The Victorian English public school – rather than the ancient Greeks – inspired Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics
Mark Whitaker Taking a short cut recently in the centre of Tunis, a city I’ve known well for years, I found myself in an unfamiliar run-down street. It took some time to find a sign telling me its name. Rue Pierre de Coubertin, it read, and sure enough, amid the small grocery shops and mechanics’ garages was the shabby but proudly named Hotel Olympique. The capital cities of former French colonies are understandably reluctant to name too many streets after famous Frenchmen. But then I realised. It mattered not that Coubertin, the man credited with reviving the Olympic Games in 1896, had been French. For a small developing country like Tunisia – where sport provides a rare opportunity for international recognition – his significance goes beyond nationality. And for the proponents of Olympism, this minor French aristocrat, born in 1863, is one of the great benefactors of the modern world. Which is perhaps to put it a bit mildly. In 1963 the French government organised a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of Coubertin’s birth, and the keynote speech was given by the American Avery Brundage, then president of the International Olympic Committee. “It was a religion that Coubertin founded,” Brundage said without embarrassment, “a modern religion, passionate, virile and dynamic. And we, the members of the IOC, are his disciples.”
In Olympic circles Coubertin was canonised during the 20th century. He’s referred to simply as “Le Renovateur”, the Reviver. However corrupt and corrupting they’ve become, the Olympics are still somehow meant to represent an ideal, linked inseparably with the name of Coubertin. And if the “religion” of Olympism has its founder, it also has its sustaining myth – that of amateurism. It’s a myth created by Coubertin himself, in volumes of self- praising memoirs that have become “official” Olympic history. The story goes like this. Sport, the young and rootless French aristocrat learned from Victorian Englishmen, was a “good thing” in itself: it taught men to play by the rules and to accept defeat while also teaching them that life was all about competition. Organised sport would bring social classes together and provide a bloodless terrain for international rivalries. The problem was that sport at the end of the 19th century was being “corrupted” by money and professionalism: winning was becoming more important than taking part. So what was needed, Coubertin decided, was a revival of the “Olympic spirit” of ancient Greece, in which financially unrewarded physi-cal competition was seen as the highest cultural good, the basis of “character”. That there wasn’t a shred of evidence that ancient Greek athletes – ruthless professionals to a man – were anything like Victorian amateurs didn’t matter, and the bizarre decision to hold an Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 was taken at an International Congress on Amateurism in Sport that Coubertin had organised in Paris.
The games, it’s important to recognise, weren’t “revived” at all. They were “reinvented”. The contemporary money-driven event is far closer to the original model. Modern Olympism has been sustained by a myth – that every four years an imperfect conflict-
driven world takes a break from reality for a few weeks, finding in the games an oasis of peace, understanding, friendship, and “pure” competition. But that’s not what the modern games have been about, not even those of 1896. Those games took place over a chilly Easter weekend in Athens. And among the spectators in the Panathenaic stadium was the unlikely figure of Charles Maurras, the intellectual who was to become the founding father of French fascism. He was there to cover the event for a far- right Paris daily, and he’d expected to hate what was billed as a celebration of “cosmopolitanism” and international friendship. In fact he loved it. “When people from different nations are brought together and forced to spend time together,” he wrote with undisguised pleasure, “instead of this producing mutual tolerance, they learn to despise one another and to struggle against each other to the utmost of their ability.” Fascist though he was to become, Maurras was no fool. He’d never witnessed competitive international sport before, and he immediately understood that it was a perfect “battleground for nationalities and races”.
