Maintained in stands and on football fields, the steeple quarrels between Lyon and Saint-Etienne have always gone beyond the scope of the round ball. Since the rise of the Forézienne city more than two centuries ago, neighborly relations have often turned out to be shady.
Saint-Etienne, mushroom town
The story seemed to start without much clashes. During the French Revolution, the two towns were integrated into a vast department of Rhône-et-Loire, of which Lyon was promoted to prefecture. In Saint-Etienne, a small manufacturing town then in full swing, the manufacturers of weapons and ribbons welcome the rapprochement with the big silky neighbor.
Alas, the uprising in Lyon against the National Convention in 1793 quickly led to the division of the department into two small entities (Feurs, then Montbrison, becoming the first prefectures of the Loire). Devastated and ruined by the revolutionary period, Lyon is witnessing with a touch of concern the demographic explosion of its frail neighbor, a veritable boom town in the middle of the industrial Far West.
“The speed of growth of Saint-Etienne created jealousy among Lyonnais, says the sociologist and writer Jean-Noël Blanc. Especially since there was a symbolic side of the dirty city which beat the rich city.”
Conversely, among the Foréziens, we can sense a small inferiority complex. “When we worked large fabrics in Lyon, in Saint-Etienne we made ribbons, explained in 2015 Georges Gay, professor of geography at the Jean-Monnet University of Saint-Etienne, at La Tribune de Lyon. [Les fabricants] assert their autonomy as much as possible so as not to be eaten by Lyon. “
“Many contractors were Lyonnais”
The phenomenon will only get worse. Silk and mechanics on one side, coal and iron and steel on the other: the Lyon-Saint-Etienne basin, with Givors and the Gier valley at its center, becomes “one of the crucibles of the industrial revolution in France”, according to the political scientist Philippe Dujardin, former scientific advisor to Greater Lyon. After the first railway lines on the continent (Saint-Etienne-Andrézieux in 1827, Saint-Etienne-Lyon in 1832), the capital of Lyon swept over the city of Foréz in the middle of the century.
“In the textile industry in Saint-Etienne, many contractors were from Lyonnais, which was not necessarily well accepted”, summarizes Jean-Noël Blanc. “There was a form of dispossession of local entrepreneurs which was very badly experienced on the spot,” confirms Georges Gay. The ribbon-making bourgeoisie is declining, that of metal “will manage to last, but by leaving outside Saint-Étienne, by forging marriages with the Lyon elites”, notes for his part the researcher Pierre-Alain Four.
Lyon amateurism versus Stéphane professionalism
As soon as sport became more democratic at the start of the twentieth century, tensions gained ground, between clubs in Lyon attached to an entirely bourgeois amateurism and an ASSE linked to the working-class and industrial world and very early on to the professional world.
After a few incidents in the 1920s, the first large-scale clash took place on March 29, 1936, during a match between ASSE and Lyon Olympique Villeurbanne which turned into a fist fight: the referee of the match must be evacuated by the police and a Lyonnais leader flees with the recipe so that the camp opposite does not touch anything.
Saint-Etienne owed its demographic growth and a large part of its identity to manufacturing and mines. When deindustrialization began across the whole of France in the 1960s and 1970s, the city paid the brunt of its dependence. Lyon, whose economic fabric is then more diversified, is doing better. On the football fields, on the other hand, it is the capital of the Gauls that looks gloomy.
The performances of the Greens on the meadows of all Europe (while OL only gleaned “only” three French Cups) thus became the symbol of the revenge of Saint-Etienne the proletarian against Lyon the bourgeoisie. “In football, Lyon has always been the suburb of Saint-Etienne”, can tackle the president of the Greens, Roger Rocher (1961-1982), using the earthy formula of his predecessor Pierre Faurand (1952-1959).
In the 1980s, groups of ultras supporters took up the torch, lastingly anchoring some images of Epinal: just as the working-class history of Lyon was erased behind the face of a wealthy and collared city, the transformation of Saint-Etienne from the 90s goes (almost) unnoticed and the derbies retain a taste of class struggle. “Are you proud of a tram? It changes you from the mine carts”, brandished the ultras from Lyon without any finesse in 2015, more than 30 years after the closure of the last mine in the coal basin …
But if football has become the heart of the rivalry between the two neighbors, it spills well beyond the sideline. “The territory [stéphanois] is it condemned to become an academic branch of Lyon? “, worried a member of the Loire, a few months before the rejection of a merger of the universities of the two cities. As if more than 200 years later, nothing had changed …