Physical education in French schools: a Foucauldian account of changes to the general education curriculum from 1815 to 1944

ABSTRACT

Following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, French physical developed gymnastics programmes, promoted their services through the press, and lobbied the central and local governments. The efforts of these physical cultural reforms brought about a transformation in athletic practices in France, especially in French schools, that has a continued relevance. The historiographic debate on sport in French education environments emphasises the ‘republican’ nature of school physical education and sport. Politicians, reformers and teachers considered the production of a physical capable student to be part of the larger curricular goal of creating French citizens. Through a close reading of government documents, popular press articles, and specialist journals sources, my work will interrogate the limits of the state's approach to integrating physical cultures into schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What I will show is how successive French governments intensified the essentially Foucauldian systems of control inside of physical cultural programmes in schools in order to more efficiently produce what they understood to be better citizens. Their efforts faced challenges from many young athletes, parents, and sometimes renegade teachers who found spaces of agency and freedom where they could rewrite the state's lesson plans to suit their own purposes.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical education
• France
• Foucault
• republicanism
• fascism

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a persistent pattern emerged in the French state's approach to physical education. Successive French governments responded to geopolitical shocks and internal political fights with increasingly expensive and expansive physical cultural programmes. Government officials and parliamentarians defended these programmes through a declensionist logic that premised physical cultural reform as central to national rejuvenation. The pattern becomes apparent in 1870s, when following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, French physical cultural reformers focused their attention on France's youth because they believed that only the physical rejuvenation of boys and girls bodies promised to reverse the nation's international decline.

This pattern aligns well with what Michel Foucault noted in a series of lectures at the College de France in 1975 and 1976; from the eighteenth century, states paid increasing attention to the bodies of its subject-citizens and subjected those bodies to increasingly intensive inventions to improve their economic, military and reproductive potential.¹ As Samuel Clevenger and David Andrews note, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), institutions of governance increasingly embraced ‘rationalized attempts to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence’, and the ‘vital characteristics’ of populations became the target of ‘[s]trategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health’.² These interventions included interpositions – both mundane and intense – into athletic and physical culture, educational systems, medical regimes, and reproductive strategies. The overall implication of these changes reflected a profound transition between the relationship between the state and the subject-citizen whose bodily autonomy was progressively limited by powerful and new systems of control. Historians of sport have paid particular attention to the ways that states promoted sports to improve the biopolitical potential, especially the way state's used athleticism to make and remake men and women into better workers, soldiers, and mothers.³

This Foucauldian pattern suggests a new way of thinking about French sport beyond the chronological frameworks that traditionally define the historiography. A wide range of scholars have examined physical culture in French schools and tried to understand how athletic life fit into the historiographic questions central to French history. In one of his earliest pieces on French physical culture life, Pierre Arnaud examined the way that early republican politicians wrote about physical education. Léon Gambetta, one of the Third Republics founding fathers, dreamed that the country could become be a ‘pedagogical territory … a foyer for the spread of republican values’.⁴ In that space, Gambetta imagined that educators, soldiers, and the gym teacher performed a special role: they allowed for the inculcation of military virtues into young men. Politicians, reformers and teachers considered the production of a physical capable student to be part of the larger goal of creating French citizens. Arnaud framed much of his early work around this quote; his work thus clearly looks at the Foucauldian influence of the state's physical cultural programme but only in the early Third Republic. He does not trace these influences through to the middle of the twentieth century. His work has however influenced many subsequent studies on sport in French education environments emphasises the republican nature of school physical education in other times and places, including into the present Fifth Republic and in France’s colonies.⁵

As French historians have largely embedded histories of sport inside studies of other historiographic areas, the questions central to those other fields can overshadow our understanding of French physical cultural life. For example, scholars working on French physical culture emphasise the differences between the Popular Front and the Vichy state, arguing that different French governments promoted sports for fundamentally different reasons. In The Republic of Men, Geoff Read compares interwar Popular Front and wartime authoritarian athleticism. He writes:

It might be tempting to conclude that the politicization of private life and the totalitarianization of masculinity was equivalent among the parliamentary parties and the fascists and Communists, it was not. While the Socialist Party, for example, did emphasize youthfulness as a positive masculine characteristic, and while it did, in a quasi-totalitarian fashion, extend its reach into children's lives, it did not for the most part seek to militarize its young boys or men in the same manner as the fascists or encourage them to take up violent revolution as did the Communists (at least at times.) Also, while the style might have been somewhat similar, the substance was different: the Socialists, Radicals, and others were not preparing their boys for a violent seizure of power … .⁶

We can agree or disagree with Read and still recognise that if there were differences in intent, the outcome was largely the same, both in terms of the physical culture practices endorsed by the state and their deployment inside of state institutions such as schools and that that too has an important history worthy of examination.

How does our understanding of French physical education change if we examine it with an eye to longer-term patterns? I will explore this question in four sections. The first deals with the rise of physical cultural practices in French schools during the early Third Republic, France's first long-standing democratic government, which lasted from 1870 to 1940. It looks at the laws that expanded physical culture to a broader range of French boys and girls in the 1880s and 1890s. The second section looks at the Chelon law, which aimed to democratise physical culture in schools but failed to pass amidst government infighting following the First World War. The third section looks at the Popular Front's (1936–1938) athletic programmes. It outlines the left-leaning Popular Front's major changes to physical cultural life and shows how France's most democratic government was also the first to institute comprehensive physical educational programmes designed to measure and improve student health scientifically. The final section looks at the Vichy regime (1940–1944), an authoritarian and collaborationist regime that emerged following France's defeat in the Second World War, which further expanded the efforts of the Popular Front.

Through a close reading of government documents, popular press articles, and specialist journals sources, I interrogate the limits of the previous historiography and argue that a different model makes more sense when thinking about the centralising French state's approach to integrating physical cultures into schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I show how successive French governments intensified the essentially Foucauldian systems of control inside of physical cultural programmes in schools to produce more efficiently what they understood to be better citizens. Their efforts faced challenges from many young athletes, parents, and sometimes renegade teachers who found spaces of agency and freedom where they could rewrite the state's lesson plans to suit their own purposes.

The early third republic (1880s and 1890s)

While physical education appeared in French schools before the French Revolution (1789–1799), the egalitarianism of the French Republican era really brought gymnastics and sport to the masses. At the same time, French schools did not develop physical education curriculum all at once but rather over a long period of time. The extension of physical education into all schools was less like a dramatic shift in how and what French children learned and more like a seeping expansion of the original underpinnings of the French educational system. Enlightenment thinkers linked education with the health of the French state. During the French Revolution, education became ‘the foundation of personal emancipation, societal transformation and democratic consolidation’.⁷ These ideas soon intersected with ideas about physical health and the ensuing tensions inherent in the project to bring physical education to all boys and girls animated both the French left and right and continued to shape physical culture in France in the subsequent two centuries as governments attempted to use physical education to produce (or reproduce) citizen-subjects. Ordinary people learned to engage and disengage in these state projects as they sought to promote their own personal, local, and regional agendas.

