This Great Symbol

Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games

John J. MacAloon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415390774
• eBook ISBN: 9781136746130
• Edition: 1

This Great Symbol is the definitive study of the origins of the modern Olympic Games and of their founder, Pierre de Coubertin, whose ideological stamp the Olympics still bear. Behind this fascinating blend of biography and history lies an impressive framework of cultural, social, and psychological theories skilfully employed to interpret the creation and symbolism of the modern Olympic Games. Hailed as both a classic in sport history and as a paradigmatic study in the anthropology of the past, This Great Symbol helped launch the new collaboration between historians and cultural anthropologists that continues to mark the human sciences worldwide. For this 25th anniversary edition, Professor MacAloon adds a new preface evaluating subsequent scholarship on Coubertin and the Olympic origins and a highly personal afterword describing the impact of This Great Symbol on his own subsequent career as an Olympic anthropologist and cultural performance theory.

This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Noble Works, Glorious Examples, Generous Sacrifices

Prouesse and Patronage

Family tradition holds that the Frédys entered France and established themselves at Dreux, near Paris, prior to 1400. [1] This is reasonable speculation, so far unconfirmed. All sources agree, however, that Pierre Frédy dit Sieur de la Motte was ennobled by Louis XI, whom he served as chamberlain, in March 1477. The original documents are described as ‘lettres écrites en latin, signé Lois, & plus bas, Per regem, Picot’, [2] and their seal is still held by the family in a perfect state of preservation. [3] The original warrant was registered with the Chambre des comptes on 4 January 1486, and the family was maintained noble in 1508, 1519, 1553, 1572, 1629, [4] 1661, 1668, 1700, 1717, and 1739. [5] In 1822, three weeks before Pierre’s father was born, his grandfather, Julien-Bonaventure Frédy de Coubertin, was made hereditary baron by lettres patentes, in the general reorganization of privileges under Louis XVIII.

According to Bonald, ‘The aristocracy is the hereditary participation in legislative [policy-making] power; the nobility is the hereditary service to the executive [policy-enacting] power’. [6] De Coubertin’s ancestors enjoyed roles of both sorts. Alphonse Frédy, [7] who died in 1553, [8] served as royal lawyer and judge in Montfort l’Amaury, and as prévot provincial for the constables and marshals of France, during the reigns of Francis I and Henry II. His third child by Marie Bluté, Jean Frédy (1518–98), was a Parisian merchant who made a fortune in the spice trade and used it to acquire the seigneuries of de la Verrie and de Coubertin, the latter (in the Chevreuse not far from Versailles) in 1577. From his second marriage, to one Catherine Boisdin, [9] there issued the second Jean de Frédy (1592–1677), who became senior counsellor to Parliament. Of his children, two were notable: Médéric Frédy, seigneur de Coubertin (1625–87), [10] royal councillor, commissioner of war, treasurer general, and payeur des rentes at the Hôtel de Ville of Paris; and Michel Frédy, seigneur des Mallets (Mollets) (1629–85), who served as royal councillor and senior controller general of revenues at the Hôtel de Ville. When Médéric’s son Martin Bernard (1658–1736), who succeeded to the offices of his father, died without male heir, the seigneurie de Coubertin went to François Frédy, seigneur des Mallets (1668–1742), eldest son of Michel.

François had a distinguished career as a soldier and a naval officer in the service of Louis XIV. Captain of the king’s ships, he was raised to the chevalerie of Saint-Louis in 1712. The previous year, he had married Marie Morel, daughter of an official of the Paris law court and great-niece of Cyrano de Bergerac. With moneys amassed from the West Indies Company by a cousin, François built the Château de Coubertin. [11] His son Pierre Frédy (1716–78) was appointed to the Cour des aides in 1744, and his son, François-Louis (1752–1807), [12] lawyer to Parliament, continued the privilege until the Cour des aides was suppressed by the Revolution in 1790. As ‘Citizen Frédy’ and ‘Frédy dit de Coubertin’, François-Louis survived the Terror. Not so his paternal uncle, Henri-Louis Frédy de Coubertin, who was ‘exiled several times by lettres de cachet from Louis XVI for having told the king the truth, and guillotined in 1790 for having told the truth to the revolutionaries’. [13]

