The Making of Les Bleus Sport in France, 1958-2010 [Hardcover]

Covering a period of over fifty years, the book considers sports as a primary means by which the French state sought to obtain and expand its own soft power in the world arena through the encouragement of national sports programs and culture. Krasnoff has drawn on an impressive range of archival material, as well as numerous interviews that provide readers with a unique perspective on recent years for which much of the written record remains off-limits to researchers. Concluding with a discussion of the most recent sports crisis in France (the national football team has suffered some serious losses n the last several years) Krasnoffs study places more recent events in French sports culture in the context of a nation struggling with competing definitions of Frenchness.The Making of Les Blues is a solid empirical study that is based upon funds in French state archives, French printed reports on sport and memoirs and reports by French athletes and bureaucrats. The bibliography includes 25 'Oral Histories:' interviews and e-mail communications with sport ministers, administrators and experts in the fields of sport, education and health in Paris, Marseille and Rennes. ... Lindsay Sarah Krasnoffs tale is packed with detailed information about the role of sports politics in the development of France, from being a programmatically non-ethnic, successfully de-colonizing civic society into becoming a nation that is characterized by ethno-social divisions and conflicts.Krasnoff offers a detailed study of French sports policy since the Second World War, thus opening up for Anglophone readers a scholarly field largely restricted to French-language participants, not least the historians and sociologists working within the hyper productive STAPS universe.This book aims to set in its social and political context the development of French sports policy, its implementation, effects, and reception within and outside France, from 1958 practically to the present day. It focuses onlS¦