Sport in the trenches: the new deal for masculinity in France.

During the First World War, the life of a soldier was not just reduced to the trenches. In daily military life behind the lines, soldiers had recreational activities, some of which were seen as a test of virility, such as visiting brothels, and also, as we want to show in this paper, sport practices. For most of the French citizen-soldiers, who were working class and mainly from the countryside, the contact with allied soldiers has to be understood as a significant step in the social construction of gender. Educated in gymnastics, shooting and military exercises, French infantrymen (Poilus) and civilians saw allied sports and soldier-sportsmen as models of a modern masculinity. In a descriptive study of the development of football in the French army, our article tries to demonstrate firstly, that football learnt in the army by workers and the French rural society extended the influence of sport and its part in the construction of masculinity in France. Secondly, we show that the official recognition of sport in 1917 by the French army led to the definition of a modern French masculinity and to the recognition of the sportsmen-soldier as the model of hegemonic masculinity.

Wartime rugby and football: sports elites, French military teams and international meets during the First World War.

The First World War is traditionally considered in history as a temporary halt for cultural and sporting activities. If the Olympic Games and the Tour de France were actually cancelled, football and rugby were in fact stimulated by the circumstances of war. Indeed, the gathering of allied nations behind the Western Front emerged as the main factor in the development of these two sports. Reading the sporting press and military archives shows that international sporting exchanges were stimulated during the Great War. To be specific, France benefited from the golden opportunity provided by the presence of the masters of the game to strengthen its practices and affirm its status as a sporting nation. Inter-allied sporting exchanges were primarily characterised by informal encounters between military selections. Then, following the recognition of these sports by the military authorities, the number of exchanges increased. At the end of 1917, the official status acquired by sport within the military forces created the conditions for the structuring of the French sporting elite. From that point, we can witness the birth of the first French military rugby and football teams, as they demonstrate, through their good performances during the demobilisation period, the progressive build-up of the international dimension of French sport during the war years.