Julien-Bonaventure Frédy (1768–1871), François-Louis’s son, served Napoleon as a cavalry officer attached to the general staff. He became a sub-prefect and a consul at Cuxhaven in Germany, and later was aide-de-camp to the Duke of Luxembourg. While it was the Bourbon Louis XVIII who awarded him the Légion d’honneur and made him hereditary baron in 1821, he did not hesitate to serve Louis Philippe as a bodyguard in the 1830s, [14] prompting one commentator to remark, ‘Les monarchistes seraient-ils plus royalistes que les rois?’ This devotion to the crown, no matter who wore it, and his freemasonry were both rejected by the son born to Julien-Bonaventure and his wife, the daughter of the marquis de Pardieu. Charles Frédy, Baron de Coubertin (1822–1908), was, as we shall see, a staunch legitimist and conservative Catholic – positions against which his own son, Pierre de Coubertin, would in turn rebel.

Pierre’s mother’s line was no less well stocked with notables. She was the daughter of Charles Gigault de Crisenoy (1787–1835) and his second wife, Euphrasie Eudes de Catteville de Mirville (d. 1887). Originally from Île-de-France, the Gigault family traced its patrimony to Étienne Gigault, the son of a hat merchant. [15] Born in Auxerre in 1695, he was made seigneur de la Salle in 1737 by Louis XV, in whose court he served as councillor-secretary. His heir, Étienne-Pascal (1720–88), acquired the seigneurie of Crisenoy in Brie around 1754, and held appointments as royal secretary, controller general of audiences at the high chancellery and fermier général. Achille-Étienne Gigault de Crisenoy (1756–1802) was a counsellor at the Châtelet, a Parliament lawyer and, in 1797, a deputy to the Five Hundred. His son, Étienne-Charles, Pierre de Coubertin’s grandfather, chevalier of the Légion d’honneur and aide-major of the National Guard, was made hereditary baron in 1822, three months after the same privilege fell to the Frédys de Coubertin.

Pierre’s maternal grandmother belonged to an ancient Norman family distinguished through the generations by its soldiers, first remembered from the Hundred Years War. Mathieu Eudes fought at the battle of the Écluse; Regnault Eudes was ennobled in 1369; and Vincent Eudes was an officer in the guard of the archbishop of Rouen. Eight generations later, the military tradition continued with Alexandre-François Eudes de Catte-ville, knight of Saint-Louis, captain of the Compagnie des gendarmes dauphins and, in 1784, maréchal de camp. For his services, he was made Marquis de Mirville by Louis XVI. His son Alexandre-Pierre, Pierre de Coubertin’s great-grandfather, fought as a major in the army of the Condé.

The seigneurie of Mirville, some two kilometres from Bolbec in Normandy, was a medieval fief, originally in the hands of one Guillaume Selles, from whom it passed in 1431 to the Dumesnildot family, ancient nobles de race. The du Bouillonnays (or de Bouillonneys), another very old Norman family (ennobled aux francs-fiefs in 1470), acquired it by marriage in 1592 and, in turn, one of their daughters brought it with her into the Eudes de Catte-ville in 1669. One hundred and seventy-seven years later, the château and lands of Mirville were the dowry of Pierre de Coubertin’s mother. It was on this estate, rather than the paternal lands near Saint-Rémy-les-Chevreuse, that Pierre and his siblings spent their childhoods. [16]

Only the trunks of the de Coubertin family tree have been tracked here. Pierre would have known also the branches (with their yet heavier load of distinguished gentlemen), additional houses and lands connected with his family by marriage and other historical events and personages associated with his ancestors. Further archival research should be undertaken to recover these.

But here the goal is not exhaustive historiography. While this genealogy is more complete than those supplied by previous writers on de Coubertin, it is offered as assistance in a task overlooked by these authors. Each rather conventionally remarks that de Coubertin’s aristocratic heritage ‘weighed upon him’ and, proclaiming the indubitable, each asserts that his family history influenced his work. But excessively simplistic and presentistic assumptions about ‘nobility’ and outmoded notions of the ‘automatic’ nature of socialization have prevented any substantial, detailed understanding of the relationship between his heritage and his legacy.

As anthropologists have repeatedly demonstrated, genealogy is linked with much larger social interests than simple ancestor reckoning. In most social groups – peoples, classes, castes, movements and so on – a family tree is not merely a map of blood ties but an index and icon of the fundamental values which ‘blood’ represents to that group. And, as a socializing agency, the performance of genealogy – reciting, disputing, verifying and elaborating it, embodying it in images, coats of arms, portraits, documents, gestures, dress and styles of comportment – provides recipes for action in accordance with these fundamental value orientations.

