91

The football World Cup of June 1938 has largely been overlooked by historians of sport interested in the interwar period, overshadowed by more high profile sporting events such as the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the Tour de France, and by interest in the sport and leisure policies of the Popular Front. This article will explore the nature and success of the 1938 football tournament, discussing it in relation to contemporary debates about spectator sport and to the phenomena of tourism and consumer spectacles. Although a significant popular and commercial success in its own right, the tournament’s relatively low profile, certainly in comparison with the 1998 instalment, suggests both the lower general cultural status of football in France in this early era and the entrenched unwillingness of the French state to involve itself with spectator sport until after the Second World War. Although willing to see the Olympic Games as a vehicle for cultural grandeur as early as 1924, in the interwar period the French state remained blind to the potential of professional football to achieve the same ends.