Sport and physical education under the Popular Front and the Vichy government: a comparative approach based on gender

Based on the study of political speeches by Leo Lagrange, Jean Borotra and Marie-Therese Eyquem, this article aims at identifying the continuation or breaches in the various policies adopted in favour of sport and physical education between 1936 and 1944. It will also points to possible peculiarities in the speeches concerning sport and physical education for women and teenage girls. The corpus is based on data collected at CARAN, INSEP, La Federation Sportive et Gymnique du travail and La Federation Sportive et Culturelle de France. The results reveal that an ideological breach is not that obvious when it comes to sport and physical education for women and teenage girls. Similar physiological and social reflections are put to the front to define what the most suitable practices for women are. What is more, excessive practice, violent sports as well as exhibition matches are heavily condemned. Therefore, gender, used as a category in historical analysis, enables us to qualify Jean-Louis Gay-Lescot's theory according to which there's an ideological breach but pedagogical continuation between the policies in favour of sports and physical education under the Popular Front and Vichy.