Sport to Educate? Sport to Reassure?

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Sport to the Rescue of the Suburbs: Sport to Educate? Sport to Reassure? When Politicians Respond to the Signs of Disturbance of Law and Order a

b

Dominique Bodin & Luc Robène a

Université Européenne de Bretagne (Rennes 2), Rennes 35000, France b

Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux 33000, France Published online: 10 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Dominique Bodin & Luc Robène (2014): Sport to the Rescue of the Suburbs: Sport to Educate? Sport to Reassure? When Politicians Respond to the Signs of Disturbance of Law and Order, The International Journal of the History of Sport To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2014.949689

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The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2014.949689

Sport to the Rescue of the Suburbs: Sport to Educate? Sport to Reassure? When Politicians Respond to the Signs of Disturbance of Law and Order Dominique Bodina* and Luc Robe`neb


a Universite´ Europeénne de Bretagne (Rennes 2), Rennes 35000, France; bUniversite´ de Bordeaux, Bordeaux 33000, France

Since the beginning of the 1980s, sport has appeared to be the last recourse against the worsening of living conditions, lack of job security and the ghettoisation of certain boroughs that stand out mostly because of continuing urban riots and juvenile violence. All of this is continually exaggerated by the media and politicians in their continual desire to dramatise and exaggerate. Certain sub-issues immediately emerge: what are the theoretical or ideological foundations on which this concept of making sport a lever for preventive policies is based? And what sport are we talking about? Is it the physical activities and sport (PAS) practised in the schools and institutes, civil sport or sport in the streets? Why do young people increasingly abandon civil/federated sport to practise ‘adventure sports’ or selforganised sports? Can self-organised sports and, more precisely, sport played outside the tower blocks favour the ‘self-control of impulses’? And if they can, under what conditions can they favour socialisation and contribute to preventing vandalism or violent acts? If it must be admitted that the links between sport and education, sport and prevention, sport and insertion, etc., are considered to be self-evident, they are rarely analysed or questioned. Keywords: Elias; civilising process; suburbs; education; sport policies

Since the beginning of the 1980s, sport has appeared to be the last recourse against the worsening of living conditions, lack of job security and the ghettoisation of certain boroughs that stand out mostly because of continuing urban riots and juvenile violence. All of this is continually exaggerated by the media and politicians in their continual desire to dramatise, and exaggerate. Ignoring this overuse of the phenomenon, it must be admitted that if riots have erupted in certain social housing projects, if violence is evident and if certain boroughs resemble no-go areas, it is still not possible to sum up the life in these difficult boroughs, as an area on the sidelines, a sort of no man’s land of modern times. The equation is simple, not to say simplistic, making the popular boroughs the preferred location for dangerous youths who have to be re-educated, thus reactivating the idea of ‘working class, dangerous class’.1 But perhaps one should in fact say ‘unemployed class, dangerous class’ due to the association of soaring unemployment, the absence of prospects of integration through work and the despair of the young people who feel rejected. Again, this is a simplistic equation making the young people, and more especially those in sensitive housing projects, a social category which is necessarily interested in sport; unless this just simply shows the demise of the educational, cultural and social policies which have been favoured until now.

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] q 2014 Taylor & Francis


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D. Bodin and L. Robe`ne

So, sport is coming to the rescue of the suburbs, which will undoubtedly calm, necessarily pacify and inevitably normalise these young people who frighten us and haunt the areas around the housing estates.2 Sport is thus supposed to support the policy of ‘surveil and punish’ by offering social time and space presented as a fun activity and responding to the logic of ‘surveil and run’, simultaneously a place and a time for learning ‘good manners’ and a new ‘modern watchtower’.3 Jacqueline de Romilly did not hesitate at the end of one of her books to state that classical Greece had invented the universal principle of refereeing, leagues and federations, to better fight against the violence which existed in the state and was endemic in human societies, thus insisting on the eminently educational role of these norms and the organisations which impose them. Thus, reinforcing the idea, if it were necessary, that sport in its institutionalised dimension could be a response, not to say the adequate response, to the explosion of violence in our societies.4 The topic discussed here will be more particularly the study of the rationale for this policy of ‘sportification’ of the housing projects, knowingly eluding the other initiatives, places, spaces and moments for creating or preserving the social bond, implemented locally and thanks to individual or collective initiatives. It is not a question of negating their suitability, interest or effectiveness but simply of limiting the analysis to the sport angle in order to try to respond to the question of knowing: whether sport can prevent juvenile violence and educate the young people from the housing projects or not, and if it can, how? Certain sub-issues immediately emerge: what are the theoretical or ideological foundations on which this concept of making sport a lever for preventive policies is based? But equally, what sport are we talking about? Is it the PAS practised in the schools and institutes, civil sport or sport in the streets? Why do young people increasingly abandon civil/federated sport to practise ‘adventure sports’ or self-organised sports? Can selforganised sports and, more precisely, sport played outside the tower blocks favour the ‘self-control of impulses’? And if they can, under what conditions can they favour socialisation and contribute to preventing vandalism or violent acts? The Laudatory Assumptions Linked to Sport: When Sport is ‘Good’ It must be admitted that the links between sport and education, sport and prevention, sport and insertion, etc., are considered to be self-evident and are rarely analysed or questioned. Political discourse and collective representations consider what is in fact cultural, to be natural. Sport is not, in essence, either good or bad. Sports practice, at times, confirmed in its positive and cathartic values (pushing one-self to the limit, the sense of effort, of the team, of cooperation, of the exploit, of the social mix, etc.), and at other times vilified because of its negative dimensions (cheating, corruption, doping, violence, nationalism, racism, etc.) cannot naturally make one better or worse. Sport is simply the result of human activity, a sort of game, the representation or reproduction of what society does or does not do.5 Marcel Mauss summarised the nature of sport stating that the facts that he had been led to study ‘are total social facts . . . i.e. that in certain cases they set all society and its institutions in motion . . . All these phenomena are simultaneously legal, economic, religious and even aesthetic or morphological . . . ’.6 They simply question society as they witness the progress or difficulties it encounters. A Slow Social Construction The laudatory representations linked to sport are the result of a slow and progressive social construction, a mixture of the legacy of the morale of the warrior in the Middle Ages, the