For a young French aristocrat, genealogy was both patrimony and project. By accident of birth, one’s name gained mention in an already existing récit. But to ensure continued mention, one had to transform oneself from a name to a ‘name’ in adulthood. Instructions for this transformation were found in the ‘descriptive’ materials – in the French case, in the titles, positions, alliances, exploits, progeny (in roughly this order of precedence) joined to ancestors’ names and dates in the genealogy.

In literate societies, ‘mentions’ became additionally ‘places’ or ‘spaces’ in a written and illustrated document or chart. Récits généalogiques give way to arbres génélogiques, chartes de noblesse and finally to dictionnaires, annuaires, almanachs, and (quoting the full title of a work to be cited shortly) Archives généalogiques et historiques de la noblesse de France ou recueil de preuves, mémoires et notices généalogiques, servant à constater l’origine, la filiation, les alliances et les illustrations religieuses, civiles, et militaires de diverses maisons et familles nobles du royaume. [17]

As has been pointed out recently, the relative fixity and consistency of the formal principles by which a document is constructed may influence the paradigms for behaviour which the document ‘documents’. [18] ‘Black sheep’, for example, may be altogether elided from oral recitations of genealogy, but written genealogies less easily tolerate empty spaces. Lacunae become immediately marked and obvious. Moreover, ‘completeness’ is added to such documents as a purpose and, therefore, as a principle of composition. Consequently, other strategies than elision must be devised for dealing with those ancestors who have deviated from the values and norms intended to be communicated by genealogy to the outside public and to the family young.

One such strategy relies upon the continued importance of oral narratives of family history in literate cultures. Not only do written documents never fully replace oral history in general, but in the particular cases of the not-yet-literate or those denied physical or intellectual access to documents, oral narrative (including exegesis of visual sources of information) is all there is. While the names, dates, birth orders and so on of the offending persons must appear in the written genealogies, all mention of them may be eliminated in oral narrative. Or else, if they must be mentioned to establish continuity of descent (as may be the case in non-literate cultures as well), the speaker’s greater control of emphasis and emotion will be used to distract attention from them.

Other strategies of selection and concealment depend upon the established cultural canons shared by written and oral genealogy alike. French noble genealogies always emphasize title and position at the expense of context. Exactly which sovereign was served by which maréchal, what the title écuyer meant in the sixteenth as opposed to the fourteenth century, the oscillations between ascriptive and achievement criteria for election to the Légion or to the Ordre de Saint-Louis, the number of appointments to the Cour des aides in the ancien régime (there were 345) – such information is almost never provided by genealogical documents themselves. Thus is true history concealed, as well as revealed, by such ‘historical’ documents. The triumphs of black sheep, no less than the failures of honoured exemplars, may be made to disappear under the titles which they bore. And, of course, no information whatever is supplied in these documents as to the characters, personalities and unique personal experiences – in short, the inner lives – of the ‘cherished’ ancestors.

Where there is developmental conflict, however, such strategies of selective history employed by one generation may turn out instead to structure the curiosities of the next. When the fact of parental selectivity is itself consciously recognized by the young, they may be incited to discover charters for rebellious behaviour lurking within the same official family history presented to them by their elders. We have noted how Pierre could cite the opportunism of his grandfather, ‘plus royaliste que les rois’, against the legitimism of his parents. We shall see below how Pierre circumvented official family silence on a maternal great-uncle, a republican priest with ‘socialist’ leanings, and made of him a psychological and literary ancestor-hero. But just as it is too simple to make of de Coubertin a ‘product’ of his class and caste, so also it will not do to make of him a straightforward rebel against his heritage. As always, the truth is more complex.

The final entry under Frédy de Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Preface to Second Edition
• Preface to Original Edition
• Introduction: Laocoon
• 1 Noble Works, Glorious Examples, Generous Sacrifices
• 2 The Vision at Rugby Chapel
• 3 Athletic Education
• 4 The Olympic Idea
• 5 The Mighty Working of a Symbol: From Idea to Organization
• 6 An Indescribable Spectacle
• 7 Conclusion: Flags and Flowers
• 8 Postscript: History as Anthropology
• Index