Lecture given at the Sorbonne,
November 1892

There are three capital cities of physical exercise in the modern world: Berlin, Stockholm and London - from where three Systems have subsequently spread to other regions, each based on ideas well known to the ancient world, incompletely or unconsciously accepted by middle ages and renaissance and which can be summarized in three words: war, hygiene and sport. I should very quickly like to describe the characteristic features of each, indicate their progress through the present age and finally describe France' s part in this great movement that has so aptly been called the physical renaissance.

-I-

The century which began so tragically and which is ending today in a troubled and uncertain peace follows one of great intellectual activity and veritable physical inertia. There might perhaps be grounds for seeking in this over-subtle contrast the initial causes of some of the imbalances from which we are suffering today. But that is not our field. Let us note merely that everywhere at the end of the 18th century violent exercise and virile games had gone out of fashion, and men went in search of amusement and pleasure elsewhere. In this respect, even the England of the day was in a most surprising condition. It was no longer the England of the day was in a most surprising condition. It was no longer the England of the Tudors living in the open air and enjoying all the associated pleasures, nor was it the England of Thomas Arnold and the creators of athletic education. It was an irresolute people among whom native brutality was mixed with a kind of weakening of purpose, which could have heralded decadence had Napoleon not arrived to strengthen Great Britain, as the north wind halts a thaw. In France, the tennis courts were deserted; they were the place for exchanging oaths, but nobody played there. Long gone were the days when Sire de Couberville used to push his bail around on the beaches of Cotentin on Sunday afternoons surrounded by the valiant youth from the neighbouring villages; when those Homeric combats which Mr Simenon Luce finds recounted in the parchments he consults were contested from parish to parish; and when the clergy of Avranches themselves, at certain festivals of the liturgical year, went down in procession to the river bank to indulge in a joyful game of hockey. All that was dead, and when the Directoire, steeped in memories of Ancient Greece, wanted to set up on the Champ de Mars in Pairs something akin to the Olympic Games, one indispensable element was missing: competitors. There were doubtless boys who came, as boys do at fairs, to try climbing the greasy pole and win the traditional leg of mutton or bottle of Benedictine. But that is not enough to supply athletics meetings and, lacking a Racing Club and a Stade Francais to organise and maintain them, the Directoire competitions quickly faded and died like roses.

It is true that, at the same time, on our borders, beyond our borders and far away, at the foot of the Pyramids, on the Danube, in Spain, beneath the walls of the Moscow Kremlin, for the twenty years of a mad and sublime epic the soldiers of France gave the world one of the most athletic spectacles it had ever witnessed. In that short space of time, they exhausted the strength which the nation had accumulated over several centuries. The blood that they spilled was that of the tennis players and the Sires de Couberville, it was the blood of France, tainted in the towns, still intact in the country...

... and not that of the weaklings and libertines of the Regency. And then, Gentlemen, you know how our soldiers are. When they have no more strength left, they invent it!

Oh! The great need to rest that France had after this long outburst of courage, and great heavens! How well one understands that she should go and play dominoes instead of exercising her hired muscles. Sated with victory, she gradually fell asleep while, beside her black, total, horrible defeat has awakened energies which laboured grimly at the undertaking that you know: the German empire. It was thus that military athletics was born in Berlin.

It has often been said in France that on the battlefields of 1866 and 1870, the real winner was the schoolmaster; if it is to this belief that we own the sight of schools opening across our country and popular education spreading so rapidly, then thank heaven for it. But I think that, in believing this, we are giving the teacher more than his due and rather forgetting his colleague, the gymnastics master.

German gymnastics, Gentlemen, that which immediately after iena found ardent and convinced apostles to preach its gospel, then numerous, docile disciples to follow its precepts, is energetic in its movements, based on strict discipline and, in a word, military in its essence. Everywhere in Germany, right up until yesterday, reigned hierarchy, obedience and precision. From childhood, the little schoolboy took his seat in the row and looked up at a superior to await orders from him. As an older pupil, he continued to make his muscles and will supple, to be able to mobilize them as soon as the call came. For that is the goal of German gymnastics, and it is easy to distinguish the qualities and imperfections that such an ideal brings with it. As a student, his greatest pleasure was to flight with his companions, and the scars that resulted on his face were like marks of nobility. There was uniformity in the smallest details of his existence, and the regulation of them seemed to procure within him a joy which the English and French are incapable of grasping. Even today, one has merely to visit a German university, to attend one of the students' meetings where glasses are emptied upon command, to understand the disciplinary frenzy that has worked on this great people. In the constitution of their revolutionary party, the socialists themselves have included something of the militarism which has impregnated the whole of Germany during the present century.