The institutionalisation of French physical culture in schools, including gymnastics and sport, was a new phenomenon in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although France had a long tradition of sports and games, including tennis, which first emerged in the twelfth century as jeu de paume, most French people were not sportsmen or women and the myriad French states and governments that existed before the French Revolution did very little to encourage widespread physical cultural activity. In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, however, successive French regimes encouraged physical cultural education among elites and in the military as a means of improving military preparation. Their first efforts focused on elites or military men but these early effort eventually expanded and helped to shape an athletic citizenship in which the French state made increasing demands over their citizen-subjects' bodies. In the nineteenth century, but particularly during the early Third Republic, especially in the 1880s and 1890s, this meant the expansion of elite physical culture into public schooling.

As early as in 1815, immediately following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Colonel Francisco Amoros y Ondeano, who served in Napoleon's army, founded a gymnasium at 9 rue d'Orleans in Paris. In 1820, as his influence grew, Marshall Gouvin Saint-Cyr created a public and military gymnasium and named Amoros as its first director. Amoros’ gymnastics methods were aimed at military men and closely mirrored military drill. Over two decades his school trained thousands of officers from France and around Europe.⁸ Pupils at his gymnasium learned military gymnastics, including rhythmic movement; marching and running; jumping; climbing; traversing obstacles such as walls, fences, rivers, and ditches; fencing; throwing; shooting; and dancing.⁹ Amoros eventually wrote his method down in a thorough, three part manual entitled the Nouveau manuel d'éducation physique, gymnastique, et morale (1839). Amoros' manual emphasised the scientific nature of his work, which he argued improved France militarily, but also economically and most importantly morally. The publication of his manual spread Amoros' influence far beyond Paris. In 1839 he retired from teaching and in 1848 he died, but his influence lived on through his pupils.

Following the restoration of the French Empire, in 1852, the French state founded a special military academy, the École de Joinville, with disciples of Amoros as its directors. Charles d'Argy and Napoléon Laisné were both former students of Amoros and as the co-founders and directors of the new École de Joinville, they built upon the pedagogical and curricular system of their instructor. They focused on teaching elementary and applied gymnastics: the former included flexing, stretching, jumping done at various speeds. The later included movement and obstacles work using gymnastics equipment such as parallel bars, ladders, pommel horses, rings, trapeze, and beams.¹⁰

D'Argy and Laisné also acted more systematically to train physical education instructors. As Pierre Simonet and Laurent Véray observed, the two goals of the École de Joinville were the preparation of soldiers and the ‘preparation of generations of coaches according to the precepts of (Amoros)’.¹¹ The military funded the school because it understood the need for pedagogical instruction for teachers working in the Army, Navy and in the elite schools around the country that prepared young men for service in the military. In 1853, the military was so pleased with the school and its results that it made military gymnastics a part of the general preparation of soldiers. In 1854, d'Argy and Laisné took part in a committee tasked with rethinking the role of military preparation in education more generally. On 13 March 1954, the Second Empire government issued an circular order that made ‘gymnastics … part of regular instruction in high schools’ and made it ‘the financial responsibility of the schools’.¹² The spread of military gymnastics from the École de Joinville into elite high schools represented the École's growing influence on the nation's thinking about physical educational and it also showed how gymnastic training would further democratise at the end of the nineteenth century.

As the mission of the École also broadened, its alignment with the military attenuated, and by the middle of the twentieth century, the École became a more civilian-oriented institution. At the same time, the École de Joinville, and other similar academies, continued to promote the militarisation of French schools and following the country's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War those efforts moved outside of the military and into the halls of parliament. As Olivier Hoibian and Serge Vaucelle have noted, early Third Republic politicians were nearly undivided in their support for additional military training for young men.¹³ In 1880, the so-called George Law passed unanimously and made gymnastics compulsory in French primary schools.¹⁴ The subsequent Jules Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882, which made French primary schooling free and mandatory for all young men and women, made physical educational a compulsory subject for all French boys. In Paris and in other major cities around France, the marching of young boys became a feature of military parades celebrating the Republic.¹⁵ At the same time, the system of military training developed by the early Third Republic only succeeding in training a relatively small number of young men because the French school system remained stratified by class and hopelessly underfunded. The physical education that happened in Paris was frequently performative and haphazard, and the most intensive military preparation only began at the lycée level. Despite the best efforts of the École de Joinville, and later the École normale supérieure schools, there were too few teachers trained in military physical cultural methods to ensure its wide distribution before World War One.

These early efforts nevertheless effectively moved French physical education from the margins of civilian life into the centre of military life and finally into the curriculum of some state schools. They also set the stage for the democratisation of physical culture in the twentieth century. At the same time, the doyens of military physical culture, much enamoured of continental gymnastics movements, faced challenges (and some support) from the myriad French sporting societies that proliferated after the passage of the 1901 associations law. Many of these sporting associations promoted physical cultural activities like those practiced at the École de Joinville but these activities were minor compared to and possibly undermined by the rising popularity of team sports, which they state did not directly fund in schools until decades later.¹⁶

Efforts to expand physical education in the 1920s

The First World War renewed French concerns about the state of French masculinity endemic in the later years of the Fin-de-siecle. As Arnaud Waquet has argued, the challenge of the trenches did not bolster French masculinity. The violence of the trench experience ‘broke … the dominant image of French gymnastics masculinity, represented by the disciplined and muscular, but also more especially static man’. Instead, the French physical cultural community came to value ‘a model where a man was in touch with the needs of war and modernity … an enterprising, individualist man, accustomed to moving, and who showed agility, reactivity, and strategy’.¹⁷ For many physical culturists, this new model was best exemplified by the American and British soldier-sportsman, and sport soon also came to play a role in French schools, but for most French doctors, gymnasts, and politicians this meant a reinvention of and a reinvestment in French gymnastic models. Interwar French governments, including the postwar Bloc National of the horizon blue government (1919–1924) and the relatively left-leaning Cartel des Gauches (1924–1926), attempted to use law to reimagine the role of gymnastics in schools. As the number of new gymnastics methods multiplied under the influence from overseas, the French military and later French secular schools struggled to find funding for military preparation from the government and to decide on a best way to train young French boys and men for war.