The 1896 games were first and foremost a celebration of Greek nationalism, politically well-timed for a government preparing to go to war with Turkey over control of Crete. That they were in Athens at all was a defeat for Coubertin, whose plan all along had been for the “revival” to take place in Paris: because what drove him, more than anything else, was his intense French nationalism. The dominant emotion of his adolescence was shame at his country’s defeat by Prussia in 1870: and he felt shame, too, at what the Paris Commune of 1871 said about France’s internal instability. By the time he dropped out of the leading French military academy in his early twenties, he’d found a mission in life – to reform the French education system so that it produced a competitive elite. Having deeply admired Tom Brown’s Schooldays he thought he knew where to find a model – the English public schools. In 1886, he went on a pilgrimage to Rugby, of which he was later to write: “How often, alone in the great Gothic chapel at Rugby, standing with my eyes fixed on the memorial stone where is written the great name of Thomas Arnold, I dreamt I had before me the foundation stone of the British Empire.” Britain was everything he wanted France to be:
economically powerful, imperially successful and politically stable. And the key, he convinced himself, was “athletic education” – team games. The French ruling class were wimps, he believed, because their education was over-cerebral. To this he contrasted the products of the English school: “Men, in the true sense of the word, full of energy, upright and pure- spirited. These men have quietly carried out the moral revolution that underpins Anglo-Saxon power. All this has been done by sport, with its beneficial physical effects and its enormous moral impact.” At home Coubertin set about trying to persuade a sceptical French public that they had something to learn from the English fad of “athletic education”. With little success. It’s not that the French weren’t interested in physical education; the governments of the Third Republic in the 1880s and 1890s were
obsessed with it. What they wanted, though, was mass gymnastics to toughen up the working class for war. They couldn’t care less about individualistic amateur games. Coubertin had a life-long loathing of gymnastics, and was to try to bar them from the Olympics. He thought they produced passivity and conformity. But the real problem with them, of course, was that they were German. Coubertin contrasted them with the hard, competitive edge of English games: “If you know the English,” he wrote, “you know that for the shy, the weak, the lazy, life is hardly bearable. In this rough-house of an existence, people like that are trampled underfoot. They’re just an impediment. It’s the same in school as it is out in the world – the weak are pushed to one side, and the only people to benefit from this are the strong. Nowhere is selection so merciless.” This is one of the most revealing passages from Coubertin’s writings. And it’s straight-down-the-middle, hard-line Social Darwinism – the intellectual rage of Europe’s middle classes at a time of intensifying military and imperial competition.
Social Darwinism ultimately views national populations in physical terms, as breeding-stocks in competition with each other for supremacy and survival. And that’s why Coubertin’s bizarre obsession with reviving an ancient Greek religious festival as an international event tickled sufficient fancies for it to take off. The first modern Olympics, according to the French sociologist of sport, Jean-Marie Brohm, were “Social Darwinism on the track”.
For Brohm, Coubertin is one of those important historical figures who aren’t studied sufficiently because people think they know about them. They buy the myth. Brohm
certainly doesn’t, and it hasn’t made him the most popular visitor in Lausanne.
He’s drawn attention to Le Renovateur’s strident opposition to the political emancipation of women, to his belief that sport should be a tool of colonial rule and to his obsessive campaign in the early 1900s to stop the introduction of sex education into French schools. Introduce competitive sport instead, Coubertin argued – that’ll stifle any sexual curiosity. But more than anything else, Brohm has raised questions about the political identity of modern Olympism. “On the one hand there’s a mystical idealism, a sort of religion of humanity, of ancient Greece with its ideal of beauty and harmony. But that’s the facade, and behind it are darker and more disturbing shadows, particularly his admiration for authoritarian figures. He worshipped virile strength in both mind and body.” The events of 1936 shouldn’t take us by surprise. Coubertin was old and sick, living in an apartment provided by the IOC in Lausanne. His fortune had gone. He wanted nothing more than to be able to go to Berlin, where his good friend and prot’g’ Karl Diem was organising the Olympic Games on Hitler’s behalf. Admiration between the old Frenchman and leaders of the Third Reich was mutual. They even put him forward for the Nobel Peace Prize. Coubertin was too frail to travel, but the Nazis wanted his stamp of approval for “their”games. So, at the opening ceremony, Coubertin’s thin voice came over the PA system. “I am conscious of having fulfilled my mission. Innumerable stadia across the globe are filled now with the celebration of muscular joy, just as formerly were the stadia of ancient Greece. The cult of athleticism spreads a sort of radiant stoicism, which helps the individual to combat the difficulties and obstacles of everyday life.”
But cults, one can only conclude, are dangerous things – particularly, perhaps, those that celebrate “muscular joy”.