It's an informative article.
For more on how the rugby yawnion gobshites in France collaborated with the Nazis to get rid of the increasingly popular rugby league being played over there, this article from 2007 is good. In the emergence and development of early rugby league in France, we can see many parallels with the rugby story in Britain - being started by posh/wealthy men, but the game soon becoming dominated by tougher, stronger working class blokes yet the administration of the sport jealously guarded by those posh guys, whose class-derived arrogance led them to believe they had right of dominion over the plebs. When RL came along as an alternative to the anti-professional yawnion game, the posh blokes sought to weaken and destroy it. We only faced sanctions, prejudice and an anti-RL media agenda; in France, the weight of the Nazi-supporting wartime government forcibly and wilfully destroyed the game (and in post-war France, the pompous aristocrat de Gaulle and his government repeatedly refused to recompense 'Trieziste' clubs, and even blocked them from taking legal action to recover stolen assets).
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/...t-5329198.html