled in the heart of Aquitaine rugby country. On 31 December 1967 the local club, perennial Cinderellas whose only taste of glory was a second division championship in 1935, played a friendly match against Stade Montois, the glamour club from Mont-de-Marsan whose champagne rugby had brought them the Bouclier de Brennus in 1963.
The undeniable star of Stade Montois was Guy Boniface, the handsome, fearless centre who embodied the spirit of open rugby. Along with his brother and centre partner André, Boniface was at the heart not only of Montois’ success but that of France itself.
He made his debut for the French team that shared the 1960 Five Nations Championship, starred for the championship-winning side of 1961 and eventually won 35 international caps. His style and looks had made him the face of French rugby, a combination of the romantic hero of La Belle Époque and the media-friendly celebrity of the 1960s television age.
As he got into his car to drive back home to Mont-de-Marsan late that New Year’s Eve, he knew his life was entering a period of transition. He had not played for France since the heartbreaking final match of the 1966 Five Nations, when the French had led 8-6 with just minutes separating them from a fourth outright championship.
As they pushed forward for a final try to seal the game, fly-half Jean Gachassin spotted an overlap on the left and threw out a looping pass to Stade Montois winger Christian Darrouy. But Darrouy’s opposite number Stuart Watkins intercepted the pass and ran 75 yards upfield to score a try and snatch the championship for Wales.
The Boniface brothers were blamed for not playing safe. Champagne rugby had gone to their heads, claimed the critics. This was not a little unfair. Full-back Claude Lacaze had missed a conversion from almost in front of the Welsh posts and just before full-time he had also missed a difficult but kickable penalty. Gachassin had thrown the pass but was not dropped. Yet it was the Boniface brothers who shouldered the responsibility for the loss. Neither was selected for the 1967 Five Nations.
As Guy Boniface drove north on the RN133 he contemplated what the approaching New Year would bring. A return to international rugby? A move into coaching? Or a new career in the media? For a man of his fame and charisma, the future seemed to be limitless.
It was not to be. As Boniface reached the village of Hagetmau, less than 20 miles from home, he lost control of his car and crashed. He was rushed to hospital but died of his injuries in the early hours of 1968.
Three days later the tragedy deepened when Bègles’ young winger Jean-Michel Capendeguy, who had made his international debut against the 1967 All Black tourists, was killed in another car accident. For many, it appeared that the age of the rugby Musketeer had come to a catastrophic end.
The deaths of Boniface and Capendeguy were a tragic start to a momentous year in the history of France and its rugby. Eleven days after thousands had turned out for Boniface’s funeral, France kicked off the 1968 Five Nations with a 9-8 win at Murrayfield. Efficient victories against England and Ireland took them to the top of the table, so by the time they arrived at Cardiff Arms Park for the final match the only question that remained the Grand Slam.
This time there were no mistakes. Although Wales led 9-3 at half-time, another pair of brothers, the half-backs Guy and Lilian Camberabero, led the French to the summit that the Boniface brothers could not. Whereas the Boniface instinct was to pass before thinking of kicking, the Camberabero style was to kick before thinking of passing.
It was Lilian Camberabero’s half-blocked drop-goal attempt that led to France’s first try and then Lilian himself went in for the try that took France ahead. Guy then landed a penalty and minutes later the game was over. For the first time since it entered the Five Nations in 1910, France had won the Grand Slam.
The irresistible rise of French rugby
Regardless of the other successes that France would have on the rugby pitch – in 1954 they defeated the All Blacks for the first time and in 1958 became the first touring side in the 20th century to win a series in South Africa – the quest for the Grand Slam was at the very heart of French rugby union. It was this more than any other consideration that had shaped the policies and practices of the Fédération Française de Rugby (FFR) ever since they re-entered the Five Nations after the Second World War.
France were invited back into the tournament in March 1939 but the war delayed their return until the Five Nations restarted in 1947. However, the French game continued to be dogged by controversy. During the 1948 Five Nations the British press had reported that France’s scrum-half, Yves Bergougnan, had in fact been a rugby league player, having signed a contract in 1944 with Toulouse Olympique before switching to code and city rivals Stade Toulousain.
