Although I was armed with a map of the cemetery’s celebrity graves, it took me half an hour to find the Rimet family’s. Nobody seemed to have tended it in years. The flat tombstone with its stone cross was overgrown with moss.
The sole sign of the man I had come for was a small gold plaque inscribed, “Jules RIMET, 24/10/1873 – 15/10/1956.” It didn’t mention anything he had done in life. Only the golden colour evoked the gold of the Jules Rimet Cup – the original World Cup trophy, which has vanished even more fully than its creator.
Nonetheless, the World Cup that we know today bears the fingerprints of its maker, a man whose desire to create the tournament stemmed partly from his years fighting in the First World War. After encountering nationalism in its rawest forms, Rimet helped steer international football through a second war, during which he collaborated (uneasily) with France’s pro-Nazi Vichy regime. He oversaw every World Cup between 1930 and 1950.
Most of the moustachioed Europeans who created the great international sporting competitions ranged from upper class to full-blown aristocratic. Rimet was different.
Rimet would recognize the street as it is today: a lively shopping district, dotted with a few Haussmannian buildings. The facade of a horse butcher’s that probably dates from his era is still there, but it’s now a fancy seafood restaurant. Groceries advertize “bio” fruits in four languages to tourists and local bourgeois shoppers.
But play was never a big part of Rimet’s life. He was what Parisians call, with some disdain, un ambitieux: a pious provincial striver. He worked in the family grocery, but also read the classics, took evening courses and studied law at university. Later he worked for a debt collection agency, which would have brought him into intimate contact with the local poor. He established himself several cuts above them: one photograph captures the young man and two friends in top hats.
Rimet served as Red Star president until 1910, and afterwards remained vice president of the Catholic-inspired football federation CFI. His speeches were heavy on abstractions (“liberty,” “youth,” “moral and physical progress”) but he was also a canny diplomat and a bureaucratic tiger. In short, he was a born football official.
The grocer’s son understood that if poor men were going to play the game full-time they would need to be paid for it. His support for professional football—which was already thriving in Britain—put him firmly on one side of the great sporting argument of his age. Also in Paris in the 1890s, a slightly older Frenchman named Baron Pierre de Coubertin was reviving the ancient Olympics. Like Rimet, he thought that sport could help moralize the masses, but Coubertin’s creed was amateurism and he didn’t see why athletes needed to be paid. The baron’s modern Olympics were strictly amateur. He was happy for football to remain a niche elite sport.
Victorian Britons invented most modern sports but couldn’t see the point of playing them against foreigners. That left it to the world’s rival elite, the Parisians, to create international sporting competitions, which they did in a whoosh around the turn of the twentieth century. Coubertin staged the first modern Olympics in 1896. The newspaper L’Auto created the Tour de France in 1903. A year later, two international federations were founded within a few minutes’ walk of each other in central Paris: the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile began writing the rules for motor racing, and in May 1904, on a courtyard off 229 rue Saint Honoré, seven European men created the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, or FIFA.
As early as 1905, FIFA’s official bulletins raised the notion of holding a championship of national teams, but at this stage it was still a pipe dream. The only existing international football tournament was the Olympics. On 27 and 28 June 1914, at a FIFA congress in Norway, a motion was passed to recognize “the Olympic football tournament as an amateur World Cup, if organized in conformity with FIFA’s regulations.” Rimet, who was present, grumbled quietly about the amateurism—“We’re far from a real World Cup!”—but, knowing he was in a minority, he let it go. Then, on the second morning of the congress, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Instead of a World Cup, there was going to be a world war.
A remarkable photograph survives of Rimet’s war. It is 1916, and he is sitting in a trench, wearing his officer’s kepi, surrounded by seven black infantrymen. These must have been some of the “tirailleurs sénégalais”—literally, “Senegalese riflemen,” though they were in fact recruited all over French west Africa—who fought for France in the Great War. Their presence was decried by the Germans as a scandalous introduction of “savagery” into “civilized warfare.” The French themselves were embarrassed by their reliance on black men. They rarely mentioned it afterwards, and fobbed off the African veterans with tiny pensions. The war may have been Rimet’s only lifetime encounter with Africans—but presumably quite an intimate one.
My apologies, when your first letter reached me I was on the lines and very busy … I don’t want to delay longer, and I send you my trusted approval. Yesterday I saw Reichel [another football official serving in the army], who took the trouble to come 15 kilometers on horseback to tell me disagreeable things about the negotiations for the competition in question …
Rimet was scribbling this at a fairly dramatic moment in the war: days later, French soldiers staged mutinies against their army leadership. Having lost over a million of their comrades, they were refusing orders to attack. But the French Cup was set up. (Delaunay would eventually create an even bigger football competition; he spent decades pushing for a European Championship for national teams, which finally launched in 1958, three years after his death.)
Monsieur Rimet, lieutenant, at the front for three years now, while engaged on October 20, 1918 with determining the elements of an indirect machine-gun assault, and caught in a violent enemy bombardment, did not leave the terrain until he had accomplished his task.