The International Journal of the History of Sport

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Coubertin ideal, which is centred on sport education and the Olympic ideal as the universal and almost divine space for purification through sport. There are also, of course, a number of deep-rooted beliefs in the pacifying functions linked to modern sports. First, the medieval legacy. Duby recognised in the modern sports ethic the direct descendant of the knightly ideal or at least that which was revealed in the tournaments and jousts.7 This avoided, a little too readily perhaps, the crimes which these knights in shining armour may have committed elsewhere, away from the ritualised confrontations. It is necessary, however, to narrow the scope, and contrast the tournaments with games for the masses and the territory8 which resembled battles in which everything or almost everything was permitted. The jousts were wisely codified duels,9 opposing two men who were obliged, because of the very formula of the confrontation, to show their courage, brilliance and spectacular performance, because they took place in public, for a public, which had to be conquered or whose colours had to be defended. Jousts were also organised in honour of ladies whose presence, more and more frequently and importantly, greatly contributed to their ritualisation.10 Jusserand indicateds that it was at the turn of the sixteenth century, during the Renaissance, that everything began to be organised, or we should say rationalised, bringing together the arts, architecture, thinking and – what interests us here – physical exercises. Physical exercises were regularized and reasoned but without simplification; on the contrary they were complicated. The ideal sought in everything was a complicated regularity . . . No more disorganized tournaments; the jousts, which will also disappear, are endowed with rules, which are more precise than ever.11

By ‘regulating’ these activities they pacified and forced their adepts to even greater selfcontrol. Thus, activities that were gradually more codified and regulated than ritualised began to dominate, where the protagonists were progressively placed at a distance from one another, imposing a set of rules on their confrontations. For example, the jeu de paume, which spaced the duel or the team competition and put the adversaries at a distance transforming the direct confrontation with the use of rackets, the ball and the net, is a very modern example of this process. The game, initially played in the open and moved indoors from the fourteenth century onwards, took place in a precisely limited terrain, was codified down to the smallest detail including how points were counted and enjoyed a truly golden age in the sixteenth century.12 It is therefore difficult, at this level, to support the theory of Norbert Elias who fixeds the genesis of modern sports from the codification of fox hunting, which reproduced the political organisation of England in the eighteenth century. This was more a fundamental movement in which societal, political and social norms (the ordering of power) intermingled and influenced each other. The maxim ‘nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed’, attributed to Lavoisier, could be completed by ‘everything is conserved and handed down’. Second, the influence of Coubertin’s ideal. Pierre de Coubertin was not the only thinker who motivated the development of modern sports. This fails to do justice to the others, whether the actors in sporting circles, contemporaries of Coubertin, like George de Saint-Clair, Georges Bourdon, then Dr Bellin du Coˆteau, and much later, Maurice Baquet, Robert Me´rand, or the theorists of rational physical education (PE), with De´meny, Swedish gymnastics with Tissie´, the natural method with He´bert, neo-Swedish PE with Seurin, all of whom contributed to constructing from varied influences, ideologies and purposes, physical exercises, PE and, mutatis mutandis, modern sports, whether by integrating certain characteristics of sports or games into the educational process of the young or, on the contrary, by rejecting certain aspects of the development of sports like


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their professional competitive and spectacular dimensions. But the ‘philosophy’ of the Baron was served and augmented by the renovation of the Olympic Games, proposed in 1892, announced in 1894 and implemented in Athens in 1896. This gave him such an aura that his ideas and precepts have been endlessly taken up and disseminated all over the globe, thanks to the extremely powerful ‘political’ though non-governmental machinery of the IOC, its seminars, congresses and its ramifications in all countries, at all levels. Its progressive visibility in sport management matters in a universalist perspective has in effect made it the governing body of world sport. Coubertin’s project was sealed in a work the title of which perfectly summarises its project: Sport Pedagogy: A History of Sport Exercises: The Technique of Sport Exercises: The Moral and Social Action of Sport Exercises. Leaving aside the first part of the book which retraces the history of ‘sport exercises’ from antiquity, this paper will concentrate on the rest of his proposition which is totally directed at the ‘manufacturing’ of a man of moral virtues forged in sport exercises learned and repeated countless times, practised regularly in regulated and controlled activities, with a disinterested aim apart from the technical skill and the feat itself. The main purpose lies in the transfer from this progressively educated and controlled individual into society. The idea is that of a man who through his behaviour, moderation, and abnegation, the efforts he knows how to make and the success he has had in the practice of these exercises should help to build a society that is organised around these same values. The ideas he expresses and defends belong to an era and a vision widely shared by a society that has to be ‘redirected’ towards intellectual, moral and physical values, to quote the title of the work by Spencer,13 or again the theories expounded in the journal L’e´ducation physique directed by Georges He´bert.14 These topics are equally visible in other social spaces like the army,15 the prison colonies at the end of the nineteenth century 16 or even the school.17 Third, it is necessary to consider the pacifying functions attributed to modern sport by Elias and Eric Dunning.18 Following the work of the former on the ‘pacification of customs’19 in western societies, they jointly attribute an essential function to sports: that of contributing to the decrease and controlling of violence. Modern sports become simultaneously a place for the ‘learning of self-control of impulses’, of ‘controlling-decontrolling’,20 but also ‘a space for unbridled emotions which is tolerated’. The proposition is certainly attractive: inspired in Freudian psychoanalysis (individual control of violence by the opposition between impulsive mechanisms and the morale of the ‘Superego’), it offers an operational framework linking individuals (individual controls), interrelated chains (the capacity of the individuals to live and exchange with others) and the construction of society (in which the settling of conflicts through individual and collective violence is replaced progressively by the exercising of a legitimate violence, that of the State, which frames and controls the individuals). However, it needs a great deal of forcing to make it fit into the theory of the ‘civilising process’. Because, if all this is acceptable from a strictly conceptual point of view, it must be admitted that on a historical level the framework of Elias hardly works. On the one hand, Jusserand had already observed the same tendencies in Les sports et jeux d’exercice dans l’ancienne Franc; and on the other, the general theory of Elias is totally insufficient to take into account the dynamic of the decrease in violence in society since the Middle Ages.21 Values Constantly Recycled or Restated These sport analyses and philosophies were taken up and integrated into the policies of sportification which gradually extended to all areas of society, the school,22 the army, the



