"Rugby playing styles initially fused with concepts of class-based masculinity of the belle epoque that stressed elegance over strength in the performance of the game. When rugby went to the south of France it was infused with different concepts of masculinity that centred on regional and cultural resistance and the increasing participation of farm labourers who were then able to use their 'physical capital' from their work in taming the men of the urban middle classes. This parallels the situation in England where one of the driving forces behind the entrenchment of amateurism was that the working classes gained an unfair advantage over the more sedentary middle and upper classes because of their more physically demanding occupations. As Terret argues for France, 'The symbolic battles taking place on the playing playing fields at the beginning of the century only intensified the conflict between the southern ideal of the strong man and the northern ideal of the urban intellectual.' A new playing style emerged based on muscularity and forward play that diverged from earlier stylistic back play. This was reinforced in the media in which positively described scrums and rolling mauls as the more valued style of manly rugby and stressed the off-field exploits of local players, linking both elements to conceptions of regional popular culture. Thus rugby and rugby culture were linked into the south-western symbol of the castagne a Gascon noun meaning 'flight'."