I said that German gymnastics was energetic in its movements. On that condition alone, it is effective. Now, for this energy to be maintained, gymnasts must perpetually be under a warlike influence. The idea of war must never cease to inspire them. If Germany frees itself from that idea, its innumerable gymnastics clubs will rapidly change. Already in some parts of its territory, sport has made its appearance: the result of twenty years of peace at home and abroad. The young athlete is beginning to think about physical effort for itself, and not its more-or-less longer term consequences. If he wants to jump a hedge, he will make himself as light as possible in order to clear it as high as possible. Now, in the country, one does not have bare arms or legs or a thin jersey as the only clothing on one's body. For his part, the gymnast is less concerned about achieving athletic prowess than moving nimbly with arms and baggage. In the same way, if they are no longer inspired by the prospect of military service, ensemble movements become tedious, gestures become weak; they are barely sketched out; there is no soul in them. Likewise, group runs break up; the runners regain their individuality; they no longer worry whether they go well together, in step; it is who goes fastest, who arrives first.

From a physical point of view, German gymnastics is artificial; it is made up of exercises which have no raison d'etre in themselves, which are not in nature and which can be obtained from men only by offering them as a goal something grand and noble which can fascinate and train them. This, Gentlemen, is what has made it successful, and it is this which will undoubtedly cause its decline in the future. But it has had offshoots. In America and Australia, not to mention France, which we shall come back to presently, numerous clubs have been created. Wherever they go in the world, the English take a tennis racquet and a bible with them, and are never parted from them. When they go abroad, the Germans take sauerkraut and gymnastics. You know how large the German colony is in the United States. Certain recent facts have drawn attention to what I, were I a citizen of the United States, would consider a national danger. Now, the Germans in America profess great admiration for European Germany. Well-established in their land of freedom, with an ocean between them and their former homeland, they ceaselessly praise the yoke that they were unable to bear, proudly say the name of Emperor and dream of Germanizing through language and customs a large part of the new world where they are established without the slightest intention of returning. Thus they have founded for their children gymnastics clubs based on those in the old country and which constitute a totally separate and homogeneous organization in that chaos of systems that they refer to over there as Physical Education.

You will tell me that this gymnastics lacks what I referred to earlier as the essential condition for its success: the military idea and prospect of the battlefield. Do not believe it, Gentlemen. You are led to see in these 69 million inhabitants only merchants, traders and businessmen. There is a thinking America, a scientific America and there is also a military America. While, materially, the traces of the War of Secession have disappeared, the moral traces are still visible: the shock produced in American hearts by this Herculean struggle has been passed right down to today, and I declare that the patriotism of the United States citizen is one of the strongest and most formidable that I know; one can expect anything from it.

While at West Point, where French military traditions are still honoured, an elite corps in trained, that of the officers of the federal army, each state now possesses a militia which one would be most mistaken to regard as a worthless national guard. I lack the time and competence to study the operation of it, but I can draw your attention to three facts: the number of men enrolled, the perfection of their arms and equipment and finally the remarkable mobilization experiment which has just been conducted in Pennsylvania, when the occasion was far from favourable. The call was unexpected and it was not a question of fighting enemies from outside but of maintaining order in the midst of a bloody strike. Within 24 hours, these traders and businessmen left everything; the 25th hour found them armed and at the designated location. For the most part, these militias are commanded and organized in German style. They present a singular mixture of those civic virtues which have produced the English volunteers and that spirit of discipline which distinguishes the German soldier. When the United States has rebuilt her navy, which she is working on, her spirit of enterprise could well become the spirit of conquest. I am one of those people who believe that, in the future, the Washington government will be trigger-happy. For these different reasons, it might be that military gymnastics escapes from the banks of the Spree where its decline seems imminent, to find pontiffs and worshippers on the banks of the Mississippi. In all cases, it will always have a chance of sprouting where there are great ambitions to be satisfied, revenge to be taken or slavery to be broken.

In Australia, the German colony is so small that it is barely worth mentioning. But some clubs have nevertheless sprung up, and although less widespread or aggressive than in the United States, militarism does play a role in the concerns of the public. Need I remind you of the agitation caused in the Australian cities by the incidents over the Samoa islands and the New Hebrides, the desire clearly expressed by public opinion to seize New Caledonia later or the sending by New South Wales of a militia contingent to support the English in the Sudan?

