French female youth and sports inspectors and the challenge of neoliberalism during the Trente Glorieuses

Introduction

Between 1947 and 1973, France, like other advanced capitalist countries (United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Western European countries), enjoyed a long period of growth and prosperity known as the “golden age” of capitalism (Hobsbawm, 1996). The advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958 and the associated changes to the political institutions of the Fourth Republic established in 1946 saw a fundamental shift in France’s attitude to international economic relations. The result was a move toward a strategy more open to international competition that involved abandoning the traditional protectionist model. Triggered by the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 establishing the European Economic Community (Lynch, 1997), the policy formed part of a more general period of strong, steady growth in the global economy (Berstein & Milza, 2017). To support the implementation of the modernization policy, General de Gaulle surrounded himself with individuals associated with the so-called “third way,” the aim being to develop an economic and political model that would circumvent the Marxism/capitalism, or socialist left/liberal right, alternative (Troger, 2011). Against this economic and industrial backdrop, neoliberal ideas began to take root in France.

Top civil service technocrats and successive finance ministers and council presidents sought to boost the national economy during the Trente Glorieuses (Fourastié, 1979), at a time when countries were rushing headlong into a “virtuous spiral of rising productivity” (Evans & Sewell, 2013: 40).

In this article, we propose to examine the effects of the emergence of a peculiarly French form of neoliberalism (Denord, 2016) on youth education in France. The paradox of French neoliberalism in the 1960s is that it combined a neoliberal order with a planned economy model (Kuisel, 1984). Against this backdrop, the close links between economic modernization and education were a decisive factor in shaping reforms to the education system, a system marked at the time by a significant rise in student numbers. The goal was to “profitably invest” (Decree No. 59-57 of 6 January 1959) in human capital through an expansion of the social base available for the recruitment of elites with a view to improving the performance of the national economy (Enfert (d’) and Kahn, 2011).

In this new context, new players emerged in the field of youth education—male and female youth and sports inspectors appointed to act as government agents tasked with ensuring that the policies developed at the highest level of government in the field of youth physical education were properly implemented in every corner of the country (Érard, 2010; Érard & Alix, 2015; Lassus, 2017). As a body, the inspectorate was predominantly male, recruiting only a small number of women, especially in the school context. Female inspectors tended invariably to act as vehicles for the more “feminine” aspects of physical education (PE) (Étard). It is only recently that we have begun to understand the careers, trajectories and actions of the few women who were able to access the highest levels of the inspectorate, such as Marie-Thérèse Eyquem (Castan Vicente, 2009; Castan-Vicente, 2016, 2019; Castan-Vicente, Bohuon, et al., 2019; Castan-Vicente, Nicolas, et al., 2019; Munoz, 2002; Terfous, 2010; Terret, 2010), Yvonne Surrel (Abonnen, 2010; Levet-Labry, 2007, 2019), Odette Jullien (Szerdahelyi, 2016) and Annick Davisse (Ottogalli-Mazzacavallo, 2013; Ottogalli-Mazzacavallo & Szerdahelyi, 2018, 2019). Of course, they were not alone in this. For example, female principal inspectors representing the Youth and Sports authority were recruited (Érard, 2016) to work locally in the different regions of France. An initial study devoted to the trajectories and gender strategies of female Youth and Sports inspectors in post from the early 1960s through to the early 1990s (Lebossé & Érard, 2019) helped to prepare the ground for an examination of the role played by a female inspector in the wider implementation of neoliberal biopolitics. Without undertaking the delicate task of defining the notion, and in line with plural approaches to what is essentially a nebulous concept (Audier, 2013; 2015; Descamps & Quennouëlle-Corre, 2018), this article will consider neoliberalism as a practice of power serving to structure and organize the actions of rulers and the ruled and entailing a mode of self-governance and ways of acting conducive to the deployment of a market logic conceived as a normative logic, from the state down to the most intimate level of subjectivity (Brown, 2018; Dardot & Laval, 2009; Foucault, 2004). This “new liberalism” is based in particular on the notion of individualism, understood as the result of a process of individualization and autonomization (Audard, 2009) consisting, in its most radical form, in “tolerating the fact that each individual’s subjective preferences prevail over any shared rational objectivity” (Lucas, 2009; translation ours). In other words, how did female inspectors contribute to the rising neoliberal logic? To what extent did they help to transmit new ways of being and acting consistent with market thinking (Connell & Dados, 2014) by disseminating, in the social and educational fields, physical and sporting practices conducive to the construction of a “system of self-conduct that consists in involving the individual in the process of developing their autonomy and responsibility” (Ehrenberg, 1991; translation ours)?