For many physical cultural reformers, the First World War proved the need for structured exercise programmes that matched national temperaments, but they also sought to incorporate ideas from global conversations about physical cultural practices that were washing across France from the 1870s.¹⁸ While the Americans and British privileged sporting education, across most of the rest of the world governments and physical cultural specialists worked together to develop and proliferate nationally specific exercise models such as the Swedish Gymnastic Method, Turnvater Gymnastics in Germany, and Japanese Gakko taiso.¹⁹ These nationally specific methods – far from being entirely endogenous to a specific place – generally encompassed an amalgam of exercises from around the globe. Physical culturalists in France were aware of the global interest in nationally specific physical cultural methods and they learned about new techniques were developing overseas through books, journals, and international meetings of sportsmen and women. This trend continued throughout the first half the twentieth century. For example, Roger Debaye, an esteemed French sportsman and journalist, who reported on a variety of sports, burnished his knowledge of physical culture by reading American books about physical education. His library included interwar titles such as the Modern Principals of Physical Education (1937), and the New Encyclopedia of Sports (1947), and Principals of Physical Education (1948). These works were more than just a un-consulted library; he filled each with marginalia. In Better Teaching through Testing (1945), M. Gladys Scott and Esther French outlined several exercises used in American gym classes and Debaye carefully outlined each of the activities in a handwritten table of contents.²⁰ Debaye's notes illustrated how he believed American sporting life could be recalibrated to a French way of being physically fit.

These international currents in physical culture were topics of conversation in French gyms, universities, and in the halls of parliament in the first half of the twentieth century; people traded ideas about them through books, exercise pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and on the radio. This proliferation of information about exercise, kinesiology, and sport resulted in an institutional cross-fertilisation that translated into new forms of physical cultural practice in French schools. These influences were the strongest from at least five distinct places: the oldest tradition came from the military tradition of the École de Joinville, where Amaros' methods had been improved through years of adaptation. French schoolteachers now also hoped to include practices from a range of sources: Swedish Ling gymnastics; the eclecticism of Georges Demenÿ; the best of French medical knowledge best represented by the widely read Dr. Philippe Tissié; and, the newly popular physical cultural practices of Georges Hébert, a French naval officer.²¹

These diverse strands of physical cultural practice provoked significant dissent both inside of the École de Joinville and in the halls of government as people disagreed about both the suitability of foreign gymnastics methods to French bodies and to the specific genre of exercises too. Previously popular Amarosian techniques were still dominant in the late nineteenth century and many French physical education teachers learned their techniques in the armed forces. By the 1900s, however, the Swedish Gymnastics method, popularised by German physicians and later adapted by Georges Demenÿ, became a mainstay in the École and so found favour in the military.²² Demenÿ eclectic method attempted to combine Amarosian applied gymnastics, Ling Swedish gymnastics, and sport. The influential French neurophysicist Philippe Tissié initially supported Ling's Swedish methods and by extension Demery's eclecticism, but he also showed favour to other more natively French methods and severely criticised Demenÿ for plagiarising his exercises in a 1905 colloquium in Belgium.²³ As the whole conversation about French physical education was increasingly shaped by medical conversations, in the 1920s French establishment increasingly promoted more mobile exercise. Tissié promoted non-competitive and outdoor games that he called lendit that combined French gymnastics exercises with outdoor education, but the lendit never really became common practice in the country.

By the middle of the 1920s, the most popular influence on physical cultural life in schools was undoubtedly Georges Hébert, a French physical education teacher, who developed his own form of exercise that he called the ‘Natural Method’ or Hébertisme.²⁴ He too took influence from overseas. Hébertisme was heavily influenced by the US Marines drills, something he saw as a naval officer in the French Caribbean. While Hébertisme was more freewheeling than traditional Amarosian French military exercises, it was not free and spontaneous, but an extremely rigid calisthenics regime. Hébertisme involved walking, running, jumping, quadrupedal movement (what we might call the crab walk), climbing, balancing, throwing, lifting, defending, and swimming. The instructor was supposed to guide his pupils, who followed through these exercises, executing one after another, without stopping or deviating from their order. To an outside viewer this style of exercise must have resembled and indeed was a close cousin to what today we would call an obstacle course. Taken all together, these movements were meant to make French students stronger and more useful in a uniquely French, national way without unduly overburdening any one muscle group or exposing students to dangerous bourgeois values.

At the same time, the redevelopment and deployment of new physical cultural practices in schools cost money. The government needed to train additional teachers, build new athletic facilities, and provide novel equipment. French physical culture advocates struggled to convince the interwar French government to properly fund their programmes. In 1920, French Senator Henry Chéron proposed a new law that would have offered increased funding for physical culture in schools but also mandated that it be for military preparation.²⁵ He received support from many important French physical cultural figures such as Adolphe Chéron (no relation), the president of the Union des sociétés de préparation militaire de France and a parliamentary deputy from Sceaux. The Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand supported the bill and explained the reason for it:

The more contingents we see arriving at the barracks in excellent physical shape, the lower the post-enlistment statistics for morbidity and mortality will be. The higher the recruits' receptivity, the easier and faster their adaptation to the life of a soldier and the needs of national security.²⁶

Politicians across France recognised the importance of such legislation as a tool of geopolitics – in fact they had just opposed a similar bill in Germany.²⁷ At the same time, the law faced considerable resistance from parliamentarians whose vision of physical culture was more expansive. Medical professionals including Philippe Tissié preferred for French students to learn a more wholistic and health-based approach to physical education. Politicians on the French left opposed the law as a tool of bourgeois domination.²⁸ Despite Prime Minister Millerand and Senator Chéron’s strong advocacy, the Chéron law failed in the French Senate and funding for physical culture in French schools languished.

In other words, while post-First World War French governments recognised the need for comprehensive physical cultural training and even sought out the best practices from around Europe and overseas, they were unable to effectively introduce that new curriculum across France. The major limitations that they faced were lack of interest among some republican politicians who disagreed about the proper function of physical cultural training in schools, and a lack of finances for the development of physical culture across France. Only government reinvestment in physical culture – outside of the ambit of the war ministry – could hope to bring gymnastic exercise to the masses.

Physical education during the popular front (1936–1938)

When the Popular Front came to power in 1936, they responded to the weaknesses of earlier Third Republican regime and started to reorganise youth politics. One of the Popular Front's first initiatives was founding a new Sport and Leisure Ministry – with subcabinet level authority – and a renewed push for funding sporting programmes in schools and sporting associations. Their efforts produced France's first truly comprehensive sporting policies aimed at measuring and extending the physical capabilities of boys and girls, such as the Brevet Sportif Populaire, a diploma that highschoolers completed before leaving school. They also hoped to bring even more of French physical cultural life – namely the sporting associations – under their explicit remit, but their efforts also faced considerable challenges from politicians across the political spectrum that wanted to preserve the communitarian and democratic nature of French physical culture.

