Belterra and the Demise of Henry Ford’s Brazilian Rubber ‘Empire’

Biographical, Economic history, Geography, International Relations, Regional History

16F41C5C-69E8-4946-87A1-FC4CA093EDA7By the 1930s it was apparent to all concerned that Fordlândia, Henry Ford‘s rubber plantation in the Amazon, had been a costly, massive underachiever. Ford however, to the unending frustration of his family, doggedly refused to pull the plug and walk away from the Amazon fiasco counting his losses. In 1934, instead of ditching the failing Fordlândia operation altogether, he retained it and at the same time poured a fresh pile of money and resources into a second Amazonian rubber plantation site.

Learning from failure
The new rubber plantation, at Belterra, was better positioned geographically in relation to the main regional city of Santarém (just 40 km south of it). The plantation site selected this time was a more judicious choice, unlike the uneven ground of Fordlândia, the site comprised a flat topography, much better terrain for moving equipment around and for planting✱. The more favourable physical conditions at Belterra meant that Ford’s agrarian labourers were over a period of several years able to cultivate some 19 square miles of land for the planting of rubber trees (not a gigantic quantity by any reckoning, but a significant advance on the pitiful returns from Fordlândia)  [‘Belterra, Pará’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

9D6EF65F-8330-40D7-93A7-9DCDBC8E9034Improvements in local agronomy
The horticulturalists at Belterra were conscious of the need not to replicate the monoculture prevailing at Fordlândia – which had made the rubber plants vulnerable to infection. By planting hardwoods this time and employing new breeding methods which used local varieties, the planters were able to avoid the scourge of Fordlândia – the Amazon leaf disease. The downside of this method however was that it was very labour-intensive and expensive [ibid.].

Infrastructure, variety and man-management
One of the clear lessons of Fordlândia was that living conditions for migrant workers in the camp were not conducive to creating a happy workforce. Again, as at Fordlândia, the migrant employees (based on the precedent of Ford’s American plant workers) were paid much higher than the going rate elsewhere in Brazil…but the company had learnt from the Fordlândia plantation that this was not enough of itself to get the desired worker performance. This time Ford’s managers delivered an enhanced town infrastructure…the drawing board for Belterra included three well-staffed hospitals (a critical area of shortage at Fordlândia) and three major (and two minor) schools◊. The sanitation system was much improved on the earlier settlement (arguably it was better than anywhere else in rural Brazil at that time). The street layouts were better planned and more uniform (straighter streets, more systematic street grid and more effort put into ‘greening’ the environment). The Belterra management gave workers more options for their leisure time – construction of football fields⍟ and playground equipment, movie and dance nights (exclusively folk dancing, another obsession of Henry Ford!). The upshot was to give the plantation town something akin to a suburban feel [‘Dearborn in the Jungle: Why Belterra Flourished Where Fordlandia Failed’, Past Forward: Activating the Henry Ford Archive of Innovation, (blog), www.thehenryford.com].

Whereas Fordlândia had catered exclusively for single men in its Brazilian work force, the Ford managers (eventually) adopted a more realistic, far-sighted policy, recruiting an increasing number of migrant families to the plantation…showing that Ford (or his management team) were serious about addressing the staff problem that had plagued Fordlândia, a high rate of turnover of the work force [ibid.].

Some relaxation of Ford’s tight reins
Other efforts were made to appease the plantation’s migrant work force to make them more compliant with company target objectives. The imposition of American food on Brazilian work force, which had been the bane of (a large slice of) the dissension in Fordlândia, was lifted. The Brazilian tappers and labourers were allowed to retain their traditional, local eating habits. In addition, in a further relaxation of conditions, musical instruments (an integral part of the Brazilian lifestyle) were allowed in the camp [ibid.].

Ford’s American ‘civilising’ mission for the “undeveloped world”
Despite a relaxing of some of the rules governing the running of Ford’s new industrial town in the Amazon, there were certain things Henry would not compromise on.  Ford was always big on “moral education”…part of his rationale for getting into the Brazilian jungle was to fulfill a mission to realise a peculiarly idiosyncratic idea of his concerning “racial progress’. As Elizabeth Esch describes it, driving Ford was a patronising impulse to “proletarianise and civilise” the uneducated rubber tappers of Amazonia, to make them into “something better”※. In the carmaker’s eyes, melding the workforce into an more efficient unit went hand-in-hand with educating them.