An examination of numerous documents held in the national archives (19770228.4/5; 19770257.7; 19780403.44/45/46/48/49; 19790365.6) alongside written sources (forty-six articles from the journal Éducation physique et sport (EP.S)) highlights recurring elements that help to understand how some of the actions of these female inspectors reflected, no doubt unintentionally, France’s emerging neoliberal project. While this perspective is interesting in itself, it becomes even more so when research on written sources is combined with work on oral sources (three interviews conducted with Lilyane Forestier). These “provoked” archives (Becker, 1987) represent invaluable material (Wallenborn, 2006) for demonstrating, illustrating, and giving substance to the workings of this process, through the medium of the narrative of this trajectory and the traces left in individuals’ affective and subjective experience.

Operating within relations of power and competition and working in positions of political and educational responsibility at different levels of the inspectorate, ¹ female inspectors came to act as agents driving a national effort that required young people and women to venture into the “personal responsibility crusade” (Hacker, 2006). As a minority group among inspectors, women may be viewed as having contributed to the biopolitical project (Foucault, 2004) focused on the task of training young people for the new political and economic imperative (Stiegler, 2019) by performing a specific role within the system. By upholding a “differentialist” feminist vision, (Pfister, 1996) do they not open up new perspectives on this form of power by helping to make men and women complementary agents in a capitalist logic of governance that does little, however, to reduce gender inequalities? In that sense, applying Foucauldian concepts relating to the forms and presence of power to a microhistorical approach (Dosse, 2011) provides a fresh perspective (Coq, 2011).

Female inspectors as key links in a new system of youth governance

In 1959, the Youth and Sports Ministry was a pioneer in the area of devolution measures (Gaborit, 1992; Héluwaert, 2009; Le Noé, 2013) in providing “the flexibility, perceptiveness and speed” (National Archives, 19770228.5) required to operate effectively. The effect of devolving from central to local bodies (Vulbeau, 2005) was to give more independence to Youth and Sports inspectors. Departmental inspectors, tasked with operating in non-school settings, and Principal Pedagogical Inspectors (known in French as Inspecteurs principaux pédagogiques, or IPPs), appointed to work in school settings, played key roles in this respect, reflecting different but complementary logics (Érard & Alix, 2015) in the new system designed to manage and control France’s youth population.

In education, the role of Principal Pedagogical Inspectors, a role created by Decree No. 64-658 of 29 June 1964, was to deputize for General Inspectors in dealing with the effects of significant population growth (Berstein, 1989), the expansion of the education system (Prost, 2004), and the growing number of teachers to be inspected, whose numbers increased by more than 50% between 1963 and 1971 (National Archives, 19770228.5). The government came to be reliant on the services of female inspectors “to promote the democratization of secondary education” (Cacouault-Bitaud, 2007: 11). Having been officially appointed as an IPP (Érard, 2016), Jacqueline Roger was among the key decision-makers in her académie ² of southern France involved in validating pedagogical experiments aimed at promoting collaboration between teachers and local actors. For example, together with Étienne Orjollet, the General Inspector representing the sector, Roger supported a team of PE teachers who had developed an original model for coordinating PE, sports associations and leisure clubs (Listello, 1964a, 1964b, 1965) with the stated aim of “getting as many children (girls and boys) as possible off the streets on Thursdays” (Listello, 1964a: 18; translation ours). In other words, within her académie, Roger encouraged the implementation of highly innovative schemes geared toward promoting greater self-responsibility among students in managing and taking ownership of their sports and PE activities at school. She contributed to a government policy aimed at encouraging the use of PE organizations conducive to the running of inter-class, inter-club and inter-school competitions (Circular of 1^st June 1961, Circular of 21 August 1962, Official Instructions of 1967, and Circular of 8 September 1969). Like other IPPs, Roger contributed to the emergence of pedagogical systems in PE specifically designed to govern, manage and control students “differently”: by creating scenarios and situations involving rivalry, competition, problem-solving and non-directivity, students were encouraged, through sport, to develop greater self-responsibility and to take ownership of their physical education. These practices were implemented across a range of geographical areas: in Corbeil-Essonnes (Team of PE teachers, 1965; PE Pedagogical Team at the lycée of Corbeil, 1976), Calais (De Rette, 1969), Niort (Team of PE teachers, 1968), Sablé-sur-Sarthe (Bresciani, 1969, 1971), Musselburgh (Delangle et al., 1978), Vendôme (Chaventre, 1976), and Ivry, Pontoise and Creil (Benoits et al., 1970). As a key player with overall responsibility for PE inspection, she contributed to the dissemination of new pedagogical and managerial approaches as part of a process reflecting a wider policy geared toward reforming the education system with the aim of guiding students on the basis of their tastes and abilities rather than their social background (Dorison, 2010). In the 1960s, the generalization of sporting activities as a hegemonic content of PE lessons aimed at ensuring that as many students as possible achieved sporting excellence had the effect of turning PE into “an exemplary model” (Attali and Saint-Martin, 2011: 146) of this social and educational process.

