sla book review: playing at monarchy

playing at monarchy

Reviewed by Alex Shakespeare, Boston College

MARCH 9, 2009 archive

Playing at Monarchy

Last summer, a friend of mine booked a hotel room in Fontainebleau, a satellite city of Paris, home to the famous Fontainebleau Forest and a magnificent sixteenth-century castle. The reservation was for July 14th, Bastille Day, the day in commemoration of French Independence. "I look forward to the fireworks," said my friend; "after all, the 14th is my birthday." The hotel clerk told him, "Sir, there will be no fireworks. You know that Fontainebleau is a royal city." This sort of reaction is alien to Americans, used to commemorating our revolution as the birth of our nation. Whatever political differences may arise in the United States, arguments about the outcome of what began in 1776 is rarely the cause of much debate in 2009. Yet, recounting the Fontainebleau story to a French friend, she only responded with a laugh, and said, "Yes, France is a very old country. These things happen."

It is precisely this difference between the newness of America and the centuries-old inheritance of France that Corry Cropper's Playing at Monarchy brings to light. As the title suggests, sports in nineteenth-century France involved the sanguinary emotions of that revolutionary period. The Revolution of 1789 brought down France's ancient royalty, and, in the process, opened sports and games to the bourgeoisie, "the new nobility," who struggled to learn "the codes and signs and leisure activities of the old monarchy" (182). Learning the codes and signs of games previously inaccessible to rural peasants and the urban bourgeois became a new way of flaunting social status, and the overriding ambitions of some of the nouveaux riches, their yearning to appear as 'old money,' provided potent subject matter for fiction writers like Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, and Prosper Mérimée.

These names alone may alienate some of Cropper's American readers. While most of us have a shadowy knowledge of Maupassant and Balzac, Gautier and Mérimée are virtually unread outside graduate-level 19th Century French literature courses. Thus, Playing at Monarchy is not your ordinary sport literature book-if such a thing exists. Jeu de paume, hunting (le chasse), a backgammon-like board game called tric-trac, boules, fencing, and chess make up the main 'sports' discussed in Cropper's study. Cropper faces the challenge of presenting materials, both literary and sportif, with which most American readers are understandably unfamiliar. But he does so lucidly and without sacrificing his scholarship to shorthand simplification. In other words, the reader does not need to be immersed in nineteenth-century French literature in order to appreciate Cropper's work. By dealing with a selective number of texts, some of which are popular manuals about sport and fitness-essentially self-help manuals instructing the bourgeoisie how to correctly imitate the nobility that are enormously fun to read-Cropper does his scholarly best to elucidate the cultural intersections between sport and literature in nineteenth-century France.

The first chapter ("Paume Anyone?") details the ways in which post-revolutionary France co-opted or rejected what were perceived as an 'aristocratic' sport, the jeu de paume, a kind of French tennis. For centuries, the game was "the exclusive cultural and social property of France's nobility," the rules kept strictly secret and too complicated for the illiterate and the uninitiated to learn. As he does throughout the book, Cropper distinguishes between the ostensibly leisure-based approached to aristocratic sport ("where the sport is an end unto itself, an aesthetic, circular practice that benefits only the body of the practitioner"), and the bourgeois adaptation of sports as contests, where the ever-present goal is to win.

Cropper also has a knack for choosing evocative historical moments. He recounts how, in June 1789, only a month before the storming of the Bastille, revolutionaries barred from the King Louis XVI's Assembly Room convened on Versailles's jeu du paume court and "promised to say there until they had written a constitution." The "tennis court oath," as this incident is known in English, thus made the game indissociable from the downfall of the French monarchy and the birth of the first French Republic: Republican Revolutionaries defamed the 'royal' court by declaring a new constitution in the space where the endless games of monarchy had been played.

Combining such telling historical scenes with cogent readings of Mérimée's much-anthologized short story "La Vénus d'Ille" and the opening scene of Balzac's Comédie humaine, Cropper enlivens our sense of how sport functioned as a microcosm of wider societal change during this pivotal and often violent period of French history-especially how France's writers harnessed games as discreet but unambiguous symbols of their opinions about the "embourgeoisment" of a formerly monarchical society, a process still very much alive in France today.

Indeed, the last paragraph of the chapter again involves the royal city of Fontainebleau, where one of the three extant paume courts of France remains. "When I asked the head pro at the jeu de paume in Fontainebleau in 2004 if his was indeed the court where Napoleon had once tried his hand at paume," Cropper writes, "his contemptuous reply demonstrated lingering offense at the fact that the usurper had dared to violate the sanctity of the sport of kings."

France is a very old country. Cropper makes this come home to the American reader repeatedly. The board games of trictrac and chess are tracked through nineteenth-century literature and histories as "models of historical discourse." Finally, trictrac (a war-game of chance) is associated with French monarchists and chess ( a war-game of logic) becomes a model for a republican viewpoint, in which "causality and logic ... replace chance" (83). Likewise, hunting is examined as it was transformed the great spectacle of the nobleman on his grounds to the self-reliant yeoman hunting privately on his private land. Fencing, and especially the practice of dueling, is tracked from the great medieval chanson, The Song of Roland, to the nineteenth-century, as an integral part of French society-first the sole privilege of the aristocracy and finally becoming a menace to the young men on France as it became more and more widespread during the early years of the Republic. The last chapter addresses Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, and the aristocratic ideals behind his dream of "a competition of amateurs."

My only complaints about Playing at Monarchy revolve around the awkward inclusion of a chapter on "The Spanish Bullfight in France," which strikes me as a forced reading of Mérimée and Gautier in terms of 'sport,' a hesitant argument that sticks out like a sore thumb among the adroit arguments of the other chapters. The introduction and conclusion, too, find Cropper paying what feels like perfunctory homage to 'cultural studies' icons Adorno and Foucault. His repetitive theoretical justifications for a book that otherwise serves as a wonderful cultural history of sport in nineteenth-century France too often read like the less inspired gambits of a doctoral dissertation.

To my mind, Playing at Monarchy's strengths lie in its independence of lengthy theoretical diatribes. Cropper's sense of sport's social power seems perfectly natural to the texts and contexts of France in the nineteenth-century, a country then heaving on a bloody sea of revolt and newfound middle-class ambitions. Certainly, it helps to have some background in the literature that Cropper discusses. American readers of Balzac and de Maupassant will likely gain new insights into old texts. (I never realized how many of Balzac's novels begin wi th symbolic games or hunts, or the significance of the jeu du paume at the beginning of his enormous portrait of Paris, The Human Comedy.) But anyone interested in French history or the social role of sports in Europe should find Playing at Monarchy well worth the time. Like Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre, Cropper investigates historical "ways of thinking" with wit and whimsy-in prose congenial to a twenty-first century American audience. By chronicling some of the historical realities behind what might strike us as a French snobbery of sports, he not only affirms that France is a very old country, but the variegated reasons how and why.

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