Belterra school girls and boys in Ford’s uniforms, ca.1940 | THF56937 | by the Henry Ford (Flickr)  🔽

7765FF7B-1AD5-4E1C-B714-F0E696990C23

Midwest “old school” values
School was compulsory at Belterra – for all! Adult workers had to attend night school classes. Schoolchildren were strictly schooled and imbued with discipline along American lines of education…all workers’ children were issued with uniforms (which made the boys look like boy scouts or cadets). Every school day started with the ceremonial raising of the US flag. Some observers have noted how Ford’s installing of rigid educational and moral discipline at Belterra mirrored his own value system…to whit, tantamount to a kind of  sociological experiment to “Americanise Belterra youth” along the lines of a “Mid-western small town model” [‘Dearborn in the Jungle’, loc.cit.].

Global war, disruption and end-game
Ford established a tyre manufacturing plant in Dearborn in 1937 which by 1940 had the capacity to build 5,000 tyres, unfortunately for Ford NOT ANY of the raw rubber was sourced by that time from the company’s Brazilian plants [Ford Richardson Bryan, Beyond the Model T: The Other Ventures of Henry Ford, (1997)].

🔽 Henry Ford tinkering (Photo source: The Ford UK Co)

63462031-6AB2-4C20-85DE-E247F66364D3The Amazonian rubber venture by 1941 nevertheless did seem to be making some headway, there was in excess of three-and-a-half million rubber tree planted (mostly at Belterra), which by the following year had yielded 750 tons of latex  [ibid.]. The Ford Company was optimistic enough to announce that it expected to produce 30 to 40 million pounds of high quality rubber from the Amazon by 1950 [Esch, op.cit.]. One thing in its favour, as a consequence of the world war extending to the Pacific, was that British, Dutch and French Far Eastern rubber plantations were now in the hands of enemy Japan and no longer commercial entities.

Ultimately though the war rebounded on the Ford Company as on commerce generally with an increasing drain on the US economy for the war effort.  The motor company’s finances were not in great shape during the war years…incredibly the increasingly ‘flaky’ Ford Senior had axed the global company’s Accounting Department! [G Grandin, Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, (2010)]) . The domestic situation in Brazil was not helping Ford’s rubber plants…although powerful Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas had given approving nods in the public eye to the company’s presence in Brazil, labour law reforms in the country were not advantageous to Ford. The Brazilian government also restricted the export of lumber during the war. To exacerbate matters even more, the rubber plantations were hit with a return bout of the dreaded leaf blight infestation [Bryan, op.cit.].

Synthetic rubber – the future!
Ford’s son Edsel✜ and grandson Henry II had for several years been badgering the bewilderingly stubborn and by now ailing and declining industrialist to bring the wasteful Amazon fiasco to an end. What possibly clinched it in the end was a technological breakthrough, by 1945 synthetic rubber production was a superior and more economical method of getting latex than natural rubber. Moreover, with WWII now over, Britain and the other European powers had regained control of their lucrative Far Eastern rubber estates, and would once again provide the Ford rubber plants with very stiff competition [ibid.]. In December 1945 Ford finally sold the Fordlândia and Belterra plantations back to the Brazilian government, losing over US$20 million in the deal [‘Belterra, Pará’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The  dragged-out, ill-fated Amazon venture of Ford, which perpetually “had teetered between failure and farce” was over [Esch, op.cit.].BAEEFE61-81ED-45EE-8E6B-3B17AE5397C8

PostScript: Fordlândia and Belterra redux
Belterra today is in much better nick than Fordlândia, this is largely because the Brazilian government has kept the Belterra plant operational, although it has never been particularly profitable. Fordlândia on the other hand bears many of the characteristic scars of a ghost town. When Companhia Ford Industrial Do Brasil ceased operations in 1945, the Americans cut and ran, leaving things pretty much as they were…pieces of equipment and machinery abandoned, left lying idle, to rot or to be stolen or to be vandalised (contemporary Fordlândia has been described as a “looters’ paradise”◘), furniture, door knobs and other fittings, whatever that was movable, was taken. Most of the original buildings though have survived✥, as well as the plantation sawmill, the generator and such industrial relics, left rusting in the jungle for the past 73 years.

