The 1960s and 1970s were a period of great change in French politics, society and culture. Demographically, the boom in the birth rate in the late 1940s was, by the early 1960s, beginning to feed into the adult population and workforce; France was a younger country than it had been for decades, and the younger citizens had new social, political and cultural aspirations and terms of reference, some of which led to the explosion of discontent at the Gaullist state and its ordering of society that occurred in May–June 1968. Politically, the return to power of General Charles de Gaulle in June 1958 led to the replacement of the Fourth Republic by the Fifth Republic later that year and a gradual rebuilding of the apparatus and efficiency of the state as part of de Gaulle's drive to bring France into phase with the century, and to restore the grandeur that he felt was natural to France. Economically, the industrialization and growth that had accelerated from the mid-1940s produced transformations in society and the economy that prompted the celebrated sociologist and economist Jean Fourastié to suggest that by the mid-1970s, ‘30 glorious years of growth’ had created ‘two Frances’, one stagnant for millennia until 1945, and the new France of technological development, urbanized industrial society and technocracy (Fourastié, 1979). Although from about 1975 France suffered the effects of the oil crisis much like other western European nations, with inflation and unemployment, its economy had indeed been radically modernized, partly due to the leading technocratic role of the Gaullist state since 1958. The state also had a stake in sport, accompanying what have been termed a ‘première sportivisation’ in 1958–75 (Chantelat and Tétart, 2007: 33) and an ‘explosion des pratiques sportives’ from the late 1960s onwards (Attali, 2007: 63).

The Popular Front in the 1930s, then the Etat français in the 1940s and to a lesser extent the Fourth Republic in the 1950s had all increased the French state's involvement in the organization of sport and recreation (Callède, 2000). It was during the 1960s, in the early years of the modernizing, technocratic and ambitious Fifth Republic, that the state's interest in promoting sport would reach its peak (Chifflet, 1995).