Bergougnan, who would become the last player to land a four-point drop goal in international rugby in that year’s match with England, was one of 99 former league players who were now playing union, contrary to the amateur regulations that the FFR had agreed to uphold as part of their acceptance back into the international fold.1 Scottish centre Russell Bruce recalled many years later asking Bergougnan why he had switched from league to union; ‘it was more lucrative,’ the scrum-half replied.2
By 1951 the situation in France had become so disquieting that the International Board wrote a confidential letter to the FFR, reminding them of the terms of the agreement that had allowed France back into the Five Nations. The first of these was that ‘no player who has been proved guilty of receiving payment other than actual out-of-pocket travelling and hotel expenses is ever allowed to play Rugby football again or to act in any official capacity in connection with any rugby football club’.3
As with most rugby union-playing nations, the FFR had no problem agreeing to the amateur regulations, safe in the knowledge that ‘social aid’, as French clubs called their provision of jobs and housing to players, would continue, but discreetly.
The IRB also demanded the ending of the French Championship, something that everyone knew was impossible. Even so, the FFR was so fearful of being expelled again that it voted in 1952 to comply with the IRB request and end its flagship tournament. Having satisfied the IRB, the FFR presented the resolution to that year’s annual meeting of the clubs, who promptly voted against the move by 745 votes to none. Despite the huffing and puffing of the IRB and the deferential posturing of the FFR, nothing changed and the polite cross-Channel gavotte continued.
One crucial reason why the British nations did not push the FFR over the brink as they had in 1931 was the continuing threat of the reborn French rugby league. Even before the liberation of Paris in August 1944, rugby league had begun to be played again. But when Paul Barrière, the future president of the French Rugby League, went to Paris in September 1944 on behalf of the Ligue Française de Rugby à Treize to ask the Comité National des Sports for government support for the rebirth of league, he was told that there was no reason to alter the Vichy decision to ban the game.4 None of the assets seized by Vichy would be returned.
In fact, the Comité National des Sports remained firmly under the control of officials who had been appointed under Vichy. In post-war France as a whole, little was done to purge the French body politic of those who had collaborated with the Nazis. Sport was left almost untouched by even the superficial cleansing of French political life that took place after 1945. Moreover, the head of the Comité National des Sports with whom Barrière was negotiating was Alfred Eluère, who also just happened to be the president of the FFR.
Rugby league was therefore allowed to be played but under very restrictive circumstances. It could not be played in schools, no more than 200 professional players could be engaged and, perhaps worst of all, was forbidden to call itself rugby. Instead, it had to go by the name of jeu à treize, or ‘game of thirteen’. The sport which had suffered the most under Vichy was treated as if it had been the guilty party.
Even so, the game sprang to life with an enthusiasm and vitality that belied the obstacles placed in its way. Carcassonne, boasting the 20-year-old prodigy Puig Aubert, won the first championship in 1945 and the next year carried off the league and cup double, the first time it had been achieved in French rugby league. They would appear in the first six championship finals after the war, winning three. In the first year in which they did not make it to the final, the title was won by FC Lyon, which had switched codes from union to league in 1946, the last club to do so.
It was not just at home that French league surged ahead of its powerful union rival. In 1949 France, led by Puig Aubert, not only won rugby league’s European Championship but it also achieved what the French national rugby union had never done in more than 30 years: defeat England in England. And not merely in England but at Wembley Stadium itself, as Aubert guided his men to an historic 12-5 victory over a strong English side. The championship success was repeated in 1951 and 1952.
Even better was to come two years after the Wembley win. Making their first tour to Australia in 1951, Aubert’s men once again played dazzling league football. Although they had not defeated Australia in four previous meetings, the French took the first Test 26-15, a margin that could have been considerably more if they had not relaxed after going into half-time 16-2 ahead.
Australia took the second Test in Brisbane but in the final one at the Sydney Cricket Ground the French blew their hosts away, running in seven tries to two, with the great scrum-half Jo Crespo picking up a hat-trick. They were acclaimed as one of the greatest sides ever to visit Australia, and arrived back in France to be welcomed by thousands lining the streets of Marseille. In 1953, the Kangaroo touring team failed to avenge their defeat and the French won a home series against the Australians for the first time ever.
