Sport in Paris: Retracing the Culture of Play and Games in the City of Light (1854-2024)

This edited volume proposes to revisit the development of recreational and professional sporting activities in the French capital between 1854 and 2024. It comprises fifteen chapters surveying the rich and multifaceted history of athletic practices in Paris, and constitutes the first comprehensive piece of scholarship exclusively dedicated to the relationship between sport, history, and culture in the City of Light.

This collection articulates and emphasizes the sustained presence and impact of sports in Parisian lives for over a century and a half, at the same time as it encourages readers to think about sports as a form of cultural expression able to alter national, regional, and individual identity, in other words, as a form of entertainment able to shift our perception of leisure and spectatorship, an activity able to transform urban spaces and social norms. To this end, Sport in Paris proposes complementary perspectives, by not only addressing multiple sporting disciplines (tennis, football, boxing, etc.) but also stressing interdisciplinary approaches (history of the press, urbanism, health studies, literary geography, etc.).