From the “Phoenix of Legends” to the “Ultimate Monument” of the Times

From the “Grand Stade” to the Parc des Princes

Before the transformation of the Parc des Princes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, sport and its spaces remained resolutely in private hands in the Parisian metropolitan area, and efforts to build a large stadium with state support never gained real traction. As early as 1922, for instance, the Paris Municipal Council voted convincingly against a proposed 10-million franc subsidy for the construction of a new 100,000-seat stadium at the Parc des Princes, which was at the time a rather rudimentary private bicycle-racing arena. While the promoters of the grand stade argued that a massive stadium would resurrect French national pride and spark a revival of French physical fitness in the aftermath of the war, its detractors, who included Socialists and conservatives alike, saw the stade Olympique as both an enormous waste of resources and as a space for parasitic mass spectatorship. ¹² As a result of this rejection, the French Olympic Committee turned to the private Racing-Club de France to modify its small stadium in the suburb of Colombes into a fifty thousand–place enclosure in time for the Games; the Stade Olympique de Colombes would go on to host most major rugby matches and the finals of the Coupe de France soccer competition until the late 1960s. ¹³

The modification of the stadium at Colombes only stalled the agitation for a grand stade, which resurfaced before the Universal Exposition of 1937 and the 1938 World Cup. Between 1934 and 1936 alone, the city received proposals for at least six different Parisian grands stades in locales ranging from the Ile de Puteaux in the west to the Bois de Vincennes in the east. The conservative Union Nationale pour une France plus Grande argued that France desperately needed a 100,000-seat stadium in order to prove its national health and vitality as a great nation. ¹⁴ Supporters of the grand stade also included prominent architects, including Robert Mallet-Stevens, Georges-Henri Pingusson, and Le Corbusier, the latter drawing up plans for a grand stade in Gennevilliers, a northeast suburb neighboring Colombes. Indeed, Le Corbusier defended the large stade as a “civic tool of modern times,” equally essential for politics and sporting activity. ¹⁵ But the push for a massive stadium, ineffective in 1922, again failed to convince politicians to abandon their traditional reluctance to subsidize sporting spaces intended for large-scale spectatorship. As Léo Lagrange, the Socialist undersecretary for sports and leisure under the Popular Front, noted in 1937, his government would “not give a single cent for 50,000 people to watch 22 athletes” and would instead concentrate on promoting sporting participation across the nation. ¹⁶

Thus, the idea of a state-supported grand stade in the Paris area remained confined to paper before World War II, doomed by fiscal conservatism and recurrent hostility to the idea of the passive “spectator,” particularly pronounced on the Left. ¹⁷ This is not to suggest, however, that sport was neglected or unimportant in Paris; it simply was in private hands, whether through Racing-Club (and its Stade de Colombes) or, more significantly, the Parc des Princes, the latter controlled by the same media and sporting empire that ran the wildly popular Tour de France bicycle race, the daily sports newspaper L’Auto, and the indoor bicycle-racing arena, the Vélodrome d’Hiver (or Vél’ d’Hiv’). ¹⁸ It should also be noted that the lack of any new spaces for sport fit within the general stasis of urban development in Paris, which experienced very little new building or substantial change in the first half of the twentieth century, despite continual proposals for reform. ¹⁹

After the war, however, discussions about building a new stadium recurred on a much more frequent basis and increasingly implicated the national government and the Prefecture of the Seine. Serious proposals for grand stades in the Bois de Vincennes were floated in 1945 and again in 1950; they became much more tangible in 1956, when the city of Paris agreed in principle to construct a stadium of 100,000 seats. ²⁰ This was largely a symbolic decision but gained new life with the advent of the Fifth Republic two years later. Although Charles de Gaulle himself was hardly an avid sportsman, his energetic High Commissioner for Sport and Youth, famed mountaineer Maurice Herzog, championed the grand stade as part of broader initiatives to “reinvigorate” France. In a press conference early in his tenure, Herzog listed the stadium as part of a campaign for the “demographic, economic and political” renovation of the nation, to be accomplished through the mobilization of French youth. ²¹ But the stade also fit within the Gaullist concern over France’s declining global prominence. Herzog, and others involved in promoting the grand stade over the next seven years, noted that France suffered in comparison to the thirty nations that already had Olympic-sized stadia, some of which were located behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe or (even more damagingly for French prestige) in underdeveloped nations in Latin America. ²² According to Herzog, Paris could no longer afford to lag behind other capitals that boasted stades, critical for prestigious competitions like the Olympic Games or World Cup. ²³

