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Emmanuel Macron was in Lille on Thursday evening to watch France defeat Uruguay as the Bleus made it two wins from two in the Rugby World Cup. The president was photographed swigging from a bottle of beer, just your normal rugby fan enjoying the game.
Rugby fans and their president have little in common. He is the strutting epitome of the aloof Parisian elite
Macron was also present last week in Paris when France beat New Zealand in the tournament opener, which suggests that either he hasn’t a busy agenda this month or there is a political purpose to his rugby supporting.
The president has long been the self-appointed Superfan of the French soccer team, memorably punching the Moscow air with delight when they won the 2018 World Cup. Macron assumed he’d have the same role in the Rugby World Cup but to his consternation he’s found himself — in rugby parlance — mauling for possession with Éric Zemmour.
The leader of the right-wing Reconquest Party watched last week’s exhilarating defeat of the All Blacks in the company of his deputy, Marion Maréchal. She, too, has become something of a rugby connoisseur. A photograph of the pair on Maréchal’s social media account was captioned “Discussing tactics before the match.”
A French rugby shirt is also featured in a brief promotional video released this week by Maréchal, in which she confirmed she will lead Zemmour’s Reconquest at next year’s European elections.
Zemmour’s conversion to the oval ball appears to be fairly recent. He didn’t reference his love for the sport in his 2021 memoir, France has not said its last word, the book that launched his political career. Nor did he take much interest in previous Rugby World Cups.
Back then, however, Zemmour was a journalist first and a politician second. Now the roles are reversed, and there is political capital to be had from the French rugby team.
Zemmour was still waxing lyrical about the boys in bleu when he addressed the party faithful at Reconquest’s return-to-work rally last weekend in Gréoux-les-Bains. “What a match, what style and what an opening ceremony!” he exclaimed, as the crowd waved their flags.
Gréoux-les-Bains is in southeastern France, about sixty miles north of the port of Toulon, one of the powerhouses in French club rugby. Rugby is a religion in the deep south of France; I know because I was a parishioner for a couple of years, playing for a club just outside Montpellier. Matches were brutal. In my time I was punched, kicked, gouged and headbutted. There is a tribalism to French rugby that exists nowhere else in the world.
It’s that tribalism that Zemmour is trying to tap into.
If soccer is the game of the big cities — Paris, Marseille and Lyon — then rugby is the lifeblood of la France Profonde. Some of the most famous clubs hail from unglamorous towns: Béziers, Brive, Bayonne, Castres, Clermont, Agen and Pau. Rugby gives them their identity. It is their antidote to the sense of abandonment the people feel from the political class.
That is why there is so much love for this French squad. Physically, rugby has evolved beyond recognition since France played its first test match in 1906, but by and large its ethos remains the same. Certainly in the amateur game, and certainly in the deep south of France. It is a game for the sons of the soil.
In his 1993 book, Thugs and Gentlemen, the French historian Jean Lacouture wrote: “Rugby isn’t just a set of rules… it’s a certain art de vivre, a certain arc and color of the landscape, a certain taste for something a little too much, a taste… for thick garbure [stew], a taste for mushrooms, goose and pigeon confit.”
This current French rugby team embody this ethos, giving a worn-down country something to finally cheer in a year of strikes, protests, riots and murders.
There is also something to boo, as Emmanuel Macron discovered last Friday when he addressed the Stade de France crowd at the opening ceremony. Rugby fans and their president have little in common. He is the strutting epitome of the aloof Parisian elite, who only venture into the provinces out of political necessity. The ploucs (yokels), on the other hand, come to Paris only when there is a rugby match.
But if they booed Macron, they cheered their team, and they also appreciated an opening ceremony that was mercifully free from the tiresome progressive proselytizing that has come to characterize such events in the Anglophone World. The twenty-minute jamboree showcased France’s l’art de vivre and topping the bill was the Oscar-winning actor Jean Dujardin, a genuine rugby aficionado. In the ceremony he played a baker in a 1950s France that was authentic in every sense. How the progressives of Paris raged. The opening ceremony was far too white, far too traditional and far too “rancid,” according to the left-wing Liberation. The Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who can always be relied on for a vacuous tweet, declared her “shame” at the ceremony, adding: “Our France is not a series of clichés.”
The right took a different view. One journalist called the ceremony a “tour de force that avoided the delusions of wokism and captured the essence of French rugby, the France of villages, bread and bicycles.” So what, he wrote, if it was a little “Zemmourian.”
Zemmour was still crowing about the opening ceremony at his party rally forty-eight hours later. “You will have noted that the same people who’ve been whining because students can no longer wear a Saudi robe in our schools have fumed all weekend because Jean Dujardin wore a beret,” he said, to roars of approval.
What the rugby squad thinks of all this politicking is anyone’s guess, although it may well echo the view of Dujardin. In response to the furore that erupted in the wake of the opening ceremony, the actor posted a message on social media this week. “We wanted to celebrate our country, our savoir-faire and the history of rugby,” he said. ‘This ceremony should never have set us against each other but brought us together. I’m an artist, I won’t be the standard-bearer for any party. I’ll leave you to sort out your affairs among yourselves….Allez les Bleus.”
And so say all of us.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
