Ken Early: Documentary shatters the myth of Les Bleus

It's typical of France's attitude to sport that a recent documentary looking at 20 years of the French national team contains almost nothing about football. Instead, Les Bleus: Une Autre Histoire de France (The Blues: Another Story of France) reminds us that no other football team has served so much time as a political football.

France is not really a football country, and in 1998 most French people were a little like their old fraud of a president, Jacques Chirac, cheering on the team while not knowing any of their names.

Asked to name his favourite player, Chirac replies that they’re all so amazing, it’s impossible to pick one out.

France beat Brazil in a bizarre final in which Brazil's best player, Ronaldo, was struck with a mystery illness hours before the game – but what mattered to the French, or at least the French media, was the symbolism: white, black and brown Frenchmen coming together to conquer the world.

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The players were happy to play along: what was not to like about this story? Eric Cantona was not part of the 1998 squad, but he remarks: "Of course it was all distorted politically, but I liked it. I liked it because it was positive. All communities were being represented. If the French team could win using those values, so could France win and grow as a country."

When Jean-Marie le Pen criticised the team as “artificial” because it contained too many black and brown faces, he seemed hopelessly out of time, an archaic malignancy clinging to resentments from which everyone else had moved on.

The golden glow around the team reached a peak in the summer of 2000 as they won the Euros in Belgium and the Netherlands.

France's best player, Zinedine Zidane, was a creative genius in the finest tradition of La Gloire, they had limitless talent rising through an enlightened administrative system. They represented a future that had already arrived.

The team became the face France showed to the world. Journalist Karim Nedjari explains: "They were like the Beatles – constantly on tour and asked to perform any and all duties.

“They were asked to perform a duty that footballers should never have to, and that’s politics. The actual political philosophy of that time was: Les Bleus.”

The documentary introduces the second act, “La Chute” (The Fall), with images of the September 11th attacks.

The paranoia and complexity of the new political era quickly exposed the myth.

Anthem

A month after the towers fell, France played Algeria at the Stade de France. The stadium was full of Algerian supporters who booed the French anthem, taunted Zinedine Zidane as a "Harki", and eventually invaded the pitch, forcing the abandonment of the game.

You can see the pitch invaders are just kids, delighted to be causing a bit of trouble. There is nothing really sinister about the scene.

The angriest man on the pitch is the France defender, Lilian Thuram, who can be seen grabbing supporters and shouting at them to get back to the stands.

Thuram understood France well enough to know how the disorder would be interpreted.

“I was thinking, what the hell are they doing?” he explains in the film. “What upset me was the fact that these people on the pitch were smiling. It was like they were running around in a meadow. I think they were genuinely happy! None of them realised the public and political impact of what they were doing.”

In the weeks after the match, polls reported that 56 per cent of the French believed the incident showed there were serious problems with France’s immigrant populations.

The right-wing nationalist politician Bruno Mégret launched his presidential campaign outside the Stade de France. Where once football had seemed to make France’s problems dissolve, now it magnified them.

Since then, it's often appeared that the chief function of the French national team is to give politicians something to sound righteous about, whether it's Nicolas Sarkozy demanding that players respect the anthem, or Marine Le Pen telling Karim Benzema to go and play for Algeria.

The team that once provided France with a symbol of its united future is now the source of more aggravation on issues of race and identity than any other national institution except perhaps the police.

Le Pen is expected to reach the run-off round of France’s presidential election.

Her father reached that stage in 2002, but was crushed by Chirac, who received 82 per cent of the vote.

That 2002 election was the occasion of Zidane’s only foray into the arena of politics.

Before the Chirac-Le Pen run-off, Zidane encouraged voters to “think of the consequences of voting for a party that doesn’t align in any way with our country’s values”.

It’s hard now to imagine any French footballer speaking out against their own generation’s Le Pen. She is too popular.

And few who watch this film could blame French footballers for trying to avoid anything to do with politics.

As Bernard Lama, one of the 1998 goalkeepers, remarks: "The terrorists who bomb us today, what age are they? They were part of the 1998 generation, they were five or 10 years old when we won."

The myth of Les Bleus made no difference. Football never really does.