In the extracurricular sector, departmental inspectors were reinforcing and consolidating the same system—a system designed to better manage and control urban youth (Sirinelli, 1995), a category viewed variously as dangerous or disorganized (Tellier & Tétard, 2010). As illustrated by the case of the Val-de-Marne department, where each inspector was responsible for up to 250,000 young people (National Archives, 19780403.46), inspectors were tasked with “democratizing sport” by developing sports facilities designed with local residents in mind (Érard & Alix, 2015), the aim being to maximize the impact on the behavior of children and teenagers growing up in the major urban centers of the Paris region. In a context conducive to an increase in the number of posts (National Archives, 19780403.45/46), Forestier became, at the age of 33, France’s youngest female “Youth and Sports” inspector after passing the competitive exam to serve within the Inspectorate for Youth and Sports (CAIJS) in 1963 (National Archives, 19780403.46). After initially being transferred to Western France (between 1963 and 1969), she chose to specialize in the very “male” domain of sports equipment, which, not unlike the construction industry, a sector dominated by male physical strength (Gallioz, 2006) and sexist biases (Curtis et al., 2018; Kakad, 2002), tended to conceal the presence of women. Building on technical skills developed in her first posting, Forestier continued to work toward achieving the objectives defined by the national policy in the Paris region (between 1969 and 1975), where youth management issues were a major priority.

For example, Forestier did much to promote the development of the Centres d’Animation Sportive (CAS), a body created in 1972 and widely viewed as the “umbilical cord between civilian sports associations and school PE” (Attali & Saint-Martin, 2004: 203; translation ours). By seeking to direct young people toward sport from school right through to club level, the system was designed to encourage self-responsibility through a “a multiform sporting life” (Circular No. 72-280 and 72-182 dated 1^st July 1972; translation ours). While other schemes flourished, including “the thousand-club experiment” (launched in 1967 and renewed in 1973) aimed at getting young people to build their own “local club” in order to encourage 15–21 year olds to “take responsibility” (National Archives, 19860412.1), Forestier contributed to the rise of governmental biopolitics, which is precisely what this article aims to demonstrate. In working to promote the development of sport and cultural initiatives locally based on a cooperative model, the complementarity between physical education, competitive sport and sport for all was reinforced with the aim “of building young people’s capacity for social integration” (UNESCO, 1976; translation ours), viewed as a contributing factor to economic development at a French and European level. Like other key actors in the world of sport, Forestier thus contributed to the development of new technologies of the self (as defined by Foucault), thereby recalling similar experiments carried out in Germany in the 1960s (“Der zweite Weg”) and the national fitness campaign conducted in Austria (Müllner, 2016).

Ultimately, in skillfully negotiating the implicit rules of the political gender game (Cassell, 1997) and gendered negotiation (Mooney and Hickey, 2012), Forestier was able to position herself as a technical adviser to mayors, seizing on the highly liberal mode of governance based on a “a new geometry of relationships” (Le Noé, 2013: 155) to “do what was planned” (L. Forestier, Interview dated 26 September 2009). Seemingly enjoying more freedom and independence and acting, in her words, as a “tiny little minister” (L. Forestier, Interview dated 26 September 2009), her career perfectly illustrates the new modes of control and management developed to improve the effectiveness of French government agencies and remove obstacles to national economic growth (Armand & Rueff, 1959: 25).

“Cherry-picked” female inspectors with careers characterized by mobility

The socio-professional profiles of the Youth and Sports inspectors recruited during this period predisposed them to serve as agents for the “democratization of sport” policy promoted at the time. Combining significant experience as sports practitioners and teachers, and even, in some cases, coaching experience and/or experience as senior sports executives (Érard & Alix, 2015), all of which were key factors in their bid to join the agency, female inspectors were a rarity. For them, geographic mobility was a condition of professional advancement (Érard, 2010a, 2010b). Their socio-professional trajectories embody the model of the “entrepreneur of the self” governed by the capitalist values of the time (Bihr, 2011). In other words, these were experienced sportspeople who had become mobile senior managers involved in spreading the “good word” of “healthy” sport as a form of training for social and economic life.

Not unlike the senior female officials working at the Ministry of Finance who held insignificant and peripheral positions within central government between 1945 and 1972 (Descamps, 2013), female inspectors working for the Ministry of Youth and Sports, who accounted in 1965 for just 3.6% of departmental inspectors and for 4.8% of IPPs (National Archives, 19770257.5), tended invariably to be selected for their fighting spirit and their success attributes. Securing such positions required PE teachers (whether male or female) to show evidence of an exemplary career as a teacher-turned-trainer, a trajectory founded on a core value of consumer society (Baudrillard, 1970; Strasser et al., 1998) and economic growth (Bairoch & Kozul-Wright, 1998): mobility as an investment (Kottis, 1971).

