Searching for Red Star

I’m a huge soccer fan and often wrote papers in college and grad school on soccer or other sports. When the opportunity came to pick a topic for my graduate school thesis, I decided to focus on French soccer during the interwar period and World War II. I focused on French soccer players Rino Della Negra and Alexandre Villaplane and the relationship between soccer and political participation during that time period.[1] In order to conduct original research for this project, my university graciously gave me funding to travel to Paris to go to various archives around the city and to see what else I could turn up on the ground.

The reason I decided to focus on Della Negra and Villaplane was because of their similar backgrounds on being outsiders to the French metropole and their choices to fight on different sides of the War. Villaplane played for a few different clubs around Paris and France, while Della Negra played for Red Star FC. I plan to return more to this research in future posts.

Anyways, while I was in Paris I visited a few different archives around the city, such as the National Archives in Pierrefite, La Contemporaine in Nanterre, the police archives in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, and the Seine-Saint-Denis departmental archives. In addition to archival research, I tried to see what I could find out by visiting the stadiums or offices of the different clubs. While researching in the archives was relatively successful, going directly to the different clubs didn’t really turn up much. My guess would be that this had to with the fact that I was visiting during the summer in June, which was the beginning of the off-season for most of these clubs. I would guess that if I were to visit during the season, I would have had a bit more luck.

Although I wasn’t able to conduct the research that I was expecting to, I was able to get a better understanding of the relationship between Red Star FC and the town they are located in, Saint-Ouen, just outside of the Parisian Périphérique in the banlieue, specifically the northern suburbs.

Walking from the metro to the Red Star FC stadium, it was really interesting to see the relationship between the city and the club, in addition to the clear left-wing symbolism embedded in both.

Red Star’s stadium, Stade Bauer, is located on Rue du Docteur Bauer and both the stadium and the street are named for Doctor Jean-Claude Bauer, a French doctor and member of the French Resistance that the Nazis killed during World War II. Adding to this theme of honoring French Resistance heroes, Red Star even calls their fan section “Tribune Rino Della Negra,” after their former player that the Nazis killed (journalist George Boxall has done great work on Della Negra on his substack).

As I walked along Rue du Docteur Bauer, I admired the many stickers the Red Star fans plastered on the streets, walls, and even the construction materials around Stade Bauer. These stickers had clear left-wing, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist messages, further reinforcing Red Star’s left-wing image (and their fans’ humor). Walking through Saint-Ouen, I felt that I was able to understand better what Red Star means to its fans and that the club transcends soccer.

After I visited the stadium, I went to a kebab place nearby that my friend recommended called O Durum. Apparently, it’s the spot to go to after Red Star games and I totally understand why. I got a chicken sandwich with fries and a soda and would for sure come back. I need to start taking pictures of my food at these places!

I can’t wait to come back to Saint-Ouen in the future to see a Red Star matchday.

[1] I am very likely the American expert on Villaplane. To my knowledge, no one in the United States has researched or written more extensively on Villaplane than me.