Jean Bretonnel, boxing coach (1925-1989): a cultural approach to understanding a remarkable career trajectory

ABSTRACTJean Bretonnel was a prominent French boxing coach/manager active from 1925 to 1989. He succeeded in shaping a new profession and, above all, in getting French boxing recognised by the Americans who at that time controlled the professional sport globally. Admittedly, he benefited from a favourable socio-historical context during France’s post-war reconstruction, when boxing matches were among the country’s most popular sporting spectacles. But how do we account for Bretonnel’s individual success in this competitive environment? In this article I explore the professional trajectory of Jean Bretonnel on two levels. On the one hand I consider his personality, examining notions of culture and relationship to culture as encapsulated in the concept of “cultural form”. On the other hand, his career path is analysed in terms of the “system” he established by drawing on both his network of contacts and his specialist knowledge as manager and coach.KEYWORDS: BoxingJean Bretonnelmanagercoachcultural formcareer trajectory Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The plots of Balzac’s novels often revolve around rapid social elevation (e.g. Rastignac) and money, tainted by the essential violence of the male-dominated bourgeoisie; the style is precise and easy to understand. Proust, on the other hand, explores the tensions between love and money in a much more elaborate manner. His writing is characterised by long and rich description and a more ambiguous view of gender relations, which sit uneasily with certain traditional attitudes regarding masculine virility.2. Another interesting example is provided by Carine Érard (Citation2007), who analysed the career of French Olympic champion (1948) Micheline Ostermeyer.3. He even founded an amateur cycling club named La Pédale Pugilistique, whose membership comprised boxers, managers and promoters.4. Raymond Lepage, French heavyweight champion 1935, Robert Bourdet, French bantamweight champion, Assane Diouf and Omar Kid Le Noir.5. Jean Bretonnel registered a company under his own name, with the SIREN no. 784448615. Based in Paris (75010), the company specialised in sports coaching and professional sporting activities. Societe.com.6. Throughout his long career as a manager Bretonnel was only on informal “tu” terms with three of his boxers, of whom Robert Villemain was the most famous.7. Although Appadurai fails to recognise the limitations of this concept which – in spite of the breadth and depth of references on which it draws, some of which carry echoes of Deleuze – ultimately reproduces certain structuralist assumptions in its opposition between soft and hard cultural forms, as in the example of cricket (Dorin, Citation2006).8. Three-time Olympic champion (1948, 1952 and 1956), European EBU Champion (1962–1964)9. See also Bernard Lahire’s notion of plural dispositions.Additional informationFundingThe work was supported by the ECOr Department.