coubertin, olympism and chivalry

Olympika XXII (2013), 1-38 1

* Jeffrey O. Segrave holds The David H. Porter Endowed Chair in the Department of Health and Exercise Sciences, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, U.S.A.

Coubertin, Olympism and Chivalry

Jeffrey O. Segrave*

While numerous historical forces conspired to produce a 19th century Zeitgeistreceptive to the renovation of the Olympic Games, le renovateur Pierre de Cou-bertin drew his ideological inspiration primarily from philosophical idealizationsof ancient Hellenism, the chivalric tradition of the Middle Ages, 19th and 20th cen-tury English, French and American educational theorists and practices, and lib-eral cosmopolitan and internationalist doctrines. While the significance of theancient and modern eras on the derivation of Coubertin’s ideology of Olympismhas been well documented, less has been written about the impact of the MiddleAges on Coubertin. Yet, Coubertin was clearly drawn to the medieval periodarguing that an unintended Olympism nearly took root in the Middle Ages. Hewas especially enamored by the esthetic, moral, and, indeed, religious context thatinformed the athletic instinct during the Middle Ages, and he found in chivalryreified and rhetorical echoes of the romantically conceived ancient Olympic cos-mology that so inspired him. The purpose of this essay is to carefully delineate theinfluence of the medieval period on Coubertin, or, more accurately, to assess theinfluence of both medieval and 19th century conceptions of chivalry on the deriva-tion of Coubertin’s idiosyncratic Olympic philosophy, Olympism. Ultimately, Iwish to argue that chivalry exerted considerable influence on Coubertin, and,furthermore, because of the way he read the Middle Ages and the cultural circum-stances that molded chivalry in the medieval and modern eras, as well as the wayhe read history itself, he was able to rationalize and popularize his Olympic proj-ect as the teleological destination of an identifiable world-historical process.

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The modern Olympic Games, as sport historian Allen Guttmann rightly notes,“are more than just games.”1 In fact, from the very beginning, the Games havealways been distinguishable from all other sporting institutions, includingworld championships. As their founder, Pierre de Coubertin wrote, “worldchampionships do form part of the Olympic Games: Nevertheless the OlympicGames are ‘something else’ as well, and it is just this ‘something else’ that mat-ters, as it is not to be found in any other variety of athletic competition.”2 The“something else” was primarily an ideology, what Coubertin called Olympism,a complex admixture of ethics, world-view, metaphysics, and mythology thatCoubertin elicited from a variety of contemporary and historical sources. TheGames were also distinguished by an elaborate and compelling system of cere-

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monies, rituals, and symbols that sanctified and popularized the Games, aswell as a pedigreed lineage that dated back to the athletic festivals in ancientOlympia. But, as important as the presentation of the Games were, and asillustrious as their history may well have been, it was Coubertin’s “philosoph-ico-religious”3 doctrine of Olympism that truly differentiated the OlympicGames from all other athletic competitions.

Olympism was an idiosyncratic philosophical amalgam drawn from eclec-tic sources, including Coubertin’s idealizations of ancient Hellenism, the chi-valric tradition of the Middle Ages, 19th and 20th century English, French, andAmerican educational theorists and practices, and liberal cosmopolitan andinternationalist doctrines. But, while the significance of the ancient and mod-ern eras on the derivation of Coubertin’s ideology of Olympism has been welldocumented,4 less has been written about the impact of the Middle Ages onCoubertin. Yet, Coubertin was clearly drawn to the medieval period arguingthat an “unintended”5 Olympism, born of “war, hygiene and sport,”6 nearly“took root in the Middle Ages.”7 Coubertin was especially enamored by theesthetic, moral, and, indeed, religious context that informed the “athleticinstinct”8 during the Middle Ages, and he found in chivalry reified and rhetor-ical echoes of the romantically conceived ancient Olympic cosmology that soinspired him. Coubertin acknowledged the core relevance of the Middle Agesin other settings too. During his visit to the Much Wenlock Games in England,he noted that “The dress and speeches were modern; the use of laurels and thequotations from Greek authors inscribed on the flags and banderoles wereantique; the latter part of the ceremony was an homage paid to medieval ideasand theories.”9 In the 1894 meeting at the Sorbonne, a three-part lecture on thehistory of physical education was delivered by George Bourdon on Antiquity,J. J. Jusserand on the Middle Ages, and by Coubertin on the modern era,10 andthe Athletic Fair at the 1900 World Fair was slated to be constituted of threesections—the ancient period, the Middle Ages, and the modern era.11

While Coubertin paid allegiance to the incipient “sporting passion”12

emergent during the feudal period, he was particularly drawn to one of themost celebrated expressions of the medieval sporting spirit—chivalry—thesacramental code of knightly conduct that germinated in the Middle Ages andechoed throughout history enjoying a widespread renaissance in 19th centuryEurope, especially France and England. As late as 1920, Coubertin acknowl-edged “the noble spirit of chivalry” as “the basis of all enduring and puresporting activity.”13 To Coubertin, chivalry constituted “a well-defined Olym-pic revival,”14 and references to chivalry and the lofty and unselfish virtues thatdefined knightly behavior and conduct inspired Coubertin and conspicuouslyinfiltrated his philosophical Olympic musings.

In other words, Coubertin was most heavily influenced by the ideas andpractices emergent in three epochs—the ancient, medieval, and modern. The


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purpose of this essay is to carefully delineate the influence of the medievalperiod on Coubertin, or, more accurately, to assess the influence of both medi-eval and 19th century conceptions of chivalry on the derivation of Coubertin’sOlympic philosophy, Olympism. After all, as Olympic historian John Lucaswryly notes, Coubertin’s Olympian was “a kind of Greek reincarnation, a mod-ern-day medieval knight, a slightly modified aristocratic English gentleman-athlete.”15 Ultimately, I wish to argue that chivalry exerted considerable influ-ence on Coubertin, and, furthermore, because of the way he read the MiddleAges and the cultural circumstances that molded chivalry in the medieval andmodern eras, as well as the way he read history itself, he was able to rationalizeand popularize his Olympic project as the teleological destination of an identi-fiable world-historical process.

This essay is divided into five sections. The first section addresses Couber-tin’s assessment of the Middle Ages with regard to sport and chivalry. The sec-ond section presents a brief description and history of medieval chivalry. Thethird section focuses on the impact of 19th century chivalry in both France andEngland on Coubertin, and considers the ways in which he embraced the corevirtues of medieval chivalry and how he interpreted the value of the medievaltournament. The fourth section discusses the regressive social tendencies pre-cipitated by modern interpretations of chivalry, and the fifth section considersCoubertin's historicism. I end with some concluding comments.

