The sun warms up the room where Roland is waiting for me, his organized files in front of him on a long, worn wooden table. We are in the city center of Châteaubriant, a sub-prefecture of Loire-Atlantique, in the iconic premises of the Amicale Laïque, the ALC. Upon arriving, I think of my seven-year-old daughter who asks, “Is this the ALC or the Voltigeurs?” every time we pass by a soccer field.
Like others, the city has two houses and two sources of pride, linked together by a rivalry contained enough to prevent any Shakespearean drama. But before the rankings, it is their history that sets the two clubs apart: one founded by the local bourgeoisie, in the hands of a wealthy family of meat industry magnates, and the other rooted in the culture of popular education and secular teaching.
A sports club at the heart of the territory’s social life
When I explain the meaning of my project to him: to portray these ordinary committed individuals who continue to defend a society where sharing is a joy and equality is a requirement; to tell through them the shared and singular history of this territory that has been repeatedly struck by extreme right-wing violence and has stood its ground each time; Roland responds enthusiastically. Because typically, “It doesn’t interest journalists much, even the local ones,” he points out to me. Then he opens up, with method and a smile in his eyes.
And not surprisingly, he starts with the public school. Capital letters could be used when listening to him talk about it, him being the son of agricultural laborers from Chazé-Henri (49), who were reached out to by teachers, making him one of their own. In Châteaubriant, Roland was a teacher at the Terrasses school, “the best there is,” as told by a childhood friend who was his student. But it is as the president of the ALC that I came to meet him. Founded in 1938, the ALC oversees various sports sections, including the soccer club in which Roland both played and coached young players, representing the 1200 members.
In Roland’s personal archives, consisting of carefully handwritten speeches, press clippings, and yellowed prints, a century of local history unfolds. The history of the railway workers from the early days of the Amicale, a time when the railway network crisscrossed the countryside. The history of the twenty-nine amicalistes who were either interned or shot as Resistance fighters during World War II, and whose memory is commemorated on the building’s façade every year. And more intimately, the history of commitments passed down from one generation to the next.
A place where sports becomes a school for collective living
People come to the club to play and end up staying a lifetime to take care of matches, tournaments, meetings, school celebrations, barbecue nights, or tartiflette evenings. The motto? “Sport for all,” meaning a pedagogy focused on children, where teamwork matters more than competition.
Since 1988, the ALC has also been a place: four large halls, a communal kitchen, and apartments on the second floor. Under Roland’s presidency, this space is made available to all collectives upon request. It hosts amateur theater, film screening cycles on the history of decolonization, gatherings to oppose extreme right-wing ideologies, organize events, create. The venue is also used for funerals, and the apartments upstairs accommodate displaced families. The ALC is “apolitical,” as stated in its statutes, but it doesn’t stop it from being “antiracist and antifascist,” as reminded by Roland. Above all, it must help “alleviate people’s suffering in this brutal world,” which is the bare minimum.
This spring, there are preparations to lose another set of school classes in the area. Here and there, attempts are made to resist the budgetary squeeze, but parents are often fatalistic in these villages where shops and post offices have disappeared. Activities dwindle and move elsewhere as public education gives way to private. If it weren’t for these small schools where pedagogy is invented for multi-level classes, teaching children the virtues of friendship between ages, some communities would be nothing more than dormitory towns in the countryside, or even death cities.
Living together, doing things together. Roland recounts his father, in the middle of the last century, distributing manure to the miners of the nearby working-class community so they could fertilize their gardens. A fundamental first lesson. Because solidarity, before being a response to the woes of the time, is an ethic of shared life in daily practice.
Author and editor, Juliette Rousseau lives between Pays de la Mée and Roche-aux-Fées, on the outskirts of Brittany. She has published “Lutter ensemble” (2018), “La vie têtue” (2021), and “Péquenaude” (2024) with Cambourakis editions, as well as “Un pays balbutiant” (2025) with Isabelle Sauvage editions.
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“It is through extensive and accurate information that we would like to provide all free intelligences with the means to understand and judge the events of the world on their own,” as Jean Jaurès wrote in the first editorial of l’Humanité on April 18, 1904. 122 years later, it remains unchanged. Thanks to you. Support us! Your donation will be tax-deductible: giving 5€ will only cost you 1.65€. The price of a coffee. [Context: The article discusses the mission and history of a local sports club and its impact on the community, as well as the importance of solidarity and public education. Fact Check: Information about the author’s publications is included after the main content, and a call for support for the journal of free intelligences is mentioned in the closing section of the article.]
