{"id":515,"date":"2024-06-18T11:44:55","date_gmt":"2024-06-18T09:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.unil.ch\/patrickclastres\/?page_id=515"},"modified":"2024-06-18T11:44:57","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T09:44:57","slug":"pourquoi-la-pantheonisation-de-pierre-de-coubertin-nest-elle-pas-davantage-dactualite-en-2024","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/people.unil.ch\/patrickclastres\/pourquoi-la-pantheonisation-de-pierre-de-coubertin-nest-elle-pas-davantage-dactualite-en-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Pourquoi la panth\u00e9onisation de Pierre de Coubertin n\u2019est-elle pas davantage d\u2019actualit\u00e9 en\u00a02024\u00a0?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Why is Pierre de Coubertin not revered in his home country?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This summer will see France host the Summer Olympics for the third time, having previously staged the event in 1900 and 1924. France is also the homeland of Pierre de Coubertin, the man whose work to \u2018re-establish the Olympic Games in a modern form\u2019, begun in 1892, led to the \u2018revival\u2019 of the Olympic Games in 1894. Coubertin was born in Paris on 1 January 1863, but he spent much of his later life between France and Switzerland, finally settling in Geneva, where he died on 2 September 1937.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2022, the Olympic gold medallist Guy Drut and the writer Erik Orsenna (a member of the prestigious Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise) launched a campaign to have Coubertin\u2019s ashes interred in Paris\u2019s Pantheon, alongside other great French men and women. However, President Macron turned down their demand, preferring to \u2018pantheonize\u2019 the American-born French singer and resistance fighter Josephine Baker and the communist resistance hero Missak Manouchian. Even France\u2019s Olympic Committee (CNOSF) appears to be in no hurry to pay homage to Coubertin. As long ago as the Grenoble 1968 Winter Olympics, President Charles de Gaulle reportedly said to French IOC member Jean de Beaumont de la Bonnini\u00e8re: \u2018The idea is worth considering, but Coubertin is not Jean Moulin.\u2019 In fact, Coubertin received little official acclaim in France, to the surprise of some of his contemporaries, who, following his death, remarked on the fact that he \u2018did not even have the L\u00e9gion d’Honneur\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, many other countries awarded Coubertin their highest honours during his tenure as IOC president, from 1896 to 1925, and every Olympic Games host country since 1948 has feted the event\u2019s founder. Through postage stamps and statues, Olympic cities around the world, from London 1948 to Tokyo 1964, from Helsinki 1952 to Mexico 1968, and from Melbourne 1956 to Beijing 2008, have offered tribute to the man who revived the Olympic Games. So why is France so reluctant to honour Coubertin?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the very start, Coubertin failed to find official favour. As early as June 1896, the French government turned down a request from the liberal parliamentarian Jules Siegfried to award Coubertin the L\u00e9gion d’Honneur when he returned from the first modern Olympic Games in Athens. Four years later, he was excluded from organising the Concours internationaux d’exercices physiques et de sport<\/em> in Paris, which was no Olympic Games, because he had joined the anti-Dreyfus camp and refused to allow the radical republican government to interfere in sport. In fact, Coubertin had a highly ambiguous attitude towards republicanism and democracy. Although he was one of the young aristocrats who accepted the new republic quite early, in 1887, he had done so \u2018on constitutional grounds\u2019, on the condition that the state respected the Catholic Church\u2019s privileges and freedoms. His aristocratic background also left him open to criticism for his social elitism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor would France\u2019s radical government forgive him for supporting his brother, M\u00e9d\u00e9ric Albert de Coubertin, who had resigned his position as a colonel in the dragoons in 1903, after being ordered to expel Carthusian monks from their monasteries. Coubertin\u2019s ensuing rapprochement with Catholic sports organisations and his subsequent Olympic embassy to the Pope further aggravated his position in many people\u2019s eyes. In 1917 Baron Seilli\u00e8re attempted to rehabilitate Coubertin via a book entitled Pierre de Coubertin, un artisan d’\u00e9nergie fran\u00e7aise<\/em>, which highlighted his services to his country at the start of the Great War. But these efforts met with limited success, as shown by the Acad\u00e9mie des Sciences Morales et Politiques\u2019<\/em> refusal to elect Coubertin as a member, a snub that contributed to his decision to move to Switzerland, first to Lausanne and then to Geneva.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following World War I, it took intense pressure from France\u2019s foreign ministry and French sports leaders\u2019 threats to repudiate Coubertin for him to agree, reluctantly and resentfully, to award the 1924 Olympic Games to Paris. These Games could have been Coubertin\u2019s crowning glory, but the victory of the Cartel des Gauches<\/em>, an alliance of radical and socialist republicans led by the radical \u00c9douard Herriot, ruined his hopes. Admittedly, France\u2019s president, the moderate radical Gaston Doumergue, attended the ceremony marking the 30th<\/sup> anniversary of the revival of the Olympic Games, held at the Sorbonne on 23 June, but Coubertin had hoped for more, possibly even direct promotion to the rank of Officer of the L\u00e9gion d’Honneur. Instead, he had to be content with becoming the first recipient of the Medal of Honour for Physical Education in 1930.