Understood in this way, mobility was the key factor in the professional advancement of a number of female inspectors born between 1920 and 1930 who resorted to a strategy of “international legitimacy to reinforce a national position” (Terret, 2010: 1162; translation ours). For example, Marie-Thérèse Eyquem held positions of responsibility within both the Fédération internationale catholique d’éducation physique (FICEP) and the International Association of Physical Education and Sport for Girls and Women (IAPESGW) (Castan Vicente, 2009). Similarly, Jacqueline Roger’s responsibilities also extended beyond France since she was appointed to lead numerous national and international initiatives as part of her appointment as Vice-President, in 1961, of the French Gymnastics Federation. Her various conference presentations (such as at the 1959 music seminar of the Supreme Council of Physical Culture in Warsaw and at a workshop at the Medau School in Coburg, Germany in 1960) earned her praise from the académie’s inspector, a key factor in her recruitment by the Inspectorate (Érard, 2016). Yvonne Surrel, the first woman to be appointed as General Inspector for Youth and Sports in 1961 and the director of the École Normale Supérieure d’Éducation Physique (ENSEP) for young women in Châtenay-Malabry from 1946 to 1967, was the first President of the Association internationale des Écoles supérieures d’EP (AIESEP) founded in 1962. Jeanne Chollat-Namy was appointed by the Minister of State responsible for Algerian affairs in 1960 to work as Chef de service académique de la jeunesse in Algiers in 1962. Likewise, Raymonde Le Cozannet was seconded from cooperation in 1963 to work at the Centre National d’EPS in Ben Aknoun in Algiers Province (Érard, 2016).

While it was not the case that all female inspectors had international careers, securing such positions usually required them to be willing to work long hours and to be geographically mobile. For these women, the vast majority of whom were married with children and whose husbands or partners also generally worked (Érard, 2016), being geographically mobile often raised work-life balance issues. For example, when Jacqueline Roger passed the examination to become an inspector in 1960, she was 38 and had three children aged fourteen, twelve and eight. She was then transferred to work over six hundred kilometers away from the family home for a year. Similarly, when she was appointed to her first post at the age of 33, Forestier’s family home (she had a 2-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son) was located several hundred kilometers away in the Paris region, where her husband’s business was based (Lilyane Forestier, Interview dated 4 May 2018). By employing a live-in couple to tend the garden and look after the children, Forestier opted, along with her husband, for work-family arrangements that enabled her to “be very free: I’d leave at 6am in the morning (…) and would never get home much before 7pm in the evening” (translated from L. Forestier, Interview dated 4 May 2018). Forestier’s successive promotions, from her posting as a territorial inspector in 1963 to her appointment as an IPP in 1976, meant being transferred to Western France (Normandy).

Like their male counterparts, female inspectors had no choice but to adopt a logic of mobility and availability to secure positions within the inspectorate and advance professionally—in other words, to accept a way of life based on the “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2011) remote from the standards and family way of life characteristic of France during this period (Battagliola, 2008). Echoing Michel Foucault, we might say that mobility, which Foucault associates with migration, is an individual’s capacity to move, understood as a constituent feature of human capital, with the aim of improving their status: “migration is an investment, the migrant is an investor” (Foucault, 2004: 236). The employability (Hassen & Hofaidhllaoui, 2012) and promotion of male inspectors and, especially, female inspectors, for whom family circumstances represent a major barrier, were thus heavily dependent on the ability to be mobile, a characteristic that would become a key requirement for any inspector (whether male or female) seeking to “achieve (…) advancement” (National Archives, 19770228.4). What these female inspectors did was to operate within a broader ministerial policy that “recommended mobility” (National Archives, 19770228.4). The idea was that the appointment of an inspector at the head of a regional directorate should be defined in line with “the Minister’s decision not to promote from within the local area” (National Archives, 19770228.4). Another key factor in the emergence of this new logic—a logic that weighed heavily on the career choices of female inspectors—was the broader context of France’s booming services sector (Berstein & Rioux, 1995).

One consequence of the growth society is to produce higher-paid urban employees in new occupations, who, “in consuming more and valuing freedom and cultural development, ]…] set the tone and pace of industrial society and promote a taste for social mobility” (Berstein & Rioux, 1995: 157; translation ours). Through their capacity for mobility, female inspectors embodied the spirit of a society open to capitalism and consumption. As further evidence of this, in the late 1960s, the competitive examination for inspectors changed radically, producing a new generation of younger civil servants with better managerial and administrative skills (including law graduates) (National Archives, 19780403.48/49 and 19770257.7). Conceived on the model of the executive, the figure of the inspector emerged as a new symbol “of France in the era of growth, the winner of the resulting social competition” (Berstein, 1989: 190; translation ours). To enter this male bastion, women had to conform to the implicit definition of the ideal inspector—a young, suitably qualified man in good physical condition capable of contributing to a body of “sharp, dynamic” public sector agents (National Archives, 19780403.49). This explains why so few women were able to enter the small, exclusive male-dominated world of inspection. In 1973, just one woman passed the internal examination, while another female candidate was placed on the reserve list in the external examination. Nevertheless, the number of women sitting the examination was increasing steadily, with 27 women taking the exam in 1970 compared to twice that number (55) three years later (National Archives, 19770257.7).