The stadium, in this light, became a tool for augmenting French grandeur and the nation’s place on the world stage. Both supporters and detractors of the grand stade often returned to the idea of prestige and grandeur, but diverged over whether a hypothetical stadium actually would possess those desired qualities and the desirability of French involvement in hosting “mega-events” like the Olympic Games. In the Conseil Municipal de Paris in 1964, Auguste Marboeuf-Regnault (a member of de Gaulle’s Union Nationale pour la République, or UNR) defended the stadium as evidence for a French desire to be at the “head of the Europe of tomorrow” in all domains. The capital, he argued, required a proper stadium so that the Parisian public could attend sporting competitions worthy of international renown. ²⁴ Socialist municipal delegate André Weil-Curiel, in contrast, thought that the stade, if constructed, would only demonstrate the kind of grandeur found in ancient ruins, as it would surely fall into disuse. Weil-Curiel also maintained that France needed arenas for athletes, not spectators and spectacular events: those spectators who periodically came to the stadium were parasites there to “aid [their] digestion and to smoke a cigar.” ²⁵

The grand stade was thus debated in terms of the prestige and priorities of the postwar modernizing French state and the place of spectator sport within that nation. The stade’s backers (largely centrists and Gaullists) consistently argued that a stadium was necessary to restore France to its place at the head of European affairs, while critics (mostly consisting of Socialists and Communists) saw a 100,000-seat stadium as a wasteful and unnecessary diversion of resources that were needed elsewhere to rejuvenate France. ²⁶ Yet intriguingly, the stadium debates in the early 1960s were disconnected from the ongoing physical renewal of Paris under the early Fifth Republic. In that process, the state sought to modernize and transform the capital city, through organized planning schemes under the direction of special administrator Paul Delouvrier that attempted to manage the growth of the city and address housing shortages (in part through the construction of “new towns” outside the city) while simultaneously improving communications and transport. ²⁷ Construction on a multilane expressway ringing the city (the périphérique) began in 1960, while efforts to improve public transport connections between the city center and its suburbs eventually produced the first stages of the Réseau Express Régional (RER) in 1969. ²⁸ The grand stade, however, remained separate from all of these discussions, just as the proposed stadium itself was relegated to forest land at the periphery of the city. ²⁹

As urban renewal in Paris proceeded at a furious clip, plans for a grand stade collapsed in February 1965, due to persistent opposition by the Ministry of Finances over the cost of the project and some concerns over potential environmental damage to the Bois de Vincennes. ³⁰ Yet stadium advocates found a way to revive hopes for a new (or greatly improved) Parisian stade by pursuing the reconstruction of the Parc des Princes after the failure of the grand stade plan. The old vélodrome, in fact, was menaced by the proposed path of the périphérique, which directly cut through part of it. As construction on the motorway drew closer to the Parc in late 1966, the city—which had quietly refused to renew the private lease on the stadium in late 1963, opting instead for more direct municipal oversight—decided eventually to not merely rebuild the stade on the same location over the highway, but to radically redesign the Parc as a soccer-only facility between 1967 and 1972. ³¹