France lost 1.3 million soldiers in the war, including several Red Star players, while another million Frenchmen were invalided. But almost immediately after the Armistice, in the winter of 1918–19, Rimet was back in action as a football administrator. In April 1919 he became president of the new French national football federation, which united the various squabbling federations of pre-war days. Delaunay was his general secretary, and both men would remain in their posts until after the Second World War. In 1921 Rimet was also elected president of FIFA. Oddly for such a proponent of professional football, he was a strictly amateur president, only accepting travel expenses (though, given his constant motion, these would have added up).
He barely mentioned the Great War after 1918, but it seems to have remade his world view forever. Like many French ex-combatants, Rimet had returned from war obsessed with peace. FIFA, in his mind, was the footballing equivalent of the new League of Nations. His lifetime preoccupation became, to quote the title of a pamphlet he published aged eighty, “Football and the reconciliation of peoples.” He would always say that FIFA sought “international solidarity.” He thought the game could eliminate “suspicions and rivalries that today still set peoples against each other.” Baron Coubertin believed much the same thing, but Rimet argued that Olympic amateurism was at odds with universal brotherhood, because it reserved top-flight sport for men with “a golden paw.”
By “all,” FIFA meant Europe and the Americas; non-white peoples such as the “Senegalese riflemen” were colonial subjects who didn’t count.
Rimet’s World Cup would be white, and it would be professional, unlike the Olympic football tournament, which excluded many of the world’s leading players because they were paid. He was snaffling football’s world championship from his posh amateur rivals at the IOC. FIFA’s World Cup would never be hamstrung by the snobbish arguments about whether to admit paid players that beset the Olympics as well as rugby, tennis and American college sport. And so Rimet helped establish international football as a commercial pursuit, played and watched mostly by working-class men. There was nothing inevitable about this. When the World Cup was conceived, professional football still hadn’t been legalized in France.
Even with a responsible treasurer, FIFA couldn’t have afforded to fund the first World Cup. The federation needed to find a host country willing to finance the whole thing. Luckily Uruguay, at the time one of the world’s richest countries and planning to celebrate its centenary in 1930, volunteered. “The host pays” has remained the tournament’s organizational principle to this day.
But there is some delicious detail. Rimet spends pages recalling the pleasure of that first crossing to Uruguay—sitting in a rocking chair, gazing out on the sunny Atlantic, spotting dolphins and sharks, with nobody able to phone him, and no irritating unexpected visitors. He was carrying in his baggage “a statuette 30 centimeters high and weighing four kilograms”—the new World Cup trophy. He had commissioned it from a friend, the Parisian sculptor Abel Lafleur, “of whom one cannot say that he is a sportsman, but who had acquired the sense of sport sufficiently profoundly to express it with talent.”
Landing in Montevideo five hours late, they were “acclaimed by a joyous crowd,” writes Rimet. The president of Uruguay, Dr Juan Campisteguy, immediately invited him for a barbecue, not so much because Rimet was president of FIFA but because he was a Frenchman. Campisteguy, the proud descendant of a French émigré, regarded Rimet as “a quasi-compatriot.” At the asado, he carved a choice piece from the cow’s head and presented it ceremonially to his guest.
In the first World Cup final, Uruguay beat Argentina 4-2. Afterwards the Uruguayans ran around the pitch waving their own trophy, apparently made of silver—possibly a prize won in some other competition. Rimet, standing lost on a field packed with celebrating fans, eventually just seems to have handed Lafleur’s trophy to the chubby bow-tied president of the Uruguayan FA, Raúl Jude. The first World Cup was considered a success.
The night after the final, the jubilant Italian dignitaries forgot about the FIFA delegation. Rimet and his colleagues felt lost until General Vaccaro, head of Italy’s football federation, kindly invited them to dinner by the sea at Ostia. The general drove them there himself, a terrifying journey along a winding coastal road, but the meal was superb. Rimet, writing after the war, understood that Vaccaro might be in bad odor with some readers for his spell commanding Italian Fascist troops on the eastern front. It was not necessary to “appreciate his political persona,” grants Rimet, but Vaccaro had been a “prestigious president” of Italian football, and a nice chap. FIFA’s consistent willingness to embrace brutal regimes, from Argentina’s military junta of the 1970s through Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, was baked in from the start. It was all part of “peace through sport.”
FIFA’s consistent willingness to embrace brutal regimes, from Argentina’s military junta of the 1970s through Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, was baked in from the start. It was all part of “peace through sport.”Rimet’s six-year-old grandson Yves performed the draw for the tournament, standing on a table in shorts amid besuited officials, pulling names from a glass vase held up by his beaming grandfather. Soon after the draw was made, Hitler’s Anschluss swallowed up Austria, one of the competing nations. This was a nuisance, as it left the tournament with just fifteen teams. FIFA had to cancel the match between Austria and Sweden.