Coubertin and the Middle Ages

Coubertin was not drawn to the Middle Ages because of an easily identifiableculture of sport, or because the Middle Ages espoused a refined athletic phi-losophy. In fact, quite the opposite: Coubertin largely condemned the MiddleAges precisely for failing to recognize, either in ideology or practice, the bene-fits of sport, especially the refined Greek model of sport, that “bilateral cult ofthe things of the body and the things of the mind,”16 as Coubertin described it.Instead, the Middle Ages made the “gross error” of “treating the body as a pileof rags,” and, as a consequence, “teaching man to despise life.”17 According toCoubertin, sport in the medieval period was never “surrounded by estheticand moral concerns,”18 and it was never embraced as an institutional necessity:“it was never a matter of state or a matter of education, as ancient Olympismhad been.”19 Rather, the Middle Ages were “deeply marked” by a “sincere andnaïve absolutism”20 that quashed the athletic spirit and prohibited the emer-gence of an enlightened sport culture. As a result, Coubertin argued, “since theMiddle Ages a sort of discredit has hovered over bodily qualities and they havebeen isolated from the qualities of the mind.”21

Despite his critique of the ascetic propensities of the Middle Ages, Cou-bertin did find one glimmer of hope in the era, a transient Olympism in the

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form of chivalry. In both practice and ideal, the knight and the chivalric coderepresented to Coubertin “a clearly defined Olympic restoration,”22 and hechampioned chivalry as a revival that, even as it “scattered and dissipated,”23

allowed him to indulge in what philosopher Russell Kirk calls “dreamy visionsof unborn ages.”24 Envisioning chivalry as an embryonic Olympism, Coubertingave voice to an idealistic historicism that allowed him to find patterns in his-tory at the same time that it helped his Olympic vision take root in a time, thefin de siècle, that was not only infused with chivalric revivalism, but also con-vinced of the notion of ineluctable progress.25

Chivalry

Simply stated, chivalry was the distinctive code, or body of law and custom,that defined the conduct of feudal knights.26 More an outlook than a doctrine,more a lifestyle than an explicit ethical protocol, medieval chivalry embracedboth ideology and practice and served as both value system and behavioralconvention for the secular aristocratic elite of the Middle Ages.27 As an ideal ofwarfare, religion, and comportment, the chivalric code prevailed in WesternEurope between the 11th and 16th centuries. The composite, enduring, and,indeed, compelling, ideal of chivalry was characterized by an inventory ofaccumulated virtues that, according to the 14th century poet and politicalwriter Alain Chartier included, nobility, loyalty, honor, righteousness, prowess,love (not only for one’s lady, but for King and country), courtesy, diligence,cleanliness, generosity, sobriety, self-sacrifice, and perseverance,28 virtueswhich also constituted Chaucer’s archetypal ‘very parfyt gentill knight.’ Chiv-alry drew its inspiration not only from heroes from real wars and tourna-ments, but also from the heroes of the romances, from the practical Gawain tothe ethereal Galahad. Formulated gradually over a period of time, the rules ofchivalry found their way into a variety of texts, not only the prayers whichaccompanied the oath and dubbing ceremonies, but, perhaps, most impor-tantly, the writings of Perceval of Chrétian de Troyes, the prose romance ofLancelot, the German Minnesang, in a fragment of the ‘Meissner,’ and theFrench didactic poem, L’Ordene de Chevalerie. Both heroic biography and epicpoetry, les chanson de geste, were instrumental in the construction and popu-larization of the cult of chivalry. In the works of Ramon Llull and Geoffroi deCharney, for example, knights are presented as the virtuous armed force ofChristendom, the practitioners of licit might, fair and compassionate judges insociety, wise and righteous men both inspired and restrained by the high ide-als of honorable social service. One poet describes the knight as “a flower ofshining perfection, a rock of steadfast virtue, a mirror of magnanimity andcourtly deportment, he was pure and humble, of manly kindness, wise, gra-cious in an understanding way, brave with lofty disposition.”29


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As Southern wryly notes, however, the knights of literature “had as muchrelationship to the knights of the time as the private detectives of fiction to thepoliceman of everyday life.”30 In other words, accounts in the chivalric litera-ture were often more prescriptive than descriptive, serving more as an activesocial force in the creation of a romantic notion of chivalry rather than a mir-ror of an already extant social reality. In truth, the roots of chivalry were bar-barian and the knighthood was a warrior class, and chivalry denoted the codeand culture of a martial aristocracy that celebrated warfare as a hereditary pro-fession. Unlike the clergy and royalty, chivalry was born not from the restrain-ing traditions characteristic of the institutions of government, but rather fromthe ancient practices and heroic exploits of warriors, proud of their indepen-dence, exultant in their right to violence, and more than willing to use it. Morethan one commentator disparaged knights for their distinct lack of chivalry:St. Bernard described them as “impious rogues, sacrilegious thieves, murder-ers, perjurers and adulterers,”31 and Baldric of Bol wrote about them: “You areproud; you tear your brothers to pieces and fight among yourselves… youoppressors of orphans and widows, you murderers, you temple-defilers, youlawbreakers, who seek the rewards of rapacity from spilling Christian blood.”32

Tournaments were condemned by the clergy as “mock wars” that “imperiledsoul as well as body, encouraged pride, occasioned the risk of homicide, and,in a more general sense, deflected martial energies better spent on Cruscade.”33

In short, all too often, knights practiced not militia, knightly service, butrapina, plundering.34

The unendurable prevalence of violence in the medieval period, includingthe behavior of knights themselves, became an issue of social order and drewthe attention of both government and religious institutions. The highestFrench court, the Parlement of Paris, for example, prosecuted knights forassault and murder, theft and pillage, and private war. The Christian Church,in particular, sought to secure what historian Gerd Tellenbach calls “rightorder in the world,”35 and the determined Christianization of the chivalriccode gradually established a more progressive social protocol for knightly con-duct which, at its most community inspired, enjoined knights to defend thechurch and the faith, protect orphans, widows, and the poor, promote justice,seek peace, exercise mercy, and refrain from treasonous acts.36 Gradually, acourtly culture with origins very different from the bloody military skills soadmired and embraced by the knights was grafted onto chivalry. Blendingwarrior honor, Roman Stoic virtue, court fashion and manners, and Christianmorality, it constituted an impossible, even self-contradictory, amalgam ofexpectations. As Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee somewhat humorouslynoted having observed life in Camelot: “I will say this much for the nobility;that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, theywere deeply and enthusiastically religious.”37

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Furthermore, knights were no more a uniform class than chivalry was afixed, uniform custom. The idea of the knighthood as homogenous estate, aswell as the notion of chivalry as a monolithic code is a modern, not medievalinvention. But, the demand, and need, for social order and peace transcendedthe social value of individualistic, even anarchical, displays of strength andskill in mounted, martial combat, and both clergy and laity alike sought to civ-ilize and institutionalize what to many had become an intolerable antisocialforce. Even Lancelot during the transformation that marks his character inMort Artu declares “better ye pees than always warre.”38

Over time, the durable synthesis of power, status, piety, and cultural idealsembodied in chivalry disintegrated and the worldly trappings associated withthe knight lost their relevance, exclusivity, and efficacy. Chivalry and its intri-cate relationship with royalty and clergy transformed, and the autonomy ofchivalry and its private violence gradually disappeared, absorbed by thegrowth of state power and public violence, sanctioned by the Church. The self-authenticating honor-based society that nurtured medieval chivalry became athing of the past. The changes were evident in a wide array of diverse agencies,including behavior in the royal court, the evolution of political, social, andreligious thought, the development of mercantile companies, the progressionof battlefield techniques, the nature of armed forces, and myriad forms andpractices that marked the social hierarchy.39 Although chivalry enjoyed arevival during the reign of Elizabeth I in England—centered primarily on thecult of Elizabeth herself—it was largely allegorical in style and pageantry.40 Bythe time the last tournament had taken place in 1624 on the anniversary ofJames I’s accession to the throne of England,41 the age of the knight had largelypassed into history.42 Invariably idealized and romanticized in the literature,chivalry exercised an extraordinarily powerful influence on the medievalworld, generating a legacy that would resonate across the ages and leave a deepimpact on the times that followed, especially the 19th century and Coubertin.

