French Rugby Championship

Football was introduced in France by British traders and workers around the 1870s. The first known club to have practiced a form of football was the Havre Athletic Club in 1872, playing an hybrid code called the "combination".
The first true club to have played rugby union was the English Taylors RFC in 1877, followed by the Paris Football Club in 1878.
In the idea to copy the British model of public school, a lot of students' clubs appeared as well to practice athleticism and rugby, like the Racing Club de France (creation of Lycée Condorcet students in 1882), the Stade Français (creation of Lycée Saint-Louis students in 1883) and the Olympique (creation of Lycée Michelet (Vanves) students in 1887).
At the same time, rugby was also introduced via the port of Bordeaux to south-western France, and quickly merged with popular local traditions of ball games.

Arbitrated by Pierre de Coubertin, the first title of French champion was decided by a single match, between the Racing Club de France and Stade Français, on 20 March 1892. Racing won the match 4–3. This embryonic league was played between only Parisian teams, and no more than six of them, until 1898. Stade Français won five titles, and lost one final to Olympique in this early stage of the league.

The 1898–99 season saw a change in the format of the championship. The champion of Paris now met in a final for the national title the champion of la province (the rest of France). That changed again in 1904 with the creation of 16 regional leagues, the champions of which were qualified for a round of 16.

The championship, now truly on a national scale, saw the emergence of the first true dynasty of French rugby, with the domination of Stade Bordelais, who played 12 of the 13 finals between 1899 and 1911, winning seven of them. The club's reign was stopped by three consecutive eliminations in semi-finals, and other south-western cities' clubs, like Perpignan, Bayonne and Toulouse, took charge of the sport.

Due to the war, league operations were suspended for a number of years. In its place, a competition known as the Coupe de l'Espérance was held, which involved mostly young boys who had not been drafted. The competition was held four times, but is not normally considered a full championship. The normal competition returned for the 1920 season, and Stadoceste Tarbais became the first post-war champions, defeating the Racing Club de France in the final.
During the 1920s Stade Toulousain initiated its now famous rugby history, winning five Championships during the decade (Stade's first feat took place in 1912 when they were crowned champions without losing a single game throughout the season: the team was nicknamed "la Vierge Rouge" — the Red Virgin, a reference to the club shirt color). USA Perpignan also won two championships (their 1925 final victory was actually a second match, as a previous final had ended in a nil-all draw).

The 1930 Championship final, won by Agen over US Quillan, was the first to go into extra time. The 1930s were dominated by the Biarritz Olympique (four finals and two championship titles) and the Lyon Olympique Université (three finals and two titles). However, those dominations were sour, because of extra-sportive turmoil that shook French rugby union in this decade. Brawls on the pitch and in the stand,s and disguised professionalism (nicknamed "brown amateurism") had become quite common.

The most stunning example of brown amateurism was the Union Sportive Quillan, a club of a village of 3,000 residents who managed to advance to three finals and win one of them, because Jean Bourrel, the owner of the village hat factory, offered paid positions in his factory to rugby players; he wanted to use the club as an advertisement for his product.

On 24 January 1931, 14 rugby union clubs, amongst them seven former French champions, seceded from the French Rugby Federation to protest against the abuses that had tarnished rugby union's image in the country. Despite a reintegration of those club in 1932, this event had deep consequences.

The four British national teams decided after this incident to ban France from the Five Nations. Coupled with the effect of the economical crisis, the number of club affiliated to the FFR dropped, from 784 in 1930 to 558 in 1939. This crisis also quick-started rugby league in France, which went from no club existing in the country in 1934 to 225 in 1939, among them 14 fully professional.

As during the First World War, the championship was suspended. Rugby union was one of the least affected sports by the German occupation, as it conformed to the amateur vision of sport cultivated by fascist ideology, and its location mainly in the unoccupied south meant that it was far removed from overly severe repression.
The Vichy regime tried to turn rugby union into a kind of national amateur sport for all, by banning all professional sports in 1941, which dealt a terrible blow to association football and rugby league.
In 1942, the rugby union league was reinstated, with Jean Dauger's Bayonne, Puig-Aubert's USA Perpignan and Albert Ferrasse and Guy Basquet's Agen among the big team.

Rugby union experienced a wave of growth after the war, thanks to the civilian population's desire to forget the horrors of the conflict, France's reintegration into the prestigious Five Nations and the return of clubs that had opted for rugby league before the war to the FFR fold, such as Béziers. The retention of a large number of teams in the championship (between 40 and 80 until 1991) also helped local identification with rugby. The 1940s saw the appearance of the Tarn department on the French rugby map, with double by Castres and a victory by US Carmaux, but above all the emergence of a new dynasty.
With a core group of eight international players - Antoine Labazuy, Jean and Maurice Prat, Thomas Mantérola, Louis Guinle and Roger Martine - FC Lourdes contested 10 finals between 1945 and 1960, winning 7 titles.
The 60's were highly contested, with 8 different winner, including three SU Agen titles.
Lourdes were also the champions of the 1968 season, but due to the May 1968 events, the final was played three weeks behind the normal schedule. At the end of regulation time the score was tied at 6–6, and then 9–9 after extra time. Lourdes were declared champions because they had scored two tries to Toulon's none and also because there was no time to schedule a third final as the France national team were about to leave on a tour to New Zealand and South Africa.

