By: Felix Gouty
Special contributor for POST Wrestling
For WWE, Backlash France is only another Saturday. But to French pro-wrestling, it’s the culmination of an almost twenty-year history.
On May 3rd and 4th, with Smackdown and then Backlash France taking place near Lyon, it will be another economically successful visit outside of North America this year for WWE. But for professional wrestling in France, history may remember this weekend as a new chapter. For almost twenty years, its history has struggled to define itself outside of WWE’s shadow.
Just a new item for the record books?
The taped edition of Smackdown on Friday and the live broadcast of Backlash France on Saturday will air from LDLC Arena in Décines-Charpieu, a suburb situated ten kilometers east of Lyon, the third most populated city in France, and where stands Groupama Stadium, home to the Olympique Lyonnais soccer team. Both shows will mark the first time any television taping and any pay-per-view or premium live event, respectively, have been held in the country. It will be followed on Sunday by a non-televised event in Aix-en-Provence, near Marseille, ending a five-day European tour beginning in Bologne, Italia, on May 1st, and Vienna, Austria, on May 2nd.
For number and attendance enthusiasts, WWE has been coming to France at least annually (excluding 2020 and 2021) since 2007. Out of its 57 events, it visited Lyon six times before this weekend. First at the 6,500-seater Gerland Sports Palace and then in the Tony Garnier Hall, a 17,000-seat building located right in the center of the city, up until its sixth visit in 2016. The LDLC Arena, named for a French online computer-selling company, is an all-new 16,000-seat building that opened in November 2023. And, as far as April 26th according to WrestleTix, more than 12,600 fans were expected for Backlash itself.
WWE originally entered the French market (then, of course, as the World Wrestling Federation) as far back as in December 1985 on Canal+, France’s equivalent to HBO since the year prior. The deal contained Superstars of Wrestling, co-produced by a French Canadian and commentated by Quebec legends like Edouard Carpentier and Raymond Rougeau, and sporadic PPV showings like WrestleMania or SummerSlam. The company wasn’t the first American outing to be broadcast in France. For a very short time, it shared the airwaves with non-regular showings from the AWA and the WCCW. However, WWE’s program on Canal+ aired up until January 2002. During its first decade on French TV, WWE only visited the territory five times – in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991, and 1993 – at the now Accor Arena in Paris. All the while at a time when French professional wrestling was perhaps at an all-time low – reduced to shady promotional tactics, like booking topless female bouts to attract customers, as seen in the 1982 documentary People are Mean.
By 1985, when WWE came into play, wrestling could only be seen very sporadically and very late on French TV’s third national channel and would disappear by 1987, aside from some failed attempts over the years. In some ways, French pro-wrestling followed the same trajectory as British pro-wrestling whose main televised outlet – World of Sport – stopped in 1985 on UK’s ITV.
At French pro- wrestling’s crossroad
France was among the main European countries responsible for the birth of professional wrestling, along with the UK and Germany, staging some of the first world championship tournaments enlisting the likes of George Hackenschmidt, the first recognized world champion by the profession starting in the US in 1905. But French wrestling’s real golden age only took hold after World War II and the advent of television. A staple of Pathé and Gaumont’s newsreels before the war, it was brought to French TV’s news shows and then as its program simply called Catch (or “Pro-wrestling”) starting in February 1956. Unlike World of Sport, the show was never broadcast weekly but between a couple of times up to 33 times a year. Nonetheless, pro wrestling became an essential part of the rise of television and the post-war popular culture zeitgeist.
It gave birth to a whole generation of wrestling figures and fans, represented by characters not unlike Big Daddy or Giant Haystacks’ significance in the minds of people from that point in time. Like the mean mustachioed singer and future topless wrestling advocate, Roger Delaporte, or L’Ange Blanc (The White Angel), a clear copyright-infringement on El Santo’s character who debuted seven years after the original, in 1959. Back then, pro-wrestling was very much centralized in Paris, with only a handful of promoters (mainly those of the old French Professional Federation of Wrestling) controlling famous arenas (like Le Cirque d’Hiver, or the Winter Circus, in which an NXT house show took place in 2018) and, therefore, the business. But just like with the heydays of its British counterpart, French pro-wrestling failed to cope with the social and political changes of its time.
Nathan Maingneur, now a documentarian, dedicated his final study in European history to the importance of pro-wrestling in the early days of French TV, by digging through the archives of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) in 2022. “I first got the idea to seek and examine these archives after seeing some GIFs of it on my Twitter feed”, he explains. “American pro-wrestling fans were marveling at the athleticism of French wrestlers back then while French fans never even seemed to know or care to know about that time period”. Retracing back the sport’s history in and around the days the French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote his famous piece on it, he saw when the decline truly began. “In my estimation, even though it could still be seen on TV at that time, pro wrestling lost its audience and its place on TV during the mid-1960s. The consequences of the Algerian war and more so of the events of May ’68 [with, for example, the resignation of President Charles De Gaulle in 1969] distanced the social, political, and cultural landscapes from the good-old virilism and moral Christian values, which were so dominant and defined the good-versus-evil basic pro-wrestling mindset. André The Giant, who debuted in France in 1966 as Le Géant Ferré, couldn’t even find success there at the time”.