Coubertin and Chivalry

It is not surprising, although certainly fitting, that the two cultures mostresponsible for the revival of chivalry in the 19th century and most influentialin the imaginings of Coubertin as he ruminated on his national reclamationproject were France and England. Both at home in his native France and whiletravelling and studying the educational environment in England, Coubertinwas enveloped in the resuscitated culture of chivalry on both sides of theChannel. From the 18th century forward, chivalry acquired a new integrity,new characteristics, and a renewed élan in both countries. As early as 1759, inEngland, Richard Hurd wrote that the tilt-yard was “a school of fortitude andhonor to our generous forefathers…Affability, courtesy, generosity, veracity,


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these were the qualifications most pretended to by the men of arms, in thedays of pure and uncorrupted chivalry.”43 In 1759, the same year that Hurdpublished his Moral and Political Dialogues, J. B. de la Curne de Sainte-Palayepublished the first two volumes of his Mémoires de l’ancienne chevalerie inParis. In 1774, Sainte-Palaye published his Histoire littéraire des troubadours.In the 19th century, medievalism became increasingly popular in England dueto the works of Walter Scott, Stacey Grimaldi, and Kenelm Henry Digby, and,in France, under the influence of writers such as Chateaubriand, Madame deStaël, and Victor Hugo. To the delight of all France, in 1835, Francisque Micheldiscovered a new version of Le Chanson de Roland.

The sheer popularity of the Middle Ages during the fin de siècle, whetherborn from political, aesthetic, or sentimental needs, brought medieval art, civ-ilization, and culture to the forefront of the national imagination. Knights inarmor were described in literature, depicted in painting and sculpture, fea-tured in statues, images, family crests, and stained glass windows, and cele-brated in the resurrected tournament, the most famous of which was theEglinton Tournament of 1839. Chevalerie influenced architecture, dress, edu-cational philosophy, language, and social behavior. In England, royal patron-age was bestowed upon chivalry in clothing, the decorations in the House ofLords, the theater, and in the works commissioned by Queen Victoria andPrince Albert for Edward Henry Corbould, the official depicter of chivalry toroyalty. While the Scottish historian and political theorist James Mill once pro-claimed that “the sun of English chivalry reached its meridian in the reign ofEdward III,”44 others felt that the sun of English chivalry had risen yet again inthe 19th century.

France French attraction to the Middle Ages during the late 19th century was due to avariety of factors, including the advance of industrialism,45 the decreasingpower of the Catholic Church in French political spheres,46 the rise of positiv-ism,47 competition with Germany and a general European preoccupation ofthe Middle Ages,48 and, most importantly, as a way of recovering national sta-bility and pride.49 “Understanding our history well,” the French dramatist andpolitician Ludovic Vitet wrote, “is the key to all of our problems, the regenera-tive principle of all order and progress.”50 It was to the cause of national revital-ization and the regenerative power of history that Coubertin would dedicatehis life. Like many of his compatriots, he was deeply concerned by the deca-dence of his era, a time of economic and moral depression, physical degenera-tion, educational tedium, and profligacy, crime, and sybaritic excess.51

Coubertin would no doubt have agreed with the French writer Joris-KarlHuysmans who, too, rejected what he described as “the purulence of a repug-nant era.”52 Rather than follow a career in law or the military, Coubertin chose

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instead the world of education: “I resolved to change careers,” he wrote, “andattach my name to a great pedagogical reform.”53

Understanding and invoking the Middle Ages and chivalry became acommon motif in the aftermath of the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War.For many, chivalry was one of the high points of French cultural history, a tes-timony to the qualité of the French soul and character; during that era, Frenchhistorian Daniel Halévy famously dubbed “la fin des notables,” the late 19th

century, a call to French pride, ingenuity, and resolve. Medieval history, medi-eval characters, and medieval literature became political rallying points, the"virile inspiration"54 for the publication of patriotic texts and treatises, thecause for the canonicalization of epics like Le Chanson de Roland, a widelyrequired text for students throughout France, including, no doubt, Coubertin,and the call for an emancipatory, even therapeutic, historicism. As the Frenchhistorian Fustel de Coulanges wrote in late 1871:

Learning the truth about the Middle Ages would allow the variousfactions of French society to see their common heritage and to healtheir psychological wounds. Understand the Middle Ages—theexact, scientific, and sincere understanding of them without bias—is, for our society a concern of the highest order. It is the best way toput an end to the insane regrets of some, to the empty utopias of oth-ers, to the hatred of all. To reestablish calm in the present, it is notun-useful to begin by destroying prejudices and errors about thepast. History implicitly observed divides us; it is by better under-standing that the work of reconciliation must begin.55

Appealing to history was one of Coubertin’s prime rhetorical tactics as hesought to rebronzer56 France through an invigorated program of school physi-cal education and sport, and, ultimately, the world through the paradigm ofthe modern Olympic Games. Clearly, he favored, in both rhetoric and reality,the lure of the ancient Olympic Games and he forever invoked the model ofancient Olympia as he sought to institutionalize, and, once institutionalized,glorify and commemorate his reified Olympic project. “To celebrate the Olym-pic Games,” he declared in 1936, “is to appeal to history.”57 Consequently, Cou-bertin also appealed to the Middle Ages, his embryonic enthusiasm for theheritage and values of chivalry well-expressed in a passage written by him in1896, not about sport, but about the Army of the National Defense:

Gambetta announced himself as the second organizer of victory; atthe summons of his voice, which rarely found nobler accents later on,confidence rose again in souls and hatred against the invader drewall hearts together. ‘Not an inch of our territory! Not a stone of ourfortresses!’ Jukes Favre had said, and that haughty reply wasrepeated by each man in the depths of his own being. A great wave ofpatriotism had swept over France, solidifying it … It was a heroicstruggle. All the generous and noble ardor of the Gallic blood awoke:


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there was but one flag now; after the young men, the elderly enlisted,with joy in their eyes, happy to fight for a cause so just and holy; andwhen, at last, the ruin was complete, when Paris besieged was on thepoint of perishing with hunger, when they were compelled to laydown their arms and confess defeat, France had the consolation ofbeing able to assert, as in the time of Francis I, that all was lost, ‘savehonor.’58

The appeal to history and the chivalric values of honor, loyalty, and prouesseresonate throughout the passage—the “wave of patriotism,” the “heroic strug-gle,” the “generous and noble ardor” of Gallic blood, soldiers “with joy in theireyes,” fighting for “a cause so just and holy,” and “as in the time of Francis I …all was lost, ‘save honor’.” Moreover, as cultural historian John MacAloonnotes, the “universalizing, nationalizing character of these symbols and senti-ments aptly signals the new meaning la patrie took on for the children of1871.”59