While the reconstruction of the Parc des Princes thus emerged in part as a byproduct of other urban renovations, namely, the construction of the périphérique, it also presaged a subtle shift in official governmental attitudes toward spectator sport in Paris. As indicated earlier, Parisian municipal participation in commercial sport had been negligible since the 1920s; in contrast, other French cities subsidized their professional soccer clubs in a variety of ways. By the early 1960s, however, as French soccer was mired in a state of serious crisis and plagued by declining attendance, the traditional opponents of the grand stade on the Left in Paris began to shed their long-time hostility to subsidizing spectator sport. ³² When Paris effectively municipalized the Parc in 1963, in fact, the Communists lobbied for the Parc to fall under direct city control, so that the city could channel receipts from spectator sports into amateur athletics. ³³ This was not a wholehearted endorsement of professional sport, to be sure, but functioned as an acknowledgement that mass spectator sporting events might have a beneficial purpose; it foreshadowed the way that Paris would begin subsidizing the soccer club that would soon take up residence at the new Parc des Princes, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), by the late 1970s. ³⁴ In approving a stadium design, too, that eliminated the historic pink cycling track from the old vélodrome, the Conseil Municipal tacitly condemned track cycling to a pre-war Parisian past and endorsed soccer and rugby as popular, modern spectator activities that merited official support and encouragement. ³⁵

Upon its completion in 1972, the new Parc—designed by architect Roger Taillibert and built by the Bouygues construction group, which would soon come to dominate the French construction industry—was a highly innovative fifty thousand–seat enclosure that employed a radical building technique known as crossed prestressed concrete for nearly the entirety of the stadium, particularly for the fifty bents (portiques), the prefabricated vertical forms that formed the “ribs” of the stade, standing (in some places) up to forty-eight meters high. ³⁶ The roof of the Parc, for its part, completely covered the grandstands, without any visible supports that would block the view of the spectators, all of whom—in an unprecedented development—were seated. Moreover, Taillibert’s stadium was perched over the périphérique, which plunged through a tunnel under its northeastern flank. Finally, the stadium was conceived for both the spectators within its confines and those watching matches on television; the architect integrated lighting and areas for television cameras into the roof of the stade and eschewed any kind of unsightly fencing to separate spectators from the pitch. ³⁷

The new Parc, while it was certainly less substantial than any proposed grand stade in the 1960s, nonetheless earned praise for the image of a modernized Paris and (by extension) France that it promoted. The prefect of Paris, Jean Verdier, exulted that the Parc was an “incontestable success” on both technical and aesthetic fronts. ³⁸ The stadium, furthermore, was read as a feat of French engineering and technological prowess worthy of emulation: Verdier boasted that the stade was a “prestigious prototype” that set the standard for architects on both sides of the Cold War divide. It attracted Soviet, Canadian, American, and Brazilian observers, among others, during its construction, and its innovative use of crossed prestressed concrete decisively influenced a horde of new stadia (many in North America) built in the 1970s, including Taillibert’s own Stade Olympique in Montreal. ³⁹ In this sense, the Parc staked a claim for France’s importance on the world stage through what contemporaries called the “technocratic” mastery of engineering, in a similar fashion to projects like the Concorde supersonic aircraft or nuclear weapons and reactors. ⁴⁰

But if the stadium functioned as a powerful symbol of the transformations in Paris of the late 1960s and 1970s, it was criticized precisely because it seemed to embody problematic aspects of that modernization. The Parc was assailed as a representation of anti-democratic, opaque processes that ultimately benefited powerful private interests, much in the same way that Parisians protested the reconstruction of the Maine-Montparnasse quarter and the proposed expressway on the rive droite of the Seine at more or less the same moment, developments that would eventually fuel the movement that sought a “Free Paris” with an independent mayor. ⁴¹ In the more immediate context of the Parc’s completion in 1972, the Left challenged the idea that the stadium represented modern progress by castigating the stade as the work of a “dominating and blindly self-assured technocracy.” ⁴² L’Aurore’s André Guérin argued that the Parc’s cost overruns (it ended up at 87 million francs, nearly double the original budget of 45.5 million) were the result of “secret studies” conducted by “technicians more gifted at calculating the resistance of materials than in the practical and functional aspects that ought to be their first preoccupations.” ⁴³ Communist delegate André Sibaud went further, accusing the prefecture of Paris of colluding with Bouygues to secure the latter a more favorable contract; Sibaud maintained that true authority over the stadium remained not with the politicians, but with “technocrats, engineers, and architects.” ⁴⁴ The sense that “technocracy” was anti-democratic found an echo in the (largely conservative) voters of the 16th arrondissement and in neighboring Boulogne-Billancourt, who complained bitterly that their concerns about parking and other issues had been ignored in the building of the stadium, which they deeply resented in the first place. ⁴⁵