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coubertin subsequently brought discredit upon himself through the comments he made in the press during Nazi Germany\u2019s preparations for the Berlin Olympics. He was not, as he wrote to France\u2019s ambassador to Switzerland in May 1933, \u2018fooled by the Nazis\u2019 activities\u2019, but he nevertheless argued against boycotting the Berlin Games in the name of keeping politics out of sport. The Third Reich showered him with honours and provided him with financial support so he would come to Berlin for the Olympic Games opening ceremony. To avoid embarrassing his successor, the Belgian Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, Coubertin stayed away from Berlin, as he had stayed away from Los Angeles in 1932 and from Amsterdam in 1928, but in his letters he hailed \u2018the grandiose success of the Berlin Games\u2019 and expressed his admiration for Hitler, noting that he preferred him to Mussolini.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Coubertin’s strongest supporters were anti-republicans and anti-democrats also tarnished his reputation. It was, for example, German, Italian and Japanese parliamentarians who nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936. Coubertin was hugely disappointed when he learned that the Nobel Committee, appointed by Norway\u2019s parliament, had passed him over in favour of the German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who had been imprisoned and tortured in a concentration camp. After Coubertin\u2019s death in 1937, the person who lobbied for a stadium in Paris to be named after him was Armand Massard, the president of France\u2019s national Olympic committee from 1933 to 1967. Massard, a former Olympic fencer, was a member of the ultra-nationalist Croix-de-Feu<\/em> organisation who rejected the republic and advocated authoritarian government. And the tribute paid to Coubertin by supporters of the anti-democratic Vichy regime on 23 June 1944, seventeen days after the Allied landings in Normandy, did nothing to enhance his reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what about Drut and Orsenna\u2019s case for pantheonizing the ‘Olympic spirit’ in the person of Coubertin? Their two main arguments were that he had helped to introduce sport into schools and that the Olympic Games had admitted women athletes as of 1928, two decades before they obtained the right to vote in France. However, Coubertin never campaigned for schools to offer sport to all children \u2014 he felt that school sport should remain the preserve of young men from the social elite who attended secondary school and university \u2014 and he opposed women taking part in any sport on the Olympic programme. In fact, it was his successor, Baillet-Latour, who oversaw the admission of female athletes, a move supported by future IOC presidents Siegried Edstr\u00f6m and Avery Brundage, who saw including women in the Olympic Games as a way of controlling women\u2019s sport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drut and Orsenna’s third argument was that Coubertin’s Olympic Games contributed to the fight against racism. Notably, they cited the impacts of African American athlete Jesse Owens\u2019 triumph in 1936 in front of Hitler and of Tommie Smith and John Carlos\u2019s black-power salute on the podium in Mexico City in 1968. How could they not know that the Nazis admired black athletes for their \u2018animality\u2019 and their unique ability (according to the Nazis) to perform with their bodies? Or that the IOC\u2019s president, Avery Brundage, an American white supremacist, reacted to Smith and Carlos\u2019s gesture by banning them from the Olympics for life? Indeed, the IOC has still not rehabilitated Smith and Carlos. Some people try to relativise Coubertin’s anti-Semitic, racist and colonial views on the grounds that they were common opinions in his day. Such apologies not only unwittingly acknowledge that Coubertin was no visionary; they also overlook the fact that some of his contemporaries, including figures in French sport, held more progressive views on these issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look hard enough and it is possible to find reasons to respect Coubertin’s memory, such as his efforts to associate sport with pacifism, his endeavours to promote the French language within the Olympic movement, and the way he turned the IOC into a diplomatic force bent on protecting its autonomy. Just as important was his idea that sport should remain neutral with respect to politics and money, which was also a way of protecting the Olympic movement from outside control, whether authoritarian or democratic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When all is said and done, is there a real need to pantheonize Coubertin, a man who, to spite his homeland, refused to be buried in France and who instead chose to create a personal cult in Greece? Indeed, his will stipulated that his heart be laid to rest in the stele erected in his honour in Olympia in 1927. So, it is in Zeus\u2019s shadow that he has built a global legacy.
<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contact details:<\/strong> <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor Patrick Clastres<\/strong>
Mobile: 0033 633 22 14 93<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Email: Patrick.Clastres@unil.ch<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other articles published in Le Monde <\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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