The historical memory of the Popular Front is dominated by rosy images ‘of a moment of lyrical fraternity, a spring-time of bonheur … best remembered for having given paid holidays to the French working class’.²⁹ The Popular Front's spending on physical culture helped many ordinary French people enjoy activities such as swimming at the beach, bike riding through the countryside, and long walks under the stars for the first time. As one observer remarked,

For the first time in centuries, French youth is beginning to improve its physique, take to the open road. Girls are not afraid of getting sun burnt, carrying rucksacks … on weekend hikes that are all the rage everywhere in France.³⁰

While these descriptions tell part of the history, they also hide a larger history of state intervention into physical cultural life that was also part of the Popular Front's legacy.³¹

If the Popular Front was a heyday of French healthy living, in the beginning of the 1930s, French young men and women were suffering from a health crisis of alarming proportions that weakened the nation. At the annual conseils de révision (conscription boards), large percentages of young men, sometimes as much as a third, were declared unfit for military service.³² Common causes were physical weakness, unhealthy lungs or hearts, and/or disease such as tuberculosis. The poor health of young French men exacerbated a sense of threat to France, including the threats of German rearmament and Italian military adventurism. When French politicians looked abroad, they saw that physical education and sports were in vogue worldwide in response to commonplace concerns about the physical health of the body politic. Movements in fascist states, such as Germany, Italy, but also in democratic ones, including Czechoslovakia and Finland brought attention to the importance of physical education and sports in a democratic France.

Socialist and communist politicians decried mandatory physical culture during the interwar. On 10 April 1935, the left-wing journal Sport claimed it did little other than turn children into cannon fodder.³³ By contrast, once they came to power, the Popular Front government recognised the need to nuance their position and adapted mandatory physical education and sports as part of their political agenda. As the Popular Front's Sport and Leisure Minister Léo Lagrange expressed to the French parliament, physical culture should be promoted among the mass of young French people to make them ‘a better, healthier race, confident in its physical power’.³⁴ For Lagrange's this physical power – a which presages Foucault's biopower – would strengthen France both domestically and geopolitically.³⁵

The Popular Front, thus, became France's next government to institute a major revitalisation of physical culture and sports, best exemplified by their elevation of the Minister of Sports and Leisure Léo Lagrange to a subcabinet role. Sometimes known to the right-wing press as the ‘minister of sloth, laziness, (and) … of gloomy Sundays’, Lagrange was actually remarkably active and Sundays during the Popular Front were typically quite lively.³⁶ He worked hard to situate physical education and sports within a greater programme focused on mobilising the leisure time of the youth and working class in order to restore dignity to the working class and to rejuvenate France.

At the same time, Léo Lagrange faced financial obstacles to his physical culture agenda. The ongoing Great Depression meant that he led a tiny bureaucratic apparatus when he became the head of the Secretariat d'État aux sports et à l'organisation des loisirs in 1936. The Popular Front spent bigger sums than ever before on leisure activities, including the training of teachers and the construction of new sports facilities, but the small size of Lagrange's administrative team testified to the limits of his office's power. Lagrange's Sports and Leisure Ministry's headquarters was on the third floor of a building a few paces from the Arc de Triomphe, but he had an annual budget of only fifty million francs. His team was less a ministry of professionals than a collection of committed friends, including his wife Madeleine; Étienne Becart, an old friend and football player from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais; Édouard Dolléans, a historian of the working class; Gaston Roux, an army captain; and the journalists Robert Fuzier, Raymond Marie, Arnold Bontemps and Charlotte Brun.³⁷

The Popular Front's efforts to rejuvenate physical culture encompassed both large urban planning projects and curricular reform. In his position as Minister of Sports and Leisure, Lagrange appropriated money for new stadiums and playing fields across France, but he also started the famous Brevet sportive populaire, a sort of sporting diploma which became part of the baccalaureate. To successfully complete the BSP, students demonstrated their athletic ability in a series of physical challenges drawn from classical athletics, including: a sprint, a long distance run, the high jump, the long jump, and shot put throw.³⁸ The Brevet encouraged athletic generalism with the overall goal of ‘to simply provoke in the masses of the young a movement towards physical education and sports’.³⁹ To better motivate students, Lagrange annually challenged them to succeed on the radio and in the press. He warned them that the BSP would require serious preparation. Officials all over France considered it a success when, in its first year, 1937/1938, the BSP tested five hundred thousand students and issued four hundred thousand certificates.

At the same time, the Popular Front faced significant limitations to their efforts too. Léo Lagrange and Jean Zay, the Minister for Education, both called for the domination of all aspects of physical education and sports by the state. In a speech given to the Chamber of Deputies in 1937, Lagrange demanded that the government ensure the ‘collaboration of all organisations interested in sporting life and the physical activity of our youth’.⁴⁰ Zay too wanted the work of sporting federations and associations to be better integrated into the state's programme of education. In 1939, in a letter to the Rector of the Academie of Paris, Zay suggested that ‘it is within the interests of the cadre générale that the activities of sporting clubs become integrated with the Association générale d’étudiants'.⁴¹ In 1939, an educational official affiliated with the Édourd Daladier government called for the state organisation of physical education and sports. ‘[In France]’, he wrote, ‘it is still a chaos of tendencies’.⁴² Lagrange and Zay's efforts to curtail the independence of French sporting federations and associations failed before the state of the Second World War. Respect for republican norms, such as the right to freely associate, stood in the way of Popular Front ministers promulgating measures that would allow them to control sporting federations and associations.

Physical education and the Vichy state (1940–1944)

The Vichy state was an authoritarian and collaborationist regime that arose following France’s defeat in the Second World War. Vichy reformers promised a wholesale rejuvenation of the French state, but in many ways, the defeat of 1940 simply gave the Vichy regime the political wherewithal to institute many laws that French republicans already desired in 1936. During the Vichy regime, the state's essentially Foucauldian educational programme reached its apogee. The Vichy government expanded on the programmes of earlier regimes but also devoted more money than ever before to physical culture.⁴³ Their investment allowed them to increase their attention on the day-to-day activities in physical education classes, to categorise the physical health of all French students, and to increase their control over sporting associations. Like their counterparts in the Popular Front, Vichy officials defended their expansion of the state's biopolitical efforts by arguing that the previous regime’s schools were insufficiently rigorous. As one Vichy official affiliated with aviation sports, General d'Harcourt, wrote succinctly on the 26th of August 1940, ‘The liberal state accorded only insufficient attention to youth … and only did it in a very limited space. It was, in effect, dominated by economic preoccupations.’ He continued, obliquely referencing professionalism in physical education and sports, stating that ‘Liberal capitalism … exploited infancy and youth’.⁴⁴

Vichy officials' repudiation of the Popular Front was a political tool that people mobilised to explain France's rapid defeat in 1940 and to differentiate the new regime from the failures of the French Republic. The Third Republics school system was accused of being unsuitable for preparing young men and women for the challenges of the twentieth century. As the historian Nicholas Atkins has recognised,

in 1940 it was fashionable … to criticize state education … for its bookishness … it was alleged, the programs of both primary and secondary schools had become too vast and encyclopedic … they had failed to provide an ‘education’ in a wider sense of the term.⁴⁵

Conditions in France in 1940 appeared to support these views; perhaps young people were improperly educated, trained, and motivated. If French youth could recite classic poetry, they also suffered higher rates of unemployment, heightened levels of physical impairment and sickness, and engaged in more acts of juvenile delinquency than the German soldiers then marching down Paris' wide boulevards. At the same time, Vichy officials celebrated and eulogised Léo Lagrange, who died fighting the Germans on the Belgian border.