Of further interest in this passage is Coubertin’s invocation of Francis I, aking that history may well have endowed with a mixed legacy, but a king who,for many, personified the best of the chivalric code. Francis I, in fact, liked tobe known as the “chivalric king” who “swore on his word as a gentleman.”60

The writer Mézeray described him as a “great king” who had “a marvelous skillin all the noble exercises of a cavalier, brave, generous, magnificent, courteous,debonnaire, and gracious in speech,”61 and the Venetian Marino Cavalli judgedhim “learned in matters of hunting, in painting, in literature, in languages, inthe difficult bodily exercises appropriate to a fine courtier.”62 Coubertin’smotive in invoking the chivalric Francis I is likely to confirm that honneur hadalways resided in the soul of France, and that a renascent honneur, one that heultimately felt best instilled in his countrymen through the rigors of sport,would help revitalize France during the waning years of the 19th century.63

In effect, Coubertin was suggesting that for France national renovation wasrooted, in part, by reclaiming history, especially medieval chivalry, a legacy inFrance that connoted cultural grandeur and vitality. It was a conservative ele-giac that assumed that France could be saved from the social and political prob-lems associated with industrialism, a waning world influence, military decline,and a deteriorating national character by a benevolent paternalism.64 As theBelle Époque historian Eugen Weber argues, Coubertin was primarily attempt-ing to re-invent the French aristocracy in a newly emerged era of democracyand nationalism to forge French Tories committed to national unity andrevanche.65 But, if the legacy and expressions of chivalry that Coubertinencountered in France gave weight to his nationalist revitalizing intentions,then the representations of chivalry that he encountered in England revolution-ized his internationalist ambitions, ultimately giving him the philosophical coreand contemporary inspiration for his incipient Olympism.

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England

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the ideals of chivalry percolated throughthe distinctly English culture and were reconstituted as the pious and bloodymedieval past was refashioned not only as a topic of antiquarian research, but,more importantly, as a powerful idiom for evangelization, education, moralinstruction, particularly for the young, and, as in France, national revitaliza-tion. The revival of chivalry was precipitated in the late 18th and early 19th cen-tury by the publication of a spate of books on chivalry, including, mostnotably, Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), KenelmDigby’s The Broad Stone of Honour (1822),66 Sir Walter Scott’s Essays on Chiv-alry (1824),67 Stacey Grimaldi’s A Suit of Armour for Youth (1824),68 JamesMill’s The History of Chivalry (1825),69 and Charles Kingley’s Westward Ho!(1855).70 In Westward Ho!, Kingsley depicted a distinctly Elizabethan chivalrybecause it allowed him to combine his chivalric enthusiasm with an equallyprofound enthusiasm for Protestantism and the British Empire. Others situ-ated chivalry in the modern context. Grimaldi, for example, treated chivalrynot as a way of life that belonged to the past, like Kingsley, but as a living codereadily suitable for socializing youth and inculcating them with an invigoratedmorality. Grimaldi stressed the duty, not the glamour of chivalry, and positedthat men who were not born into privilege and advantage were equally capableof valor and heroism as those who were. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of thechivalric moral literature of the Victorian era was its criticism of dissolute anddecadent aristocrats unworthy of the ideals they had inherited.

One of the most influential books in England, Digby’s The Broad Stone ofHonour, served as an extraordinarily popular and powerful apology for chiv-alry and Christian knighthood. Digby’s goal was to present the heroes of chiv-alry as men of faith and honor rather than as barbarians, and he stressed thevalue of chivalry as a civilizing and moralizing agent. He downplayed the vio-lence of the knighthood and represented it instead as a doctrinal register thatwas both high-minded and didactic. The aggressive anti-social behavior thattypified chivalry was presented as self-denial, constraint, and humility, thesublimation of the delinquent and rebellious proclivities of youth to thegreater good of others and the community, and, in the service of honor. Digby,in fact, defined chivalry as “a name for that general spirit or state of mindwhich disposes men to heroic actions, and keeps them conversant with all thatis beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world.”71 MuscularChristianity was another kind of chivalry. The key figures in the adaptation ofMuscular Christianity to Victorian life were Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Kings-ley, and Thomas Hughes, all of whom valorized the Anglo-Saxon culture,fused physicality with Christian morality, and preached physical toughness asthe path to a valiant and noble manhood.


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In conjunction with the publications of numerous other authors, such asHenry Newbolt, Alfred Austen, and J. M. Ludlow, collectively works on chiv-alry served as the literary foundation, inspiration, and justification for the turnof the century way of life in England. In particular, with regard to Coubertin,chivalry was a potent influence in the development of the code of the Englishgentleman, and, most importantly, the educational environment in England,especially the public schools that so charmed and influenced Coubertin as hesought not only in the early stages of his career to “harder, a flabby, listless,confined youth, its body and its character,”72 but also, subsequently, as he inter-nationalized his thinking and developed his idea of reviving the OlympicGames and proselytizing the world to the merits of Olympism.

The model of the 19th century English gentleman, with its emphasis onhonor, loyalty, independence, modesty, and accomplishment, grew out of thechivalric tradition. As Sir Walter Scott put it: “From the wild and overstrainedcourtesies of Chivalry has been derived our present system of manners.”73 Oneof Scott’s greatest accomplishments, in fact, was to resurrect the cult of chiv-alry and popularize a type of character that appealed to his contemporariesand took root as a viable and serviceable code of conduct that invigorated theleadership of the country. While Scott viewed the gentleman as a derivative ofthe knight, Grimaldi used the terms gentleman and knight interchangeably.

In either case, the English gentleman constituted an ideal and a reality thatimpressed and appealed to Coubertin during his travels. Unlike French gen-tilshommes, indolent dandies, or ignorant reactionaries “imprisoned in theruins of the past,”74 for whom idleness was vital to social prestige, the Englishgentleman personified the model of rigor, vigor, and social action that Cou-bertin had encountered in Hippolyte Taine’s Notes on England.75 The privilegedrentier mentality drove the French upper classes into the sort of contempt forpolitical and community action manifested by Flaubert, Baudelaire, andValéry, whereas the English aristocrat, according to Taine, “rarely stands asidefrom public business; for it is his business and he wishes to take a hand in itsmanagement. He does not live withdrawn. On the contrary, he feels himselfunder an obligation to contribute in one way or another to the commongood.”76 English gentlemen represented a modern nobility, “who, as citizens,are the most enlightened, the most independent and the most useful to thewhole nation.”77 The “real ‘gentleman,’” wrote Taine in reference to the Englishexample, was:

A truly noble man, a man worthy to command, a disinterestedman of integrity, capable of exposing, even sacrificing himself forthose he leads; not only a man of honor, but a conscientious man,in whom generous instincts have been confirmed by right thinkingand who, acting rightly by nature, acts even more rightly fromgood principles.78

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This, for Coubertin, was the formula for an invigorated national leadership, acontemporary aristocracy that could effect change, engage in communityaction, act selflessly, and embrace the common good, and not, as he found inFrance, nobles, who, as Weber politely puts it, “spend longer in the indetermi-nate and undemanding chrysalis stage of student life.”79 Moreover, as historianJ. A. Mangan points out, it was not only in England that these gentlemanlycharacteristics were exalted. They were equally commended in the elite circlesof European civic and social life, and here they formed the pretext for Couber-tin's vision of nobility of the Olympic athlete, “the diplomat of an ideal worldcommunity of respect.”80