In forging careers and trajectories around mobility, the female inspectors of the time may thus be seen simultaneously as objects, subjects, and drivers of a neoliberalization of behaviors (Gill & Scharff, 2011; Stival, 2018), consistent with a view of homo economicus as human capital or as an entrepreneur of the self (Laval, 2018). By contributing to a process of academic renewal and innovation receptive to the human and social sciences in the field of sport and PE (Pociello, 2004), they were able to shape and change established ways of “handling men” (Le Texier, 2016; translation ours), thereby helping to transmit and embed new modes of managing and controlling youth in education.

New academic references as support for a new way of teaching physical activities

During this period, references to the human sciences became an increasingly prominent feature of youth and sports inspection practices, with the new modes of governance and regulation drawing largely on psychological approaches. With the newfound emphasis on the human and social sciences, should this be interpreted as an attempt to impede France’s transition toward a market economy? As an example, the content of inspector training courses changed radically between the late 1950 and the early 1970s.

In 1959, the continuing training program was developed based on practical and professional objectives and considerations aimed at initiating inspectors into the workings of general administration, budget and equipment issues, PE and post-school physical activities, and the general operation of the inspectorate (National Archives, 19780403.45). Alongside these traditional topics, the program also focused on refresher training combining interventions by experts in sociology, psychology and psychopedagogy. For instance, core issues in “group dynamics and non-directive pedagogy” (National Archives, 19770228.4; translation ours) were introduced by Gilles Ferry, a renowned professor of psychology, the idea being that inspectors should learn to better situate themselves and to become their own mediator. Through such training, the aim was for them to lead new groups based on novel managerial principles and techniques reflecting the neoliberal philosophy of the 1970s: the historical rules of bureaucratic administration were thus challenged “in favor of new institutional arrangements inspired by the principles of New Public Management” (Bezes, 2009: 17; translation ours).

Drawing increasingly on psychological approaches, the new movement also shaped the work of female inspectors, who became critical to the new power dynamics governing French administrators responsible for youth and sports. Thus, between 1953 and 1968, Yvonne Surrel worked tirelessly to promote her school’s international standing and prestige, notably through the development of academic research (Levet-Labry, 2019). In 1953, she launched the creation of France’s first psychology research center specializing in psychomotor behavior in the field of PE. Key studies in psychophysiology and social psychology reflected the dual mission enshrined in Article 1 of the ENSEP charter: “to train PE teachers to the highest standards and to become an autonomous academic research center” (Collinet & Terral, 2010; translation ours). Surrel also encouraged teachers and researchers working in her school to develop and disseminate their research in this area (Marsenach, 2004). In 1958, she also sent a teacher, Lucienne Choulat, to Switzerland to attend the Congrès international pour une éducation physique contemporaine, where speakers highlighted the benefits of an approach to PE based on new academic references emphasizing the psycho-sociological aspects of group behavior (Choulat, 1959). Following her lead, Edmond Hiriartborde, who was appointed as head of the center in 1955, also contributed to the colonization of PE by the behavioral sciences. Through his attendance at various conferences devoted to psychology (and especially sports psychology; Levet-Labry, 2007) and the promotion of a new approach to PE based on the human sciences and specifically designed for PE teachers (Hiriartborde, 1959, 1962, 1963), Hiriartborde contributed, as did others (Ferry, 1958; Parazols, 1965), to the edification of psychology and psychanalysis as “metaknowledge” and to its embeddedness in society as both a politics and a philosophy (Ehrenberg, 2010: 208).

Through her work as an inspector and in her capacity as director of a national teacher training institute, Surrel contributed to the dissemination of new academic references and standards aimed at “modernizing” PE teaching. By delivering training to the most renowned teachers in France, she was able to put in place a mechanism for the practice of power based around the development of the individual’s psychological capabilities geared toward improving their performance (Luthans & Youssef, 2004). As such, she played a key role in transmitting and establishing ideas first developed by Walter Lippman (Lippmann, 1922) and Edward Bernays (Bernays, 1928), who viewed the psychological dimension as a new kind of capital to be exploited (Newman et al., 2014) in building a successful capitalist society. While historically the life sciences had been the dominant force in the construction of PE and the field of physical and sports activities in France (Pociello, 2004), the body was thus no longer the main object of power, having been superseded by the “psyche,” which needed to be channeled “to make it useful, docile and productive” (Gaulejac (de), 2006, p. 32; translation ours).

