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The mighty working of a symbol: From idea to organization

De Coubertin’s drive and personality, the resources of money, prestige and social contacts he commanded, and his total investment [1] in his identity as a sports entrepreneur and reformer were essential to his success. In 1889, de Coubertin repulsed an effort by certain citizens of Le Havre to get him to stand for Parliament. Despite the flattering character of the invitation, he turned it down in favour of his sports campaign, after consulting with Ribot. (Additional efforts were made in 1893 and 1898; these too he rejected.) As Eugen Weber has put it, ‘de Coubertin meant what he said and that mattered’. [2] But without his talents for organization and inspiration, the modern Olympic Games would not have been revived, or else would have been revived by someone else in a quite different form. These talents were honed on a double front between 1889 and 1894. On the one side, de Coubertin shifted his efforts from general physical education to sports per se, placing himself at the centre of attempts to organize the many but diffuse French stirrings towards sport during the period. On the other side, he multiplied his international contacts and began to draw them together as the seed of the future International Olympic Committee. De Coubertin saw these efforts as two sides of the same project. ‘Popularizing’ sport in France depended, he wrote, on ‘internationalizing’ it. ‘It would be necessary to organize contacts between our young French athleticism and the nations which had preceded us in the way of muscular culture’. [3] But for these contacts to be possible in the first place, sports had to be popularized and sports groupings organized in France itself. Developments in contemporary French gymnastics, shooting, military drill, alpinism and walking have been described earlier. For the most part inspired by the bourgeoisie, these activities reached into the urban labouring classes on account of their patriotic and socially appeasing character and the opportunities they offered for association and socializing in the transient and anaemic world of industrializing France. In rural areas, traditional pastimes, animal sports such as cockfighting in the north and bullfighting in the south and team games such as hoquet in Brittany and brutal forms of soule or choule barette (recalling the old English village ‘football’ matches of Shrove Tuesday) remained popular in enclaves of peasant society as yet unacculturated by ‘greater’ France. [4] Sport hunting, angling and equestrianism The International Journal of the History of Sport Vol. 23, Nos. 3–4, May–June 2006, 528 – 570