Our anniversary event “80 years of Le Parisien, 80 front pages”
The very first issue of Le Parisien was published on August 22, 1944, in the midst of the liberation of Paris. To celebrate this anniversary, we have selected 80 historical or emblematic front pages of their time. Sports, news, space exploration, presidential elections, celebrity deaths… They tell the story of eight decades of current events. We have chosen to tell you the behind-the-scenes stories. A series to discover until the end of the year.
Seville. 1982. A place and a date known to all. The statement of a city and a year exhumes one of the greatest traumas in French football. A true Greek tragedy played out on a world television. A match crowned with a dramatic power rarely equaled. Comparable in its intensity, its twists and turns and its emotional charge to the final of the last World Cup, which ended, once again, with a terrible defeat for France on penalties. “Heads held high”, is displayed on the front page of Le Parisien on the morning of July 9, 1982. “Enough to cry with rage”, we find on the inside page of our newspaper.
In the Andalusian capital, forty-two years ago, the heat was reasonable. A light breeze ran along the backs of the necks. Michel Hidalgo’s Les Bleus embodied a certain idea of romanticism, in their collective expression, confronted with the realpolitik of the impassive Mannschaft. At the start of the tournament, no one imagined them inviting themselves into the last four, twenty years after their elders from Sweden. Unlike their rivals, they had a clean record and played without pressure like innocent, mischievous and talented children in a playground.
But it is never far from the Capitol to the Tarpeian Rock. Michel Platini and his brothers learned this cruelly at their expense on July 8 (3-3, 4 penalty shootouts to 5). For decades, this evening in Seville would haunt the sleepless nights of certain actors, but not only them. No screenwriter, even the most creative, would, it is true, have been able to construct such a plot, because an essential ingredient in its common thread would always have been lacking: immediacy.
The instantaneity of a story being written before astonished eyes. A story turned upside down by a multitude of imponderables, unpredictable events leading to the assumption that the reality of the moment is valid for the time that remains. This is the reason why an encounter is unlike any other. It lives, then dies with its share, more or less subjective, of posterity.
Schumacher’s “attack” on Battiston
Only sport in its entirety, and football in particular, provides such reversals that are conducive to creating memories for a lifetime. What remains are the images. The thrills. The irrationality. “The most beautiful book I could read, the most beautiful play I could attend, the most beautiful film I could see, is that match,” Platini confided in 2012 in an interview with France Football. “It’s a moment that makes you say, after the fact: Damn, I’m glad I was there! Even if you lost.”
Sanchez Pizjuan Stadium (Seville), July 8, 1982. Michel Platini (right) against the Germans Bernd Förster (left) and Wolfgang Dremmler. EFE
Given the very late time of the end of the match and the constraints inherent in the completion of any daily newspaper, Michel Drucker’s column in Le Parisien, “A dream, real”, is interrupted even at the end of regulation time. The synopsis is, then, known to everyone. It is transmitted orally from generation to generation. Platini serves Six, who passes to Alain Giresse. From 18 m, the latter strikes at goal, the ball ricochets off the left post and goes in. Fists clenched, ecstatic, the Bordeaux midfielder shouts his happiness to the world.
It’s the 10th minute of extra time. Les Bleus, watched by Lino Ventura and Julien Clerc, who are present at the stadium, are leading 3-1 and no one expects to see the Germans of goalkeeper Harald Schumacher, who committed an unspeakable “attack” on Patrick Battiston in the second half, wipe the slate clean. The gates of paradise, initially ajar, are then brutally slammed shut by a breathless and epic penalty shootout. The Sanchez Pizjuan pitch then resembles a field of desolation. Sadness pours out. Tears well up in the eyes of the protagonists.
VideoFrance – RFA in the semi-final of the 1982 World Cup
“We were broken, devastated, inconsolable.”
Voted the most combative player of the World Cup, Alain Giresse has forgotten nothing. “It’s like an ember,” he says, “you just have to blow on it to rekindle it. It remains a nightmare, a dream that we would have guillotined. We were put on the scaffold without having the weapons to defend ourselves. I still feel today like I’m in a vicious circle, a kind of labyrinth from which I can’t find a way out. You can lose a match, but here, we were unfairly deprived of qualification by an accumulation of opposing elements. The referee skewed everything with his decisions and not just on Patrick Battiston’s aggression. The second German goal was tainted by a previous foul… Our only small error was not to show management at 3-1. But after…” READ FULL STORY HERE>>>CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING>>>
German goalkeeper Harald Schumacher, who injured Battiston, on Didier Six during the World Cup semi-final in Seville. PictureAlliance/Icon Sport
The return to the locker room of haggard players. The tears. The sobs. Alain Giresse recounts. “We were broken, destroyed, inconsolable, prostrate on the benches. Elsewhere, disconnected from everything. The tension was so strong that we opened the floodgates. Everything was evacuated. Everything had to come out.” Beyond the elimination, the course of the match also reawakens, outside, old wounds. Resentments. Both intimate and shared.
All the repressed and dormant resentment comes to the surface. And of course, the popular vindictiveness points to one man, Harald Schumacher. If this semi-final gave rise to an anthology battle, the West German goalkeeper is, himself, doomed to the pillory. In addition to his exit, which leaves Patrick Battiston inert and with a slack jaw, his attitude horrifies the French.
Michel Platini accompanies Patrick Battiston, injured after a violent exit by German goalkeeper Harald Schumacher, in Seville, during the World Cup. AFP
In his movement, we can already detect the intention to hurt, but in the slow motion of the television that we watch ten, a hundred times, his gesture reaches all its indignity. On the sidelines, chewing gum, he carelessly bounces the ball in his hand, not concerned in the least, he does not make the slightest gesture, shows no empathy, for the defender evacuated on a stretcher with Michel Platini holding his hand.
“God’s judgement,” says German President
This incomprehensible behavior, added to his impunity with Mr. Charles Corver, resurrects the Germanophobic undertones of a section of the French population. A strong feeling of injustice spreads through all levels of society. An avowed football fan, and passionate witness of this match, the actor Francis Huster will even write an open letter to Michel Platini after the match, emphasizing the chivalrous character of the Blues, 4th in the end after their almost anecdotal defeat against Poland (3-2).
“Good Lord, Michel, don’t you realize, or what? What Cyrano, Molière, Jean Moulin and unknowns died for: panache. Against the blind brute, against the stupidity of force, against the mass of flawless muscles, you have sprung forth, with poetry, your imagination, your intelligence, your inspiration, and you know what, Michel, your humility.”
François Mitterrand, the head of state for fourteen months, followed the match attentively in a typical Hungarian restaurant. Quite a symbol for the oldest. Hadn’t the fabulous Hungarian team led by its galloping major Ferenc Puskas, against all expectations, scattered its ambitions in the 1954 World Cup final against this same FRG?
The German Chancellor himself, Helmut Schmidt, sent a telegram of sympathy to the President of the Republic, worded as follows: “The judgment of God, which according to classical mythology comes into play in every fight between two peoples, has willed that this chance should fall to the German camp in this match. We are wholeheartedly with the French who deserved to move forward just as much as we do.” All the words in the world, however comforting, will not replace the intoxication of a first final. A drop of water in an ocean of sadness, in short. A simple poultice on a wooden leg.
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