As long as the game has been played in France there has been a divide between Paris and the provinces. Old Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics and champion of rugby in the capital, thought it was an ideal way for athletes to keep fit and hone their running and prancing. Which wasn't quite the way they saw things down in Bayonne, Biarritz and Bordeaux. From day one, they liked things a little cruder. And so there began a French version of the rivalry common to most countries and most sports.
Except in France it was more pronounced. Paris became the place for amateur, pretty play; the provinces were where all the forces of corruption - money and violence - were concentrated, evil forces that led to France's international isolation in the 1930s. The problem went away after France's reintroduction to the Five Nations at the end of the second world war, simply because Paris ceased to be a rugby power. But in the 1980s that began to change as well.
Jean-Pierre Rives and Robert Paparemborde, the outstanding rugby personalities of their age, left the south-west and joined Racing Club de France. By the 1990s Racing were going to the championship final, cycling to the ground, sporting pink bow-ties and sipping champagne at half-time.
This was 'le rugby du show', as opposed to 'le rugby de clocher' of the villages and towns that considered themselves the spiritual guardians of this sport de combat. How the Parisians were despised.
Racing Club gave way to Stade Francais as the standard-bearers of the Parisian game, but under flamboyant president Max Guazzini the tone remained the same. In fact, he doubled, trebled the elements of showbiz. Two seasons ago he filled the Stade de France for a Stade-Toulouse championship game, drawing a disillusioned football crowd to his grand event on a diet of cheap tickets and a giant evening of karaoke.
This World Cup was launched to the pumping throb of that very Parisian beat. Hoardings in the capital and pages of glossy magazines were full of advertisements, revealing sultry French players in posh garb - overdressed compared with the nude calendar of the Stade players, but still glitzy.
Suddenly, however, France lost to Argentina. Scorn was heaped on the mood of over-commercialisation. Humility and modesty had been overlooked, and had to be rediscovered. And then France beat New Zealand. In Cardiff. The game of the people in towns and villages a long way from Paris had been saved. Sébastien Chabal, hirsuit and wild-eyed, from a village near the industrial town of Valence, was the anti-glam hero.
And then France lost to England. To find herself swimming in a sea of confusion and ambivalence. Both Paris and the provinces have been found wanting. They took defeat pretty well, really. On the chin. But somebody at some stage is going to have to pay a price.
The victim has already been chosen. Coach Bernard Laporte is being spared until after the bronze final. After that he will be fair game. The son of the small town of Gaillac to the east of Toulouse, the former Begles-Bordeaux scrum-half, was lured to Paris by Guazzini to coach Stade Francais. He cultivated his business connections, began to move in political circles, sneered at the rugby press. After the World Cup he will be joining the right-wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy.
He had to win the World Cup. And not just to increase sales of France shirts available on his website. He needed to win for his personal credibility.
The World Cup in France, across every square centimetre of her territory, has been a success. The divide between Paris and the provinces remains, but the country as a whole rose to the occasion. France were not winners, but France was a winner.
And Laporte will be a loser. If you want to see how capital and regions can unite, watch them as they turn on their coach. This will be blood sport of which De Coubertin would not be proud.