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prison system and of course the sport institution itself. It was newborn, still immature, but soon relayed by the media and at times organised by some of them, as with the Tour de France.23 The passage from ‘ancient game to sport show’24 does not just mark the hyperpresentation of modern sports in the media and their transformation into something else which is not solely sport. It equally brings into the picture heroes who suffer and, after many sacrifices, triumph victoriously over adversity25 in a cleverly reported dramatisation. The Mens Sana in Corpore Sano thus gave way to Citius Altius Fortius. Man and his body no longer had to be just ‘healthy’, but had to perform. There is something important which is forgotten in these analyses. That is the relationship with work, which also has a relationship with time and leisure, an enormous step forward at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In France, the adoption of the 10-hour day and 6-day week, just before the First World War, greatly transformed society. However, sport, or rather sports, had a rather ambiguous status. They were not simply leisure activities, they were the counterpart of work, a means of compensation and recovery, granted, even cleverly organised, by the industrialists in their interested paternalism. But an additional comment is necessary. These analyses, philosophies and policies of sportification rest on an excessively normative model, totally impregnated by prejudices and moral values.26 What had to be transmitted were particular norms, those of the elite and the well-bred, which had to be imposed on the less privileged below them. These were the values of the elites (controlled technical skill, a sense of effort, self-sacrifice, disinterested practice, fair play, etc.) which were to serve as the basis for education via sport. These laudatory values were thus progressively imposed on collective representations all the more easily because they were reinforced in many ways. First of all, they served as the basis for the Official Instructions27 which guide the work of the PE teachers (later PE and sport teachers). The sports culture which slowly but surely penetrated teaching practices during the twentieth century brought with it the sports ideology which rested on the a priori socialising and educational dimension of sport, at times the support for a morale in action, and at others the support for the controlled emancipation of youth (Official Instructions for 1923, 1938, 1941, 1945, 1959). The shift that occurred in the 1960s, which saw General de Gaulle’s minister Maurice Herzog impose sport as a hegemonic content of PE (Official Instructions for 1962), accentuated these effects. Even more so, L’Essai de doctrine du sport (1965),28 requested by Herzog, the product of a ‘Commission for the doctrine’, chaired from 1962 to 1964 by the former tennis player and former General Commissioner for General Education and Sports under the Vichy government (1940 –1942), Jean Borotra, proposed in a very consensual way all that sports ideology has collected from cliche´s about sport values, automatically making sport the ideal educational practice for all sectors of society in the face of developments in the modern world (school, army, company, clubs, associations, etc.), making sport the ideal practice for channelling the violence of the young.29 The fact that those chosen to direct these considerations came largely from the world of federal sport30 permits us to measure the strength of the representation (Maurice Herzog was a renowned climber, who conquered Annapurna in 1950) and to understand some of the stakes that drove sport into the educational channels of the school field, armed with an ideology and belief which were strong on the idealised values of sport, fair play and finally of the ideal education which sport represented for the young. The Official Instructions for 1967, permeated by the cultural influences of the FSGT (Labour Federation of Sport and Gymnastics) movement which included Me´rand, the


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ideological heir of Baquet, took up this discourse, set sport up as a ‘phenomenon of civilization’, praising the educational virtues of physical and sport activities, while instilling other related values such as the necessity and the morality of ‘sustained effort’. The Official Instructions for 1998 responded 30 years later to the sport which was capable of putting things in order, controlling the violence of the young (already underlined in the Essay on the doctrine of sport in 1965). It also advocated the virtues of physical and sport activities in the framework of the PE class, which had become not only the place where the young express their violence but also the place where they learn to control it through sport (effects of sport rules, of the cooperation and the construction of a common culture, etc.).31 The ‘values’ of sport, an educational foundation and lever par excellence, were imposed on the school and on the children who, in turn, would become parents and would pass on this discourse and these beliefs. They would infiltrate a number of social worlds. They would frame the rehabilitation of prisoners in the form of corporal punishment,32 and would become a means of preventing the particularly high premature ageing and mortality in the prison population33 before evolving towards a more occupational approach aimed at improving their re-education and their re-insertion into society. These values would be exalted by the increasingly numerous media, which took hold of sports to glorify their exploits, efforts and successes at the heart of modern western societies which favoured, during the Glorious Thirty Years,34 the cult of performance and the singling out of individuals.35 They would also, in addition, be highlighted by the important international institutions during the second half of the twentieth century, whether it be the United Nations organization, the European Union or the Council of Europe. All of these bodies would defend and praise, each in their own sphere of influence, sport for all, the benefits of regularly practising sport, sport at the service of developing peace or, even more recently, sport as a means of developing intercultural dialogue. The recourse to ‘sport’ is permanent when social or societal problems emerge. The education of the elites, the education of the masses, the re-education of the bodies and minds to rehabilitate the nation, the educational policies of Vichy – there is no scarcity of examples to remind us of the use made of ‘sport’ in troubled times. However, the educational assumptions linked to sporting practice are not based on anything. The laudatory values are greatly praised to the detriment of the reality of sport.36 The school of sociology, which is critical of sport,37 has often recalled this, indicating that sport was also the theatre of many deviations and carriers of internal and external political functions. The Emergence of Juvenile Violence in France: When Sport, Which is ‘Naturally Good’, Can and Should Occupy and Educate This did not prevent sport being sought as a response to the juvenile violence of the 1980s in France. Without prior thought, without assessment beforehand of the merits of this response, nor of course afterwards of the benefits obtained, sport would nevertheless become a sort of ‘antiviolence panacea’,38 the miracle remedy charged at first with curing, and then with perhaps preventing, the evils which translated into riots in numerous housing projects. The Appearance in the Media of Juvenile Violence Taken as a Starting Point It was in 1979 that the urban riots in the borough of Grappinie`re in Vaulx-en-Velin in the suburb of Lyon made their appearance in the media. Some young people fought with the



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police but these were not the first incidents. Others had preceded them over the previous 10 years, very often limited to street racing or setting cars on fire in Vaulx-en-Velin and Villeurbanne. But these, more violent, were motivated by the death of a young man who the police had come to question. The images and commentaries multiplied in the media. In the eyes of the public, the housing projects were becoming ‘sensitive’, the boroughs ‘difficult’, and the suburbs ‘problematic’. The issue is not so much the violence itself but the fact that it is widely presented in the media is visible to a much larger number, and the fact that young people are capable of getting together and confronting the police. In short, they are a concern because they are disturbing ‘public law and order’.39 A long series of urban riots has continued until today, riots which are impossible to cite in their totality because there have been so many. Towns and boroughs which were almost unheard of were in the news because of the troubles: the Minguettes estate in Veńissieux, the Mas du Taureau borough in Vaulx-en-Velin, Mantes-la-Jolie, Sartrouville, the Tartereˆts estate in Corbeil, until 2005 when they spread to a large part of France, just to cite a few examples. From 1994 to 1999, the Tartereˆts estate had scuffles almost every week. In Nanterre (1995), Chaˆteauroux (1996), Lyon (1997), Toulouse (1998), Vauvert (1999), Lille (2000), Metz (2001), Evreux (2002), Avignon (2003), Bobigny (2004), the incidents follow one after another. As if a riot culture had been transmitted, like a virus and had taken hold.40

