For centuries sports have been used to mask or to uncover important
social and political problems, and there is no better example of
this than France during the nineteenth century, when it changed
from monarchy to empire to republic. Prior to the French
Revolution, sports and games were the exclusive domain of the
nobility. The revolution, however, challenged the notion of noble
privilege, and leisure activities began spreading to all levels of
society. Games either evolved from Old Regime spectacles into
bourgeois pastimes, such as hunting, or died out altogether, as did
trictrac. During this period, sports and games became the symbolic
cultural battlefield of an emerging modern state.
"Playing at Monarchy" looks at the ways sports and games (tennis,
fencing, bullfighting, chess, trictrac, hunting, and the Olympics)
are metaphorically used to defend and subvert, to praise and mock
both class and political power structures in nineteenth-century
France. Corry Cropper examines what shaped these games of the
nineteenth-century and how they appeared as allegory in French
literature (in the fiction of Balzac, Merimee, and Flaubert), and
in newspapers, historical studies, and even game manuals.
Throughout, he shows how the representation of play in all types of
literature mirrors the most important social and political rifts in
postrevolutionary France, while also serving as propaganda for
competing political agendas. Though its focus is on France,
"Playing at Monarchy" hints at the way these nineteenth-century
developments inform perceptions of sport even today.
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