There was one further specific quality of the gentleman that infused the cultureof late 19th century sport and profoundly influenced Coubertin’s Olympism—thenormative expectation that honor and virtue transcended personal gain, whichwas another legacy of the ideal knight. “If you will endeavor to arrive at distinc-tion,” Digby wrote, “the prize must be, not riches, but virtue.”81 Reflecting theclassist cult of amateurism that dominated the bureaucracy of sport, Coubertinfamously wrote in his evaluation of the 1896 Athens Games that

professionalism tends to grow apace. Men give up their whole exis-tence to one particular sport, grow rich by practicing it, and thus,deprive it of all nobility, and destroy the just equilibrium of man bymaking the muscles predominate over the mind. It is my belief thatno education, particularly in democratic times, can be good andcomplete without the aid of athletics; but athletics, in order to playtheir proper educational role, must be based on perfect disinterested-ness and the sentiment of honor.82

As MacAloon rightly notes, “To Coubertin, sport was to produce a moral elite,not a social elite.”83 The aim of Olympism was to challenge the athlete to riseabove self-interest in the pursuit of an ideal that would serve as a positiveimage for society.

It was not only the model of the chivalric English gentleman thatimpressed Coubertin, but also the public school education that prepared theEnglish elite for their role in servicing a vibrant imperial nation, an educationthat drew from the legacy of chivalry and focused on the development of char-acter. Even when Digby addresses the education of the gentleman in medievaltimes, it is the character-building aspects that he admires most, the training ofthe body as a means to strengthen character. Coubertin found an analogousvalue in the games of the public schools: “The effects of exercise and activity,and even of the violent amusements of ancient chivalry and our modern youthare,” he wrote, “unquestionably in warming the heart and in exciting the loveof virtue.”84

The relationship between public school education, chivalry, character, andsport is made even more explicit in Edward FitzGerald’s Euphranor, a dialogue


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on education published in 1851 that provided the philosophical framework forboth the Arnoldian system and the Muscular Christian movement that soaroused Coubertin’s interest and admiration. The importance of training thebody, Fitzgerald wrote, is to provide the soul with “a spacious airy, and whole-some tenement becoming so Divine a Tenant.” While he initially recommendscompulsory gymnastics and military drills as a way to strengthen the will andto acquire a “Sense of Order, Self-restraint, and Mutual Dependence,” he alsoadvocated cricket, boxing and other sports to instil a “habitual Instinct of Cour-age, Resolution, and Decision” and “the Good Humour which good animalCondition goes so far to ensure.”85 Eton College, the preeminent public school,in particular, is praised for teaching their students to “sublime their Beefsteakinto Chivalry in that famous Cricket-field of their by the side of the old FatherThames murmuring of so many Generations of chivalric Ancestors.”86

The example of Eton, along with the rhetoric of Digby, Scott, Hughes,Newbolt, and Carlyle, caused the role of sport to attain special status in thecurriculum of the English public school. Extending the chivalric model evenfurther, Henry Newbolt, described, even if inaccurately, how the publicschools had “derived the housemaster from the knight … and the love ofgames, the ‘sporting’ or ‘amateur’ view of them from tournaments and the chi-valric rules of war.”87 Success on the school team, participation in the demo-cratically organized system of sport, and the inculcation of distinctly chivalricvalues assumed primary importance in the culture of schools like Wellington,Winchester, Charterhouse, Rugby, and Marlborough, all schools that Couber-tin visited during his English sojourn. To Hughes and Kingsley, strength ofintellect was useless, even dangerous, without strength of character. The bestway to attain moral prowess was physical prowess: after all, at Eton, “It was notcricket only that the boys learnt from poor old Bob Grimston, but theyacquired the true principles of chivalrous honor.”88 Being a sportsman, a gen-tleman—not to mention the driving force for an imperial empire—and beingchivalrous were overlapping concepts. As Mangan has persuasively argued,English public school athleticism embraced a self-conscious deification of chi-valric values and the English sportsman was routinely lionized as the hero of a“romance of nineteenth-century knighthood, a youthful public school Arthur,Lancelot, and Galahad rolled into one,” and the games field “his Chapel Peril-ous and Fair-Play his Holy Grail.”89

While Coubertin was universally infatuated with English public schoolsand their athletic ideology, it was Thomas Arnold’s pedagogical and curricularmodel at Rugby that specifically consumed his attention and generated hisadulation. Coubertin's “vision at Rugby Chapel,” as MacAloon metaphoricallydescribes it,90 drove Coubertin to acclaim the Arnoldian system of schoolgames, student self-government and self-regulation, and postgraduate athleticassociation, combined with a rigorous liberal arts and Christian education, as

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the enduring hope for a reinvigorated France and a lasting democratic society.Moral development, athletics, and social education were the hallmarks ofArnold’s prototype: the catalysts were “liberty and sport.”91

This prescription for greatness profoundly impressed Coubertin: “Gentle-men,” he proclaimed in 1894, “there are not two parts to a man—body andsoul: there are three—body, mind and character; character is not formed bythe mind, but primarily by the body. The men of antiquity knew this, and weare painfully learning it.”92 Sport, to Coubertin, was the catalyst for the incul-cation of ethical qualities and instilled the virtues of initiative, daring, deci-sion, and self-reliance. It “also has the effect of exalting courage,”93 he wrote.The potent amalgam of distinctly chivalric public school moral values and vir-tues, especially sportsmanship and fair-play, became the inspiration for one ofthe most well-known of Coubertin’s Olympic dictums: “The important thingin these Olympiads,” he wrote in 1908, “is less to win than to take part inthem.” “Gentlemen, let us bear this potent word in mind,” he wrote:

It extends across every domain to form the basis of a sense of aserene and healthy philosophy. The important thing in life is not thevictory but the struggle; the essential is not to have won but to havefought well. To spread these precepts is to prepare the way for ahuman race which will be at once braver and stronger, and morescrupulous and generous.94

The Muscular Christian, among whom Coubertin counted Thomas Arnold,also mediated between medieval chivalry and Coubertin’s modernized sport-ing agenda:

True chivalry existed in only a few scattered individuals without acode, without a fraternal organization or opportunities and means tohelp one another, when there appeared in England a century ago these‘muscular Christians’ among whom one finds in embryo all the quali-ties of bygone chivalry—its high ideals, its healthy ruggedness, its gen-erous ardour; all that modernized, detached from war and blood,turned towards the less picturesque but wider horizons of the democ-racies, within which a man serves the cause of the general good moredirectly than in former times by perfecting his own individuality.95

As sport historian Patrick Clastres argues, from a political perspective, Cou-bertin became obsessed with the idea of creating a new French elite, a newbrand of French Tories shaped by English sport and compatible with theRepublic. This new elite was a sort of revamped French gentry federated bysports, which would allow France to once again assume leadership statusamong European nations and, indeed, the world at large, in the commercial,military, and colonial realms.96

It remains one of the great ironies of Coubertin’s life that the two elements thatloomed large in public schools and in Coubertin’s philosophy were entirely


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lacking in Arnold’s Rugby: organized games, in which Arnold took little, if anyinterest, and chivalry, which he construed as an affront to God with its empha-sis on personal allegiance and honor rather than faith and justice. In 1829,Arnold wrote: “If I were called upon to name what spirit of evil predominantlyderived the name of AntiChrist, I should name the spirit of chivalry the moredetestable for the very guise of the ‘Archangel ruined’ which has made it soseductive to the most generous spirits.”97 But, Coubertin misrepresented muchabout Arnold, choosing instead, to invoke the images that most suited hiscause. He glorified the moral idealism, Christian chivalry, and athleticism ofArnold's model, and summarily dismissed, or willingly ignored, the philis-tinism and barbarism of the school environment. Despite Arnold's antipathytowards chivalry, Coubertin still credited him as "one of the founding fathersof sporting chivalry."98 Coubertin misrepresented much about the history ofsport too. There was, of course, no continuous tradition that joined the ancientOlympic Games to chivalry and chivalry to the games of the 19th century. Justas the Victorians selected the qualities which they most admired in chivalryand refashioned the cult of games in the light of them, so Coubertin selectedthe qualities that he most admired in the Arnoldian system and chivalry andcreated Olympism in their image.

