"Theirry Terret shows that in France university students also played a key role in the early development of rugby. As in the USA, when rugby went to France it was not constrained by ties to imperial ideologies. In the late nineteenth century many French elites, however, shared the view of Baron Pierre de Coubertin that English sporting practices were superior ones that would reinvigorate the manhood of the French nation, seen to have been humiliated by the Prussians in 1870. As Terret argues, in France, and particularly in the south-west regions in and around the cities of Bordeaux and Toulouse, rugby rapidly departed from its English origins. Attempts by anglophile Parisians such as de Coubertin and Pashal Grousset were unsuccessful in transplanting English rugby practices to France. Rather, a distinctive playing style emerged centred on French concepts of masculinity and resistance to central authority. This manifested itself clearly in the rise of the game in the south-west where anti-Parisian sentiments were literally played out on the rugby field."