Vichy politicians understood that they did not need to repudiate the Third Republic entirely and they also understood that it would be impossible to recreate the state and all its institutions wholesale in a short period of time. They could build on the legacies of earlier athletic movements. In fact, in many ways, Vichy's physical education programme was simply a doubling down on earlier Republican school programmes. Vichy reformers outlined their planned reorganisation of the curriculum of physical education in French public schools in two circulars published in August 1940. The first circular, entitled ‘Rapport de la direction de la Jeunesse et du Commissariat Générale des Sports’, issued on the 27th of August 1940, dealt broadly with overcoming three distinct obstacles to the development of physical education and sports.⁴⁶ Vichy officials argued that France needed a strong bureaucracy able to oversee the development of physical education and sports, a considerable number of new qualified teachers and coaches, and the construction of stadiums and gymnasiums and the manufacture of athletic equipment. To the best of their ability, the Vichy officials in the Youth and Sport's Ministries worked hard to accomplish these goals and achieved notable successes.⁴⁷

The biggest issue that Vichy administrators conceded was extreme shortages in the number of trained physical education teachers and in response they worked to found and operate teacher training schools all over the country. The system they devised was particularly managerial and controlled from the top-down. Vichy's most ambitious prospective physical educators attended the École Nationale d'Éducation physique et sportive (ENEPS), which was tasked with training elite physical education and sports teachers. The curriculum of the ENEPS was important enough to be worked on at the highest levels of the Youth and Sports ministries and it emphasised a diverse and modern pedagogical approach to physical culture. Documents preserved by the Vichy Ministry of Sport show that officials shaped the day-to-day activities of pupils in the ENEPS. In 1941, the curriculum guide required teachers to study football – France's most popular sport – for only twenty-eight hours over the course of semester.⁴⁸ They spent more time learning about the relatively less popular but more systematised sports of dancing, rhythmic movement, and wrestling. In the 1943–1944 school year, the number of lessons on football decreased to three sessions a semester. On 21 February 1944, for example, the government directed teachers to spend one hour learning football techniques; they spent more time on Roman physical education, folkloric dance, swimming, and gymnastics.⁴⁹

Officials in Vichy's Department of Youth imagined a gradual diffusion of their centralised programmes as their elite teachers started to work in other schools. Students at the ENEPS learned to operate their own pedagogical programmes outside of the capital. In regional teacher training schools, they too would train their physical education students and thereby increase the number of grade school and high school P.E. teachers and coaches across the country. One such school, of the more than a dozen founded during Vichy, was the Ecole de Cadres de Bagatelle that opened its doors in January 1941. The school offered classes lasting three or four months. The daily exercises at Bagatelle emphasised practical and skills-based approaches to education – they spent most of their time practicing the sports they were preparing to teach. Both men and women were trained and licensed; several hundred teachers per year. Most of these teachers trained at Bagatelle, ended up in schools around Paris, such as Henri IV and Louis-Le-Grand, but others found employment across France including in collaborationist sporting associations such as the Francistes.

While the system was designed to be controlled by the government, the extensiveness of the problem of teacher training necessitated a dispersed system and there was a significant role for local agency. To mitigate against local differences, the Department of Youth used circular memos about appropriate curricula to maintain a measure of control over local schooling once those elite physical education teachers left and started working in local primary and secondary institutions. In doing so, Vichy's physical educational reformers modelled their managerial approach after the still extant Third Republic system that was also largely run from the top-down.⁵⁰

A second circular that dealt with physical education and sports, entitled the ‘Projet d’organisation de l’Éducation Physique et sportive dans l’enseignement’, concentrated more on the day-to-day workings of the schools. This circular laid out concrete orders for a more intensive focus on the physical education of children that the directors of state schools were expected to follow. In the eyes of Vichy officials explicitly linked physical education and moral education and therefore P.E. class offered teachers the opportunity to shape students physical and moral development. In the broad terms expressed by the circular: ‘physical education and sports have for its objective the physical education of the youth … and it must coincide with the intellectual disciplines and moral training’.⁵¹

In terms of day-to-day operations, the second circular outlined clear, practical guidelines that teachers and principals were expected to follow closely. The second circular not only dictated the kinds of activities, but also voiced support for their preferred method of daily physical education in French schools: Hébertisme. The ‘Natural Method’ popularised during the 1920s was now official state policy. Students were required to spend at least eleven hours per week in physical education class. A minimum of two of those hours in were for ‘outdoor’ education such as hiking. Special certificates, called brevets, were organised to test student aptitude and to celebrate particularly able students. Whenever possible, students of varied age groups were to practice together to utilise older students as coaches for the younger. If schools were not following the rules – and they often were not! – the circular laid out a process of monitoring and sanctioning schools. Both the Sports Ministry and the Youth Ministry set aside funds to employ new civil service ‘monitors’ hired from the teacher training schools.

As in the Popular Front, the Vichy regime attempted to systematically understand how they might improve studies bodies. Able students were tested at the end of their secondary school as the Sports Ministry revived the Popular Front-era sports diploma. The Vichy brevet copied the structure of the Popular Front's sports Brevet sportif populaire – the Vichy diploma was unimaginatively called the Brevet sportif national. The activities of this new test mirrored those of the Popular Front. To earn their brevet boys and girls ran sprints and long distances, high jumped, long jumped, lifted weights, and climbed.⁵² Appropriate speed, distance, and weight of these exercises depended on the age and gender of the student. A sixteen-year-old boy needed to run 100 m in 14.6 s, while a sixteen-year-old girl only had to run 60 m in 10 s. The Vichy Brevet, like the early Popular Front diploma, also completely abjured any kind of unmeasurable athletic activity or team sport.

The wartime Sports Ministry's administration of the brevet was one of its major achievements, linking huge numbers of personnel, public spaces, and students each year. Preparations for the examination took months, involving officials from the schools, the Sports Ministry, the local government, and the occupying authorities. Proper facilities had to be selected to host the events. Each commune chose dates. Sports administrators were dispersed to each testing site. Proctors trained. Despite these obstacles, the number of brevet candidates increased markedly. The Vichy regime encouraged participation by making it a requirement for some baccalaureates and a prerequisite for other extracurricular athletic activities.⁵³ As a consequence, more students attempted and passed their brevet per year during the war than in the interwar period, making it a crucial piece in Vichy's effort to encourage and measure students' athletic development. In the Academie of Lille alone, around thirty-five thousand boys and fifteen thousand girls took the BSN during the war.⁵⁴ Of the boys, 16,351 passed their BSN at their schools and 18,476 at their sporting association. Of the two, the school candidates proved to be better prepared: only 3632 were failed as opposed to 5595 of the association candidates. A similar pattern emerged with female candidates. 1878 girls came from athletic associations and 13,191 from the schools; 361 association candidates failed compared to 1438 for the school candidates.