The most striking physical industrial remnant at Fordlândia today is the Torre de água – the 50m-high Water Tower…it still stands, like a symbol of the lost town, and like most of the fixtures at Fordlândia, built in Ford’s Michigan and shipped to the Amazon. Greg Grandin describes its still erect form as a reminder of what it once personified, “a utilitarian beacon of modernity for Ford’s ‘civilising’ project” [Grandin, op.cit.].

15330077-3C7C-4A29-BF29-2D8033DE644D__________________________________________________________
✱ botantist expert James R Weir, brought in to ‘troubleshoot’  the company ‘s dismal performance in trying to grow rubber at Fordlândia, came up with the idea of a second plantation in the Amazon (and then promptly left the project altogether!)
◊ named after Henry Ford’s three grandsons, Edsel, Benson and Henry
⍟ Ford had banned the playing of football (soccer) at Fordlândia
※ there was lots of talk at Dearborn about “taming savages” and more disturbingly, of pseudo-racial categories – creating a  “Latin-Saxonian unity” that supersedes the ‘Indian’ and mestizo groupings, E Esch, ‘Whitened and Enlightened’: The Ford Motor Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazilian Amazon’, in OJ Dinius & A Vergara [Eds.], Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power and Working Class Communities, (2011)
✜ Ford heir Edsel predeceased his father, dying in 1943
◘ Simon Romero, ‘Deep in Brazil’s Amazon, Exhibiting the Ruins of Ford’s Fantasyland’, New York Times, 20-Feb-2017, www.nytimes.com]
✥ but not the crumbled mess of the town hospital

The ‘Monopoly Myth’, a Review of The Monopolists

Commerce & Business, Leisure activities, Old technology, Popular Culture, Retailing history, Society & Culture

Monopoly: (n.) a market situation where one producer (or group of producers acting in unison) controls supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted; “exclusive possession” of the commodity is customarily implicit in the term [www.businesssdictionary.com; www.en.oxforddictionaries.com]

⌖⌖⌖ ⌖⌖⌖

As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.

f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/image-60.jpg”> (US Patent & Trademark Office)[/capt
Pilon’s book starts with two very different Americans, one an out-of-work Eastern Seaboard “average Joe” wallowing in the depths of the Depression, the other a fairly nondescript, left-leaning economics professor at a Californian public university –Charles Darrow, the individual identified as the putative inventor of Monopoly, and Ralph Anspach, the man who almost inadvertently exposed Darrow as the faux inventor of the game. The unemployed Darrow learned the game from friends during his enforced leisure time…then with the germ of an idea in his head, got other friends to provide artwork (especially political cartoonist FO Alexander) and a written set of rules. Darrow crafted a version, copyrighted it and eventually sold “his” game of Monopoly (without acknowledging or recompensing the contributions of his friends) to games manufacturers Parker Brothers who mass-produced and distributed it – and the rest is blockbuster games sales history!

Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly.

The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player).

When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.

Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:

among members of the early 20th century rural community of Arden (Delaware), an “alternative lifestyle” arts and crafts colony of “Single Taxers” (including the influential writer Upton Sinclair and the radical economist Scott Nearing who spread the word about Magie’s game to other locations)

among members of the Quaker community residing in Atlantic City in the 1920s (many Quaker families held “Monopoly nights”)

among left-wing university students and college “frat boys” on the Eastern Seaboard

among couples and families in urban Philadelphia (including those neighbours who first taught the game to Charles Darrow)

Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.

Parker Brothers’ whole claim on Monopoly was based on the contention that the game had no precedents to its 1935 patent with Darrow. Anspach’s pains-taking spade work proved that the game in various guises and forms existed “in the Public Domain” years and years before the Parkers and Darrow came on the scene!

Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).

The three Parker Brothers

Another strand follows the career of George S Parker, the founder of the eponymous games empire. Parker published his first board game (‘Banking’) at 17, and from the get-go was determined to establish a monopoly, systematically building up a catalog by buying up other manufacturers’ games (leading him headlong into an ongoing rivalry with fellow games giant Milton Bradley). In Parker’s zeal to totally tie down the company’s ownership and control of Monopoly, the company even went round buying up old (Pre-Parker) Monopoly sets. Eventually George Parker talked Lizzie Magie (by this time now Elizabeth Magie Phillips) into parting with her patent for the Landlord’s Game, and paying her a pittance for it with no residuals (despite inventing the archetypical business game Magie lacked business acumen and naively trusted Parker’s intentions to do the right thing by her and her invention, which he didn’t!)

The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one –

Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)

FN: Mary Pilon’s research for The Monopolists is nothing if not thorough. In the end-piece she includes a long, long list of acknowledgements of her sources, helpers and supporters, she even gives a hearty shout-out to coffee shops in seven different cities (I said she was thorough!)…one very notable exception missing from the author’s acknowledgement of research help is Hasbro! Hasbro denied Pilon’s request to access the Parker Brothers’ archives and outright refused to answer any of the many fact-checking queries she submitted to the world’s largest toy and games company. Zero marks to Hasbro for the cause of corporate transparency…ummm, given how much she gleaned from other sources, I wonder what else they didn’t want her to discover?

The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, by Mary Pilon [Bloomsbury New York: 2016 p/b ed.]

∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿

Pirate and Traveler with some modifications and an updated, aviation emphasis eventually morphed into a similar game called Pan American which I played with equal relish. The idea of these two games was to spin a number or roll a dice, collect a destination card and progress from one city to another city somewhere in the world. When you completed a requisite number of destinations, you hightailed it back to a home base city (Godthab, Greenland), first one there was the winner! The games educated me on political geography and I learnt the distance (in miles in those days) between different places on the world map
with Atlantic City street names on the earliest editions of the Monopoly sets (later editions of the game utilised New York City streets and London streets on their boards)
a comparison of the visuals of Magie’s original 1904 patented game and Darrow’s 1935 patented Monopoly reveals profound continuities…Darrow’s replicates essential features of Magie’s – a square board, a space “for the emblematic GO TO JAIL”, a “Public Park” space (anticipating the Parkers’ “Free Parking”), ‘chance’ cards, the use of tokens representing money, deeds and properties
Parker Bros, when taking on Darrow’s game, accepted and promoted the myth that Darrow had fed them, ie, HE invented the game from his own head in the early 1930s, and that there were NO precedents for it
by a remarkable happenstance of history Lizzie filed her patent claim on the same day in 1903 as the infinitely more famous Wright brothers filed their “flying machine” patent
interestingly Magie devised two versions of the Landlord’s Game – version 1, the objective was to crush all of your opponents (= the contemporary game of Monopoly produced by Parker Bros), and version 2 – the objective was to create wealth for all to share
the three Parker brothers (especially George) were evangelically zealous about this because, as the author explains, the company had been “badly burnt” twice before with two products that they had thought that they held exclusive control and ownership of – ‘Tiddlywinks’ and ‘Ping Pong’

Rugby à quinze: The Vichy French Regime’s Game of Choice

Military history, Sport, Sports history
Vichy emphasis on youth sport (Coll: Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC)

Pro rugby
The Nazi-installed, collaborationist Vichy ‘puppet’ regime assumed power in France in 1940—jettisoning the liberté, égalité et fraternité of the democrats and socialists —and adopting in its place the new national motto of travail, famille et patrie (“work, family and fatherland”) as the official philosophy. The new government was quick to focus on sport as a platform for implementing its policies and goals. Taking a leaf from the Corporative State approach of fascist Italy (Carta della sport), Vichy envisaged sport and PhysEd as integral to the “moral education” of the French, an “instrument for constraining and indoctrinating the population in general and youth in particular”. A good illustration of its importance can be seen in the regime’s dissemination of propaganda posters extolling the virtues of physical education (from the start Vichy law made it compulsory for schoolchildren to complete seven hours of PhysEd a week)[1].

