Moments after the French male football team won the 2018 FIFA World Cup, commentators on TV compared the victory with the birth of their first child and the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, no less. Meanwhile, millions of fans, dressed in the national colours of blue, white and red thronged the streets of all major cities to celebrate in a loud, cheerful and brawling way. It had been 20 years since the French team’s first World Cup victory and an entire generation seemed adamant on upping the ante. By no means do I wish to rain on this parade and must point out that the team not only offers a positive and generous, but also a multi-ethnic face of the country. This in itself is a source of celebration, particularly in the face of racist attacks that members of the team have been facing – both outside the country and within – in various stadia and online. That Kylian Mbappé, a 19-year-old black Frenchman with roots in former French colonies Cameroon and Algeria can be the new national hero, with people of all ages chanting his name and his face projected on the Arc de Triomphe, is a source of satisfaction. However, the mood in France is disturbingly consensual and does not seem to allow any dissenting view of the World Cup and the post-victory celebration. People positing French President Emmanuel Macron turning a blind eye towards human rights abuses in Russia, the host country, and his own drastic and inhumane migration policies at odds with the very composition of the French team are considered kill-joys. Macron has already tried to milk this sporting event to his political advantage, well aware that former President Jacques Chirac attributed his own re-election to the 1998 World Cup victory and that France’s GDP is likely to increase by up to 1 point. He is therefore turning the victory into a large public relations operation. He seeks to project the image of a young, dynamic winner, an image that flatters the French ego to the point of driving his regressive social policies into collective (though only momentarily, one hopes) oblivion.France President Emmanuel Macron embraces Paul Pogba at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, Russia. Credit: Christian Hartmann/ReutersThis suspension of common sense and the use of superlative platitudes about the team’s attainment of immortality in the name of celebration is not the most disturbing aspect of the French victory. Football, like cricket in India, serves as a substitute for war and the vocabulary used to comment on the sport is distinctively martial. Didier Deschamps, the team’s manager, was often referred to as “the general”, while the players were presented as “his soldiers under the flag, ready for battle”. This banal show of warrior spirit could well be a harmless and cathartic expression of a collective baying for blood, but the country’s circumstantial nationalism and the ensuing demand for unanimity actually negate France’s deep problems with racism and sexism.Black, Blanc, BeurAfter the victory in 1998, the football team was feted as the “Black, Blanc, Beur” generation (black, white and beur – a colloquial term referring to people of North African descent). But in twenty years, nothing much has changed for the “beurs” . In 2018 again, the team’s ethnic diversity is duly celebrated. It, however, is not representative of inclusiveness of the French society at large. On the contrary, it projects a likeable but deceptive image of how minorities are treated. The recurrent targeting of people of colour – generally males – by the police is very reminiscent of the state of affairs in the US that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. On July 3, a police officer fatally shot a 22-year-old in the neck during a routine check. The victim, Aboubakar F., had a record, but was not immediately threatening, according to preliminary reports. Aboubakar was black. Such tragedies occur with troubling frequency and generally lead to endless political speculations and sometimes even to riots. Children born and raised in France are still referred to as “immigrants” when they are second, third or fourth generation descendants of people born in the former French colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa. These children, when studying outside large metropolises, have to face an intense institutional discrimination when they apply to top universities located in Paris for instance. Once they enter the job market, they are four times less likely to find employment than a white person. Football, the holy grailIn this context, football is often seen as the only way out, the only field where excellence will be encouraged and saluted. That football has become the holy grail and its practitioners heroes shows something deeply worrying about the scarcity of opportunities for large sections of society.The celebration of the football team’s diverse backgrounds foreshadows the hypocrisy of French republican colour blindness and fiction, according to which religion, class or colour come second to a wider notion of citizenship. According to a poll conduced by Ipsos for the BBC, 45% of French people attribute social tensions to immigrants, 45% to religious diversity and 35% to ethnic diversity, not income gap or differing political views. The diversity of the team, the joy shared widely by people of all races and creed are positive signs of course, but that the World Cup is the only instance of such national pride and inclusiveness is also somewhat ominous. Finally, the victory celebrations have resulted in the taking over of public space by dominant, and often naked or semi-naked men and the molestation of a worryingly large number of women who had chosen to celebrate on the streets. When feminists dare point it out, when LGBTQ activists expose the irony of people seeing nothing wrong with nudity provided it is straight, mainstream and white, they are dismissed as pedantic anti-nationals. This victory is not the victory of France, its values or its systems – it’s merely the victory of a sports team. A team of formidable professional athletes undoubtedly, but just a team nonetheless and not an entire nation. If the female French team wins the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2019, will the players be celebrated as heroes by millions? Will they suddenly be made to embody an entire country? Will toxic masculinity recede while France celebrates and will opportunistic nationalism show its head again? Meanwhile, will France create more opportunities for its citizens of colour and be more welcoming of foreigners? Unlikely. And if by just pointing out the illusion that the current celebratory mood entertains, I am deemed an anti-national partypooper, so be it. After all, to borrow Orwell’s words, if serious sport is “war minus the shooting”, the French World Cup celebrations are certainly politics without the thinking. Ingrid Therwath is an Indo-French journalist based in Paris and holds a PhD in political sciences.