Thus the stadium was defended, in terms of its place in the urban landscape, as a triumph of modern engineering and a transformed Paris and critiqued as a product of anti-democratic, nontransparent urbanizing processes. As a sporting space, the Parc des Princes showcased the growing acceptability of governmental involvement in sport in Paris (despite the debates over the construction process) but also reflected uncertainties and unfulfilled aspirations about sporting spectatorship itself. Taillibert’s stadium ostensibly aimed to use modern construction techniques to “democratize” the way Parisians experienced their leisure time, in an era when television and mass automobile ownership had opened up a multitude of other possibilities that competed with the stade. The all-seater stadium, which Taillibert defended as a “social choice” because it consciously did not distinguish between the seated and standing-room sections found in all other European arenas, was clearly intended as a more egalitarian kind of leisure space. By removing the fencing (grilles) that separated spectators from the pitch at other European stadia, too, Taillbert hoped to present the stadium as a more attractive place for familial leisure and, perhaps less explicitly, a more commercially exploitable space that was ultimately used for sporting events and rock concerts in the ensuing decades. ⁴⁶ Overall, the Parc was certainly envisioned as a means to broaden spectatorship beyond the (mostly male) clientele who braved the standing-room conditions of the old Parc or Colombes, either through the internal improvements to the stadium or the ways in which the stadium facilitated “virtual” spectatorship via television.

This attempt to reshape spectator identity at the Parc, not surprisingly, fell short of any transformational aspirations. For one, despite Taillibert’s attention to the needs of television, French soccer authorities resisted greater TV exposure for their sport up until the mid-1980s, fearing the corrosive effect of live broadcasts on game-day attendance. ⁴⁷ And had television actually been allowed to transmit many matches, that coverage would have revealed that the spectator experience at the Parc in the 1970s was characterized by relative indifference. Despite the arrival of PSG in 1974, regular matches at the Parc were very often sparsely attended for the next decade. When large crowds flocked to the Parc, they often were predominantly comprised of supporters of visiting teams like Bastia or Reims. Thus, the Parc suffered from a lack of what John Bale has called the “topophilic” attachment of most Parisian spectators to that particular place. ⁴⁸ Moreover, spectator identity at the Parc des Princes was also associated with the potential for a new kind of violence that surpassed previous acts of spectator misbehavior. The notorious European Cup final between Leeds and Bayern Munich in 1974, when irate Leeds fans destroyed seats in the stadium, invaded the pitch, and smashed windows outside the stade in protest over the final result, was a prominent example of a new kind of disorderly spectatorship—hooliganism—that scandalized observers. ⁴⁹ Joao Havelange, the president of the international soccer federation (FIFA), actually complained that Taillibert’s modern stadium had facilitated the violence; the seats (for Havelange) merely gave the English supporters something to throw on the pitch, and the lack of a fence separating spectators and players allowed for a pitch invasion. ⁵⁰ While it is doubtful that any stadium could have curtailed the pugilistic instincts of the hooligans from Leeds, Taillibert’s hopes for a new kind of well-behaved, “democratic” crowd (however unrealistic they might have been) clearly fell short, as evidenced by any number of incidents from 1974 onward that have showcased repeated problems with spectator violence at the Parc. ⁵¹

