De Gaulle was rather Tour de France. He loved the individual epic and the spirit of resistance. Giscard, president of « seventies », years of the consumer society and leisure, preferred skiing and tennis, these bourgeois sports in the process of democratization. Mitterrand was more ambivalent. There is no evidence of a thorough knowledge or even a great passion for the sport (except golf), even if, of course, none of the champions of his time were missing, from Yannick Noah to Michel Platini.
If he really had to choose, this lover of Latche, in the Landes, and Hossegor, in the Basque Country, would have chosen rugby instead. Never, in any case, would he have kissed the skull of a player as his successor, Jacques Chirac, did one day. Question of height, distance and a certain idea – too monarchical, according to its detractors – of the function. But he took a few steps that transformed national football. It was on his injunction that Canal+ was born, which was to radically modify the visibility of matches and the economy of TV rights in France.
In his eyes, football was a little elbow grease in politics. On June 27, 1984, the socialist president thus attended, at the Parc des Princes, the victory of France over Spain, in the final of the European Championship, but in the process, he left for Madrid to discuss the entry of the defeated country in the common market. And how can we forget that it was he who bombarded the government, eight years later, the boss of OM, Bernard Tapie? It was only after him that the Presidents of the Republic really plunged into the locker room. This does not necessarily have to do with the reality of their knowledge, but everything with the explosion of the impact of this sport on opinion.
In full coexistence
Jacques Chirac, for example, knew nothing about it. Everyone remembers, or almost, that during the 1998 World Cup, when the composition of the Blues was announced, the cameras pointed at him revealed that he did not know half of the names shouted by the stadium. It didn’t matter what happened next.
France “black-blanc-beur”, embodied by Dessailly or Zidane, could well be adored, the National Front continued its progression
France was in full cohabitation. A year earlier, the dissolution of the Assembly, decided against time by this same Jacques Chirac, had not only forced him to choose a Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin – a connoisseur, him – but cut off from part of its traditional electorate. At the Elysée, an armada of communicators began to order qualitative polls: voters, observed behind a one-way mirror, delivered what they thought of this now powerless president. “Incompetent”, “outdated”, there was not much to save him. Except one qualifier: ” friendly “…
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