The Rugby Wars
The Vichy regime had been in existence for only a matter of months when it banned the sport of rugby league, in France known as
rugby à treize, (at the same time taking no action against the amateur rugby code, rugby à quinze). The Vichy French minister for sport, family and youth announced in August 1940 that because rugby league was (according to the government) a ‘corruptor’ of French youth, it would (in his words) simply be “deleted from French sport”. The Vichy regime justified this action by claiming that it wanted to bring an end to professional sport in France, which the regime argued had a deleterious effect on French society and morale, dubiously linking the professionalism of sport to the pathetically feeble and dispirited French military showing in face of the onslaught of the German Nazi war machine. Marshal Pétain and the Vichy leadership associated rugby league with its large working class following in the south with the pre-war Popular Front Socialist government of Leon Blum[2].

Vichy also made efforts to curb professionalism in some other sports, eg, tennis and wrestling were restored to strictly amateur status. The uncompromisingly draconian approach taken to semi-professional rugby league by Vichy however contrasts with its more restrained intervention in the fully professional sports of association football, boxing and cycling (see PostScript for the treatment of football)[3].

f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/image-1.jpg”> FFR: Haut coq[/capt
From two rugby codes one …
In December 1940 Vichy chief of state Pétain decreed that
rugby à treize would ‘merge’ with rugby à quinze (the fifteen man-a-side rugby union game). In effect, rather than a merger, the thirteen man code of rugby ceased to exist, its funds (around 900,000 francs), its players, its stadiums, even its playing gear, were all expropriated and given to the Fédération Française de Rugby (FFR). This benevolence in favour of French rugby union was not simply the happenstance of good luck on the FFR’s part. The FFR had been at efforts to establish a cosy relationship with the Vichy regime from its inception and had actively lobbied for the elimination of its rival rugby code. This was facilitated by the regime’s choices of commissioner of sport, men with active links to the FFR: Jean Borotra, a former Wimbledon tennis champion who had extensive connexions with the French rugby establishment, and Colonel Joseph Pascot, a prominent rugby international for France in the 1920s[4]. Before I address why the FFR was hellbent on taking down the French Rugby League, I will outline some background relating to the two codes in the period leading up to the war.

http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/image-2.jpg”> Jeu de Treize[/caption
Varying fortunes of the two rugby codes
Attempts to kick-start
rugby à treize as early as 1921-22 with a planned rugby league exhibition match in Paris between the touring Australian Kangaroos and Great Britain’s Lions was vetoed by the influential FFR. In the early 1930s the established sport of rugby à quinze in France experienced a setback at international level. Because of the French national team’s tendency towards violent play and the widely held perception that the FFR was making secret payments to its (amateur) players, France was kicked out of the Five Nations tournament (with the British home countries and Ireland) in 1931. The ostracised FFR responded by setting up its own European competition outside of the IRFB (world rugby board) comprising rugby lesser lights-cum-minnows like Italy, Czechoslovakia and Germany. Rugby à quinze was on the back foot. In 1932 the FFR banned a union international player named Jean Galia who was suspected (albeit with fairly sketchy evidence) of being covertly a professional…Galia went on start up the breakaway code of rugby league in the south-west of France, initially called néo rugby by the French. By season 1934-35 there was a 14-team semi-pro domestic comp underway[5].

Through the thirties French rugby league made progress culminating in victory in the European championship in 1938-39 (on route defeating both England and Wales). Rugby à treize’s crowds were growing, it was a hit with many French spectators who were drawn to its more open, free-flowing and swashbuckling style of game, which seemed to match the French temperament better than the somewhat stop-start rugby union game. In 1939 three of the top rugby union clubs in the country defected to rugby à treize…the FFR were fully aware of the threat posed to its sport by rugby league. At this point the Vichy regime intervened dramatically to salvage rugby à quinze’s and the FFR’s traditional advantage[6].