Yet even if the anxious hopes about creating a new spectator collective proved impossible to realize, the new Parc became a well-established sporting site on the Parisian landscape, supplanting Colombes as the site of Coupe de France soccer finals and Five Nations rugby matches. The Parc—while not the grand stade of Herzog’s aspirations—nonetheless allowed Paris to host smaller-scale international sporting events, such as the aforementioned European Cup final in 1974 and the European Soccer Championships in 1984. And it gave the French capital the ability to assert the same sort of parallels between stadium architecture, modern technological progress, and overall urban prominence that were being floated in other cities around the world in roughly the same period. In Munich, for instance, the new Olympic Stadium, also completed in 1972, featured a glass and acrylic roof designed to symbolize the “transparency” of a rebuilt postwar West Germany and its figurative distance from the Nazi regime that hosted the Berlin Olympics in 1936. ⁵² As another example, the Houston Astrodome, built in 1965, was touted as the “Eighth Wonder of the World” and envisioned by its boosters as the first step to Houston’s rise to national and international prominence. ⁵³ Thus, the transformed Parc, while embedded in distinctively Parisian debates both about urban restructuring and spectator sport in the 1960s and the anxieties and tensions that they produced, also manifested the overarching set of values coming to be placed on stadia as modern urban spaces and sites of sporting festivity after the Second World War.

From Parc to Stade

By the time France captured the 1984 European Soccer Championships at the Parc des Princes, thanks to a stunning 2-0 victory over Spain, governmental support (Parisian and national) for spectator sport was now fairly well entrenched. François Mitterrand’s Socialist government, in fact, committed 100 million francs to the renovation of stadia in Marseille, Lyon, Saint-Etienne, Lens, and Strasbourg and the complete construction of another (the Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes) to stand alongside the Parc as venues for the competition. In the process, the Ministry of the Economy and Finances overrode statutes that prohibited the state from giving substantial subsidies to “spectacular” institutions. ⁵⁴ If the 1984 Euro offered proof that sport could boost French prestige, the mayor of Paris and (between 1986 and 1988) Prime Minister Jacques Chirac saw that sporting competitions and their spaces offered promising possibilities for both Paris and his own political fortunes. As part of his own municipal building agenda, Chirac pushed the construction of an all-purpose indoor sporting arena along the Seine in the 12th arrondissement (the Palais-Omnisport de Bercy) in 1984, to parallel Mitterrand’s prestige building projects, or grands travaux, which included the refashioned Louvre, the Opéra Bastille, and the Grande Arche de la Défense. ⁵⁵ Chirac also revived the idea of a new grand stade for Paris as the centerpiece for a bid to host the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. While the French capital eventually lost out to Barcelona, Chirac was undeterred: in November 1988, he called for the construction of a 100,000-seat Parisian stadium in order to bolster an ultimately successful French bid for the 1998 World Cup. ⁵⁶

The movement to build a grand stade lumbered forward (at the national level) over the next five years before Prime Minister Edouard Balladur finally selected the suburb of Saint-Denis as the site for the stadium in September 1993. As Hugh Dauncey has noted, this decision put an end to the political power struggles and the “political football” surrounding the proposed location of the stade. ⁵⁷ Balladur, in fact, had scrapped an earlier decision made by then Prime Minister Michel Rocard in February 1991 to build the stadium in the “new town” of Melun-Sénart, twenty-five kilometers southeast of Paris. While Rocard’s selection of Sénart constituted part of a strategy of urban decentralization, intended to “rebalance” the eastern part of the Ile-de-France by attracting investment and development, it foundered because it elicited opposition from the major sporting federations, allied with Chirac. The latter denigrated Sénart as too distant from Paris; as he opined, it was a “technically debatable” choice that would not attract spectators. ⁵⁸ Chirac, not surprisingly, did not bother to hide his delight at the selection of Saint-Denis in 1993, while Socialists like Jean Glavany (who had spearheaded the search for a stadium site under Rocard) fumed, in language reminiscent of the critics of the Parc, that the choice reflected the “arrogance of technocrats” and the “imperialism” of Paris. ⁵⁹

If the selection of Saint-Denis certainly attested to political jockeying, as Dauncey has suggested, it also demonstrated a broad and novel consensus (in Paris, at least) about the importance of a grand stade for economic growth and development. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of Saint-Denis itself. A stalwart bastion of the French Communist Party, Saint-Denis had suffered from poverty and unemployment as a result of the systematic deindustrialization of the Parisian basin, beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1990s. ⁶⁰ The city’s longtime Communist mayor, Marcelin Berthelot, had for many years fought a losing battle to preserve the proletarian character of Saint-Denis, freezing all new development in former industrial sites in hopes of luring heavy industry back to the city. ⁶¹ While Berthelot’s administration did undertake a decade-long process of mixed-use urban renewal at the city center with both commercial and residential buildings, it resisted pleas in the 1980s from Chirac to consent to a grand stade, which Berthelot viewed as capable of only “creating nuisances.” ⁶²