At the FIFA congress in Paris on the eve of the tournament, Germany and Brazil had both bid to stage the 1942 World Cup. But FIFA officials, already sensing that “politics” might intrude before 1942 rolled around, delayed choosing a host.
When Rimet returned to France, he found himself in trouble. Why had he been consorting with Germans? On the morning of 27 October, he was summoned for an interview at the office of Amédée Bussière, the head of the Sûreté Nationale, the French police. Later that day, one of Bussière’s underlings typed up an account of Rimet’s self-exculpations:
M. Rimet has a son at the front, and he is profoundly saddened … it was with tears in his eyes that he asked me to be excused.
Schricker had met Rimet’s train at 9.15 a.m. on 21 October. He then informed an “astonished” Rimet that Bauwens, who headed FIFA’s committee on the rules of the game, would also be attending the meeting. Bauwens had been summoned by FIFA’s Italian vice president Giovanni Mauro, supposedly to discuss “certain divergences in the translations of the rules of the game in different languages,” and to opine on the regulation of Olympic football. Rimet didn’t say it, but the Axis powers clearly wanted to pack FIFA’s first wartime meeting with their own men.
He told Bussière that he had led FIFA for twenty years, having repeatedly been unanimously elected. “I have always sought to use this confidence in the service of France. Many of our diplomatic agents abroad can testify to this.” He offered to resign if that was what the French government wanted, or to hand off his presidential duties for the duration of the war to one of the vice presidents, the Italian Mauro or the Belgian Rodolphe Seeldrayers. If France let him remain FIFA’s president, “I would be very happy to receive the directives that would permit me, in this position, to serve my country as I always have.” He signed the beseeching letter “Jules Rimet, Croix de guerre – three citations.” The Sûreté Nationale let him keep his post. After all, the FIFA presidency represented French soft power.
[Rimet] seemed able to live with the [Vichy] regime’s fascism; what he couldn’t accept was its support for his old enemy, amateurism.
Meanwhile, the Axis powers were planning a coup at FIFA. Their opportunity came with the meeting of FIFA’s executive board at the federation’s headquarters in Zurich in January 1941. Football officials travelling to Switzerland from occupied Europe required German or Italian visas. The Axis powers pulled a trick: they first granted the visas, so that the meeting would go ahead, but then suddenly withdrew them.
As it was, Rimet and the other senior FIFA officials in their various warring countries contrived to exchange some friendly messages during the conflict. Schricker, in Zurich, helped keep letters circulating between them, and Rimet managed to visit the city twice in the war years. The footballing brotherhood treated the calamity as a mere interruption.
Bauwens had had a complicated journey through the Third Reich. He had applied to join the Nazi party in May 1933. A membership card in his name was written out. But the party never issued it, rejecting him because of his marriage to a Jewish woman, Elise Gidion.
During the war, Bauwens’ family construction company ran its own forced labour camp, which appeared on a post-war list of 2,500 “Slaveholders in the Nazi regime.” Yet after the German surrender, Bauwens sent Rimet a letter in which he portrayed himself as an anti-Nazi: “Would I not be the worst person in the world, if I had performed only the smallest henchman services for the people who have my wife on their conscience?”
With the war over, Rimet could focus on what mattered: the World Cup. In 1946 a FIFA congress in Luxembourg renamed the trophy the “Coupe Jules Rimet”—”to my great confusion,” he writes modestly.
Travelling around Brazil during the tournament, Rimet observed that the country “seems to live only for football and the cup.” When the Coupe Rimet itself was exhibited in a shop in Rio, the crowds flocking to see it were so large that a security firm had to be hired. The Brazilians were certain that they would keep the cup. As Rimet noted: “By a curious phenomenon of collective psychosis, all the city was celebrating victory before it was won.” FIFA officials weren’t invited to the opening ceremony in the new stadium, the Maracanã. Rimet explains in his memoir that for the Rio authorities, “the World Cup is a strictly Brazilian affair.” The stadium with its 200,000-person capacity was so packed for matches that even VIPs had to fight their way to their seats. Rimet was told that the Archbishop of Rio, “caught in a besieging crowd, could not free himself except by roughly knocking over his nearest neighbors.”
Rimet writes: “There was no longer a guard of honor, nor a national anthem, nor a speech in front of a microphone, nor a solemn awarding of the trophy.” Instead he found himself jammed amid a throng of pitch invaders, the cup in his hand, not knowing what to do with it. He was forced to repeat the rushed handover of 1930: “I end up spotting the Uruguayan captain, and I give him the cup while shaking his hand, as if in secret, without being able to say a word to him.”
The peasant boy from Theuley had overseen the growth of the World Cup into an event that moved the white world. During his thirty-three-year reign, the federation’s membership had grown from twenty-nine countries to eighty-five. His associates at FIFA proposed him for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1956, while they were assembling the supporting dossier, Rimet died, aged eighty-two. Though he lies forgotten in his suburban grave, his obsessions still mark the World Cup.
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