In all this, I appear to be abandoning sport to study diplomatic issues. In reality, I am merely insisting on that important social law, namely that there exists a close correlation between frame of mind, ambitions, the tendencies of a people and the way in which they understand and organize physical exercise in their country.

-II-

That is true of Germany, Gentlemen, and that is true of Sweden. To move from German gymnastics to Swedish gymnastics is to hear a pastoral symphony after a heroic symphony. The Swedes are a happy people with little history for the last hundred years who devote themselves peacefully to a national and beneficent sport, skating, and to a singular and at first sight anodyne gymnastics called, after the name the name of its inventor, the Ling system.

I would hasten to say that between Ling and skating, it is definitely skating which would be the more entitled to receive the gratitude of the Swedes, their good health, the smooth balance of mind and body that distinguishes them. That tranquil temperament, the regular breath of life which sustains them, are, they believe, thanks to the learned inventor, but I have no hesitation in attributing these, on their behalf, to the wild races on the smooth northern ice, in the frozen air, to the healthy joys of the Scandinavian winter.

This does not mean that this Swedish gymnastics, which is even timidly starting to establish some colonies in Germany, London and New York, is devoid of merit. Our friend, I could say our illustrious friend, Dr Lagrange, a member of the Board of our Union, went to study it in its native surroundings, and readers of the <<Revue des Deux Mondes>> know the impression that the Stockholm Institutes made upon him.  Swedish gymnastics, he said, is the gymnastics of the weak. Precisely, and that is why we do not want it. Through the moderation of its movements it is suitable for delicate children and the aged alike. Through its scientific character, it is applicable to the sick. It was the medical side which chiefly interested and captivated Lagrange. The French doctor who goes to study in Stockholm, he writes, finds himself in the presence of things which are so new to him that he initially has difficulty in finding his bearings amidst such varied movements as he sees performed in the public or private 'Institutes'. But gradually the light dawns in his mind and he ends up classifying all these ingenious procedures and seeing that they are seeking, in short, two results: measuring out exercise and localizing it.To give you an idea of the boldness of this medical gymnastics based on a particularly thorough study into the muscular system, I shall tell you that through exercises and the different massages which are the corollaries of this, it treats even diseases of the heart. The results seem excellent, and for more than half a century, the Swedes have not tired of going to the Institutes in search of health. That alone makes it worth attending to, but lovers of physical exercise are not generally recruited from among the sick. It is the sound of body that we are dealing with. It is good that Swedish gymnastics should look after young children, particularly at an age when they are at risk of deviations and deformities; that the sick should be brought to it; and that it should offer the old exercises in keeping with what remains of their strength. But it should not seek to exercise power in the empire of the young; they need precisely what it repudiates: effort and emulation. Effort is obtained from it only by amplitude, never by energy of movement; it is reached slowly, never brusquely. And as for emulation, it is a dogma for this gymnastics that men must not measure themselves against each other, only against themselves.

To get our young athletes to give up effort and emulation, we should first have to remove all the blood from their veins. While a drop of blood is left, they will not give it up, that I Guarantee. Truly, to give them such precepts would be to make fun of them, and that is too much like the caricature by Cham where the mother says to her little girl in the Tuileries Gardens: Go and enjoy yourself, dear, but be careful not to catch cold or get too hot, or crease your dress or get your boots dirty, mess up your hair or undo your cravat.

In Sweden itself, there has been a party of reformers working on making Swedish gymnastics more masculine, if I may put it like that; they are viewed with that indignation mixed with interest that revolutionaries everywhere always attract; they will gain the upper hand...for a little while. When Swedish gymnastics ceases to make claims other than to the sick and the weak I see nothing that will prevent it from spreading all over the world, and for my part, I should have no objection to helping it.