That’s it, I’m gonna keep posting GIFs of old french pro wrestling until the INA uploads the rest of this stuff. Eat your hearts, flippy wrestlers of today! pic.twitter.com/9GeBZ6ZjHQ
— Ryuma Go Memorial Account (@secretwrestlin1) January 7, 2020
However, failing to renew their approach, French pro-wrestlers and promoters have to share the guilt for the long dark age that followed. Sturry, who begrudges qualifying himself a “French influencer” with almost 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and 31,000 on Twitch, still recounts that kind of dusty atmosphere when he debuted in the ring in 2000, first as a referee and then as a full-blown wrestler. “At the time, the wrestling scene was still under the influence of the old guard, former wrestlers or their trainees standing by the old-fashioned ways of teaching and thinking pro-wrestling. Whereas, the up-and-comers like me were primarily fans of American or Japanese pro-wrestling, through Canal+ or the Internet, and were looking to freshen things up”.
The WWE generation
This shock of generations only intensified when WWE benefited from a modernization and expansion of French television in November 2006. In March 2005, fourteen new national channels were added to the existing six networks with the launch of the numerical broadcasting technology. To fill its lineup, channel number 11, called NT1 (before becoming TFX), chose to bring WWE to national television for the first time in France on a late-night Saturday slot with Catch Attack. Since the end of its run on Canal+ in 2002, WWE was only broadcasted through RTL9, a cable channel that started showing wrestling with WCW Monday Nitro in 2000.
In 2007, WWE ran two events in Paris (one in April and the other in September), the firsts since 1993 – the same year it held Raw and Smackdown from Milan, Italy, the last European TV tapings outside of the UK since this weekend. Rapidly bringing in strong ratings, the channel decided to double-down on WWE by adding a second show, a shortened and delayed version of Smackdown on late Friday nights, and promoting its first show, a similar version of Raw, to a prime-time slot the next day. By March 2009, the two programs – bringing around 600,000 viewers each time, more than 3% share – would be shown in their entirety with only a one-week delay. A wrestling craze was born: the “Catch Attack Generation” or “NT1 Generation” as it has been nicknamed among French wrestling fans. For the first time, not only one but several wrestling magazines appeared on the newsstands (one being a French version of the WWE Magazine) as well as toys, DVDs, and CDs in every store. On the Internet, old forums were replaced by a burgeoning – but still quite amateurish – wrestling media scene. TNA tried to join in on the fun as well, making its way to a late-night slot on W9, the ninth national channel, for less than a year beginning in October 2009 and with three house shows (one in 2010 and two in 2011, attracting less than 2,500 fans each). Even PWG, during its second and last European tour, stopped by France in 2007. Most importantly, it gave the local scene the spark it desperately needed to build itself back up.
According to Cagematch.net’s data, ten to twenty shows in one full year were a good year by French pro-wrestling’s standard in the years before WWE’s run on national television. And only a very small number of regional promotions provided these events. But by 2007, the bar of fifty shows in one year was crossed for the first time in ages and several local promotions joined the fold. In 2009, 2010, and 2011, years, when WWE ran between seven to nine shows per year in the country, 68 to 97 by Cagematch’s accounts, were staged, sometimes in front of 6,000 to 8,000 fans not shying away from WWE’s performances. Unfortunately, the craze wouldn’t last.
Citing decreasing ratings, NT1 moved Catch Attack back to late-night slots in 2012 and freed itself from it altogether in June 2014. Just two months after its famous commentary duo, Christophe Agius, a former newsletter publisher, and sports announcer Philippe Chéreau, were on hand for their first WrestleMania. RTL9, still airing WWE as well, did the same for its Puissance Catch (“Wrestling Power”) show in 2016 although the cable channel continued to air it until April 2018 when another cable channel, AB1, took it all. This very same network today airs a litany of WWE’s offerings (including NBC’s Young Rock and A&E’s WWE Rivals) and will broadcast Backlash France with a three-day delay to maintain the WWE Network/Peacock’s live exclusivity. After trying its hand with Ring of Honor in 2015 and 2016, L’Equipe 21 – the 21st national channel launched by France’s biggest sports newspaper after another expansion of its TV lineup – also airs WWE’s big shows semi-regularly since 2018.
The French wrestling evolution
As far as WWE’s physical presence, its Superstars began only making one to three stops a year once again after 2014. But, even though fans and families came in lesser numbers to its shows, French pro-wrestling remained and started building on the groundwork that was opportunely laid out in the years before. It’s during this period that Tristan Archer, who Lance Storm trained and once wrestled in WWE as real-name Clément Petiot during the 2016 Cruiserweight Classic, really saw a shift in the locker rooms.