These riots, however, do not have the same origin, or even the same purposes. They show evidence first of all of the social and economic transformation of these boroughs which have progressively gone from being popular housing areas in the 1950s/1960s to places where all the evils of society are concentrated.41 They have their origin in trigger events, which served as catalysts for the violence which erupted when social injustice was seen to accompany the progressive ghettoisation of these boroughs. On the one hand, they served as ‘cocoons’, in the comfort and protection of being with one’s own kind, but also like prisons because living on an estate acts as a social marker preventing the inhabitants from finding a status and a place outside them.42 They express the categorical refusal of a planned future. They are simply the reflection of the exclusion and marginalisation suffered by a part of the population, which the young, through defiance, rancour, provocation, anger, fun, the building of their identity or just simply a fear of tomorrow, refute and refuse.43 This urban violence shows evidence above all of the social violence experienced.44 It is closely and deeply linked to the social gap, to the growing precariousness of finding a job, to the absence of a future, which is perceived and internalised, and to the different forms of discrimination in hiring and denial of the existence of a whole section of the population.45 When the first urban riots erupted, the media, the politicians and public opinion were probably suffering from ‘collective amnesia’46: violence by the young is everything except new,47 the era of the Apaches 48 and the Blousons noirs,49 or even the problems related to the integration of Polish or Italian immigrants were ignored or more simply forgotten. A Quickly Found But Scarcely Analysed Solution: ‘Quick, Let’s Educate the “Delinquents” [“Sauvageons” “Wildlings” in the Original] with Sport’! The response is sport. Sport is going to educate, re-educate and occupy the young and, thus prevent their misbehaviour. What could be more normal? They are young, the sports culture is more or less omnipresent in society, the young are the biggest ‘consumers’ of sport, sport is a vehicle for values the solution seems as obvious as it is easy. Here, all


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together we have the ‘naturalisation’ of sport and, simultaneously, the naturalisation of the ‘delinquents’ who need to be pacified. At the outset, the question of the violence of the young is avoided, reduced to a simple problem of idleness; of young people who occupied by this activity that is so ‘naturally’ educational will learn respect for others and for the rules and will thus integrate a new ethos, transferable to other social moments and spaces, making them ‘good and honest’ citizens. It is not a matter of criticising these policies promoted by the public authorities,50 otherwise admirable, which appeared, and always appear, to be necessary. But one should consider that this is not in any case a matter of prevention, because to prevent is to concern oneself beforehand, rather than just constitute a retroactive effort in the face of manifestations of social disorganisation. These policies were put into place with no prior considerations, often with no account taken of the expectations and needs of the young people in the boroughs, and without knowing whether or not they have other interests, whether they all love sport and, more simply, denying any value to other types of initiatives. This appeal to sport as a calming measure reminds us of a return to the old topic of the dangerous classes, mixed with the topic of the wild boy.51 The topic of the wildness, or the running wild of the suburbs, is frequent and recurrent, as shown in the introduction to an article in the Magazine Le Point which appeared in 1993: . . . the spiral of insecurity – delinquency with a background of cultural and racial tensions gnaws away at the suburbs. Such a deep and serious phenomenon that the whole balance of the country is at risk: it manufactures violent young people, who although still marginalized, are enough to constitute an element of social destabilization.

It is really against this ideological background that the stigmatisation of the ‘delinquents’ must be understood; but also the appeal of the normative aspects of sports practice, considered necessary to save the day. The change of direction has been drastic. In a few years, sport has changed its image, not to say its social function. The passion for sport also reveals the demise of the dominant sociocultural doxa which had prevailed until then and which explains, although probably only in part, the renewed interest of social operators and workers for the sport activities which they had until then looked down upon and considered at best a mediocre occupation and at worst a space for the recruitment of the young.52 From ‘a culturally lower status object’ par excellence,53 sport has metamorphosed into a miracle cure. This is probably the source of the disillusionment not only with what is called ‘metropolitan policy’, but also with specialised prevention. The belief in the virtues of sport as an antidote to violence is simply overestimated. We must make a clean sweep and eliminate the mirages. Not only does ‘contemporary sport at times not pacify, but rather it increases violence, violence against others, violence against oneself, symbolic violence or real violence’.54 Roche´, under the provocative title, Plus de sport, plus de de´linquance chez les jeunes [No more sport, no more youth violence],55 summarises the survey carried out in two French cities (Grenoble and Saint Etienne) and raises a paradox, or at least an ambiguity: sport, far from pacifying the young people in the suburbs, can maintain opposition and rivalry. He remarks that in these two places, the young boys who practise sport the most are the ones who are the most delinquent. Thus, we come back to the essential point: it is not in the nature of sport to pacify and, if sport can contribute to doing so, it cannot be done exclusively by supplying sports facilities. In fact, the policies implemented can be divided into two categories, which are fundamentally and philosophically different: those that emanate from the State and those that are promoted by local groups.56 The political context and the passing of decentralisation laws favour the development of local initiatives.57



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The former, which arise from State interventionism, try to bring ready-made solutions to the locally elected authorities. The latter welcome them with open arms when they are accompanied by some subsidies. The deviations at this level have been numerous, with certain towns seeing this financing as an opportunity to increase their budgets and forgetting, at least for a time, the interest of the users themselves.58 There were many initiatives. They can be considered in parallel with the establishment of the National Commission for the Social Development of the Boroughs59 and the Priority Education Areas.60 Sport has since then been perceived as a fully integrated tool and a valuable element of social policies.61 Thus, followed the anti-summer operations,62 implemented in 1982 and which would become the Summer Prevention Operation (OPE) in 1985, the construction of sport facilities (including football pitches and/or basketball courts) which would become Agorespaces (multi-sport facilities) and then, city stades, the tickets jeunes, [cut-rate tickets for young people] permitting the partial financing of a sport license, the CRS63 and the police becoming sport monitors in the housing projects or during the summer outings, and very many others. The latter, locally based, often refusing the means granted by the State to concentrate on solutions, negotiated locally among the young people, association movements and representatives of local groups. Locally, the question was not put in terms of occupying the time of young people. Local actors desired above all to implement preventive actions and via the insertion of sports programmes.64 Moreover, these actions were considered in terms of the social composition of the town, the boroughs and the housing projects in order to try to adapt the best response according to not only the public, their expectations and the problems but also the material, human and financial means at their disposal.65 The proposals formulated at Trappes are exemplary in this regard. The action taken in the 1990s responded, as far as was possible, to the needs and expectations of the different actors and not to a simple recycling of the means granted by the State. The purpose was to serve humankind and the actions taken were concerted and negotiated. If the aim was educational, it was also a question of making those involved responsible and integrating them into the discussion about the projects.66 In saying this, there is no intention to signal the suitability or superiority of the latter over the former. Each one was put into effect and, above all, was intended to respond to a social problem which, although not totally new, needed to be taken into consideration, having often been avoided – at least by the public authorities. Whatever the approach, the aim was threefold. It was a question simultaneously of occupying the young people who posed (or could pose) a problem, of educating them via sport and lastly of preventing the riots which they caused and, thus constructing a defence against their violence. In this way, the educational function was vigorously and abruptly reaffirmed, and the practice of sport implanted, almost by force, in the housing projects and surrounding areas and the education of the young people suspected of ‘posing a problem’ was accomplished by physical and sporting activities.67 But has not the role of sport been overestimated? Can sport prevent juvenile violence? Is that its role? Should not the nature of the sports implemented have been considered? When the Role of Sport, Which is ‘Naturally Good’, and Which Should Occupy and Educate These Young People Who are Posing a ‘Problem’, is Completely Overestimated This has been said a thousand times and restated in many ways: the laudatory functions of sport are completely overestimated and arbitrary. Not that practising sport cannot have an

