A profound mutation: The advent of professional rugby in France

International audienceAmateur before 1995, professional thereafter, French rugby has changed considerably. However, to focus the entire analysis on the most manifest transformations can lead to certain pitfalls of which the main effect consists in only understanding rugby through the notion of change, built for the circumstances into a veritable rhetoric capable of explaining by itself all that goes on and is played out. It is not a case of stating that nothing has changed but rather to show that the rhetoric of change in effect says little about French professional rugby, from a sociological point of view. In the case in point, this rhetoric masks on the one hand what has not or has hardly changed, notably the relationships between players and directors; on the other hand what has effectively changed but which is hardly talked about, in particular the players' working conditions and the possible regulation regarding employers and club directors