Because the Paris Olympic Games start in a month. And because the man who is presented as the father of the modern Olympic Games continues to divide, especially in France, where his figure is the subject of debate, 87 years after his death. Visionary for some, reactionary for others, who really was Baron de Coubertin?
It’s true, we owe him the rebirth of the Ancient Greek Games, the creation of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894 and the entry of athletics into the modern era. Pierre de Coubertin was convinced that sport was a virtue, even a pacifist bond between people. His vision holds up. No wonder his wax statue entered the Grévin museum in Paris on Tuesday, and that some are campaigning for his induction into the “Pantheon” of French glories.
The problem is that the baron is far from unanimous. Passed through the prism of 21st century values, some of his writings are today enough to cast doubt, even to discredit this aristocrat, born in 1863 and imbued with the values of his time and his environment. Racialist, colonialist, elitist, misogynist, sexist, Pierre de Coubertin seems to have been all of these at the same time. Not to mention his weakness for Hitler.
This precise point has been known for a long time. Unlike others, Pierre de Coubertin openly supported the organization of the Berlin Games in 1936 by the Third Reich. This does not in any way mean that he adhered to Nazi theses. On the other hand, his political convictions at the time instinctively pushed him towards authoritarianism. In letters, he is said to have expressed his “admiration” for the Führer, with whom he shared a visceral rejection of Bolshevism and social progress. “He saw Hitler as a bulwark,” summarizes Patrick Clastres, professor at the University of Lausanne, author of several writings on the baron.
On another ground, today we are unearthing his comments favorable to colonization and some incriminating sentences with racialist, even racist, content. For the baron, there were indeed “inferior races”, of “different value” and having to “form allegiance” to the white race, “of a superior essence”. Yes, Pierre de Coubertin held humanist and universalist values, but from an elitist and resolutely Western perspective, where sport would be reserved for young people from the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.
We write “young men”, but we should rather say “young men”, as the Baron was so hostile to the participation of women in the Olympic Games. For this puritanical and traditionalist Catholic, woman was above all a baby factory, and not a machine for winning medals. “A small female Olympiad next to the large male Olympiad. Where would the point be? […] Uninteresting, unsightly, and we are not afraid to add: incorrect,” he wrote in 1912, the year of the first participation of women in the Olympic Games, in Stockholm. He will never abandon this point of view. “In his mind, sport only served to produce the elites of tomorrow, and women had no place among these elites,” explains Mr. Clastres. He did not develop the idea that women could emancipate themselves through athletic practice. »
The baron’s defenders argue that he was a man of his time and that it is dishonest to judge the past by the present. True. But according to Patrick Clastres, it would be a mistake to claim that everyone at the time thought like the very conservative Pierre de Coubertin. “There were others who were much more progressive, while he never changed his mind,” he says. “His political culture came from the depths of the Middle Ages. He was a knight lost in the 20th century.” So medieval that when he died, he asked for his heart to be placed in a stele erected in his honor at Olympia in Greece, a tradition dating back to the Capetian kings…
Can we at least attribute this unstoppable slogan to him? Well… no! This phrase, which has become universal, is actually due to Ethelbert Talbot, Bishop of Pennsylvania. During a sermon in London, during the 1908 Games, the latter is said to have said that “the important thing in these Olympics is less to win than to take part in them”. A phrase then taken up by the baron, in a more succinct and “marketable” format, as is the whole ceremony surrounding the opening of the Olympic Games, for which he claims, for once, paternity. “He was an excellent communicator”, concludes Patrick Clastres.
