ABSTRACT
The history of sport and physical education was relatively unknown in France before the second half of the 1960s.1 Over the past 40 years, the production of knowledge has considerably increased and contributed to the exploration of the issue in various perspectives. Yet English-speaking scholars have tended to ignore these works, despite a couple of historiographical statements made in international journals by Allen Guttmann in 1983, André Gounot in 2001 and Thierry Terret in 2007,2 completed by more thematic papers published by Richard Holt on French sports history and sociability in 1989, Thierry Terret on French sports history and gender in 2000 and Evelyne Combeau-Mari on French colonial sports history in 2007.3 Furthermore, French scholars rarely submit their research in international publications, with about 50 papers published in the four dominant journals of the field, the Journal of Sport History, the International Journal of the History of Sport, Stadion and Sport History Review during the last 30 years. As a consequence, a number of English-speaking sports historians are familiar with French sports history mainly through Richard Holt’s Sport and Society in Modern France, which dates back to 1981 and thus hardly reflects the historiographical changes of the last 20 years.