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effect on individuals but that this would be to consider as natural what in reality emerges from the implementation and the modalities practiced.68 This response, of sport, taken with the urgency imposed by the media ignores three important questions: that of the violence against which society wants to forearm itself; that of discovering which sports are charged with educating and which are the most appropriate for this calling; and quite simply, that of policies of positive discrimination.


Educating via Sport to Prevent Violence, But What Type of Violence? If the starting point of the policies of sportification was the riots in the housing projects, especially those of Vaulx-en-Velin in 1981, there has never been a precise analysis of these crises. It is the concentration, the visibility and the violence of these troubles which pose problems and which sport, with a wave of its magic wand, is charged with resolving with the urgency imposed by the media. The violence has, however, a dual character of objectivity and subjectivity69 which should have been studied and taken into account. The riots are first of all the result of social and urban segregation catalysed by trigger events,70 which made the injustice, experienced and resented, even more unbearable.71 Therefore, how can one believe that the practising of sport can resolve the iniquities suffered? The myth of the sporting hero cannot be sufficient. Neither can that of social integration via sport. That of a ‘Black, White and Brown’ France, united as it was the day after the World Football Cup victory in 1998 does not outlive the euphoria. Sport simply cannot resolve the evils of society by itself. It is first of all the values of this society, defended by their parents and in which these young people no longer recognise themselves, which they reject with violence. Not only for those who are the ‘products’ of immigration, but also for many young working-class people, the family discourse of integration and moving up the social ladder through work and school have collapsed with soaring unemployment. When they were children, they cherished the hope of a better life and were the instruments of social retaliation, or at least of a possible future. They have, through their experience at school and the ordeals of their elders, accepted that nothing will change.72 This marks the disintegration and the end of the industrial society and jeopardises the republican model of integration. Their fathers have lost their authority since it is no longer the income from their work, which permits the family to live, (survive) but the family allowances.73 This violence is not just the expression of injustice, but equally, a way for those who have been excluded to transform inequality into success, exclusion into social recognition, iniquity into vindication, trying in this way to reverse the stigmata.74 It thus acquires a political status: that of the class struggle, for which the widely broadcast riots are a metaphor. This violence also reveals the construction of masculine identities. The rioters are young. They are mostly between 12 and 18 years old. Even if it is difficult to retain the affirmation widely tainted with evolutionism, of Elias and Dunning, who, in their study of the hooligans, state that: because it is difficult for them to find a meaning, a status and gratification and to construct satisfying identities in the spheres of school and work, the men from the ‘hard’ core of the working class adopt particular forms of behaviour: physical intimidation, fighting, excessive alcohol consumption, sexual relations based on the exploitation of the other.75

It is necessary therefore to recognise that the violence corresponds to a type of socialisation. It helps to construct the collective identity of groups of young people (being a crowd, being strong and being able to confront the forces of law and order, etc.) as well as permitting every individual to construct a threefold individual identity76:


11


(i) assigning value (I am capable of), (ii) valued (in the eyes of others), and (iii) judged by others (attainment of recognition and a status). Violence becomes a symbolic capital which is cleverly constructed and maintained.77 It is a social game like the others which further permits these young people to construct all the recognition that is denied to them elsewhere. Verbal jousting, brawls and fights are part of the system of honour and reputation catalysed by the publicity they attract.78 The riots of 2005 therefore spread through imitation and competition. Each group, housing project and borough tried to ‘outdo’ the others. These first reasons should be juxtaposed with the emergence of gangs. If they have been in existence for a long time (numerous works have been devoted to this topic),79 they multiplied in the middle 1980s. Marwan Mohammed recalls the difficulty in defining and circumscribing them as their composition and organisations were so diverse. In a text which presents the triptych ‘family, school and street’,80 he states that ‘sociability and schooling are linked . . . The gangs form by co-opting those who have had a miserable experience in school’.81 They quickly crystallised around territorial, cultural but also ethnic oppositions. In his autobiographical account, Lamence Madzou shows how exclusion lived daily, suspension from school, the first fights, led him to form a gang which would take part in the territorial wars which set the north of Paris against the south, before, for the majority of them, they became organised into gangs which were more interested in bizness (illegal activities) than confrontations.82 This said, a new dimension of juvenile violence appears. If it is still the cultural, economic and social inequalities that drive the young towards violence, the gangs themselves contribute a new dimension: the territorialisation of the boroughs and housing projects that break with the ‘political vindication’. Not that these two dimensions cannot be linked or act, at times in the same direction, have common interests, or just simply common representatives. But different systems emerged; a new social dynamic appeared. ‘Disturbances’, provocation, fights for territory, vendettas, punitive expeditions and settling of scores thirst for adventure and games which they summarise by ‘doing crazy things’ begin to confuse and complicate the understanding of violence in the housing projects.83 The gangs have taken part and take part in the riots but their role is less spontaneous and more calculated and, beyond the ‘common dimensions of all the rioters, the differences related to the social world of some and others, and notably of the young people in the gangs and the others, subsist in the collective action. In spite of the apparent unity of the riot . . . it turns out that the young people from the gangs are in general more involved’ but equally less consulted! 84

The logic for the actions and aims is complex. How therefore can it be thought that the practise of sport without any other form of reasoning can resolve these disorders? At this stage, three remarks are warranted. First of all, the apparent tranquillity of certain housing projects does not mean that there are no problems or that there is no need to implement cultural, educational and sport policies. Perhaps, there are fewer problems than in other places but this apparent tranquillity may also be because the borough is sliding into more criminal activities that are more organised and where riots and disorders are undesirable. Next, the question of the lumping together of the young people into one apparently criminalised category. All of them are not engaged in violence. Those who become involved in rioting often only represent a small proportion of the demonstrators. So to what public should the implemented prevention policies be addressed? Can we simply use the same policies? The answer is obviously no. Finally, there is the question of the housing projects and the boroughs. The riots put them at centre stage. The young are