The Values of Chivalry Drawn to the model of both medieval chivalry and the modern mutation ofchivalry as it was conceived and expressed within the late 19th century Englishtradition of sport, Coubertin invoked the virtues and values of chivalrythroughout his illustrious career. As early in his Olympic sojourn as 1894, hepraised chivalry as a “vast athletic fraternity,”99 and, as late as 1935, just twoyears before his death, he declared that his Olympic athletic elite should be “aknighthood.”100

One of the primary reasons that Coubertin was drawn to chivalry wasbecause the medieval knight, as well as the reincarnation of the knight in the19th century, personified the exalted and lofty values that inspired Coubertinand that he ultimately imposed on his Olympic athlete and lauded as the moralfoundation of his idealized Olympic philosophy. The virtues that defined thebehavior and conduct of the knight, and the code that developed to circum-scribe, and, in fact, over time, to civilize the knight’s demeanor, found theirway in one way or another into Coubertin’s sporting taxonomy.

From a very early stage, romantic authors such as Chrétian de Troyes,Geoffroi of Charney, and Ramon Lull, habitually and consistently identified aquorum of qualities that defined the archetype of chivalrous distinction:honor, prowess, loyalty, generosity, courtesy, self-sacrifice, and daring. RamonLull, for example, argued that the knight should not only routinely exercise hisbody in hunting and jousting, but he should also school himself in the virtues

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necessary to discharge his duties, in wisdom, charity, unselfishness, and loy-alty, and, above all, in courage, “for chivalry abideth not so agreeable in noplace as in noblesse of courage.”101 In Geoffroi of Charney’s judgment, chivalrycomprised an ethos in which athletic, martial, aristocratic, and Christian ele-ments were fused together. Embracing the positive sentiments expressed in theclassic chivalric code, and consonant with the values instilled in him duringhis formal education,102 Coubertin advocated for an Olympic formulationbased on the traditional virtues of chivalry. In 1918, he specifically called for a“broad-based athletic education accessible to all, trimmed with manly courageand the spirit of chivalry.”103 In 1928, he made an impassioned appeal for a“modern chivalry” that he hoped to see displayed by the athletes at theAmsterdam Games, a chivalry characterized by “its high ideals, its healthyroughness, its generous zeal.”104

Not only did the values of chivalry in general resonate with Coubertin, butspecific virtues echoed particularly strongly in his idealized Olympic visionand related rhetoric. Just as one 13th century romance writer suggested, “TheGood Knight upheld loyalty, prowess and honor,”105 so too did Coubertin resthis philosophic Olympic edifice to a great extent on the core values of honor,loyalty and prowess.106 These same values also reflected what MacAloon iden-tifies as the “structural triangle”—a matrix comprised of ‘name’ (nom, honneur,virtue), ‘deeds’ (noble travaux, beaux exemples, généreux sacrifices), and ‘voca-tion’ (guerrier, magistrate, home de genie, jurisconsonsulte, artiste)”—thatbecame a paradigm for action for each successive generation of French aristo-crats, including Coubertin’s generation as it sought to assert a new élan againsta weary and enervated nation.107

Honor, honneur, took particular pride of place in the medieval chivalriccode.108 Honor, according to historian Clifford Backman, was the “fundamen-tal core value of chivalry;”109 to historian Maurice Keen it was “the greatest leg-acy of chivalry to later times,”110 specifically and especially as honor related tothe idea of nobility and noble works. Social historian Richard Barber simplyidentified honor as “the shrine at which the Knight worshipped.”111 The socialvalue of honor, as the British social anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers pointsout, and as Coubertin well-understood, was that it provided “a nexus betweenthe ideals of society and their reproduction in the actions of individuals—honor permits men to act as they should even if opinions differ [from societyto society] as to how they should act.”112 Consequently, Coubertin allocated acentral role to the value of honor as he adumbrated his Olympic ideal. “Athlet-ics,” he wrote,

can bring into play both the noblest and basest passions; they candevelop the qualities of unselfishness and honor just as much as thelove of gain; they can be chivalrous or corrupt, virile or bestial; finallythey can be used to strengthen peace or to prepare for war. Now,


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nobility of sentiments, high regard for the virtues of unselfishness andhonor, a spirit of chivalry, virile an energy and peace are the primeneeds of modern democracies, whether republican or monarchic.113

Derivative of honor, and aligned with his broader aesthetic ideology, Coubertinalso grafted the modern Anglo-Saxon concepts of sportsmanship and fair playonto his Olympic construction. “The Olympic idea,” he wrote, “is the concept ofstrong physical culture based in part on the spirit of chivalry—what you here sopleasantly call ‘fair play’—and in part on the esthetic idea of the cult of what isbeautiful and graceful.”114 After all, as Backman writes, “no knight should vio-late his sense of honor by taking unfair advantage of another knight.”115

Nowhere is the concept of honor more centrally located than in the Olym-pic oath, an element of the Olympic protocol which Coubertin specificallyidentified as representative of “a commitment, an obligation in the name ofhonor.”116 Just as honor was the most solemn oath the medieval knight knew,117

so was it to become the virtuous cornerstone of the modern Olympic oath. Firsttaken at the Games of the VII Olympiad in Antwerp, the Belgian fencer VictorBoin declared on behalf of all athletes, “We swear that we are taking part in theOlympic Games as loyal competitors, observing the rules governing the Games,and anxious to show the spirit of chivalry, for the honor of our countries and forthe glory of sport.”118 While the current oath no longer invokes “the spirit ofchivalry,” as it once did, it still demands that athletes swear to compete in thename of honor, a collective honor, “the honor of our teams.”119

Just as the purely individualistic, even radically anarchic, force of chivalryneeded to be tied to a correspondingly positive social ethos, so also did Cou-bertin’s cult of sport need to be tied to a progressive collective ideology thatsought not only to refurbish a nation, but to morally advance a world. In bothcases, loyalty served as one of the integrative values; in the case of the medievalknight, loyalty to the chivalric code with its emergent emphasis on charity andcommunal justice,120 and, in the case of the Olympic athlete, loyalty to the ideaof fair-play and sportsmanship and to the notion of a courteous competitive-ness that ultimately served as a paradigm for a robust civic life as well as theultimate goals of a cosmopolitan internationalism. In 1935, Coubertin recog-nized the likenesses between the chivalric knight and the honorable athlete,writing that

