Overview

From the first tentative selections of the early 1900s to the era of global superstardom, France's national team has never been only a football team. It has been a travelling stage on which the Republic performs its ideals-unity, equality, and civic belonging-while the country argues, relentlessly, over whether those ideals hold up in real life. This narrative follows Les Bleus across the defining arcs: the 1958 breakthrough, the Platini revolution and Euro 1984, the Zidane years that culminated in 1998 glory and 2006 rupture, the post-Knysna institutional reckoning, and the modern machine that returned France to the summit in 2018 and carried it to another World Cup final in 2022. Alongside the matches are the moments that turned football into national controversy: the anthem and the shirt as civic tests, federation decisions as political symbols, and the media storms that made every gesture and sentence part of a larger argument about identity, integration, and representation. Written with a historian's discipline and a storyteller's momentum, this is the complete, fact-based account of how a team became a mirror-then a battleground-and why France keeps returning to Les Bleus to ask the same question in new forms: what does it mean to represent the nation?

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9781970852233

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