We thought the wound had closed, that revenge was within reach. But on Saturday night, at the Stade de France, the memory reopened: the Springboks once again imposed their iron law. History, stubborn as ever, is written in pain all over again.

This was meant to be the night of resolution, the one where the memory of that lost quarter-final would finally be erased, in the very same Saint-Denis garden. The air throbbed with an almost mystical fervour, without bitterness, the crowd on its feet like a blue swell, carried by the simple, immense desire for revenge.

From the opening minutes, France burst out with that dash of bravery you want to believe in: quick rugby, a try in the corner from Damian Penaud (who became France’s all-time leading try-scorer, ahead of Serge Blanco) after a clever chip from Thomas Ramos, then another, and already the French daring was on show. But the fable stopped there. Very quickly, reality took on the shape of an anvil again.

When the French surge runs into the Boks steamroller

The South Africans have made it their trademark: the beauty of rugby does not lie only in flowing movement or the flash of an individual piece of brilliance, it is woven into resilience, into the harshness of the contact. So against the French surge, South Africa set their science of the hard yards, their grammar of iron and muscle.

Every ruck became a gravity field, every scrum a slab of geology. Rassie Erasmus’s men, even down to fourteen after an utterly indisputable red card for Lood De Jager – a turning point purely in theory -, stayed on their feet, unmoved, as if losing one of their beams changed nothing in the equation. With them, time did not stretch: it was crushed.

A feeling of helplessness

What might have been the swing became a paradox. Because France, for all their promise, only rarely knew how to turn their incursions into certainties. Three times they got close to the try line; three times the Boks wall closed up again, without any fuss. And little by little, we saw what we no longer wanted to see: that quiet helplessness, that feeling of being sucked into a mechanism that never stops. And as the clock hand tilted, the South African steamroller kicked in.

The shove from the giants in white, a man down, was methodical. An imposing maul, a battering ram on the line, and two decisive tries. The effort could be read as clearly as the result: 32-17.

So the angle is that of a revenge mission aborted. Not so much for a lack of will (France had plenty), but out of naivety. Through a failure to convert, to finish, against a well-oiled, well-drilled opposition. The script is a tragic echo of 2023: a game under control, then a general derailment. The greyness. But this time the margin was not a single point, it was a feeling of helplessness in the face of a machine.

Unable to close it out

The paradox is cruel: a man down for the Boks, and yet it was they who set the tempo and made the difference. France had the surge, the flame, the madness; but not the control, not the ability to turn that fire into a win.

There will be plenty of lessons: discipline, realism of course, the handling of the crucial moments. Or indeed the coaching calls. But the image that will remain is that of a French side standing tall, quivering, then dominated, without the slightest spark in a heap of ashes. And that of a crowd hoping to see the ogre fall, but watching their own team turned into prey. And above all, that of serene Springboks, with the precision of watchmakers and an unmatched physical dimension, who have now made Saint-Denis their own garden for good (74% wins, including two world titles).

On this autumn evening, the revenge dissolved into a mist of regret. With the sense of inevitability that this France side lacked the lungs, still less the weight. And that, above all, it is struggling to grow up. When the siren sounded, the Stade de France fell silent, as after yet another implacable verdict. For now, France remain that poem of attack crossed out by the prose of reality. And Galthié’s group had not lost four in a row since 2018…