The following year, in 1954, France staged the first Rugby League World Cup. Masterminded by Paul Barrière who first suggested it in the 1940s, the tournament brought together the four rugby league nations for the first time. By now, the French were acknowledged as the unofficial world champions of the game and were heavy favourites to take the tournament, especially after Britain and Australia were missing key players after a hard Test series during the summer. But in front of 30,000 people at the Parc des Princes, Puig Aubert and his men were outfoxed 16-12 by a wily British side and it was the Scotsman Dave Valentine who would lift the very first rugby World Cup trophy.
It was the one failure in Aubert’s long sequence of success in the 1940s and 1950s that brought him five championships, four cups and 46 French caps. Universally known as ‘Pipette’ for the prodigious smoking habit that would eventually kill him – legend had it that during dull matches he would pull out a cigarette for a quick smoke – he became one of those rare players that transcend sport to become a cultural symbol of their community. As his biographer Bernard Pratviel points out, Aubert’s qualities as a player became the basis for a number of everyday phrases used in south-west France, such as ‘Hé, maladroit, achète les gants de Pipette!’ (‘Hey, clumsy, buy some Pipette gloves!’) and ‘Tu as le panache de Pipette!’ (‘You have the verve of Pipette!’).5
Pipette missed the 1955 tour to Australia due to injury, but Jacques Merquey’s team repeated the success of the 1951 tourists, taking the final two Tests after the Australians won the opening match of the series. Although no one could guess at the time, this was to be the high water mark of French rugby league. The sport’s post-war success had been built on a generation that had learned the game as youngsters and who continued the indomitable spirit of defiance that the experience of the war had taught the Treizistes.
But, due to the ban on league in schools and the restrictions placed on the game, there was a shrinking pool of players from which to replace the Puig Aubert generation. What’s more, the growing strength of rugby union offered far greater financial rewards than league, leading to talented young league players such as Jo Maso, the son of a Carcassonne league international who himself had played representative league against England, switching to the supposedly amateur game.
Rugby union’s greater financial clout was not simply due to the FFR’s creative interpretation of the code’s amateur regulations. Like league, it too was experiencing a surge in its fortunes on and off the field, not least because of the institutional advantages it had carried over from Vichy. In 1951 the national team emulated its league cousins’ famous Wembley triumph over England by winning for the first time at Twickenham.
On a mud heap of a pitch, the French pack completely outplayed the English forwards, who at one point were so battered by the ferocity of their opponents that they were reduced to six scrummagers due to injuries. The French back row turned the screw, scoring all of their side’s point. Captain Guy Basquet touched down for the first try that was converted by Jean Prat, who also scored the next try and sealed the game 11-3 with a drop goal five minutes from time. France’s only defeat that year was to the great Ireland side that was on its way to its third championship in four years.
Better was to come in 1954. Now captained by Prat, France won three of their Five Nations matches to share the title for the first time in their history. Perhaps even more significantly, they also recorded their first ever defeat of the touring All Blacks, thanks to a Prat try that gave them a tight 3-0 victory.
Just like Puig Aubert in league, Jean Prat became the totemic figure in French rugby union in the 1950s. Nicknamed Monsieur Rugby, Prat was a back-rower who had mastered all the skills of the game. Just as importantly, he was an inspirational leader. With France desperately hanging on to a two-point lead as the clock ticked down against a rampant Welsh side during their 1949 international at Stade Colombes, Prat told his teammates, ‘these British have pissed on you for a hundred years, you can hold out for five minutes’.6 They held on to win 5-3.
Prat and his centre-three-quarter brother Maurice were two of the pillars of their home town club, FC Lourdes. In 1928, the year Maurice was born, their father, a local farmer, sold some of his land to enable the club to build a stadium. Lying in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the town had become famous as a site of Catholic pilgrimage after a local girl reported seeing the Virgin Mary there in 1858. Yet it was the vision of Jean Prat and his fellow Lourdais forwards pounding down the pitch on land that had once belonged to his father that caused opposing players to pray during the 1950s.
From 1948, the year of their first French championship, to 1960, when they won their seventh title, FC Lourdes did not lose a single match at home. They completed a hat-trick of championships between 1956 and 1958, the first side to do so since Stade Toulousain in the early 1920s.