Although Béziers won their first championship in the 1961 season, it would be the 1970s which would bring a golden era for the club, under the command of the coach Raoul Barrière, as they would win ten championships between 1971 and 1984, as well as being runners-up in 1976. The club also established a lot of records : a 100–0 win against Montchanin in September 1975, a home undefeated streak lasting 11 years and 9 months, and five entire undefeated seasons (1961, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1978).

In the mid-1970s, after being held in Toulouse, Lyon and Bordeaux, the final was fixed on a permanent basis to the newly reconstructed Parc des Princes in Paris.

A former number eight of the club in the 60's, and a high school and university teacher, Daniel Herrero was named as head coach of RC Toulon in 1983. He transformed the RCT, going unbeaten for seven years at home and appearing in three finals, winning in 1987. The club's main opponent was the resurgent Stade Toulousain, with a generation nicknamed "the gymnastics professor team", because of the job held by eight of them. Toulouse won the title in 1989, the tenth in its history.

The first match of the 1990s went into extra time, as the Racing Club de France defeated Agen, winning their first Championship since 1959. Bègles, Toulon, Castres and Toulouse would win the following finals.

The decade saw the league move increasingly toward professionalism, with a reduction of the number of teams authorized to play in the elite from 40 in 1995 to 16 in 2001.

The 15 first years of the newly professional league were dominated by three teams. Including their 1994 and 1995 victories, Toulouse won four championships in succession, and three others in 1999, 2001 and 2008.
Biarritz won in 2002 its first title since 1939, then two others in 2005 and 2006, with a core of players like Marc and Thomas Lièvremont, Joe Roff and Dimitri Yachvili. But the team who benefited the most from professionalism was Stade Français. After experiencing success at the beginning of the sport, this club had long been stuck in the lower divisions of French rugby. Bought by Max Guazzini, the owner of the successful radio station NRJ, the club came back with a core of young and exciting players coached by Bernard Laporte to claim five titles between 1998 and 2007.

Encouraged by the Stade Français experience, other wealthy individuals invested in Top 14 : Mohed Altrad in Montpellier, Mourad Boudjellal in Toulon, assembled teams of star to compete for the title. Those rich newcomers, however, did not completely topple the traditional teams.
Since 2010, Toulouse, driven by its powerful academy, have won five titles, while Clermont and Castres, the two other teams to have never been relegated in the professional era, have each won two.

The competition saw an enormous rise in popularity in 2005–06, with attendance rising to an average of 9,600, up by 25% from 2004 to 2005, and numerous sellouts. On 15 October 2005, Stade Français drew a crowd of 79,502 at Stade de France for their home match against Toulouse; this broke the previous French attendance record for a regular-season league match in any sport (including football) by over 20,000. That record was broken on 4 March 2006, when Stade Français drew 79,604 to a rematch of the 2004–05 final against Biarritz at Stade de France. It was broken again on 14 October 2006 with 79,619 as the same two opponents met, and a fourth time on 27 January 2007, with 79,741 for another Stade Français-Toulouse match. During the regular season 2010–2011, the average attendance per match reached 14,184.

In 2011, Canal+ indicated that evening matches were being watched by between 800,000 and 850,000 viewers while afternoon matches were watched by around 700,000 viewers.

In recent years, numerous foreign players have joined Top 14 teams.

In August 2016, LNR released a strategic plan outlining its vision for French rugby through the 2023 Rugby World Cup. The plan includes significant changes to the top levels of the league system, although the changes were more dramatic for Pro D2 than for the Top 14. Changes affecting the Top 14 are:

• Starting with the 2017–18 season, the only club to be automatically relegated from Top 14 will be the bottom club on the league table. That club will be replaced by the Pro D2 champion.
• From 2017 to 2018, the second-from-bottom team on the Top 14 table will enter a playoff with the Pro D2 runner-up, with the winner taking up the final Top 14 place.

On 13 March 2017, the Top 14 was rocked by the announcement that Racing 92 and Stade Français planned to merge into a single club effective with the 2017–18 season. Stade Français players soon voted almost unanimously to go on strike over the proposed merger, and within days LNR held an emergency meeting to discuss the Paris clubs' plans. The clubs announced on 19 March that the planned merger had collapsed.

The 1993 French Rugby Union Championship was won by Castres, who beat Grenoble 14–11 in the final, a match decided by an irregular try. A try by Grenoble's Olivier Brouzet was ruled out and the decisive try by Gary Whetton of Castres was awarded by the referee, Daniel Salles, when in fact Grenoble scrum-half Franck Hueber had touched the ball down first in his try zone. This error gave the title to Castres. Salles admitted his mistake 13 years later. Jacques Fouroux, then coach of Grenoble, came into conflict with the French Rugby Federation after claiming the match had been fixed.