“French pro wrestlers had a bad reputation in the late-2000s and early-2010s. They were only leaning on the late 1990s hardcore and American styles of pro-wrestling, without any robust technical and athletic training for the most part”, says the former two-time wXw world champion who nicknames himself ‘The French Revolution’. “But when the WWE left, some of the wrestling fans it created began taking to wrestling with a more serious mindset. Wrestlers like Aigle Blanc (White Eagle), who has had opportunities to wrestle in Arena Mexico, in All-Japan, and now in the US during this year’s WrestleMania weekend, really exemplify the hard work and dedication that come through when watching the new generation wrestle. Aigle Blanc and its contemporaries, like Senza Volto or Kuro, have upgraded the in-ring level on par with what we’re seeing in the UK, Germany, or even in the American Indies. French promoters still clinch on booking outside guests, like former WWE wrestlers, as special attractions to bring in the fans. But now, thanks to this new generation of local talents, I feel fans have finally a reason to come to our shows just to see excellent French pro-wrestlers”, concludes the hardened wrestler – before hinting at “something unexpected” for him the day of Backlash. In 2023, for example, Cagematch counted 211 shows, involving around fifteen different promotions (even after the closure of several ones during the pandemic) – a record.
The NT1 Generation also helped bring forth a new kind of promoters, more interested in matching the level of production and booking philosophy of the RevPro’s or wXw’s of the world rather than sticking with the family-circus-like mentality of their elders. For instance, Guillaume Andréoni, one of BZW’s four young founders, is co-promoting a card on the afternoon of May 4th. Teaming with the similarly-minded Rixe, an independent promotion located in the Britanny region located 600 km north-west of Lyon, BZW wanted to capitalize on the presence of 12,000 French fans from around the country to demonstrate an example of a wrestling production on par with that of other ambitious indies. “Our goal was to attract wrestling fans to see the level of wrestling they can seek out when WWE isn’t around, and that is not just an amateurish clown show and spread the word outside of France’s borders”, Andréoni says.
Situated initially in Mons, a Belgian town located just outside the French border, Bodyzoï Wrestling renamed itself to Banger-Zone Wrestling this past January to keep gathering international attention and in anticipation of WWE’s big event. That same month, more than 700 gathered in Lille for a BZW show built around Minoru Suzuki’s first venture into the country, along with other Japanese talents like TNA & NJPW’s KUSHIDA, DDT’s Mao and Yoshihiko and British ones like RevPro’s Trent Seven and Connor Mills (who he’s also booked on the May 4th show). “French wrestling fans comprise a small but tight and very much solidified fanbase since the days of WWE on NT1. Nowadays, being adults with purchasing power, they expect a certain level of production, including accessible ways to support and stream their wrestling of choice as with our BZW+ streaming platform”, declares the promoter. The inter-promotional BZWxRixe show has been sold out for two months now and is looking to attract at least 450 fans to a slick showroom in the city’s center with a special appearance by Samuray Del Sol but also French staples like Tristan Archer, Senza Volto or Aigle Blanc. It is also counting on meet & greet happenings, a practice only brought recently in France by BZW – and the same is true for providing English commentary to their shows.
Proving time for French pro-wrestling
This Backlash weekend presents two opportunities. Firstly, for WWE, it’s another chance to see if its new scheduling strategy can truly bear fruit on less established international grounds than the UK and Australia. There is another chance to evaluate the real hunger of French wrestling fans after two successful years running Paris’ Accor Arena in 2022 and 2023. As well as maybe examine the French authorities’ willingness to pay for it too: the Lyon Metropolis, which regulates all activities in Décines-Charpieu, has confirmed to POST Wrestling that Backlash didn’t perceive any public subsidies, at least from their side. As well, Netflix won’t carry WWE’s programs immediately in January 2025 in France as AB1 will remain its main broadcaster on the ground for “the next several years”, after renewing their contract in January of this year.
And secondly, this weekend presents a test for the local scene. “French pro-wrestlers and promoters currently in activity have their heads at the right place and have learned from the mistakes made in the mid-2010s when the wrestling trend in France fizzled out and wrestling became cliche again to the general public”, states Sturry, the YouTube personality that started an ironic following around Baron Corbin culminating with the biggest pop of his career in Paris in April 2023 and perhaps contributing to WWE’s renewed interest for France. “The quality of French pro-wrestling today makes it easier for fans to show and share their passion around them. As long as the shows continue to bring the production and in-ring levels up even after WWE is gone and eventually doesn’t come back, it will attract more fans willing to talk about it, bring their friends to experience it or share it with the rest of the world on social media. And it will open yet new international opportunities for wrestlers to make a place for the French on the world stage. Only such a positive mindset can help bring positive things”.