Coller Global France

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Laurent Dubois. Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2010. xx + 329 pp. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25928-7.

Paul A. Silverstein. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 2004. x + 298 pp. $23.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21712-7; $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34451-9.

Reviewed by Ian Coller (La Trobe University, Melbourne)Published on H-Levant (April, 2011)Commissioned by Amy A. Kallander

Global France, Plural France

The word shared in the titles of these two booksis France, but that word can mean many dier-ent things. In Laurent Duboiss recent and highlyreadable book Soccer Empire, France is the mass-merchandised brand ofLes Bleus, the French nationalfootball team. At the same timeFranceis a far morefragmented territorial sovereignty scattered from theCaribbean to the Pacific. This is a France metissee,a product of multiple crossings, both slave and free.The France of Paul Silversteins close participant-observation of Algerians in Paris, is both France andAlgeria at once, perpetuating in underground ways

the coerced and ruptured connections that boundthese territories together for more than a century. Itis also a France of multiple transversal identificationsthat challenge the postcolonial French and Algeriannation-states from within. What these two booksshow, then, is that France must be understood in aplural sense. Too many English-speaking observerswhether neoconservative France-haters or multicul-turalist critics of the republican modelhave falleninto the trap of projecting a unitary vision of France,a France stripped of its messiness, its ambiguities, itscontradictions. These two authorsfollowing on fromseminal works by Tyler Stovall, Gary Wilder, and

othersrepresent a dierent and refreshing trend, onewhich deserves the full attention of all serious stu-dents of contemporary France, colonialism and post-colonial theory.[1]

What these books share is a wholehearted com-mitment to the people who live in this plural France,a determination to tell their individual stories in alltheir complexity, and to build from that base to-ward a wider analysis of French society, its structures,

and challenges. Silverstein approaches his subjectsthrough the medium of everyday life, following therandom individuals encountered in his field work inthe 1990s, applying an ethnographical methodologywith a highly critical and self-reflexive awareness ofthe environment he shared with them. As much anoutsider as those he studied, Silverstein is able to stripaway many of the preconceptions of French and evenof Algerian observers: he does not present this spaceas a problem of integration or of political loyalties,but as a space in its own right, as he aptly frames it,a transpolitical space.

The names that pepper Duboiss story are muchmore glamorous: Zinadine Zidane, Lilian Thuram,Thierry Henry. These are names familiar to anyonewith the remotest interest in football, but Dubois usestheir compelling rags-to-riches stories to illuminate araft of other less prestigious players and teams, alongwith their families, their neighbors, and the historiesfrom which they emerged. Soccer Empire is aboveall the story of the French team, not a sociologicalanalysis of the sport itself. Indeed, in many ways itis an unashamed paean to that team, to its diver-sity, its strength, and its skill. It is a celebration of

the extraordinary moments of possibility that foot-ball seemed to open up in the World Cup of 1998 andagain in 2006, moments that few observers of Francecould aord to ignore.

The triumph of the French soccer team againstBrazil in 1998, on the home turf and in front of a

jubilant crowd, is the only World Cup France hasever won in the eighty-year history of the competi-tion, a triumph sealed by winning the European Cuptwo years later. This victory is the central tableau

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of Duboiss book, and he insists that it must be un-derstood as a key event in modern French history.For the crowds pouring onto the streets, more numer-

ous even than those who welcomed the Liberation of1944, it certainly seemed so. There is little doubtthat this moment brought the diversity of the Frenchpopulation into the spotlight in a way that nothingelse had done before. A few churlish xenophobescomplained that the team was not really French,but Dubois makes a convincing case that the victorychanged many peoples understanding of what thatreal France could be.

Sport can be discomforting to the historian be-cause of the role that pure chance plays in its out-comes. In this instance it seems possible that arandom case of food-poisoning sealed Brazils fate

and allowed the black-blanc-beur (black-white-Arab)French team to win. Would a French loss havechanged the understanding of diversity in the longterm? As historians we try to analyze the processesat work across apparently random events, and Duboiscertainly marshals a vast range of references to con-textualize the responses to that victory. It is impor-tant to recognize, however, that in the case of sport itis precisely the sense of play, of luck, of miracle even,that defines its attraction. In that sense, sport mustinevitably explode from within our best attempts tocontain it within a rational, historical explanation.One of the great strengths of Duboiss book is howfully he gives rein to this other passion, how vividly hebrings to life in his writing the roller coaster emotionsof exhilaration and despondency. That intimacy andinvolvement might seem to place into question its his-toriographical objectivitybut Dubois is very clearwhat kind of a book this is, and it deserves to beunderstood both as a great football book, and as anexperiment in a new kind of histoire engagee.

