Sport and Physical Culture in Authoritarian Regimes

“Le Sport: Cette Chevalerie Moderne” Poster. La Contemporaine: Bibliothèque, Archives, Musée des Mondes Contemporains.

This module explores how authoritarian regimes promote control and legitimacy through physical culture and sports.

The setting is France in 1940 and the rise of Vichy state that promised a national revolution to remake France through an ideology based on anti-democratic, nationalist and white supremacist ideas. The regime launched a massive intervention in education, sport and youth life designed to transform young French people into new men and women that Vichy believed would better serve its social aims. The primary source is a Vichy propaganda poster “Sport: This Modern Chivalry.” Professor Keith Rathbone offers a context for appreciating the larger meanings of the poster’s authoritarian visual imagery and the ways in which it reveals the complexities of the government’s intervention into physical culture. The teaching plan offers a guided sequential visual analysis that allows students to see how the poster speaks to Vichy traditional notions of revolution as well as the gendered construction of the roles the regime believed men, women and children should play in France’s new authoritarian order. Rathbone also offers an exercise for students to work in groups using e-media to produce their own posters in the Vichy style as a way of getting inside the creation of authoritarian propaganda. As part of Authoritarianism 101, this module enables teachers to examine the theme of authoritarian practice, the tools of authoritarian control and the lived experience of life under authoritarian rule.