12



singled out. A simplistic equation is written: suburbs-boroughs-housing projects-young people-violence-danger, avoiding the fact that many initiatives exist, that these boroughs also experience a social life and intense solidarity, that the riots are only one-off and that the media exaggerate and distort the viewpoint, and thus the facts. Educating through Sport to Prevent Violence, Perhaps, But Which Sports? Under What Conditions? For Which Public? By proposing ‘sport’ as an ‘immediate antidote to violence in the housing projects’, the absence of reasoning was flagrant. The sport in question was mainly self-organised. The young people are violent, they haunt the ground-level shops, they have nothing to do: let’s give them an occupation (the possibility of practising sport activities), open spaces (where they can meet when they want to), sport facilities near their homes (facilities built in the housing projects next to the tower blocks), made up essentially of basketball courts and football pitches (two ‘carrier’ sports, which are always in the media, in which the young people are supposed to recognise themselves as they are vaunted as ‘integrating’ sports), self-organised activities (young people are increasingly interested in activities outside the institutional framework), activities which are in fact free (the inhabitants of the boroughs are poor). In short, these are the assumptions and prejudices that have directed the measures. The other actions (Sports Tickets and Operation anti-hot summers) correspond more to a fine sprinkling of measures rather than activities rooted in the boroughs. While the majority of programmes and financing came from the State at the beginning of the 1980s, at no time did the question posed consider if it were possible with the state structures and the services of the State to implement a set of concerted and coherent actions among the Ministries of National Education, that of Sports85 and the local groups? Would it not have been coherent to develop school sports more, at practically no cost, with existing structures, something which would have meant the reinforcing at the same time, and in a fun way, of the link among the schools, the young and the boroughs? How could they have implemented the integration of the young people into the traditional sport associations? How could they have promoted the creation of new associations, if needed, to correspond perhaps more closely to the aspirations of the young? Should they have built sports facilities or made educators and monitors available in the different areas? Here, we have a set of topics that were never discussed, except locally, and questions which were never addressed. At no point, either were the local needs or peculiarities studied. The political concept of the era was based mostly, in spite of the contemporary process of decentralisation, on Parisian Jacobinism: in essence ‘good advice and subsidies’ for the local authorities. The financing of sports facilities was not only a laudable effort obviously, but also one which denied the inhabitants of the boroughs, and more especially the young people, any opportunity to co-consider and co-construct the policies and means. The ‘ready-made’ solutions that were implemented contradict the very principle of social integration, refuting, in fact, any idea of concerted input or negotiation for the inhabitants, and especially the young people. It is easy to understand why many facilities built in the boroughs have either been abandoned or have deteriorated, while those chosen by consensus were used and maintained. At no point was consideration given to the principle of ‘positive discrimination’. In the middle 1980s, this was ‘in the air’. But the policies of positive discrimination were aimed specifically at those who posed a problem, not at all young people. Finally, it was better to be a troublemaker and violent rather than calm and pacific. Sports policies probably had no



13

other objective than that of trying to preserve social peace in the boroughs. At no time were they supposed to help to solve social problems. El Houlali El Houssaı¨ne, criticising these policies, implanted with no prior thought, talk about ‘ethnic social’ and ‘couscous pedagogy’, reproaching them for the fact that they always proposed the same activities, in the familiar setting; that of the housing project, in a milieu of people of the same kind, which is simultaneously protective, discriminating and self-exclusive.86 The political, social and media points of view finally construct ways of ethnicising violence. There should have a corresponding ethnicising policy for sports practices. It is not so much sports activity that is being questioned but the ways in which this miraculous potion is administered to those assumed to be socially maladapted, that is the young people in the housing projects, especially the choice of activities, or at the very least, the ‘lack of choice’ for the intended beneficiaries. Any policies on integration utilising sport should in any case have encouraged considering integration into society beyond the restricted limits of the housing projects. By proposing activities such as surfing El Houlali El Houssaı¨ne is thinking outside of conventional ideological frameworks. He is proposing an ‘abnormal’ activity (surfing is not traditionally practised by young people from the popular classes), an activity which ‘gets them out of their routine’ (which is out of the ordinary, which cannot be practised with no technical training), an activity which is practised outside the walls of the housing projects (in a natural environment which makes them leave the former, to adopt/get to know/recognise other codes), a demanding activity (which redistributes statuses and requires learning) and many more parameters. For El Houssaine, ‘surfing permits the meeting of two worlds which are unaware of each other around a common heritage: the ocean’.87 It is true that it is not possible to practise surfing everywhere but other activities can replace it. In his preliminary reflection, implementation methods are as important as the choice of the activity, in order to open the door to a sport that really does help social insertion. A study carried out between October 2004 and November 2006, on ‘open’ spaces like the multi-sport centres, Agorespace or City Stade, in the housing projects reputed to be ‘sensitive’ in the towns of Corbeil-Essonnes, Tremblay and Villepinte in Iˆle-de-France, Saint-Brieuc and Rennes in Brittany and, finally Cenon, Lormont, and Floirac in the Aquitaine, has shown the limits of self-organised activities in the context of integration.88 Three observations are evident. First of all, the activities are essentially masculine. The reasons are multiple. The girls are excluded initially for reasons of ‘honour’ (so as not to reveal their bodies). Male domination and sexual segregation are also the reflection of the social functioning of the popular classes, which value masculinity and virility. They also bear witness to the logic of the game being played. The spectacular aspect (dunking for example) confers/implies a special status. The exclusion of girls from the sports fields is reinforced by two complementary factors: the parental framework and the supply in terms of available facilities. Both boys and girls agree in recognising that parental pressure and control are greater for girls than the boys. Then there is the age of the young people involved. The main category is from 12 to 15 years of age. This fact, according to the way of thinking in federative sport, queries the objective of the sport practice. In order to prevent violence, should not younger people be the focus, encouraging their practices and proposing personalised activities that are more in tune with their desires? Free access facilities present numerous advantages for the young people who in fact widely and openly choose this mode of operating. A relationship