By the early 1990s, however, building a stadium in Saint-Denis became a far more attractive proposition. Berthelot was succeeded as mayor in 1991 by a much younger Communist politician, Patrick Braouezec, who gradually came to the conclusion that the stade offered enormous opportunities for Saint-Denis to extract significant assistance from the state. Braouezec, in fact, saw the stadium as a way to force the national government to “nudge” efforts to attract economic investment to Saint-Denis and nearby communes like Aubervilliers and Saint-Ouen. ⁶³ Braouezec thus proposed the candidature of Saint-Denis for the stade, but made the offer contingent on the fulfillment of six other conditions, chiefly focusing on improvements to public transit and urban development. Foremost among these demands was a request to “cover over” the autoroute, which bisected Saint-Denis and separated the neighborhood around the stadium (the Plaine Saint-Denis) from the city center. By paving over that gaping fissure in the suburb, extending metro lines, improving existing RER stations, and stimulating private development in Saint-Denis, Braouezec argued that the stadium would “create social links” and serve as a “pole for development” in the area. ⁶⁴ For Braouezec, in short, the construction of the grand stade offered an economic stimulus and a chance to refashion his municipality’s self-image. ⁶⁵ The stadium could still be imagined as a link to the past and Saint-Denis’ long-standing proletarian identity, given the historic popularity of soccer with the industrial working class in France. Yet it simultaneously attempted to project an image of a postindustrial municipality, reshaped to be more attractive to outsiders, through infrastructural improvements to the autoroute and metro lines, alongside other kinds of development.

From an urban planning point of view, the construction of the Stade de France in Saint-Denis concretized developments in the late twentieth century (in France and elsewhere around the globe) that witnessed the stadium gain value within new kinds of urban redevelopment schemes that targeted the former sites of industrial or commercial activity, in contrast to the general trends of previous decades. In the 1960s, for instance, most of the efforts of urban planners involved managing the expansion of Paris, decentralizing the population through “new towns,” and improving transportation infrastructure throughout the Parisian basin; the Parc des Princes came to fruition as an effect of these changes. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, Parisian urbanism frequently grappled with the legacy of industrialization, whether through the conversion of old slaughterhouses into the Cité de la Musique at La Villette or rebuilding the train yards in eastern Paris along the Seine as the site for the Bibliothèque Nationale. ⁶⁶ In this light, the reclamation of a polluted tract of land on the Plaine-Saint-Denis, the former site of a Gaz de France tar-processing plant, as the location for the Stade de France was another kind of large-scale urban development project on a former “brownfield” site, one that eventually featured a mixed-use assembly retail establishments (anchored by the sporting chain Décathlon) and office space alongside the new stadium. ⁶⁷ But not only did the Stade’s construction fit within recent examples of Parisian urban reclamation, it also paralleled the use of stadium construction as urban redevelopment strategy in other world cities at the end of the twentieth century. In Sydney, for example, the new stadium for the 2000 Olympic Games was built on the site of the disused Homebush Bay abattoir and was envisioned as the anchor of a redevelopment project that included park space and residential area; a similar logic has surrounded the recent construction of the new soccer-only Red Bull Arena outside New York City near Newark, New Jersey, on old industrial land along the Passaic River. ⁶⁸