The club’s success was no miracle. It was based on set moves, such as the ‘lourdaise’ which involved the flanker and the scrum-half swapping positions, and combinations that were endlessly rehearsed in training, an ethic of hard work and involvement of all players, and a powerful set of forwards who were confident with the ball in hand, the exemplar of which was Prat himself. Moreover, its players trained and prepared in a professional manner thanks to the assistance of the club patron, Antoine Béguère.
Béguère had played for the club as a young man but his greatest contribution was as a businessman and mayor of the town. As a building contractor at a time, Béguère was able to offer ‘social aid’ to Lourdes’ players in the form of jobs in his building company, thus allowing them to devote their energies to rugby on a full-time basis. After Béguère collapsed and died of a heart attack during a Lourdes versus Agen match in October 1960, the club would win only one further championship.
The impact of Lourdes’ domination of French rugby union was as important internationally as it was domestically. It was no coincidence that France rose to be considered a major rugby-playing nation in the 1950s. Between 1948 and 1958 the national side played only one major international match without a player from Lourdes. In the 1958 Five Nations the French side contained no fewer than seven of the club’s players.
Lourdes’ players occupied central roles in one of French rugby union’s greatest achievements when the national side toured South Africa in 1958. This was a weakened side, missing for various reasons Maurice Prat and the Boniface brothers, and tour manager Serge Saulnier sought to bind the squad together through an emotional appeal to patriotism. He reminded them that this was their first visit to a former British dominion and that the South Africans believed the French had ceased to be a world power. ‘You will be able to demonstrate that France is still a great power,’ he told his players.7
The first Test was drawn 3-3 after a Pierre Danos drop goal had given France a 3-0 half-time lead, but most commentators felt that the French had the best of the match. Three weeks later the two sides met again in the deciding game. France opened the scoring with a penalty goal from Lourdes full-back Pierre Lacaze but a converted Loftie Fourie try saw the Springboks lead 5-3 at half-time.
The second half saw the French pack, led by captain Lucien Mias playing the game of his life, dominate the match. Lacaze dropped a goal to put the French ahead and then with seven minutes remaining his elegant Lourdes’ teammate Roger Martine dropped the goal to win the series. Although all the points were scored by backs, it was Mias and the forwards who were the heroes of the day, leaving South Africa defeated in a home Test series for the first time since 1896. France were now unquestionably a member of rugby union’s international elite.
‘The France that wins’
The victory in South Africa took place at the same time as France itself was undergoing a profound political crisis. Forced to withdraw ignominiously from its former colony Vietnam, humiliated by the failure of the Anglo-French attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956 and paralysed by a revolving door system of government, matters came to a head when the French army seized power in Algeria in May 1958 in an attempt to stop Algerian independence.
The leaders of the coup called for Charles de Gaulle to return to power and on 1 June 1958 he was made prime minister with emergency powers. In November his proposals for a new constitution were passed and a new, fifth, republic was proclaimed. In a country that had flirted with the possibility of civil war, de Gaulle needed symbols of national unity and international prestige to legitimise his regime. He called for La France qui gagne (‘The France that wins’) and his new government put sport at the centre of French life. ‘The best [youths] must be taken in hand to prove the continuity of French vigour and its rebirth in international competition,’ he wrote in 1960.8
There was no sport better placed than rugby union to fulfil this national role. Rugby league had no diplomatic weight and French soccer was not a power in world football. And, as luck would have it, two days after de Gaulle had become president of the new French republic on 8 January 1959, France defeated Scotland in the first match of the campaign that took the Five Nations title across the Channel as the sole property of the French for the first time.
The championship was shared with England the following year, thanks to a 3-3 draw with the English in Paris, but in 1961 and 1962 the title was won outright yet again. As de Gaulle’s quest to restore France’s status on the world stage continued – in 1960 it became the fourth nuclear power when it exploded an atomic bomb in the Sahara, the same year that French gross domestic product overtook that of Britain for the first time – rugby became the sporting symbol of French success.
The game was boosted by the rise of television. French television had first broadcast international matches in 1955 and the annual cycle of the Five Nations became a regular focus for viewers to convert their homes into 80-minute citadels of Gallic patriotic fervour. French technological expertise also meant that the national side’s 1961 tour to New Zealand was broadcast live on French television via satellite, the first time ever for a rugby tour, although a 3-0 whitewash in the Test series was perhaps not the best way to showcase the new technology.