In Duboiss hands, the story of the French na-tional soccer team is much more than just a canvasfor the great sporting moments of exaltation and de-spair: it opens a space for exploring some of the more

shadowy aspects of French colonial and postcolonialhistory. His early chapters investigate the ambivalentinsertion of sport in the fabric of colonial societyasa safe activity to occupy colonial workers as theirworking hours were gradually reduced, or as the ter-rain for the rising resentments of the colonized, whichwould eventually explode into years of violence andrepression. These conflicts are never black and white,although race and color play a powerful role in theirdevelopment. Between colonizer and colonized are a

panoply of other contradictory figuresthe black colo-nial governor who fought against Vichy; harkis whofought for the French in Algeria; Kanak New Caledo-

nians traumatized by their experience in a Parisianhuman zoo, Algerian Jews playing on Muslim teamsto make up European quotas. Football is a threadthat connects the lives of these people in tangledways, dispelling any sense that there is any simplenational story to be told.

Duboisan eminent historian of the HaitianRevolutionnever succumbs to the temptation to sim-plify these concatenating realities. In giving historicalshape to this diversity, he shows how deeply rootedin French history the ethnic and religious pluralityof the French team of 1998 actually was, with itswhite convert to Islam, its Antillean players of vari-

ous backgrounds, its French Arabs and Berbers andBasques and Africans. One group not represented inthe team, of course, is the other half of the popula-tion: womens sport has never been given the samerecognition as the games of men. But women are nei-ther absent nor passive in this story: they can be for-mative influences, like Thurams charismatic grand-mother; agents of political action, like the youngwoman who led the pitch-invasion during the Algeria-France match of 2001; or international athletes intheir own right, like the track star Marie-Jose Perec.This rich multiplicity is a both an advantage and adisadvantage ofSoccer Empirethe rollicking story al-lows ample space for all these elements to coexist, butthey are never quite pulled together into an overar-ching argument.

Algeria in France provides a more tightly ana-lytical framework: Silverstein is acutely consciousof the powerful genealogy of anthropological knowl-edge about Algeria, and in particular the Kabylehousehold (axxam) which played a crucial role in theethnological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. Silversteinboth challenges and renews these ideas, reconsider-ing Bourdieus structural nostalgiain the context ofpopulations displaced during the Algerian War, and

resituating questions of space and spatializing prac-tice in the urban suburbs of Paris. He emphasizesthe ways in which ethnicity was shaped and even pro-duced by larger historical events, and then maps theseformations of identity back into the everyday lives ofindividuals and groups in France. He shows very ef-fectively how these formations have become as Frenchas they are Algerian, articulating themselves increas-ingly alongside Breton, Catalan, and Basque region-alisms, extending solidarity to other Berberophone

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populations in North Africa, while seeking shelter un-der the transnational umbrella of the European Unionon questions such as human rights.

Such transformations are part of the phenomenonthat Silverstein identifies as transpoliticsan in-creasingly deterritorialized set of claims and contes-tations that no longer take as their ground a sin-gle nation-statein this case France or Algeria. Yetin drawing upon these powerful genealogies for hisanalysis, at times the inherited ethnographical focusseems to inflect his argument away from the wider im-plications of transpolitics. From the title of his doc-toral thesis and earlier publications, it seems that Sil-versteins original fieldwork was devoted to the ques-tion of Berberity rather than to Algeria: and forthis reason all of his subjects were Kabyle (a termfor Tamazight-speaking eastern Algerians, with anindigenous/Berber identification), some of them ac-tivists in enforced exile in France.

Both Dubois and Silverstein make reference toZinedine Zidane, a French citizen born in Marseille ofAlgerian parents, who takes great pride in his identi-fication as a Kabyle. But, as Dubois notes, at othermoments Zidane has spoken of himself as anArabinterms of his wider cultural attachment. This Arabquestion is almost entirely absent from Silversteinsstudy, and with it the majority of Algerians, whetherin Algeria or France, who identify themselves pri-

marily as Arabs. Of course, many Kabyles considerthemselves wholly distinct from any Arab identifi-cation, and reject the Arabizationsometimes ex-tremely violentenforced by the Algerian state. Butto project Algeria in France solely through theprism of Berber nationalism is problematic. Dubois,in contrast, brings a much more volatile and pluralset of identifications in the Antilles to bear on hisdiscussion of these Algerian configurations, and thisexternal gaze allows some of these complexities toappear in ways that Algerian nationalisms, whetherArab or Kabyle, may not.