Another female inspector, Jacqueline Roger, also played a major role in the dissemination of a neoliberal process that drew on a wide range of psychological and/or sociological references. According to Joffre Dumazedier, a French expert in the sociology of leisure, Roger contributed, along with her husband (also an IPP), to ensuring that French PE teachers developed into apprentice sociologists “capable of carrying out their own investigations at the social level” (Roger, 1964: 12; translation ours), not least to better meet the needs of the groups and populations that they taught in educational settings. Through the EP.S journal, a major reference and resource for the PE community, she also disseminated, with PE teachers in mind, a sociometric and structural conception of team sports based on the work of Jacob Levy Moreno, an expert in psychiatry and socioanalysis (Schützenberger, 2011). Along similar lines, she also drew on research by Pierre Pesquié, a graduate in psychology and a teacher trainer at a Centre Régional d’Éducation Physique et Sportive (CREPS) in southern France who promoted the value, for teachers, of being trained in the psychology of sports groups (Pesquié, 1963, 1964). When Forestier’s attention turned to continuing teacher training in Normandy from 1976 onward, she also drew largely on research in the psychopedagogy of learning by the same author (Pesquié, 1966a, 1966b; 1966c; 1966d, 1966e), with whom she shared similar interests in the field of child development (Lebossé & Érard, 2019). Like other IPPs, through their PE teacher training duties, what these female inspectors did was to promote the development of an entirely new ethos (Fabre, 2018) focused on consciousness, the psyche and self-regulation. A good example is Jean Dossman, an inspector working in an académie in eastern France who, in the 1970s, sought to promote an approach to teacher and educator training founded on managerial rules drawn from the behavioral sciences for the management of group dynamics (National Archives, 19790365.6). The development of organizational studies and of social and behavioral sciences in North America and, later, in Europe from the 1950s and 1960s onward (March, 2007) served to reshape the traditional conception of power relations in education, as illustrated by the case of one inspector who, in the mid-1970s, sought to encourage educators to “always demand the active engagement of students in their own education by emphasizing both their immediate interests and their real needs” (National Archives, 19790365.6; translation ours). Having integrated the new frames of reference, inspectors (whether male or female) came in turn to train teachers in these new ways of conceiving and practicing PE, thereby shaping the kind of education provided by promoting students as agents taking increasing ownership of their education.

In short, under the pressure of new economic dynamics (Armand & Rueff, 1959), female inspectors were roped into the process of molding France’s youth population to suit the growth society—a society in which “the growth of consumption is an encouragement to produce, an incitement to invest” (Fourth Economic and Social Development Plan, 1962; translation ours). By advocating the use of new academic references to reform the teaching of PE and physical activities, they sought to promote new ways of being and acting that were conducive to the emergence of intropreneurs, who, according to the Hayekian conception of the market, “engage in a process of self-realization or self-reappropriation by expanding their own level of consciousness” (Aimar, 2019: 15; translation ours).

However, with the arrival of the human sciences in the field of sport, and in the specific context of May 68, a small number of dissenting voices began to make themselves heard among PE teachers, paving the way for the development of critical perspectives on sport and for a radical interrogation of PE teaching (Liotard, 2000). The emergence of bodily countercultures (such as Raymond Murcia’s eutony, bodily expression as promoted by Claude-Pujade Renaud, and the Freudian-Marxist school of thought driven by figures such as Pierre Laguillaumie and Jean-Marie Brohm, as well as Daniel Denis and Michel Bernard) is a good illustration of this trend. These pockets of resistance could be the subject of a separate study devoted to their relation to the postmodern logic of self-realization and self-fulfillment (Lipovetsky, 2004) and their potential contribution, through instrumentalization, to the deployment of the neoliberal project.

Female inspectors and the governance of women by women

The mechanism of self-regulation (Elias, 1973: 183) was of particular importance to female inspectors since their aim was to develop physical practices designed to enable them to govern themselves, consistent with an approach rooted in a differentialist form of feminism that “views women as beings ontologically different from men” (Achin, 2001: 59; translation ours).

In the early 1950s, two French female inspectors joined forces to organize the second Congrès International d’Éducation Physique et Sportive Féminine: Marie-Thérèse Eyquem and Yvonne Surrel. Acting respectively as general secretary of the organizing committee and chair of the technical committee, they both illustrate the existence of an international network aimed at promoting the development of a veritable “think tank” of female physical education, a space in which physical practices are conceived as “liberating” for women in the sense of serving to disseminate a new form of female self-regulation. Through their collaboration, various methods initially developed at the beginning of the century finally came to the fore in the service of the “wellbeing of young women” (Eyquem, 1953b: 5; translation ours). For example, the Langgaard-Rohden method, in which self-observation and experimentation play a central role, provides a clear view of this new form of female self-governance embodied in new bodily practices. The process “of (women’s) liberation of and through movement” (Eyquem, 1953a: 10; translation ours) was in motion, demonstrating the gradual internalization of the idea that movement forms “an integral part of the life of women today” (Eyquem, 1953a: 10; translation ours) and helps to engage in a process of “self-realization” (Eyquem, 1951:20; translation ours). By the end of the conference, all the attending headteachers agreed that, regardless of the forms of physical education, these had come to be viewed “as a means of individual expression” (Eyquem, 1953a: 10; translation ours). Based on more introspective and seemingly more liberating principles, the new methods of physical education defended along these lines were conducive to the rise of new techniques of the self that departed markedly from the more authoritarian teacher-led principles of, say, rhythmic gymnastics.