The game that dare not speak its name!
Eventually, in late 1944, the ban on the Ligue de rugby à treize (French Rugby League) was lifted but three years later the code was split into two bodies: the Fédération française de jeu à treize (governing the amateur RL game) and a Ligue de rugby à XIII (governing the semi-professional game)[7]. Although the sport of rugby league was once again allowed to be played, the League bodies were barred from using the word ‘rugby’ to describe the code, having instead to refer to it as Jeu à Treize (Game of Thirteen). This prohibition lasted remarkably until 1991!

World champions: rise and decline
Since its reinstatement rugby league has struggled to establish a foothold in France – despite experiencing some stellar moments in the early to mid 1950s, especially under the leadership of France’s most famous rugby XIII player, the mercurial, cigarette-smoking (during matches!!!) Puig-Aubert[8], Les Chanticleers defeated the powerful Australian side in three consecutive test series. By 1952 having won the European Championships twice and beaten Australia, France could justifiably claim to be unofficial world champs. Despite France’s rugby XIII game reaching this peak rugby à quinze and FFR remains the hegemonic rugby code and body in France, and have by far the lion’s share of coverage in the French media. Today, international results suggest the sport is still in the doldrums, however the rise of the (sole) French club side Catalans Dragons in the English Super League competition, culminating in victory in the 2018 Challenge Cup, (analogous to English football’s FA Cup) is a bright glimmer on the rugby league horizon in France.

PostScript: Vichy’s take on the ‘World Game’
Football (soccer) did not get off entirely unscathed from the pervasive tentacles of the Vichy regime. It was allowed to keep its professional status but it suffered significant modifications. Vichy restructured the French football competition to eliminate or discourage the development of “local derby” rivalries (matches between clubs in the same or neighbouring towns). Professional players were made to take up a second trade and teams were compelled to field four amateur players in games. Matches were reduced from 90 to 80 minutes duration. After the eclipse of Vichy in 1944 things reverted to the old system but the upheaval suffered over the previous four years left French football in a state of flux and chaos for a number of years post-war[9].

Footnote: To this day the FFR (French Rugby) has neither issued an apology to Fédération française de jeu à treize for its role in what happened, nor moved to recompense rugby à treize (French Rugby League) for lost finances and the expropriation of its property and equipment over three-quarters of a century ago.

┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅
badminton was also outlawed but in its case because it was deemed by the authorities to be “un-French”!
FFR’s banning of Galia was intended to show the British rugby authorities that it was serious about cleaning up France’s ‘shamateurism’ [Lichfield]
the south-west was and remains the heartland of rugby à treize – all of the clubs in France’s Elite One competition except one are located there, the exception Avignon is in the south-central/south-east region
followers and fans of rugby à treize were called treizistes

[1] Christophe Pécout, Le sport dans la France du gouvernement de Vichy (1940-1944)’, www.hssh.journals.yorku.co; ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie … and Sport’, (Mémorial de la Shaoh Musée), www.sportmemorialdelashaoh.org
[2] Vichy also associated it with Free French leader Charles De Gaulle and naturally enough with the United Kingdom, ‘Badge of dishonour: French rugby’s shameful secret’ (John Lichfield),
The Independent, 06-Sept-2007, www.independent.co.uk; ‘Rugby league in France’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org
[3] Lichfield,
op.cit.
[4] ‘When Vichy abolished rugby league’, (Mick O’Hare),
The New European, 21-Nov-2017, www.theneweuropean.co.uk
[5] Lichfield,
op.cit.
[6]
ibid.
[7] ‘gentlemen agreement of 10th July 1947’, quoted in ‘Rugby league in France’,
op.cit.
[8] the French leadership off the field was provided by Paul Barriere, postwar president of
Jeu à Treize who guided French rugby league through the turbulent period and laid the groundwork for the inaugural Rugby League World Cup in France in 1954, ‘Why this trophy for winning the World Cup?’, (Steve Waddingham), Courier and Mail (Qld), 15-Jun-2008, www.couriermail.com.au
[9] ‘Inside History: How Vichy Changed French Football’, (David Gold),
Inside Futbol, 06-Feb-2011, www.insidefutbol.com