France during the 1870s and 1880s was a country undergoing social, political and economic transformation. The end of the Second Empire (1848–70) in ignominious defeat at the hands of Germany in the Franco-Prussian war led to a change of political regime with the institution of the Third Republic in 1871, after the bloody and divisive interlude of the Paris Commune (1870–71). After what Roger Magraw has described as the ‘modernizing dictatorship’ of the Second Empire (1983: 149), the Third Republic continued France's measured move towards modernity, as the economy industrialized and society became increasingly stratified into an industrial working class as well as the traditional rural peasantry, dominated by an increasingly well-educated and prosperous bourgeoisie (Charle, 1991). Between the workers and the upper classes lay a swelling social grouping of clerical and administrative workers, essential for the changing nature of the economy, whose support was courted by the Republic as it gradually established its legitimacy during the 1870s and then flourished in the later decades of the century, and whose growing affluence and cultural assertiveness partly found expression in leisure and sport (Zeldin, 1980: 331–48).