As the popularity of rugby reached new heights, stars such as Guy Boniface became celebrities. Boniface was as likely to appear in Paris Match, the weekly colour magazine that combined news, celebrities and lifestyles, as he was in L’Equipe. President de Gaulle allegedly did not allow cabinet meetings to be held if they clashed with Five Nations matches. When France won the championship in 1967, the captain of the side Christian Darrouy sent a telegram to the Elysée Palace declaring ‘Mission Accomplished!’. The game simultaneously represented Gaullist modernity while still symbolising the unchanging vérités of traditional rural France, la France profonde.
Yet, as the controversy surrounding Boniface and the failure to play conservatively in the closing stages of the Welsh match showed, French rugby faced a dilemma. Had its desire for international success led to the abandonment of the philosophy of rugby champagne, open, attacking rugby? Many feared that it had, and with good reason.
The successes of the late 1950s had not been based on flowing back-line moves but, as was pointed out by one of French rugby’s leading journalists, Denis Lalanne, on the scrum. ‘We know where rugby begins and where it must begin all over again. It certainly does not begin in the back row. It begins in the FRONT ROW,’ he explained in his classic account of the triumphant South African tour, The Great Fight of the French Fifteen.9
The historic Five Nations Championship win of 1959 also followed this philosophy to the letter. E. W. Swanton noted of France’s 11-3 win over Wales which clinched the title that ‘William Webb Ellis himself might almost have wondered whether his revolution had been achieved in vain, for there was certainly not a great deal of picking up the ball and running with it.’10
As with most beliefs about national playing styles in sport, French commitment to open rugby had a mythic quality to it. The great Lourdes side of the 1950s was based on strong forward play, as was the success of the national side in the same decade. Clearly the French had a preference for a daring, dashing rugby played through the hands, but so too did almost every rugby nation.
Even England, from whom the French took their scrummaging expertise, believed deep down that the true spirit of the English game was expressed by Ronald Poulton Palmer and David Duckham rather than the aggressive forward play that was the traditional source of English success. Like all narratives about national character – such as America’s belief that it was the land of opportunity or Australia’s vision of itself as the lucky country – views about the national ways of playing rugby tell us more about how nations wished to see themselves than how they actually were. But the French myth helped to anchor rugby in the national culture. The French may not have invented rugby, but they believed that only they knew truly how to play the game.
Yet the simple truth for the French, as much as for anyone else, was that once winning became the imperative, the rules of rugby union meant that every side defaulted to a safety-first approach that, in the words of Lalanne, began in the front row of the scrum. And despite protestations to the contrary, this was a lesson that would not forgotten by French rugbymen.
Thus the 1968 Grand Slam was achieved by a ruthlessly attritional pack driving forward to give the Camberabero brothers the time and space to launch the ball upfield. In the aftermath of the Grand Slam there was no attempt to return to rugby champagne. Instead, the forward-dominated, territorial game was refined and perfected. It became the style that made France the only challenger to Welsh superiority in the Five Nations in the 1970s and the most successful northern hemisphere nation of the 1980s.
It also dominated French domestic rugby, most notably through the stranglehold that AS Béziers maintained on the championship in the 1970s and early 1980s. Playing the same powerful forward game, they carried off the Bouclier ten times in 14 seasons from 1970. In some ways, this functional, almost technocratic, style reflected the conservatism of French society in the aftermath of May 1968. De Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, appointed the former rugby union international Jacques Chaban-Delmas as his prime minister, and the game was seen as a unifying force in a society that had been split from top to bottom by les événements of 1968.
In 1977 the essence of that utilitarian style was refined to it purest, when a second Grand Slam was achieved by a French side that comprised the same 15 players in each of the four matches and which did not concede a single try. Its star was the blond, brave and charismatic flanker Jean-Pierre Rives, who seemed to embody the suppressed spirit of French rugby.