Despite this limitation, Algeria in France is a crit-ical work in opening up a broader consideration ofthe complex set of identifications running betweenFrance, Algeria, and the wider Arab and Muslimworld. That world today includes large diasporicpopulations across Europe, the Americas, and Aus-tralasia, and new factors such as the independentArab media (Al Jazeera, al-Arabiyya) and the blo-gosphere. Silversteins analysis of transpolitics ismore relevant than ever in regard to the recent wave

of democratic revolutions sweeping across the Arabworld, and in understanding their implications for thefuture of France: his book should be required reading

for addressing these new global conditions.But the real change eected by these revolutions

confronts us with a question. Does sport really of-fer a path to a new politics? Dubois is very clear inpresenting football as a kind of vanguard and modelfor political change, arguing that the mass commu-nion that took place in the streets in 1998, liberat-ing many from the shackles of their own uncertaintyabout their place in French society, should serve as acharter for a dierent way of being French (p. 169).But for others, sport is no more than a distraction,or, worse, a substitute for political change. Silver-stein expresses such doubts in his book, seeing foot-

ball instead as a colonial instrument and an expres-sion of multinational corporate interests. In a 2000article on soccer he argued that the celebratory dis-course of multiculturalism in the wake of the WorldCup victory was itself largely predicated on the activesuppression of certain kinds of cultural and religiousdierence deemed incompatible or dangerous to theFrench nation.[2] Dubois shows that some Frenchfootballersnotably Lilian Thuramhave engaged inpolitical activism, speaking out with great force andclarity, and shaping the debate in important ways.But this highly articulate use of celebrity has notopened the way to increased diversity in the ranks ofgovernment, industry, or the media in France. BothSilverstein and Dubois struggle to see a way forwardout of the trap of tokenism, with varying degrees ofoptimism about the future.

These divergent viewpoints come together againin considering the riots of November 2005, trig-gered by the deaths of two young men in a Paris sub-urb after a chase by police. Those events came toolate to be treated in Silversteins book, but Duboisbuilds in many ways quite closely on Silversteinssubsequent writings on the subject.[3] What bothwriters recognize is that these events provoked an

important act of protest by the inhabitants of thebanlieue against deteriorating urban conditionspoorhousing, unemployment, lack of infrastructurebutalso against their exclusion from the wider Frenchsociety. That exclusion was summed up in the con-temptuous way that Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister ofthe interior, dismissed as racaille (scum) those whobooed his arrival in a Paris housing project, oer-ing to clean them out with a pressure-hose. DespiteDuboiss unequivocal celebration of 1998, he does not

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pull his punches in describing the violence of 2005.Both writers see this three-week uprising as a turningpoint, and as a form of political protest rather than

an eruption of violence as the French media so oftenportrayed it. But six years on from those protests(and their lesser known sequels) it is not clear howmuch change has really taken place: indeed, recentindications suggest a surge in support for the xeno-phobic right as the economic downturn stretches on.

Duboiss book closes with the famous coup deboule that ended Zinadine Zidanes participation inthe World Cup final of 2006, and marked the lastact of his football career. At the heart of thatevent is a questionnot just the unanswerable rid-dle of what the Italian player Marco Materazzi said

to provoke Zidane into headbutting him in the chest,but the question of what political or historical sig-nificance we should attach to such an act. UnlikeThuram, Zidane long shied away from direct polit-ical involvement, preferring to keep his private lifeout of the public eye. But he found himself drawnnonetheless into the highly charged political relation-ships between France, Algeria, and what Silversteincalls Algeria in France, most notably in organiz-ing the friendly match between French and Alge-rian national teams in 2001. Intended to promotereconciliation, the match ended in a pitch-invasionby French Algerians when it became clear that Francewas heading for victory. In the hands of many Frenchcritics, that moment became a confirmation (only amonth after the September 11 attacks on New Yorkand Washington) that French citizens of Arab back-grounds had no intention of integrating into Frenchsociety.

Zidanes 2006 gesture, however, elicited remark-ably dierent responses. While expressing regretabout the incident, many French observers, from

President Chirac down, refused to pronounce judg-ment on the man himself, insisting instead on thenations admiration and respect for Zidane as a great

French player. Does this dierent response to a crit-ical moment of loss and violence suggest a gradualtransformation in the understanding of French iden-tity and the role of diversity? Or is it an extensionof the football exceptionalism that has allowed na-tional fans to embrace individual players while re-

jecting their Arab and black neighbors? In the end,the great virtue of Duboiss book is in accepting thatit is both, and in his vivid picture of his own struggleto comprehend this incident which seemed to bruisehis own belief in the redemptive power of football.What Dubois and Silverstein show, with considerablepanache, is that the historian and the anthropologist

not always in agreement, but in dialogue with oneanothercan engage in the fray itself, not just standon the sidelines taking notes.

Notes

[1]. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Ameri-cans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Mif-flin Press, 1996); Tyler Stovall and Sue Peabody,The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and GaryWilder,The French Imperial Nation-State: Negri-tude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World

Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

See also John Bowen, Can Islam be French? Plural-ism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2010).

[2]. Paul Silverstein, Sporting Faith Islam, Soc-cer, and the French Nation-State, Social Text 18(2000): 42.

[3]. Paul Silverstein and Chantal Tetreault,Postcolonial Urban Apartheid, online athttp://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Silverstein Tetreault/.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Ian Coller. Review of Dubois, Laurent, Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of Franceand Silverstein, Paul A., Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. H-Levant, H-Net Reviews.April, 2011.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32840

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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Coller Global France