In this case, then, the logic for situating the future Stade de France in Saint-Denis and the stadium’s envisioned role in revitalizing the local area demonstrated affinities between Parisian and international urbanizing developments. ⁶⁹ The construction of the Stade de France, however, was also made possible by a more specifically French development—the decentralization of planning power across the Ile-de-France in the 1970s and 1980s. While the Parc des Princes could not have been reconstructed without the acquiescence of the Parisian municipal council, it remained a reflection of the power of the state (via the prefecture of Paris) and its ability to shape the face of the city. ⁷⁰ Yet the reforms of the late 1970s that created an independent mayor for Paris meant that the eventual office-holder in the Hôtel de Ville—Jacques Chirac—could push an independent urbanist agenda for his city, building Bercy and proposing a national stadium for Paris. Chirac continued to weigh heavily in the selection process for the site of the Stade de France, vetoing Melun-Sénart and supporting Saint-Denis. (The city of Paris, it should be noted, actually still owned the land in Saint-Denis that became the site for the stadium but permitted its development under the assumption that the stadium would benefit Paris as much or more than Saint-Denis.) At the same time that Paris itself was more autonomous in terms of urban planning, the banlieues around Paris enjoyed more leverage in their relationship with the state and the capital, albeit with limits. As was the case in the 1960s, the central state still controlled the location and design of the stadium itself, and Braouezec’s willingness to permit his commune to host the stadium was facilitated by the fact that Saint-Denis bore little of the financial risk. ⁷¹ Yet Braouezec’s demands for state attention to long-festering infrastructural problems in his city certainly serve as evidence of the power of suburbs to push back against both the state and Paris, or at least to shape the way that urban development unfolded in ways that were not possible in the era that gave birth to the Parc.

The Stade de France, then, certainly showcased how city development and planning authority alike had shifted in the Parisian basin since the completion of the Parc des Princes in 1972. Gone was most (if not all) of the rhetoric of Gaullist grandeur that accompanied the Parc, replaced by a defense of the stade as a socially useful space for economic growth and urban revitalization that might well have been articulated in other cities around the globe. It is worth noting, too, that the consensus over the utility of spectator sporting events in the abstract, and for Paris in particular, had developed dramatically by the time of the Stade’s completion. Chirac and his supporters were not alone in pushing for a Parisian presence on the global sporting stage, in hosting “mega-events” like the World Cup and Olympic Games. In fact, it was Socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoë (admittedly with the support of then President Chirac) who anchored the Parisian bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics that nearly brought the games to the French capital. ⁷² These ventures demonstrated that Paris, long an attractive destination for foreign tourists, had now embraced the “mega-event” as a means of self-promotion and to reposition itself in what Maurice Roche has described as a “world of global inter-city comparisons and economic competition.” ⁷³

Yet, for all the ways in which the Stade de France demonstrated the transformed character of Parisian urbanism, the stadium’s place within that world, and affinities to global trends related to stadia and spectator sporting events, the new stadium was met with the same sorts of critiques and anxieties that met the Parc des Princes twenty-six years previously. Following the script of those critics of the Parc who assailed the stadium as “technocratic” and intended for the benefit of private commercial interests, certain politicians (mostly on the Left) criticized the construction of the Stade de France as being both overly favorable to powerful corporate interests and inherently anti-democratic. The stadium was built and then administered by a private consortium that combined the three giants of the French building industry: Bouygues, Dumez (Lyonnaise des eaux), and SGE (Générale des eaux). ⁷⁴ This not only demonstrated the powerful and lasting influence of Bouygues but also led some observers to suggest that the private sector—which had provided slightly more than half of the financing for the project—would benefit far more from the Stade than would the state. ⁷⁵ The Stade also drew fire for lack of transparency in the architectural bidding process: Jean Nouvel, whose design for the stadium lost out to the plan of Michel Macary, Aymeric Zublena, Michel Regembal, and Claude Constantini, eventually filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging that the bids had been skewed to the advantage of his competitors. ⁷⁶ Nouvel’s complaints were upheld, at least in part, by the European Commission in January 1997, which ruled that the government’s selection procedure violated European regulations on “free competition in contract-tendering.” ⁷⁷ In this regard, the Stade de France and Parc des Princes alike were critiqued for the ways in which the close relationship between the French state and its leading economic and financial firms (what Vivien Schmidt has termed “state-enhanced” capitalism) seemed to benefit certain favored private actors more that the French populace at large. ⁷⁸

