Educating bodies through football. The teacher, the sports club, and the youth in the villages of Vaucluse (1930s and 1940s)

In the 1930s and 1940s, in the villages, the teacher, who came socially just after the notary, embodied knowledge and culture, all things highly respected within the community. If, at the beginning of the 1930s, Paul Gauthier, secretary-general of the EPS of Avignon, made the observation for the department of Vaucluse "that there are hardly any villages left that do not have their land and their football team," this was mainly due to the sporting commitment of many black hussars of the Republic. Historiography has not particularly focused on the role of teachers in spreading football to rural youth, or on the educational models offered. However, in the interwar period, young Vauclusian teachers, encouraged by Gabriel Biron at the École normale d’instituteurs d’Avignon, recognized as an "excellent nursery of football facilitators," were at the origin of the founding of numerous sports clubs in the villages of the department. Their commitment continued into the 1940s. If for the teacher and president of the Olympique de Vaison, Raoul Costalin, “football is the school of life,” we know little about the motivations that led teachers to prefer the practice of football to educate the bodies of young people in the villages. Our article will thus endeavor to demonstrate why and how the education of the bodies of young people in the villages of Vaucluse was done through football within sports clubs in the 1930s and 1940s.