France during the 1870s and 1880s was a country undergoing social, political and economic transformation. The end of the Second Empire (1848–70) in ignominious defeat at the hands of Germany in the Franco-Prussian war led to a change of political regime with the institution of the Third Republic in 1871, after the bloody and divisive interlude of the Paris Commune (1870–71). After what Roger Magraw has described as the ‘modernizing dictatorship’ of the Second Empire (1983: 149), the Third Republic continued France's measured move towards modernity, as the economy industrialized and society became increasingly stratified into an industrial working class as well as the traditional rural peasantry, dominated by an increasingly well-educated and prosperous bourgeoisie (Charle, 1991). Between the workers and the upper classes lay a swelling social grouping of clerical and administrative workers, essential for the changing nature of the economy, whose support was courted by the Republic as it gradually established its legitimacy during the 1870s and then flourished in the later decades of the century, and whose growing affluence and cultural assertiveness partly found expression in leisure and sport (Zeldin, 1980: 331–48).

During this period of change and transition for France, sporting activities were in many ways a marker and indicator of the transformations occurring in society, culture and the economy, as well as in politics (Holt, 1981). Traditionally associated with the aristocracy, the concept of sport and the practice of sports of varying and novel natures became increasingly widespread among other classes in society from the 1860s onwards, and sport grew in its social and cultural significance, as well as in terms of its commercial and industrial importance for France. The social and cultural significance of the adoption of so-called ‘English’ or ‘athletic’ sports such as running or football by the French upper classes in the later nineteenth century has been much documented, stressing how these new sports – added to the traditional elite sporting activities of riding, horse racing, hunting, and so on – accorded distinction to those who practised them. Initially the preserve of social elites, English sports gradually became popularized (the French term closest to this is the rather slippery démocratisé), reaching a wider range of social classes and eventually becoming – in the case of football especially – a clearly ‘mass’ pastime.