Knights, above all else, are “brothers in arms,” brave, energetic menunited by a bond that is stronger than that of mere camaraderie,which is powerful enough in itself. In chivalry, the idea of competi-tion, of effort opposing effort for the love of the effort itself, of courte-ous yet violent struggle, is superimposed on the notion of mutualassistance, the basis of camaraderie.121

As in chivalry, so also in Olympic sport, the chivalrous cults of competition,loyalty, and honor remained mutually enshrined in a universal sacrament:

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“Healthy democracy, wise and peaceful internationalism, will penetrate thenew stadium and preserve within it the cult of honor and disinterestednesswhich will enable athletics to help in the tasks of moral education and socialpeace as well as of muscular development.”122

Coubertin’s emphasis on disinterestedness and the love of effort for itsown sake were also derivative of the knightly virtue of honor. According toGeoffroi de Charney, knights who exercise prowess should find that it is itsown reward, and that honor and justice are more worthy and socially valuablethan personal fortune. The concept of selflessness in the name of civic duty issimilarly affirmed in Chaucer’s description of knightly behavior in the“Miller’s Tale.” One scholar, Gregory Semenza, specifically argues that, whilewrestling in the “Miller’s Tale” is an activity practiced by both knights andcommoners, the medieval knight, in particular, “must remain a hero and agentleman,” because, at least in theory, “the knight’s athleticism was not to beemployed except in a socially functional manner,” namely, on behalf of the“stability and safety of the Kingdom.”123 Coubertin’s Olympic code, too,required a renewed spiritual and physical discipline dedicated to a larger socialgood, the Olympic athlete competing in “the spirit of sincere disinterested-ness” so that sport, “collective muscular exercise,” could become a “true schoolof moral perfection.”124 “O Sport,” Coubertin intoned in his renowned poem,“Ode to Sport,.. You are Honor! The titles you bestow are worthless save if wonin absolute fairness and perfect unselfishness.”

Central to Coubertin’s philosophy of Olympism, the knightly “cult of dis-interestedness” also stood as a moral bulwark against an overly commercialand materialistic culture that threatened the very fabric of sport, certainly themodel of sport, le pedagogie sportive, that Coubertin evinced as indispensableto the progress and rejuvenation of society. Referring specifically to his Olym-pic vision and the sanctity of the values of a selfless chivalry, he wrote:

As for the modern movement, it had hardly emerged before corruptionstrove to penetrate it. And by corruption is meant not only profit andmonetary gain, which directly and indirectly entice the athlete andchampion in a thousand ingenious ways, but also the crumbling andere long the obliteration of the spirit of chivalry. From the day when thesportsman ceases to place above all else his joy in his own effort and therapture of power and body equilibrium which result from it, from theday when he lets himself be mastered by considerations of vanity orself-interest, from that day his ideal is tainted and its educational value… immediately diminished. That is why in these times, when the thirstfor gold piles up so many evils, and having instigated a vile holocaust… it is of the utmost urgency that a school of practical chivalry shouldbe open to youth, a school in which it will learn that success can beobtained by will and perseverance and can be consecrated only byuprightness and loyalty. And their school will be sport.125


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He railed equally strongly against the moral decline that visited “one of themost noble sports” in France, fencing. That “fine chivalrous spirit which ruledit a few years ago,” he observed, “is becoming even more rare; a mandarinate ofbutton-blows … is being organized under our eyes.”126

Coubertin’s language also gave expression to a vaulted position that formany years rationalized the code of amateurism and established the OlympicMovement, at least during its early years, as yet another institutionalizedexample of a privileged class seeking to protect its preeminent socio-politicalstatus. In stringent terms, Coubertin opined that,

Sport has grown up within a society which the lust for money isthreatening to rot to its marrow. It is for the sports clubs now to set agood example by returning to the code of honor and sincerity, and bycasting out mendacity and hypocrisy from their midst … Let themruthlessly disqualify the false amateurs who in more or less directforms reap fat rewards from participation in public events.127

But the “demi-god” of knightly values, what medievalist Richard Kaeuper alsocalls the “quasi-religion of chivalric honor,”128 the ultimate quality of the knightas depicted in les chansons de geste, romance, vernacular literature, chivalricbiography, and chronicle, was prowess, prouesse.129 The Lady of the Lake tellsGuinevere that she raised the young Lancelot “because of the great prowess thatwas to manifest itself in this knight.”130 Within the chivalric tradition, prowessgenerally referred to proficiency in feats of martial combat and violence, but, asthe American sociologist Jesse Pitts points out, prouesse in French culture ingeneral and the aristocratic ethos in particular described conspicuous moralacts undertaken for the sake of honor rather than utility.131 Prouesse became aconcept that not only provided a moral framework for Coubertin’s own ambi-tions as he sought to institutionalize his Olympic dream,132 but also a conceptthat allowed him to rhetorically rationalize the feats of his Olympic athletic elitein the name of a greater moral good, what he ultimately identified as nothingless than “the general welfare” and “betterment of humanity.”133

The prowess of his Olympic athlete was to serve as an inspiration for soci-ety. “In order for a hundred people to take part in physical culture,” he wrote,“it is necessary for fifty to take part in sport; in order for fifty to take part insport, twenty must specialize; in order for twenty to specialize, five must becapable of astonishing feats of prowess.”134 Consequently, he enjoined athletesto dare, to aspire to greatness, to embrace “initiative, perseverance, intensity,search for perfection, disdain for possible danger,”135 to seek “freedom ofexcess,”136 to strive for excellence, break world records, and to compete collec-tively every four years in the Olympic Games, those “peaceful and chivalrouscontests” that “constitute the best of internationalism.”137

Both medieval chivalry and Coubertin’s modern Olympic edifice were rifewith paradox; both represented conflicting possibilities—preparation for war

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or education for peace, as a model for social order or as the paradigm fornaked competition, for blatant self-interest or for altruistic service. Coubertinwell understood the dialectic of sport, that it could be noble or ignoble, doctri-naire or enlightened, but he was, as Lucas describes him, “a consummateromantic,”138 and so he celebrated and, hence, sought to institutionalize theprogressive values he encountered in what he consciously and purposefullyinterpreted as an honorable code of chivalry, a code that he once saluted as“the last summit and supreme goal of sporting activity.”139

Medieval TournamentsCoubertin not only idealized the values of chivalry, he also idealized the famedtournaments that featured the knight in action. The great social spectacle ofchivalry, medieval tournaments were as characteristic of the age as were thePan-Hellenic Games of antiquity or the gladiatorial games of the ImperialRoman Empire. Tournaments were both écoles de prousse, and, as Pope Inno-cent II called them, “detestable markets and fairs … at which knights are wontto assemble in order to display their strength and their rash boldness.”140 Cou-bertin assumed the best in medieval tournaments, and, emphasizing the pro-found role of sport in modern democracies, cast the medieval tournament inthe role of “social educator.”141 While the athletics of antiquity served as the“agent of human equilibrium,” chivalry served as the agent of social education:“We must look not only towards the Olympic gymnasium,” he wrote, “but alsotowards those much-neglected and much-misunderstood tournaments of theMiddle Ages whose only fault was sometimes to push beyond reason the ele-gant cult of honor, stoicism and generosity.”142

For Coubertin, social education, more than physical, intellectual, andmoral education, was vital to the health and evolution of modern democra-cies. Although he never fully explains how medieval tournaments func-tioned as social educators, he does argue that the two bases of democraticeducation are “proper hygiene and cooperation,”143 the maintenance of ahealthy body and, most importantly, a deep and abiding appreciation for thedynamics of a communal life. Suggesting that no association can functionunless “fed by a mixture of personal activity, mutual tolerance, and a properunderstanding of common interests,”144 Coubertin presumably interprets thecamaraderie of the knight and the knight’s associative organization, thebrotherhood of knights, as an engine for inculcating what he calls “solidarityand mutual responsibility,”145 social skills learned not in theory, but in theactive pursuit of group life.