In this view, French women were encouraged to free themselves of the providentialist and collectivist institutional model (the defining principles of which are interdependence, sociability, and cooperation) by constructing a new relationship to the self that is both more intimate and more individual and that requires the active participation and engagement of the individual. In promoting their own conception of female physical education (Surrel, 1953a, 1953b, 1959, 1966; Eyquem, 1951, 1953a, 1953b), the two inspectors, whose “sole concern [was] to work in the service of youth” (Eyquem, 1953a: 11; translation ours), played a key role in the wider dissemination of new forms of female self-governance forged in accordance with biopolitical principles centered around the value of women and their right to decide for themselves. Eyquem thus defended the idea of “family planning” (Castan Vicente, 2009: 137), just as the freemason Yvonne Dornès campaigned for planned contraception (Picart, 2010). Yet while they may have encouraged female bodily practices designed to undermine the patriarchal logic, none of these women escaped a new system of governance and control built on capitalist principles (Connell, 1987: 41-47; Kelly, 1984: 52-54).

In an educational context, Jacqueline Roger, widely regarded as “a great expert in female PE,” also contributed, through her conception of a specifically female form of physical education, to disseminating new modes of self-governance among girls and women. In her view, female PE exercises should be designed to promote sensorimotor intelligence in order, more generally, to provide “human beings with a fully ‘available,’ ‘liberated’ body – that is, a body capable of any adaptations” (Roger, 1960a: 13; translation ours). The term “adaptation” is of particular interest here, not least because it was reiterated in the 1967 Official Instructions as the ultimate goal of PE, with adaptation being defined as an essential trait of contemporary man, a characteristic deemed so central that it came to define the very notion of health. To educate girls in such a way that they have the ability to control their body as they see fit, they need to be encouraged to develop “a habit of motion in consciously organized movements” (Roger, 1961: 23; translation ours). In this view, PE must be thought of as an educational tool that helps them to “develop a balance that protects both their robustness and their ‘femininity’” (Roger, 1965a: 16 ; translation ours) and where the aim is not to provide them with a form of education consisting exclusively of basic endurance activities focused on sport “on the pretext of becoming ‘the equal of men’” (Roger, 1965a: 16; translation ours). Not unlike Marie-Thérèse Eyquem and Yvonne Surrel, by adopting a differentialist position (Roger, 1960a, 1960b; 1960c; 1960d, 1961, 1963, 1964; 1965a; 1965b), Roger contributed to disseminating a system of control which, based on the idea of available, mobile and adaptable bodies, is capable of helping young women to integrate a world built on the key principles of investment, innovation, competition and consumption. While the services sector experienced significant growth in 1960s France, with “more than 66% of women in work, especially in medical services, offices, retail, teaching and the intellectual professions” (Berstein, 1989: 165; translation ours), the efforts geared toward developing the capacity of school-age girls to adapt were precisely designed to prepare them for sectors seeking to grow their female workforce. The idea was that as increasing numbers of women enter the labor market (Schweitzer, 2002), they need to be prepared, like their male counterparts, for tomorrow’s world—a key condition of economic growth and social progress (Armand & Rueff, 1959: 27). To better tailor the teaching of PE to the role of women as productive individuals capable of multitasking and of combining different social statuses, Roger recommended the introduction, alongside more traditional female activities, of team sports in PE curricula. For example, she developed pedagogical proposals involving team ball sports for young girls who “often struggle more (…) [and] appear to be less drawn to such activities” (Roger, 1964: 12; translation ours). Implicitly, the aim was to target those “left behind by the educational democratization of French physical education” (Attali & Saint-Martin, 2005: 207; translation ours) by developing bodily practices in which boys and girls alike are expected to redouble their efforts to be able to adapt and progress. For example, in accordance with national guidelines, she called, alongside more traditional female activities, for the introduction of “activities based on team sports that provide learning opportunities available nowhere else” (Roger, 1964: 13; translation ours). Sport, as the embodiment of progress and modernity, must be “an educational tool” (Attali & Saint-Martin, 2012: 105; translation ours) for all, including for girls—with, however, appropriate restrictions and precautions to be observed. The Circular of 21 August 1962 stipulated that girls who show an interest in sport or specific skills should be encouraged to engage in physical activities and that excessive physical exertion should be avoided by selecting a limited number of competitions for them to take part in. Against a backdrop of growing individualism (Lipovetsky, 1983) in which education had come to be viewed from a new perspective centered around population growth (Prost, 1992: 97) and management (Prost, 2004: 286), Roger contributed to expanding the range of physical activities available to young girls (and the associated culture of PE), thereby helping to disseminate new modes of regulation focused to a greater extent on gender-differentiated self-responsibilization.