-III-

We have already seen, Gentlemen, at the start of this discussion, how mistaken were those who believe that the taste for physical exercise is so deeply anchored in the English that it can never be eclipsed. These people cheerfully imagine that what they see has always existed; and England without sport is a nonsense to them. Now, this nonsense marked the whole of the end of the last century and the beginning of our own. Popular games had fallen into disuse; the monopolization of the right to hunt resulting form the creation of large properties had deprived the petty bourgeoisie of the country of their favourite pastime, and if boxers were to be seen killing each other here and there, or a rowing competition was held on the Thames, it was between professionals to give spectators the pleasure of losing their money on exaggeratedly high bets. There was nothing sporting or athletic about it. The England of those days knew only two distractions: doing business more or less honestly and getting drunk more or less completely. Colleges were a miniature version of society: no spirit of solidarity; indifference among the masters; the law of the jungle among the pupils. When studying this vulgar and shapeless organism, one cannot foresee all that the genius of an educator will bring out in the way of refinement and delicacy. For, - and here I am going against a prejudice common in France - in the whole world, there is not a system more refined, more delicate or more tender towards youth than the current English system; appearances are deceptive.

English athletics, Gentlemen, began only recently, and already it is taking over the world. The history of this great movement has not yet been written, but we know the main events. The names of Canon King-sley and his followers do not yet belong to the distant past: sixty years have sufficed for this prodigious transformation. The first workers were less worried about going to school than obtaining some healthy pastimes. They were far-sighted, however. A certain philosophical glow surrounded them: reminders of Greece, respect for the stoic traditions and a fairly clear idea of the services that athletics could render the modern world were not slow in drawing attention to them. They were mocked, but ridicule did not discourage them. When the movement gained grounded, they were furiously and angrily attacked. But their work was already under the protection of youth. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge had started to associate themselves with it. They must have found there the seed of magnificent recovery, a very necessary purification. At the same time, that great citizen, Thomas Arnold, the leader and classic model of English educators, gave the precise formula for the role of athletics in education. The cause was quickly understood and won. Playing fields sprang up all over England. The number of clubs grew. You have no idea of their number. London has a whole collection, not in the aristocratic quarters, but in the poor and popular areas. Every village has one or two, with the result that, while English law does not provide for the physical education of children, private initiative largely replaces it. Then, when they left their native land, the sons of Albion took with them the precious recipe, and athletics overflowed into the two hemispheres in the most varied of climates.

In the United States precisely after (the age ?)* ( *There is some doubt as this word.) of Romanticism, we wished to know what had become of it there, and taking advantage of the numerous congresses grouped around the Centennial Exhibition, in 1889 we distributed throughout all the British and English-speaking colonies 7,000 copies of a questionnaire on games, their influence on education and their progress. This progress is constant, and the replies were of a unanimity that proved to us that the upward movement of athletics would attain gigantic proportions and that the experience of fifty years had merely confirmed everywhere the doctrines of Arnold and Kingsley. In the United States, to cite this country of statistics, Dr. Sargent, (an authority on the subject) estimates that between 1860 and 1870, 1 million dollars, from 1870 to 1880, 2.5 million dollars, and from 1880 to 1890, 25 million dollars were spent on setting up playing fields and exercise halls or manufacturing apparatus, making a total of 28.5 million dollars.

In Australia, the Cape, Jamaica, Hongkong or the Indies, the club yearbooks and rules for athletics meetings gave the impression of a veritable rising tide which I estimate today - and I should say that my calculations are based on very imperfect data - at around six million individuals, counting only adults registered as active members on the books of properly constituted clubs. In my calculations, I am including neither Belgium nor Holland where every day sport is making major strides, nor the countries where there might be isolated groups of amateurs.

A special press has been set up to cover the interests of the athletic world.

Countless newspapers have appeared. The results of a baseball match played in Chicago or a rowing competition on the Paramatta travel around the world and find a place in the Times which, forty years ago, timidly devoted a small corner to announcing the first foot races between Oxford and Cambridge. On the days of major meetings business stops, offices empty, and there is a truce like in Ancient Greece to applaud the young people as they pass.

They pass, Gentlemen, with the merit of seeking in effort only the effort itself, of imposing upon themselves constraints to which no-one is pushing them, of submitting themselves to a discipline which is doubly effective because freely consented to. It is very noble and fine to think of war; it is laudable to think of hygiene; but it is more perfectly human to worship effort in a disinterested way and love difficult things simply because they are difficult.

That is the philosophy of sport in general and of our union in particular.

-IV-

In 1886, Gentlemen, France was not so badly endowed in terms of physical exercises as some people seem to believe. I shall not mention the brave Colonel Amasos who was certainly a convert but had composed a collection of religious and moral songs which his pupils would sing as they stamped their feet, which means that the Salvation Army has as much right to regard him as an ancestor as gymnastics does.