The Vichy regime also expanded upon the Popular Front's emphasis on student medical wellbeing. All school age students received grades of either strong, middling, or weak from trained physical education teachers based on their physical capabilities, size, and weight. Under-developed children needed to do additional ‘corrective’ gymnastics exercises and they were given added vitamins meant to counteract malnutrition.⁵⁵ These additional exercises were with hindsight counterproductive. They likely produced additional weakness or injuries, but Vichy administrators were not trying to be careless with the health and well-being of their pupils. They genuinely believed that the cure for physical weakness was more effort rather than less. This was a commonplace viewpoint in the mid-twentieth century. They went to great lengths to ensure that their programmes contributed to the health of their students and by corollary the health of the French people. They installed doctors and nurses in schools and sporting associations and required students to go through thorough medical examinations every year before any physical activity. In Saint-Mandé, a Parisian suburb, Vichy officials assigned children mandatory medical visits and emphasised the ‘close collaboration between the director and the teachers of physical education’ in order to ‘control and guide (the youth’s) physical development'.⁵⁶ In Toulouse, the number of students who visited doctors sky-rocketed from fewer than 1500 throughout the 1930s to more than 2700 in February, 1941 alone.⁵⁷ Healthy students earned the right to carry a carte sportive without which they were prohibited from participating in a wider variety of more popular athletic activities inside and outside of schools.⁵⁸ The regime's response to febrile children who were too weak to partake in exercise thus demonstrated Vichy's most ambitious biopolitical attempt to assess and improve student physical capabilities at all ages.

The Vichy government even succeeded where both Léon Gambetta in the 1870s and Jean Zay and Léo Lagrange in the 1930s failed. They brought all physical cultural activity definitively under the control of the pedagogic state. On 20 December 1940, the Vichy government signed the Charte des sports (Sports Charter). The Charter gave the Vichy state, through its agents in the Sports Ministry, wide authority to regulate sporting activities, in both sporting associations and sporting federations. The Charte explicitly described the Commissariat général de l'éducation générale et aux sports as a powerful state bureaucracy, responsible through its subsidiary the Comité national des sports for the coordination, control, and development of ‘all activity organized under the sporting federations’.⁵⁹ The Comité national des sports directed all of the sporting federations in France and under their rules all sporting organisations were required by law to affiliate with the appropriate national federation. The Comité also appointed half of the members to each federation's board of directors, a power they exercised regularly throughout the war.

The Charte des sports delivered a more authoritarian structure to French sport than existed during the Third Republic, but like so many things during Vichy appearances were deceiving. The press quickly reported on the new Charte as an accommodation with the 1901 law of associations rather than a suppression of the previous order. As Marcel Oger wrote in L'Auto, ‘(the Charte) would not suppress the law of 1901 but add to it’.⁶⁰ At the same time, the new law immediately suggested the mergers of many organisations: the Kayak, Canoe, and Crew Federations would become a single group under the Fédération française des sociétés d'aviron's control. They even considered the combination of the basketball and handball federations. The press’ helped spread information about the new law as well as kept the public abreast of organisations providing further details about the new regulations. Reports emanated from the metropole, reverberating even in France's colonies, including in protectorates like Morocco where sporting associations reported discussing the charter in their annual meetings.⁶¹

Conclusion

The Vichy regime's organisation of teacher training schools illustrated how the state envisioned working with the established French sporting world. Yet, there was considerable reason to suspect its authoritarian character did not always result in immediate changes: it is unclear whether the Vichy Sports Ministry wanted to or even could verify whether each sporting organisation across the country was following its dictates. Indeed, the forceful language of the Charte notwithstanding, many sporting organisations across France, including the Club athletique de a radiotechnique did not even align their own governing documents to the Vichy charter until 1944. They would realign it with the new government following the end of the war.⁶²

Throughout the tribulations of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth centuries, the athletic subject citizen was constantly reinvented by each successive French regime. These regimes often blamed their political predecessors for their inattention to physical education and promised national rejuvenation through an increased investment in education and youth. This intensification of physical education included the extension of gymnastics exercises to all school children, the standardisation of the system across the country, the systematisation and measurement of gymnastic achievement of all students, and eventually the comprehensive medicalisation of the system. State officials also tried to extend their control of physical education into French associational organisations. If they had been completely effective, they would have succeeded in creating Gambetta's pedagogical territory. The efforts of these physical cultural reforms, nonetheless, brought about a transformation in athletic practices in France, especially in French schools, that has a continued relevance for students into the present. For example, the Hébertist physical exercises that dominated interwar and postwar French gymnastics exercises are still practiced in France and have become the progenitor of alternative athletic practices such as parkour.

These observations also have broader implications for the historiography of physical culture in the twentieth century. In 1975, Susan Sontag suggested that totalitarian regimes privileged athletic culture and her work influenced two generations of scholars that suggested totalitarian states have used sports in unique ways to inculcate moral values, promote physical health and wellness, and bolster gender and sexual identities.⁶³ While these studies have been invaluable in showing the ways that fascist regimes mobilised physical culture, they have fundamentally misunderstood the ways in which Communist and fascist sport were part of a longer durée growth of essentially Foucauldian physical education programmes across the globe. The Third Republican, Popular Front and later Vichy French governments joined almost all other European governments, democratic, fascist, and communist, in producing a national athletics programme designed to promote traditional gender norms, nationalism, health, productivity, and military preparedness.

The general dynamic by which physical culture expanded in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries France has major implications for our understanding of physical culture across the modern period. Historians have often associated physical culture with radical political regimes: for example, the esteemed Patrick Clastres has argued that democracies may have ‘used the same tools, but pursued different goals. The Popular Front wanted to liberate youth. The political right … wanted to capture them’⁶⁴ Robert Paxton used very similar language in a book review when he argued that sport was encouraged both by the Popular Front and by Vichy but for different purposes: for hygiene and public welfare in 1936, and after 1940 for national revival.⁶⁵ These observations may be true but the way that successive French governments relied on a declensionist logic of national decline to promote a regenerative physical culture programme suggests that scholars must also look carefully at the sports programmes of interwar democracies too. In the case of France, the various French ministries of Youth and of Sport pursued increasingly interventionist policies throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They frequently defended these programmes by claiming they served the goal of military preparation, health, and hygiene. A more serious scholarship of the physical education and sporting culture inside of democracies in the interwar period seems necessary to demonstrate the ways in which democratic states also mobilised the biopower of their citizens and how those programmes differed from those of their enemies across the political spectrum. Historians of modern Britain in particular might be able to further unpack the ways that the British state's concerns about geopolitical conflict and national preparedness shaped British sporting culture in ways similar to and different from republican France. A comparison between physical education and sport in the British and French empire too might yield interesting commonalities and differences.