Like the Parc, too, the Stade de France witnessed lingering anxieties and misplaced expectations about the role of the stadium as a space for sporting spectatorship. The planners of the Stade de France—from the architects to local government officials—shared Roger Taillibert’s sense that they were “reinventing” mass leisure space. Even before Bouygues, Dumez, and SGE competed in the bidding process, they issued a joint study in 1990 announcing that a grand stade needed to reach beyond the traditional crowd of supporters to attract a new public for “spectacular” events, “festivals” to be experienced with friends or with family. ⁷⁹ The Stade was thus explicitly designed to be a “polyvalent” space that could be reconfigured for a variety of sporting events and musical concerts, thanks to its retractable grandstands. ⁸⁰ As Aymeric Zublena later proclaimed, the architects envisioned a new kind of “conviviality” between spectators and between the stadium itself and its environs, one that presumably would not include hooliganism or spectator disorder. ⁸¹

Yet, akin to the Parc des Princes, the Stade de France has also been perceived as detached from its own immediate surroundings and a site of problematic spectatorship. For all of the efforts on the part of the municipality of Saint-Denis to claim the stadium as its own, the stadium is still arguably associated with Paris, according to Marie-Hélène Bacqué. ⁸² Unable to attract a permanent resident soccer club, the Stade is essentially consigned to hosting special soccer and rugby matches and musical events and thus lacks a persistent core of spectators that might be present at other stadia. Moreover, there is little to suggest that this particular stadium has produced a new kind of spectator collective, despite the temporary euphoria over France’s triumph in the 1998 World Cup. Saint-Denis and the stade have become synonymous with a “difficult” public, from the infamous incident in 2001, when spectators (largely of North African descent) at an exhibition match between France and Algeria whistled during the playing of the Marseillaise and invaded the pitch of the Stade de France, to the more generalized incidents of whistling and booing directed at underperforming French players. ⁸³ Yet while the continuities of these anxieties about spectator behavior are striking, it is certainly hard to see these incidents as an indictment of the stadium itself or as a uniquely Parisian problem, given ongoing concerns about true hooliganism and so-called ultras in southern and eastern Europe and elsewhere around the globe. ⁸⁴ Here again, the Stade demonstrates the way that Parisian stadia—both as urban spaces and sporting arenas—have come to align themselves not only within global narratives about urban renewal but also within ongoing anxieties about disorderly spectator behavior and violence.

Conclusion

The Parc des Princes and Stade de France both came to fruition in the roughly half-century after the Second World War, when the urban spaces around the capital were transformed in ways unprecedented since the mid-nineteenth century. Both stadia, too, were inexorably products of their respective eras: the Parc des Princes was made possible by the systematic infrastructural projects of the 1960s and early 1970s and reflected the concrete modernity of that era’s large structures like Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport. The Stade de France, for its part, saw the light of day in an era when Paris and its surrounding suburbs could weigh more heavily in the decision-making process and when urbanists and politicians increasingly turned to large-scale building projects as means of stimulating depressed neighborhoods or blighted industrial areas. The construction of both stadia, too, demonstrated a sense that spectator sporting spaces mattered in postwar Paris, in ways that merited official governmental endorsement and support. By the same token, however, a powerful undercurrent of anxiety still surrounded both stadia, both for their place as a result of specific urbanizing developments (i.e., the fears about political decision making and transparency) or the demeanor of sporting spectators in general.

The story of Parisian stadia, then, certainly enriches our narrative about postwar urban modernization in the French capital, and the place of sporting spaces within that process, but ultimately situates those Parisian developments within a much more comparative global framework. In retrospect, this is hardly surprising: the stadium has certainly become a truly globalized space, valued in similar ways worldwide, from its place within urban renewal to its role in anchoring sporting “mega-events” like the Olympics or World Cup (to say nothing of the global capital flows that now characterize international sport). ⁸⁵ The saga of the Parc des Princes and Stade de France, I would suggest, demonstrates a particularly Parisian process of urban change and a recognition of the place of spectator sport within that development that ultimately gave the French capital tangible points of intersection and affinity to other global cities in the early twenty-first century.