14


of domination is exercised between the young (less than 12 years old) and the not so young. The aphorism of might makes right reduces the youngest and the weakest to the role of mere spectators. At the other end of the scale, the oldest (over 15 years of age) rarely practise. Does that mean then nothing should be adapted or that for them anything would be too late? Finally, the refusal of alternatives, and at three levels. First of all, the ethnicisation of activities, which constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena, with regard to the ‘sportivation’ of the housing projects. The basketball courts are essentially frequented by the young Blacks, while the football pitches are the territory of the Whites or ‘Greys’ as they call themselves. However, let us not be mistaken. Cultural, religious and spatial differences divide individuals much more than the colour of their skin unites them. The ethnicisation of practice is, however, only the reflection of the social homogeneity of the boroughs. Next, there is the territorialisation of the facilities. The facilities ‘belong’ to a group, a tower block, or a housing project. There is no question of accepting that someone from outside comes in. That would be seen as a provocation that would demand a response. The facilities are covered in graffiti, authenticated with many signs and meanings, which indicate to the other (or outsider) that they should not risk entering. Finally, there is the rejection of federal sport. Remarks like ‘football in a club is for fools’ often hide suffering: a bad experience in a club, the impossibility of the parents to pay for a sport license, fear of being ‘outside’ the housing project, fear of ‘what people will say’ reassurance in the peer group. Sport in the boroughs, as a self-organised practice, only represents an occupation. This is probably not so bad but in no case does it correspond to a policy that has been thought out and aimed at the education and social integration of the young people from the housing projects. Added to the functions arbitrarily attributed to sport are the ways in which it is implemented, which do not favour socialisation and even less the socialisation of all. Conclusion But are not we asking too much of sport? It has been urgently called upon to respond to a problem, which is all the more worrying in that it concerns juvenile riots that are being widely presented in the media. In tackling this question and providing an educational response, the politicians have only played their role of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ organising periodic campaigns that aim to reassure public opinion on their ability to intervene.89 Can sport considered in this way be anything other than a social time like any other? The degradation of certain boroughs is not only a problem of juvenile violence or the ‘decivilisation’ of some of the inhabitants in the housing projects, it is above all the result of social problems and the absence of a global policy on educational, cultural and social affairs. It is also the result of lack of employment and equal opportunities. To think that sport at the door of the tower blocks will solve the evils of society is a total utopia. To go to extremes, what is to stop a young man practising extortion at his high school, stealing scooters, engaging in ‘bizness’ and other illegal activities even while from time to time he might join his mates in the sport facility? However, much of a caricature this seems to be, it is a true image. Sport can only be a means, permitting, to a certain extent, to solve problems of socialisation provided that it is integrated into a more global and above all concerted policy in which all the actors (including the young people) are involved. To think that the violence of the young can be resolved just from the sporting angle is pure utopia and lack of knowledge on the part of those outside them about the places concerned. There is a profound link among the ghettoisation of certain housing



15

projects, the precariousness and fragility of many families, just simply social problems, and juvenile violence, whether it is visible in the street or in the school. The solution can only be global but it can also only come from local experience.90 It is easy to see at this level the difference that exists between the policies of insertion and prevention in France and on the North American continent – notably in Canada. While too often our decision-makers carry out ‘periodic campaigns’ by installing policies centred upon the provision of sports facilities, given the urgency provoked by the media on the problems that emerge. This is in order that they might have a clear conscience, send a signal to appease the general public, or just simply with an electoral aim. Others try to adapt a response to the problems they have encountered by regularly evaluating their actions to better adjust them and thus respond to local expectations. What we are discussing in these few lines, is not only the question of participative management but simply of management by the citizens of public actions which should be implemented in the combined interest of the different actors and thus reinforce the social bond in the housing projects,91 with the condition of being willing to take advantage of the wealth of these boroughs, of what exists, instead of rejecting it.92

Notes on Contributors Dominique Bodin is a Professor at the Universite´ Europeénne de Bretagne (Rennes 2), Director of the Laboratory ‘Violences Identite´s Politiques et Sports’ (http://www.sites.univ-rennes2.fr/ violences-identites-politiques-sports/) and of the International Federative Research Structure ‘Violences Pre´vention des Violences’ (http://violencesetpreventiondesviolences.org/index.php/fr/); his works deal with the relations linking sport and violence through two main prisms sport as a place for the dramatisation of violence and sport as a way to control this violence. Luc Robe`ne is a Professor at the Universite´ de Bordeaux and a member of the Laboratory ‘Culture, e´ducation, socie´te´’ (Culture, education and society). His works deal with the history of cultural practices through three main axes: the history of aeronautics, the history of the body, the knowledge and techniques of the body, including the history of violence, and the history of popular music.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses a` Paris pendant la premie`re moitie´ du xixe sie`cle. Bodin and Debarbieux, “Le sport, l’exclusion, la violence”; Bonnemaison, Face a` la de´linquance, pre´vention, re´pression, solidarite´. Courtine, “La ‘sportification’ peńitentiaire, de la ‘roue´’ ou ‘ballon’ . . . prisonnier,” 239. Franc ois Courtine, analysing the emergence of sport in prison, shows the primary role of surveillance and assessment of the detainees in the closed environment of the prison before the eventual occupational functions it can offer or its use as an outlet. De Romilly, La Gre`ce antique contre la violence. Collectif, In honorem Bernard Jeu. ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’ećhange dans les socie´te´s archaı¨ques’, see Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, 274. Duby, Guillaume le Marećhal. Taking for our use, one of the definitions of sport contained in: Jeu, Le sport, l’e´motion, l’espace. De Pluvinel, L’instruction du Roy en l’exercice de monter a` cheval, par Messire Antoine de Pluvinel, son soubs gouverneur-conseiller, en son Conseil d’Estat, Chambellan ordinaire et son escuyer principal. Jusserand, Les sports et jeux d’exercice dans l’ancienne France, 41, and passim. Ibid., 329.

16 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.


