I arrived in Paris on May 11 with one mission: to finish the book manuscript that I need for tenure. It has certainly been a longer journey than I expected when I first set out to write a book on the French political thinker Raymond Aron. I defended my dissertation about him in 2016, but I gave up on turning it into a book when the academic job market started falling apart and I began looking for alternative opportunities. Fortunately for me, I received a job offer from Wesleyan University in 2021. This meant that I had to return to the Aron book.
During my time in Paris, I needed to write the last chapter and tie up some loose ends in the Aron archives, which are housed at the National Library of France. The pressure was on, and apart from some long walks, I rarely left the library. But as the end of my stay in France approached, I did allow myself a few extracurricular activities. I had lived in Paris for a few years during grad school, and when I reached out to my old friend Matthieu, he immediately invited me to watch the Champions League final, which pitted the local soccer club Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) against Inter Milan. I jumped at the opportunity and met him and his friends in Montreuil, a Paris suburb, to watch the match.
It was to start at 9 p.m. on Saturday, May 31. Throughout the whole day, there was a World Cup–like atmosphere in Paris, as PSG fans belted out the club chants on the streets and the metro. I was staying in a small studio—what the French call a “chambre de bonne”—at the western end of the Champs-Élysées, just a couple hundred meters away from the overwhelming Arc de Triomphe. As I left the apartment for a late breakfast that morning, I noticed that there were no cars parked on my street. Usually, every parking space was taken. I asked the server at the restaurant what was happening, and he replied that the Champs-Élysées is the one place in Paris that you don’t want to leave your car if PSG wins the game—actually, he said, “win or lose, this will be the epicenter for potential riots.” Right, I thought to myself: this sort of thing happens all the time in the United States after a local team wins a championship. Memories came to mind of the authorities greasing the poles in Philadelphia before the Eagles won Super Bowl LII in 2018, which led to some serious rioting and looting. Of course, I had never witnessed something like that firsthand. But the server’s warning did not disturb me at all, and in the evening, I made my way out to Montreuil.
The restaurant/bar where we watched the match was called Le Berrichon, and it was filled with PSG fans of all ages—indeed, I was surprised by how many children were glued to the screens. PSG dominated the match from beginning to end, winning 5-0. The fans’ joy seemed to increase with every additional goal, and most of all when it was clear that Inter Milan had no chance of coming back. Blowouts in major sporting events in the United States are often treated as disappointments, boring even to fans of the winning team. People start to tune out once the outcome is clear. But this was certainly not the case that night in Montreuil. The PSG fans remained glued to Le Berrichon’s many screens until the last whistle blew. Then tears of joy flowed as red flares shot up outside.
No doubt this level of excitement had something to do with PSG’s many previous failures to win a Champions League title. Expectations had grown significantly since the team was bought in 2011 by Qatar Sports Investments, whose wealth had allowed PSG to land such superstars as Zlatan Ibrahimović, Neymar, Kylian Mbappé, and Lionel Messi. Yet there had been nothing to show for all that expensive talent—until now. But I also discerned something else, something beyond the huge sense of relief that comes from finally winning the big match. There was an unlikely sense of solidarity, even fraternity, uniting a rather diverse group of fans who would ordinarily have little to do with one another.
As I left the bar with my friends, the streets were alive with a joyfully raucous atmosphere. I discovered that no one was following the traffic lights when I was almost run over by a scooter. It was around midnight, and Matthieu warned me that the crowds would be descending on the Champs-Élysées—it might be impossible for me to return to my apartment. Thinking it wise to get home as early as possible, I immediately jumped on a train that was erupting in chants. After a series of long delays, I finally got off the metro and ascended to the street, where I found myself in the middle of what looked like a full-scale riot. The police, dressed like a military special-ops unit, were launching tear gas into the crowd. A car was on fire nearby, and fireworks were being shot in every direction.
The police had shut down the Métro Charles de Gaulle–Étoile station, the stop closest to where I was staying, so I was forced to get off at a different stop about a mile away. As I walked from there to the apartment, I felt as though I were traversing a warzone. I saw burglarized stores, cars and bikes destroyed, and acts of aggression committed by the police. I finally reached my place at around 2 a.m., but the din of explosions and sirens didn’t end until sunrise. When I left my apartment the next morning, the streets of my little bourgeois quarter were full of debris, and many shop windows were broken. One notable exception was a restaurant whose owners had wisely put PSG posters and jerseys over the windows in preparation for what they knew was to come.
I did not want to respond to all this like a bourgeois crank. Why not let the PSG fans of the banlieue descend upon the city’s wealthy arrondissements to make the rich uncomfortable for one night? Didn’t Jean Baudrillard say that “there’s not a French man, woman, or child who doesn’t delight in seeing a car burn”? Still, some of what I witnessed—rioters destroying Vélib bicycles (the French equivalent of New York’s Citi Bikes) and breaking the windows of little all-night grocery stores run by working-class people, leaving French African and Arab workers to clean up the mess in the morning—didn’t sit well with me.
A few days later, I began writing the conclusion of my book, which looks at the last three years of Raymond Aron’s life (he died on October 17, 1983). At the archives, I stumbled on a piece by him that addresses some of the questions I found myself asking in the aftermath of PSG’s Champions League victory. The article, published in April 1982 by the French newspaper L’Express, is titled “Confession d’un fan.” Aron wrote very little about sports during his lifetime; in this piece, however, he confesses to being a serious soccer fan and lists all the World Cup matches that he watched over the decades.
Aron writes that the crowd at the Parc des Princes—home to the local Paris club—“behaves rather badly.” “I deplore this,” he continued, “and it should be deplored.” Aron notes that the French soccer league is made of clubs whose fans exhibit an almost patriotic loyalty, and that the passion countries devote to their teams at the World Cup constitutes a kind of nationalism. He does not condemn this. In fact, he thinks there is a reason to be indulgent toward sports nationalism. Players and their fans suffer less from defeat than they enjoy in victory. When it comes to real wars, the opposite is true. There, even victories come at a high price. A competition subject to rules, controlled by referees—is this not, finally, the image of the only reconciliation between peoples compatible with the nature of communities and perhaps of man himself?
In short, Aron acknowledged the poor behavior of some fans but was able to separate it from the enthusiastic solidarity that comes with supporting a local club or national team. The context for his article was his concern about the decline of civil associations and public life; he worried about the larger trend of individuals withdrawing into themselves, or into a narrow circle of family and a few friends. Sports was one of the few things that seemed to defy this trend, and despite raucous fans, Aron believed that the bonds of solidarity it created were a good thing for society, and even for the international community. He said all this as one of the leading liberal bourgeois voices of his day, knowing full well the contempt many of his bourgeois readers felt for working-class soccer fans. That’s why his thoughts about sports remain relevant to this day.