Although it largely lays outside of this article, one might further unpack authoritarian physical cultural systems too. For example, the Italian Fascists and the Soviets were not as revolutionary as previously described. Like the Republican French, the totalitarian regimes undertook significant revisions of their nation's physical cultural systems, made use of national gymnastics designed specifically to train men for war and work, prepare women to be better partners and mothers, and therefore strengthen the nation-state. At the same time, neither Italy nor the Soviet Union completely replaced prewar sporting organisations. Instead, both grafted their ideological programmes onto prewar sporting federations and associations. Both the USSR and Fascist Italy also made use of professional sports to promote their regimes’ legitimacy, even if their reliance on elite athletes undermined their supposedly popular aims of transforming the bodies of all young men and women.⁶⁶

Similarities between French, Italian, and Soviet physical cultural programmes demands a revision of our conception of sport in the twentieth century. The French physical education programme from the nineteenth century through the Second World War suggests that longer durée forces were at work and that democratic and other authoritarian governments adopted and mobilised similar rhetoric concerning sport and the body. The presence of a robust French republican sports politics – indeed an increasingly intrusive one – shows that athleticism, masculinity, and bodily health were metaphorical issues with which all European governments framed the health of their body politic. Each government conceived of physical education and sports programmes to achieve national goals. Consequently, scholars of fascism and sports must take more account of the transnational and comparative nature of physical education and sports, especially when placing physical education of the body so close to their understanding of fascism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keith Rathbone

Keith Rathbone (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2015) researches twentieth century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency and Everyday Life (Manchester University Press, 2022), examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime.

Notes

1 See especially, Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997), 239–47.

2 Samuel M. Clevenger and David L. Andrews, ‘Regenerating the “Stock” of Empire: Biopower and Physical Culture in the Garden City Planning Discourse’, International Journal of the History of Sport 38, no. 2 (2021): 286.

3 For French athletics and biopolitics in the twentieth century, see Joan Tumblety, ‘Rethinking the Fascist Aesthetic: Mass Gymnastics, Political Spectacle and the Stadium in 1930s France’, European History Quarterly 4 (2013): 707–30; and Joan Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For explicit discussions of gender, physical culture and biopolitics in interwar France, see Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of Decline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to the Political Sociology of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

4 Pierre Arnaud, ‘Le geste et la parole. Mobilisation conscriptive et célébration de la République. Lyon 1879–1889’, Mots: Les languages du politique 29 (1991): 7–8.

5 For more on physical education and sports and Republicanism, see Rachel Chrastil, Organizing for War: France, 1870–1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010) and Pierre Arnaud, Les Athlètes de la République: gymnastique, sport et idéologie républicain, 1870–1914 (Toulouse: Privat, 1987). For work on republicanism in French colonies, see work by Nicolas Bancel, Evelyne Combeau-Mari, Laurent Dubois, Stanislas Frankiel, and Jacob Krais, among many others. See especially, Nicolas Bancel, ‘Semaine coloniale et quinzaine impériale (1941–1942): L’évolution de l’intégration de l’Empire dans l’idéologie vichyste à travers deux manifestations coloniales et sportives’, in Les Politiques au stade: Étude comparée des manifestations sportives du XIXe au XXI siècle, ed. André Gounot et al. (Rennes: Presses universitaire de Rennes, 2007); Timothée Jobert, Stanislas Frankiel, and Nicolas Bancel, ‘The Athletic Exception: Black Champions and Colonial Culture (1900–1939)’, in Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, ed. Pascal Blanchard et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Philip Dine, ‘France, Algeria and Sport: From Colonisation to Globalisation’, Modern and Contemporary France 10, no. 4 (2002): 495–505; Laurent Dubois, Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Evelyne Combeau-Mari, ‘Sport in the French Colonies (1880–1962): A Case Study’, Journal of Sport History 33, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 27–57; Evelyne Combeau-Mari, ‘Le sport colonial à Madagascar, 1896–1939’, French Colonial History 8 (2007): 123–38; Peter Benson, Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixing, Race, and Murder in the 1920s (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006).

6 Geoff Read, The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 88–9.

7 Emily Marker, Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), 27.

8 Jean Saint-Martin and Michaël Attali, ‘The Joinville School and the Institutionalization of a French-Style Physical Education, 1852–1939’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 32, no. 6 (2015): 741.

9 Francisco Amoros, Nouveau manuel d’éducation physique, gymnastique, et morale (Paris: Roret, 1839), v–xii.

10 Saint-Martin and Attali, ‘The Joinville School and the Institutionalization’, 743.

11 Pierre Simonet and Laurent Véray, ‘Introduction’, in L’Empreinte de Joinville, 150 ans de sport, ed. Pierre Simonet and Laurent Véray (Paris: L’Empreinte de Joinville, 2003), 9.

12 Saint-Martin and Attali, ‘The Joinville School and the Institutionalization’, 743.

13 Olivier Hoibian and Serge Vaucelle, ‘Les exercices « au grand air » des lycéens (1820–1880): un effet des campagnes hygiénistes du début du XIXe siècle?’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 66, no. 2 (2019): 127.

14 See especially, Jules Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire for a contemporary discussion of the role of gymnastics in boy’s schooling. Jules Barthelemy-Saint-Hilaire, ‘Rapport devant le Sénat’, Recueil des débats parlementaires, PV 206, June 10, 1879.

15 Lionel Pabion, ‘Turning Gymnasts into Citizen-Soldiers: The Militarization of Physical Activities during the Third Republic in France (1870–1940)’, International Journal of the History of Sport 40, no. 2–3 (2023): 227.

16 Ibid.

17 Arnaud Waquet, ‘Wartime Football, a Remedy for the Masculine Vulnerability of the Poilus (1914–1919)’, International Journal of the History of Sport 29, no. 8 (2012): 1209.

18 Joan Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 57–94.

19 Keith Rathbone, Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France, 125.

20 ANMT 2009 032 073 Jesse Williams Principals of Physical Education (1948); ANMT 2009 032 075 Jackson Sharman Modern Principals of Physical Education (1937); ANMT 2009 032 078 Frank Menke, New Encyclopedia of Sports (1947).

21 For a discussion of these transitions, see especially, Philippe Sarremejane, ‘L’héritage de la méthode suédoise d’éducation physique en France: les conflits de méthode au sein de l’Ecole normale de gymnastique et d’escrime de Joinville au début du XXème siècle’, Paedagogica Historia 42, no. 6 (2006): 817–37; Joan Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 57–94; Natalia Bazoge, Jean Saint-Martin, and Michael Attali ‘Promoting the Swedish Method of Physical Education Throughout France for the Benefit of Public Health (1868–1954)’, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sport 23 (2013): 232–43; and Jean Saint-Martin and Michaël Attali, ‘The Joinville School and the Institutionalization of a French-Style Physical Education, 1852–1939’, International Journal of the History of Sport 32, no. 6 (2015): 740–53.

