Paris, Wembley and a Night of Solidarité

Since ’98 at every England home game Philosopohy Football has organised a group of fans, under the banner ‘Raise the Flag', who lay out thousands of cards to form a huge St George Cross, a fans’ flag.

 

Not on Tuesday night we didn’t, against France.The FA get a lot of stick but on this occasion they took a magnificent lead. As soon as the French announced they wanted the game to go ahead the FA turned Wembley into a celebration of solidarité and humanité. The stadium bathed in the bleu, blanc et rouge not of a Union Jack but Le Tricolour. Sponsors' logos and pitchside advertising replaced by three words. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Much-needed leadership from above. But none of this would be worth very much without support from below. The fans busy practicing La Marsellaise on the tube to the game, those who’d hunted out an old French shirt to wear, daubed a message on a tricolour, symbolised by the thousands of fans holding up the cards the cards we'd laid out to form their flag, not ours and with hardly a murmur of dissent. 

 

 

Hugh Tisdale, co-founder of Philosophy Football and designer of these 'Raise the Flag' effects describes Tuesday night as 'a very effective event, its poignancy extremely moving, its coincidental closeness to the Paris attacks extraordinary, but the elements of direct crowd participation were crucial the singing of the French national anthem, the dignified minute's silence, and the giant mosaic of the French tricolour - a huge visual statement of solidarity which emerged from 8,000 football fans for just for a minute or more, before fading away back into the crowd. A great, brief, collective, work of art, generously given to the spectacle by anonymous individuals. "

 

This was a participative, visual, inclusive politics, with an eye on maximum media exposure. Not a public meeting, a rally, a vigil, these were ordinary men and women, kids with mums and dads, at a game they had been looking forward to, watching a sport they love appreciating something bigger than the fact that the bombs had killed their lot, not ours. It could just as easily have been us.

 

This is what a hegemonic politics looks like. Starting where people are at not where we might want them to be. Too much of politics consists of a language only capable of understanding by the already-committed, bolstered by a cult of activism that is entirely alien to most people. Politics should be a journey of beginnings not final destinations.

 

Tuesday night was a supreme moment of popular internationalism. Caring about, singing the anthem of, waving the flag that belongs to, an other. Football, the biggest single popular cultural form in England, is also entirely Europeanised. The single Europpean currency a coin? Don’t make us laugh, it’s a game of twenty-two trying to put a ball between two uprights and a crossbar. What hope do we have with an in/out EU referendum when for these so-called activists this has never even occurred to them. Philosophy Football has always recognised this from our very beginnings with Euro '96, with a shirt that celebrated football as a common language via a design illustrated by a fussball, voetbal, le foot, fitba and every other language of the participating nations' teams. And we have done the same via soft patriotism, one that is for all, around the England team too. 

 

Yes there are contradictions. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternitéthe founding ideals of the French Revolution and the French republic, with the wreath-laying led by Prince William. La Marsellaise a rebel song, once described by comedian Rob Newman as “like having The Clash’s ‘Guns of Brixton’ as your National Anthem” vs “Long to Reign Over Us, Happy and Glorious.” A multicultural French team on the pitch. Off the pitch the Front National on the march.

 

But life is full of contradictions, this is politics. A hegemonic politics pushes at the limits of the contradictions, taking them as the start of a conversation, not a reason to close it down. The sociologist Stuart Hall once wrote of the importance of popular culture as a space where ideas are formed and changed, "the cultural dimension seemed to us not a secondary, but a constitutive dimension of society." That's why Wembley's night of solidaritéwas so important, so effective and we were proud to play our part in helping to make it happen because we absolutely believe in the cultural dimension, especially at the popular level, as a spsce where change happens. We were inspired originally, after all, by the words of Albert Camus, "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football." For Philosophy Football, that's not a marketing slogan, it's our credo.

 

Half of Philosoophy Football is based in Lewes, where Tom Paine lived, worked and wrote. One of this country’s most famous writers, defender of the French revolution, put on trial for sedition in a British court, elected to the republican National Assembly in France. His most famous words are the means to shape humanitéout of horror. “The World is my country. To do Good is my religion.” After Paris these words are our beacon of hope, then and now.