21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

D. Bodin and L. Robe`ne Mehl, Les jeux au royaume de France du XIII e`me au XVI e`me sie`cle; Bonhomme, De la paume au tennis. Spencer, De l’e´ducation intellectuelle, morale et physique. This in fact is a translation and compilation in the form of a work of four articles that appeared in different journals between 1849 and 1859. Like ‘mental hygiene’, ‘physical education for the masses’, ‘body hygiene for the worker’, etc. in L’e´ducation Physique, (1926). Ministry of War, Projet de re`glement geńe´ral d’e´ducation physique. Gaillac, Les maisons de correction 1830– 1945; Bodin et al., “Le sport en prison entre insertion et paix sociale.” Robe`ne, Bodin, and Heás, “L’e´ducation physique au 20e`me sie`cle.” Elias and Dunning, Sport et civilisation. Elias, La socie´te´ de cour; Elias, La civilisation des mœurs; and Elias, La dynamique de l’occident. A difficult expression to translate but which integrates the notion of self-control and of release of tensions, which may also include what some call the ‘outlet’ function of sports. Mucchielli and Spierenburg, Histoire de l’homicide en Europe; Mucchielli, L’invention de la violence. See on the subject of schools the emergence, the development and the succession of important currents from the end of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century: Collinet, Les grands courants d’e´ducation physique en France. It was in 1903 that the L’Auto journal founded the Tour de France. Vigarello, Du jeu ancien au show sportif. Ibid., 118– 20. Read for example on the official texts related to PE and sports: Gleyse and Rouanet, “Les oxymores moraux de l’e´ducation physique et sportive a` la fin du XIXe et au XXe sie`cles en France dans les textes officiels.” In France, the Official Instructions were to determine the spirit, the objectives, the methods and even the pedagogical processes to implement the ministerial decrees which, with regard to education, fixed the structure and the duration of the teaching. They have a prescriptive character that conditions and guides the work of the teachers. Read: Chobaux, “Un syste`me de normes pe´dagogiques.” Herzog and Borotra, Essai de doctrine du sport. Ibid., 22– 3: ‘(Sport) brings to the child a compensation which neutralizes or channels his natural tendency towards instability, and aggressiveness, if not violence’. Also see Robe`ne, Bodin, and Heás, “L’e´ducation physique au 20e`me sie`cle,” 56. Robe`ne, “Les sportifs gaullistes, 1958 –1981.” Instructions officielles. Classes de troisie`me des colle`ges, 1998. Robe`ne, Bodin, and Heás, “L’e´ducation physique au 20e`me sie`cle.” Bodin et al., “Le sport en prison en France.” It was in 1949 that there was an explicit reference in a note issued by the office for the application of sentences to the need to implement sessions of ‘physical culture’ in order to improve the mental and physical health of the older prisoners. An expression invented by Fourastie´ to describe the period of economic wealth in France after the Second World War: Fourastie´, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la re´volution invisible de 1946 a` 1975. Ehrenberg, Le culte de la performance. Gasparini and Knobe´, “Le salut par le sport?” Brohm, Sociologie politique du sport, or, more recently, Brohm, La tyrannie sportive. Duret, “Le sport comme contre-feu a` la violence des cite´s.” Roche´, La socie´te´ incivile. http://www.liberation.fr/evenement/010164686-trente-ans-de-violences-urbaines (accessed April 3, 2012). Bachmann and Le Guennec, Violences urbaines. Lapeyronnie, Ghetto urbain. Lapeyronnie here reactivates the thesis of Louis Wirth on the Jewish ghetto in the United States of America. See Wirth, “Le Ghetto.” The works on these questions are too numerous to cite them all. Among them, Bachmann and Le Guennec, Autopsie d’une e´meute; Debarbieux, “L’oppression quotidienne”; Roche´, Le frisson de l’e´meute; Mohammed and Mucchielli, Les bandes de jeunes; Kokoreff, Sociologie des e´meutes; and Le Goaziou and Mucchielli, La violences des jeunes en question.

The International Journal of the History of Sport 44. 45.


46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

17

Beaud and Pialoux, Violences urbaines, violence sociale. Guibert and Mergier, Le Descenseur social; Bodin et al., “Le sport comme outil d’insertion et de pre´vention.” Mucchielli, L’invention de la violence, 107, et passim. Ibid, 115. The young thugs in Paris in the Belle-Epoque (around 1900). Monod, Les barjots. Arnaud and Augustin, “L’E´tat et le sport, construction et transformation d’un service public.” Debarbieux, “Le professeur et le sauvageon.” Labbe´, “Le sport, les jeunes et la citoyennete´.” Ehrenberg, Le culte de la performance, 47. Bodin and Debarbieux, “Le sport, l’exclusion, la violence,” 13. Roche´, “Plus de sport, plus de de´linquance chez les jeunes.” Calle`de, Les politiques sportives en France. Law n882 –213 of March 2, 1982, ‘a law related to the rights and freedoms of the communes, departments and regions, http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte¼LEGIT EXT000006068736&dateTexte¼vig (accessed April 7, 2012), complemented by the ‘law related to the distribution of competencies among the communes, departments and regions and the State’, the so-called Defferre Law, Law n883 – 8 of January 7, 1983, http://www.legifrance. gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte¼LEGITEXT000006068819&dateTexte¼vig (accessed April 7, 2012) and the Law n8 83–8 of January 7, 1983 related to the distribution of competencies among the communes, departments and regions and the State which completed the previous law, http:// www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte¼LEGITEXT000006068817&dateTexte¼vig (accessed April 7, 2012). Paquot, “Politiques de la ville.” The commission was created on December 23, 1981. The purpose of the Priority Education Areas was to grant schools supplementary human, material and financial resources to fight against school failure. National Education Circular n8 81 –238 of July 1, 1981, http://dcalin.fr/textoff/zep_1981.html (accessed April 4, 2012). Gasparini and Vieille-Marchiset, Le sport dans les quartiers. This was a case of ‘distancing [the young] from the housing projects, sending them far from the lights of the city, their bad company and their hideous temptations to place (them) under strict surveillance’. Bachmann and Le Guennec, Autopsie d’une e´meute, 362. Compagnies Re´publicaines de Sećurite´: an organ of the French National Police. Charrier and Jourdan, “Pratiques sportives et jeunes en difficulte´.” Charrier, Activite´s physiques et sportives et insertion des jeunes. Philippe, “Mode´lisation d’une politique publique de pre´vention par le sport.” Pociello, “Introduction.” Bodin, Robe`ne, and Heás, Sport and Violence in Europe; Flacoz and Koebel, L’inte´gration par le sport. Wieviorka, Violence en France. Taking up here the thesis of Gurr, Why Men Rebel? Lagrange et al., “E´meutes, se´gre´gation urbaine.ieńation politique.” Sayad, La double absence. Bouamama, Les classes et quartiers populaires. Wieviorka, La diffe´rence, 126, and passim. Elias and Dunning, Sport et civilisation, 355. Heinich, L’e´preuve de la grandeur. Sauvadet, La capital guerrier. Lepoutre, Cœur de banlieue. Citing among others: Robert, Les bandes d’adolescents. Mohammed, La formation des bandes, 406. Ibid., 408. Madzou and Bacque´, J’e´tais un chef de gang. Ibid. Mohammed, La formation des bandes, 384– 5. Whatever its name or ministerial situation throughout these last 30 years. El Houssaı¨ne, “La Planche du salut.”

18 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

D. Bodin and L. Robe`ne Ibid., 137. Bodin et al., “Le sport comme outil d’insertion et de pre´vention.” Becker, Outsiders, 171, et passim. Titz et al., “Re´ponses a` la violence quotidienne dans une socie´te´ de´mocratique.” Bodin, Robe`ne, and Heás, Sport and Violence in Europe. Kokoreff, La force des quartiers.


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