The Dragons Catalans Rugby League side brings together local talent with the cream of international Rugby League, here in the form of Australian international Steve Menzies, pictured in 2012. Menzies played 71 games for the Dragons, between 2011 and 2013.
IN 1940, Paris fell to the invading German army. Parts of France which were not actually occupied came under the authority of an extremely unpopular puppet government sympathetic to Nazi Germany, based in Vichy.
The influential men in Vichy were enthusiasts of the English sport of Rugby, because (they said) they admired its noble amateur code. But in southern France another form of the game had been flourishing since the early 1930s: Rugby League, a faster, more swashbuckling Rugby originating in the manufacturing towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and this was a game for professionals.
To the delight of the French Rugby Union, the Vichy government banned Rugby League, along with Badminton and other sports considered unfit for their supposedly advanced European society; as late as the 1990s, the sport was still prohibited from marketing itself as ‘rugby’, only ‘jeu-à-treize’, game-for-thirteen. It remains the poor relation of Rugby Union in France, but Catalans Dragons from Perpignan play among the world’s elite in Britain’s Super League.
Précis
During the German occupation of France in the 1940s, the collaborating Vichy goverment banned Rugby League on the grounds that unlike the amateurs of Rugby Union, its players were professionals. This prejudice continued, and it is only since the 1990s that the French game (still the poor relation of Rugby Union) has been able to call itself ‘Rugby’ again. (59 / 60 words)