22 Natalia Bazoge, Jean Saint-Martin, and Michael Attali, ‘Promoting the Swedish Method of Physical Education Throughout France for the Benefit of Public Health (1868–1954)’, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sport 23 (2013): 232–43.

23 Philippe Sarremejane, ‘L’héritage de la méthode suédoise d’éducation physique en France: les conflits de méthode au sein de l’Ecole normale de gymnastique et d’escrime de Joinville au début du XXème siècle’, Paedagogica Historia 42, no. 6 (2006): 828.

24 Georges Hébert published a wide range of books on physical culture in the first half of the twentieth century: see, L’Éducation physique raisonnée (1907), Le Guide pratique d’éducation physique (1910), and L’Éducation physique ou l’entraînement complet par la méthode naturelle (1912).

25 Journal Officiel, Documents parlementaires, Sénat, Session of April 17, 1920, Annex: 188, 119–23.

26 Translation from Daphné Bolz and Jean Saint-Martin, ‘Physical Education and Bodily Strengthening on Either Side of the Rhine: A Transnational History of the French Bill on Physical Education and its German Reception (1920–1921)’, Sport in History 43, no. 1 (2023): 28–54. Journal Officiel, Documents parlementaires, Sénat, Session of April 17, 1920, Annex: 188, 119–23.

27 Bolz and Saint-Martin, ‘Physical Education and Bodily Strengthening’, 46.

28 Ibid., 47.

29 Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy 1934–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), xii.

30 Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years¸ (New York: Horton, 1994), 160.

31 Tumblety, Remaking the Male.

32 Ibid., 187.

33 FSGT Archives Sport ‘L’Unité pour l’action’ (10 April 1935).

34 Léo Lagrange, Journal Officiel, July 23, 1936. Quoted first in Fatia Terfous, ‘Sport et éducation physique sous le Front populaire et sous Vichy: approche comparative selon le genre’, STAPS 90, no. 4 (2010): 53.

35 See especially Léo Lagrange’s speeches ‘Civilisation moderne et biologie’ and ‘Santé de la race et activités physiques’ in Yann Lasnier, Léo Lagrange: L'Artisan du temps libre: Textes choisis (Paris: Mémoires du socialisme, 2007) .

36 Lasnier, Léo Lagrange: L'Artisan du temps libre, 30.

37 Pierre Mauroy, Léo Lagrange (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1997), 72.

38 BNF, 16-V-1767 ‘Brevet sportif populaire’ (n.d.).

39 Ibid.

40 Lasnier, Léo Lagrange: l'artisan du temps libre, 105.

41 AN 69AJ2, ‘Le Ministère de l'Éducation nationale à M. le Rector de l'Academie de Paris’ (27 May 1939).

42 Jean-Louis Gay-Lescot, Sport et éducation sous Vichy (1940–1944) (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1991), 25.

43 See especially, Keith Rathbone, Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency and Everyday Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), particularly chapter 2 ‘Building the world they wanted: bureaucrats, teachers, and athletic fields in Vichy’; and Gay-Lescot, Sport et éducation sous Vichy.

44 AN 44F1, ‘Circulaire de General d'Harcourt’ (August 26, 1940).

45 Nicholas Atkins, Church and School in Vichy France, 1940–1944 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), 83.

46 AN 44F2, ‘Rapport de la direction de la jeunesse et du Commissariat générale des sports’ (August 27, 1940).

47 See especially, Keith Rathbone, Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency and Everyday Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), particularly chapter 2 ‘Building the world they wanted: bureaucrats, teachers, and athletic fields in Vichy’.

48 A 44F40, ‘École nationale d'Éducation physique ET aux sports: Section masculine 1^er année’ (n.d.).

49 Ibid.

50 J. Gleyse, C. Pigeassou, A. Marcellini, E. De Léséleuc, and G. Bui-Xuân, ‘Physical Education as a Subject in France (School Curriculum, Policies and Discourse): The Body and the Metaphors of the Engine-Elements Used in the Analysis of a Power and Control System During the Second Industrial Revolution’, Sport, Education and Society 7, no. 1 (2002): 5–23.

51 AN 44F2, ‘Projet d’Organisation de l’Éducation physique et sportive dans l’Enseignements’ (n.d.).

52 AN 17F14462, ‘Notes on the Brevet sportif national’. For a comparative look at the BSP and the BSN, see Paris de la vie sportive: 1940–1944 photographies (Paris: Musée Nationale du Sport, 1994).

53 Athletes who were injured in competition or practice could, as a matter of course, be excused from participating in the BSN without any penalty. To receive the dispensation, a student needed to make a personal case to the Sports Ministry. AN 44F37, ‘Letter from the CGS to M. le Président de la Fédération française de cyclisme’ (April 17, 1944).

54 AN 17F14464, ‘Note de préfet de Lille’ (n.d.).

55 For more on schools as sites for nutrition, see Matthieu Devigne, ‘Coping in the Classroom: Adapting Schools to Wartime’, in Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime, 1939–1945, ed. Lindsey Dodd and David Lees (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 40–4.

56 BNF MFILM 16-LK7-47750, ‘Une Expérience, un exemple’ (n.d.).

57 Archives municipale de Toulouse JO1932-1941, ‘Inspection médicale des écoles’ (n.d.).

58 AN 17F14462, ‘Sanctions d'obligation faite aux Sportifs pratiquant de posséder la Carte sportive’ (n.d.).

59 BDIC, Q pièce 5083, ‘Charte des sports’ (1941).

60 Marcel Oger, ‘La Charte de sports serait imminente’, L’Auto (Paris), December 21, 1940.

61 ‘La Vie dans les clubs’, Le Petit Marocain (Casablanca), April 9, 1941.

62 BNF F-27043, Recueil des actes administratifs de la Préfecture de la Seine et de la Préfecture de police (Paris: Préfecture de police, 1944), 131.

63 See Felice Fabrizio, Sport e fascismo: la politica sportiva del regime, 1924–1936 (Florence: Guaraldi. 1976); Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Gigliola Gori, Italian Fascism and the Female Body: Sport, Submissive Women, and Strong Mothers (New York: Routledge, 2004); James Riordan, Sports in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Soviet Spectator Sports (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

64 Patrick Clastres, Professor Lausanne University, personal discussion, 2014.

65 Robert Paxton, ‘Vichy Lives! – In a Way’, The New York Review, April 25, 2013.

66 Keith Rathbone, ‘A Revolutionary Approach to Physical Culture’, in Reform, Revolution and Crisis in Europe: Landmarks in History, Memory and Thought, ed. Bronwyn Winter and Cat Moir (New York: Routledge, 2020), 105–28.