New Books In French Studies

In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, and then lost in the first game of the knockout stage. The official noted that Europe’s top teams, such as the first-place Soviet Union, all had players over two meters tall (6’6″). The official summed up the disparity: “The giant [basketball player] is like an atomic armament.  If a nation does not possess one, it is an unbalanced struggle.”  The core of the complaint was simple: If France was to stand tall in the Cold War world, then it had to stand tall in the sports arena. Historian Lindsay Krasnoff looks at this sports crisis in postwar France and the French government’s attempts to remedy it in her book The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010 (Lexington, 2012). Lindsay frames her study in two episodes of international athletic failure: the 1960 Rome Oly