This perspective was not an isolated view and was taken further by another female inspector, Lilyane Forestier, who felt much sympathy with the ideas developed by her elder. Like Roger, Forestier was favorable to the idea of helping “girls to flourish in PE but without necessarily relying on male activities” since feminism “is, first and foremost, a matter of taking into account what a woman actually is” (L. Forestier, Interview dated 12 October 2017; translation ours). Like Marie-Thérèse Eyquem, Yvonne Surrel and Jacqueline Roger, Forestier’s efforts are embedded in a more general context in which students are viewed as decision-making agents capable of expressing their personality and of acting and behaving with self-awareness—and capable, therefore, of self-governance, consistent with the principles of independence and autonomy extolled by the champions of neoliberal economics and politics.

The four female inspectors examined here contributed, at their own level and in their own way, to disseminating a female mode of governance that bore the marks of liberalism.

Despite this, and despite promoting and disseminating physical and sporting practices geared toward self-realization, they also appear to have been caught in a process of historical transformation without, however, belonging to a community of thought specific to neoliberalism. Indeed, each of them reflected different political persuasions. While Lilyane Forestier considered herself to be a centrist (Lilyane Forestier, Interview dated 4 May 2018), Marie-Thérèse Eyquem moved away from Catholic activism in female sport toward feminist and socialist activism (Castan-Vicente, 2009). As for Yvonne Surrel, she displayed leftist leanings through her husband Robert Sorrel’s political activities within the Syndicat national des professeur d’éducation physique (National Union of Physical Education Teachers), a body affiliated with the Fédération de l’Éducation nationale (National Education Federation), which brought together socialist activists and sympathizers (Martin, 1999; Abonnen 2010).

However, through their differentialist standpoint—a standpoint that implied a different approach to physical education for boys and girls—they appear to have worked against the grain of the rising neoliberalist philosophy that advocated the idea of interchangeable individuals (whether male or female) together with a principle of equality in the name of the market. For example, Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome (1957) is central to the definition of Community policy on gender equality, geared not toward promoting greater social justice but to “ensuring equal competition among Member State industrial operators, particularly in female-labor-intensive sectors” (Jacquot, 2014: 49; translation ours). It remains that by promoting and disseminating a conception of PE founded on values consistent with a market society (with an emphasis, in particular, on adaptability and mobility), they did little to fundamentally challenge the exercise of a form of power that views men and women as individuals serving the interests of the market.

Conclusion

In a society where the introduction of greater competition and of a full-fledged market economy were central in shaping government reforms (Bezes, 2009) and familiarizing senior Finance Ministry officials with business management methods (Descamps, 2016), Youth and Sports inspection practices appear to have played a major contributing role in disseminating a new mode of governing young people’s bodies and physical activities—a mode centered around the idea of self-governance based on the increasingly entrenched values of a socioeconomic system built on the core principle of competition established and consecrated during the Trente Glorieuses (Berstein, 1989).

Since 1948, the state has depended on the “free expressions of [the] personality” (Circular No. 1720 of 19 November 1948) of its agents in governing the territory for which they are responsible. In the 1960s, the decentralized structure of Youth and Sports served to consolidate this singularizing process (Ehrenberg, 1991) by basing the deployment of the modernization policy through sport on the capacity of inspectors, both male and female, to operate through their own initiative. Because of the autonomy and responsibilities granted to them, female inspectors were made full-fledged actors of the policy in being able to opt for a local adaptation reflecting their own beliefs and territorial characteristics. Representing a small minority in a predominantly male bastion, and cherry-picked for their ability to operate “as inspectors,” women were tasked with “instilling in young people (including girls) the ability to adapt to change” (Fourth Economic and Social Development Plan, 1962, p. 29; translation ours).

As women, they had considerable influence among female PE teachers, to whom they had unique access, placing them in a critical position. Though of sometimes different political or pedagogical persuasions, they took part, at their own level, in a new mode of youth governance designed to encourage young people, against a backdrop of social control, to assume more self-responsibility and to take ownership of their physical education. Under the pressure of the new political and economic goals driven by a market logic, they relied on references drawn from sociology, psychology and psychopedagogy in rethinking and reconceiving the teaching of physical education. In doing so, they contributed, no doubt unintentionally, to disseminating new modes of regulating and governing the body consistent with a form of neoliberal power that was becoming deeply ingrained in France (Dardot & Laval, 2009; Denord, 2016; Gaïti, 2014).

In subscribing to a differentialist form of feminism, they came to represent pockets of resistance (albeit not always consciously so) to the deployment of a logic of governing interchangeable individuals aimed at meeting economic needs. However, as the evidence suggests, the positions that they defended as experts in female physical education and sport did little to fundamentally challenge the exercise of capitalist power. Rather, they appear to have been more inclined, against a backdrop of converging cultural and social changes, to lend support to a more individualistic logic; however, much their political leanings might have predisposed them to contest this logic.

Is it not true that their proposals are consistent with the distinctive processes of the competitive and consumer society that took root during the Trente Glorieuses and that has developed to the point of becoming a “form of life” (Paltrinieri & Nicoli, 2017: 2; translation ours)?