But as valuable as Rives was, and he became national captain in 1978, the field marshal of the side was le petit caporal, the scrum-half Jacques Fouroux, a man whose similarity to Napoleon extended beyond his nickname to both his diminutive height and his limitless ego. He was appointed national coach in 1981 and quickly established total control of the side, basing his tactics on ruthless forward play and attritional territorial advantage. His strategy met with complete success. He carried off a Grand Slam in his first season in charge, another in 1987, won an outright Five Nations Championship in 1989 and shared it on three more occasions. In his ten years of generalship, he lost just ten Five Nations matches.
He was much less successful against Australia and New Zealand, recording just a single win against the All Blacks, but his regime is perhaps best, if uncharacteristically, remembered for the inaugural 1987 rugby union World Cup. After an opening draw with Scotland, Fouroux’s men played sparkling rugby to reach the semi-final, where they played the joint hosts Australia.
In one of the greatest ever matches, the Wallabies held the lead for most of the match but the French, like a marathon runner following a pacemaker, refused to let them out of their sight. With minutes remaining on the clock, Didier Camberabero landed a penalty to level the scores at 24-24. Extra-time loomed. But then, from an Australian line-out deep in French territory, the Wallabies were harried off the ball. It was inelegantly passed out wide by full-back Serge Blanco and hoofed downfield by Patrice Lagisquet.
Everyone knew that this was France’s last throw of the dice. The ball then moved through 11 pairs of French hands, first to the right and then finally to the left where Blanco suddenly appeared to finish off the move he had started in his own half and score in the corner. Camberabero converted to make it 30-24.
There was just time for the kick-off. The ball was caught by the French and fed back to Franck Mesnel who booted it into touch, whereupon the referee blew for no-side. Against all expectations, France would meet the All Blacks in the World Cup final.
The two sides were to meet at a time when France–New Zealand relations were at the lowest point they had ever been. In 1985 French secret service agents had sunk the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour to stop its protests against France’s testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Just as French foreign policy towards Britain could be contained in a single Five Nations match, now its interests in the Pacific were encapsulated in a World Cup final.
But history took its revenge on Fouroux and the All Blacks snuffed out France by playing the way of the Little Corporal: a tight, controlled forward game dominated by the positional and goal kicking of Kiwi fly-half Grant Fox. In a match that was as dour as the semi-final had been exciting, the All Blacks took the World Cup by 29-9.
The 1987 World Cup marked the beginning of the end for amateurism in rugby union. In France, the process was far less traumatic than it would be for the English-speaking rugby nations. In 1965 Rugby World magazine explained that ‘amateur may be a French word, but in the rugby clubs of France and elsewhere on the continent attitudes are borrowed from professional sport that would make the turf at Twickers bristle’.11
By the mid-1970s the benefits on offer in France were such that players began to make their way across the Channel to play rugby, most notably England lock Nigel Horton who joined Toulouse in 1977 and worked as a bar manager.12 Nor was there now any shame, or discretion, about signing rugby league players, as had happened most notoriously in 1980 and 1981 with league internationals Jean-Marc Bourret and Jean-Marc Gonzalez. The advent of professionalism in August 1995 was the signal to put the French game on a sounder business and financial footing.
The open poaching of two of its star players said much about French rugby league’s fall from grace since the 1950s. Although the national side had reached the final of the 1968 Rugby League World Cup and hosted the 1972 tournament, the game lacked financial and institutional power of the union code and it began to contract. Even Test series wins against Australia in 1968 and 1978 did little to raise its national profile. Lack of television coverage and its inability to project an international image for France restricted the appeal of the game to its heartland. And the bitter opposition of the FFR to rugby league continued long after the code had ceased to be a threat to the popularity of rugby union.
In 1981 league finally garnered the national headlines it had wanted, but for all the wrong reasons when the championship final between Villeneuve and Perpignan’s XIII Catalan was abandoned after the referee was unable to stop the fighting between the two teams. The game remained rooted in its traditional localities and fostered its strong sense of injustice and defiance of the status quo, which reflected the position of both the sport and its communities in the South of France.
In 1991, thanks to a determined campaign by its supporters, the sport finally won back the right to call itself rugby à treize, rather than jeu à treize, although reparations for its assets confiscated under Vichy have never been paid. Despite Jacques Fouroux’s short-lived attempt to revivify the game in 1995, it would not be until the present century and the introduction of the Perpignan-based Catalans Dragons into the British Super League that French rugby league would begin to recover the ground it had lost.