I shall limit myself in passing to saluting the gymnastics clubs, the result of defeat and springboard to victory, let us hope. Whatever may have been said by some who sometimes confuse them with that childish masquerade that has been called school battalions, they have rendered great and noble services, and the mere feeling which inspired their creation must make them sacred to all Frenchmen. The Club Alpin also deserves a mention for having reminded our compatriots that on their boarders there are summits where one can breathe air which has never been used and where one stores up health of the body and of the soul. Finally, how could one forget fencing? Is it not our national sport, in which only Italy can rival us for supremacy, the one which allows us to savour honourably the joy of fighting, the greatest after the joy of living?

In 1886, however, a wing was missing from the edifice of physical education. I do not know if many architects had noticed, but none, to my knowledge, had presented a precise plan of the intended construction. One appeared in the newspaper Le Francais on 23rd August 1887 and although I do not wish to bring personal issues into this discussion, I insist on this date out of a feeling whose legitimacy could not be contested. At that time, the Academy of Medicine was rising up strongly against mental fatigue. It seemed to the author of the plan in question that an exit was being sought where there was only a wall. The Academy of Medicine stubbornly insisted on wanting a revision of the programmes as much to reduce the amount of mental work as to make room for Games. We have no time to play, it said. This was s serious mistake: there was time, there was sufficient time, and we were not wanting to be given more, but we made poor use of it. As for public opinion, it was getting lost in another direction. Why does nobody play at your institution? It said to the University. Go on, get going. Play and get people to play. That was easy to say and impracticable to do. The thing had to come from outside, a private initiative; it was necessary for a club with a base on each of the banks to undertake to throw a bridge across this river. The Sorbonne was one such base; the racing Club and the Stade Francais could be others - these two clubs, the one founded in 1882, the other in 1883 had ignored each other for some time. A man who has done more than any other for Athletic Sports, Mr G. de Saint Clair, brought them together on 18th January 1887. After a rally that day in the woods of Ville d'Avray, the Union des Sports Athletiques was decided upon; it was definitively established and received its first statutes on the following 29th November. The first months of 1888 passed in discussions and steps leading to the constitution of a Committee for the Propagation of Physical Exercises. Mr Jules Simon and Mr Greard were the first to enrol. Meeting were held on the following 31st May and jth July; an inter-school cross-country race took place just outside Paris. You know the rest: the founding of the Physical Education League, the Gironde League which groups together the lycees of the Bordeaux Academy, the holding of competitions all over France, sometimes with too much noise and not enough competence, in short this great movement which for us has led in five years to the result that you know, Gentlemen, and with which you are satisfied: your presence here confirms it.

-V-

So much for the past; what about the future?

Very briefly, Gentlemen, for it is time to conclude the cycle of this portion of universal history that has been presented to you tonight, very briefly I shall tell you about the programme that we, responsible Ministers, are proposing to our electors, and I believe that it has their approval. In education, we shall strengthen our school associations, create new ones in areas where they have not yet appeared, remain as we are, attached to the University of France for whose good we have the duty to cooperate, make little noise and do a lot of work, receive no subsidy and preserve our full independence and finally to introduce slowly and surely...

-V-

So much for the past; what about the future?

I shall not tell you, because the role of prophet is one full of danger, and also because it is high time I concluded this brief survey of universal history that has been presented to you tonight. The Union has great duties to perform towards both the University and its own members; it will not fail in these.

As for athletics in general, I do not know what its fate will be, but I wish to draw your attention to the important fact that it presents two new features, this time in the series of these secular transformations. It is democratic and international. The first of these characteristics will guarantee its future: anything that is not democratic is no longer viable today. As for the second, it opens unexpected prospects to us. There are people whom you call Utopians when they talk to you about the disappearance of war, and you are not altogether wrong; but there are others who believe in the progressive reduction in the chances of war, and I see no Utopia in this. It is clear that the telegraph, railways, the telephone, the passionate research in science, congresses and exhibitions have done more for peace than any treaty or diplomatic conven-tion. Well, I hope that athletics will do even more. Those who have seen 30,000 people running through the rain to attend a football match will not think that I am exaggerating. Let us export rowers, runners and fencers; this is the free trade of the future, and the day that it is introduced into the everyday existence of old Europe, the cause of peace will receive new and powerful support.

That is enough to encourage me to think now about the second part of my programme. I hope that you will help me as you have helped me thus far and that, with you, I shall be able to continue and realize, on a basis appropriate to the conditions of modern life, this grandiose and beneficent work:

the re-establishment of the Olympic Games.