Robert W. Lewis,<I> the Stadium Century: Sport, Spectatorship and Mass Society in Modern France</I>
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BOOK REVIEWS Robert W. Lewis, The Stadium Century: Sport, Spectatorship and Mass Society in Modern France. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) 233 pp. This illuminating work uses the sports stadium as a means of tracing evolutions in French attitudes to sport and urban development over the course of the twentieth century. Lewis begins by arguing that ‘stadia, as physical and urban landmarks and as venues for spectator sport and political mobilization, played a privileged role in shaping mass society and mass culture in modern France’ (2). Throughout his monograph, Lewis negotiates a path that simultaneously focuses on changes in French sport, town planning and the nation’s sense of itself. Chapter One is entitled ‘A “grand stade” for Paris: Stadia, Urban Planning and the 1924 Olympics’, and is one of several in which the author discusses elected officials’ reluctance to build a major sports stadium in Paris. One of the merits of this chapter is that it devotes attention to lesser-known but significant Parisian stadia such as the Stade Pershing, in addition to venues such as the Stade Colombes. In the second chapter, ‘“A Civic Tool of Modern Times”: Politics, Mass Society and the Stadium’, Lewis provides detailed discussion of the ideological power of stadia. He links the growing attention devoted to sports stadia to the way in which France ‘began to devote more attention to physical fitness policy and sport in the aftermath of the First World War’ (47–48). Within this context, Lewis examines tensions that existed in France between recreational and professional sport. The following chapter, ‘Sportsmen or savages? Stadium sport and its spectators, 1900–60’ sees the author assess discourses about those who frequent sports stadia in France. He compares the sporting psyche in France and Great Britain, noting that the French sporting press of the interwar years appeared concerned that ‘the French crowd IJFrS 18 (2018) 232 COMPTES RENDUS lacked the requisite “sporting education” to behave properly in a mass setting’ (97). Analysis of stadia within the context of power and control in this chapter, and the previous chapter, could have benefited from discussion of works by Jean-Marie Brohm and Marc Perelman — such as Le Football, une peste émotionnelle (Paris: Folio, 2006). The lack of such reference points may in part stem from the author’s location of his study primarily within the context of the history rather than sociology of French sport. Chapter Four pursues similar topics to Chapter Three, albeit from transnational as well as national perspective; it is entitled ‘Stadium Travels: Spectatorship, Territorial Identity and Global Connections, 1900–60’. Through his analysis of the Tour de France, Lewis also examines the interaction between local and national identities in a French sporting context. In the fifth and final main chapter, ‘Postwar Modernisation and the Stadium, 1945–98’, the author examines the evolution of French stadia from the end of World War Two until the 1998 Football World Cup that was hosted — and won — by France. He argues that this major tournament in the 1990s is particularly noteworthy due to the way in which the Stade de France finally became the major stadium that France had craved for so long, and that the Parc des Princes had ultimately struggled to become. Lewis argues that the Stade de France’s significance stems, in particular, from the way in which it saw ‘stadium construction bec[o]me construed as a driver of urban renovation’ (177). At the end of the fifth chapter, Lewis makes several significant statements about the place of sports stadia within narratives about French sport. The short overall conclusion that follows this chapter reads somewhat like a postscript as the author discusses the Fédération Française de Rugby’s now aborted plans to build a national stadium specifically for rugby in Évry-Essonne and also France’s preparations for hosting the 2016 European Football Championships. This book is likely to appeal to people with an interest in the history of sport and leisure in France, and in particular the BOOK REVIEWS 233 interactions between sport, urban planning and French national identity. Lewis’s work could potentially be said to have an overly Paris-centric focus on sports stadia, although references to provincial stadia are not entirely absent. However, this is certainly not a major deficiency and could be interpreted, in part, as a consequence of the Paris-centric nature of many aspects of French political, cultural and sporting life. Ultimately, Lewis succeeds in mapping out significant elements of twentieth-century French sporting and urban history within a well-structured, concise and accessible monograph. Jonathan Ervine Bangor University .