While Coubertin was largely silent about the workings of the medievaltournament as social educator, he was far from silent when it came to the qual-ities of social education that he attributed to the Arnoldian system of Englishpublic school sport. “The most noteworthy aspect of English education,” he


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informed his compatriots, is “the role that sports play in that education.” Therole of sport is “physical, moral and social, all at the same time,” he wrote.

Sport means movement, and the influence of movement on bodies issomething that has been evident from time immemorial. Strengthand agility have been deeply appreciated among savage and civilizedpeople alike. Both are achieved through exercise and practice: happybalance in the moral order, mens sana in corpora sano say theancients.146

The English public school model of sport was particularly distinctive to Cou-bertin not only because it ascribed the highest ethical values to participation inschool games and athletics, but also because it furnished a “perfect terrain forsocial education,” preparation for life in an environment that was “a wholesociety in miniature.”147 The liberty that the English school boy was allowed inorganizing, administering, and participating in sport cultivated a dynamiccooperative that would serve as preparation for life in a robust democracy,allowing the “boys to create and inhabit a society as homologous as possiblewith the adult world they would soon enter.”148

Although Coubertin certainly never said so, it is possible that he imputeda similar social function to tournaments. After all, the medieval tournamentwas not just the “school and study of arms,”149 it introduced young knights, aswell as spectators, to a whole scale of civil values and virtues that spoke to thedevelopment of physical skills and fitness as well as to the development ofknightly character and the traits deemed most worthy of a true nobleman.150

The 13th century minstrel Jacques Bretel, for example, wrote that, “without giv-ing, a tourney is not worth two livres tournois: for largesse is one of the robes ofprouesse; courtesy is the second; the third is… honesty.”151 Tournaments hadan important integrative social function in the sense that they portrayedesteemed social values in action and deeply influenced social mores and atti-tudes.152 They also served as the expression of an order that drew men from farafield, inculcated appropriate social behavior, and depicted a martial and aris-tocratic ideology that transcended local boundaries and parochial interests.They even operated as a socializing mechanism for knights as they preparedfor service in social and civic life.

Perhaps, most importantly to Coubertin, the medieval tournament servedas a point of diffusion for a chivalrous culture that sought to advance the inter-ests of an enlightened communal life.153 As Keen writes: “It could indeed beargued that the relatively subtle influence of the tournament did more, in thelong run, to promote standards of civilized behavior between belligerent forcesthan papal prohibitions, issued in the name of restraining undisciplined vio-lence, ever looked like doing.”154

The knight was seen to embody moral social behavior, and, according toMacAloon, Coubertin likely seized upon the image of the knight at the same

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time as he was looking to transform sports from the idle pastimes of the“bejeweled and gallant rich” to a form of moral education available to all. Themedieval tournament was, MacAloon suggests, “one of the strands of adoles-cent inspiration which lay behind the revival of the Olympic Games.”155

In the end, however, it is a mistake to impute too much importance to themedieval tournament in Coubertin’s thinking. He only mentions the idea ofthe tournament as social education once in his voluminous writings, and, eventhen, he makes no effort to expound upon the claim. He is far more eloquentand vociferous about the English system of games as social educator and therole it could play in his effort to revitalize France and create an enduring dem-ocratic society. But, that said, he mentions the medieval tournament in thesame breath as the athletics of antiquity, arguing that both were pivotal histor-ical moments in Olympic lineage. In this sense, the tournament served animportant role in the etiology of his Olympic project.

Chivalry, Masculinity, and Imperialism

The renowned Greek historian Thucydides once claimed that the three causesof the Peloponnesian War were fear, interest, and honor, and, that of the triad,it was honor—for both the warrior and those who admired him—that meta-morphosed individual fear and interest into something beyond a merely fleet-ing response to events and made action morally reasonable. Honor is alwaysmore individually rooted and only metaphorically a collective trait, and itbecame a crucial historical element in the construction of masculinity. Themost enduring cultural mediator between the individual warrior and his socialgroup, between violence and civility, between war and peace, honor palliatesthe propensity for male physical violence and transposes it into sociallyacceptable and productive forms.

The transformative power of honor is no less compelling for Coubertin’sOlympic athlete than it was for Thucydides’s soldier or chivalry’s knight. Forthe Olympic athlete, with his mixed ancestry in medieval chivalry, MuscularChristianity, and the distant memory of classical Hellenism, honor consti-tuted a social practice within which numerous seemingly disparate valuescould be fused: material gain and idealism, social hierarchy and social egali-tarianism, competition and cooperation, nationalism and internationalism.To resolve these conflicting precepts, the preaching of chivalry and honoremphasized the relationship between agonetic masculinity and the ambitionsof a peaceful cosmopolitanism. In fact, one of the singular achievements ofCoubertin’s Olympic Movement was to bring a chivalric manhood in theguise of a performative nationalism onto the world stage during the lastdecade of the 19th century. In place of the warrior body, Olympism stressedthe agonetic body as the essence of personal and collective character, first in


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athletic competition, and later, in artistic creativity—or, as Coubertin liked tothink of it, purification through athletic performance. At the heart of Olymp-ism, Coubertin wrote, was a “sort of moral Altis,” a “sanctuary reserved forthe consecrated, purified athlete only, the athlete admitted to the main com-petitions and who became, in this way, a sort of priest, an officiating priest inthe religion of the muscles.”156

As fears of national degeneracy grew in France in the aftermath of theFranco-Prussian War and in the face of a perceived widespread effeminacy, thelink between sport and national vitality, first promoted at the time of the Rev-olution and the Napoleonic Wars, became even more pronounced duringCoubertin’s milieu. Throughout Europe, sport became the realm of an ener-getic male fellowship and purified physicality that pointedly excluded women,such that the perfected male body became the goal of numerous movements inEurope that embraced national revitalization, including gymnastic societies inGermany, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia, what Friedrich Ludwig Jahn referredto in The German Art of Gymnastics (1816) as “love of the fatherland throughgymnastics.”157 Underlying the cult of athletics in England was the familiarorganic metaphor that identified the health of the male body with the health ofthe nation—the male body as the locus of political power. Within ThomasArnold’s pedagogical formulation, the goal was “the body of a Greek and thesoul of a Christian Knight,”158 a vigorous manliness that would replenish adepleted national moral and physical stock. As historian Leo Braudy argues,the central importance of Greek and Latin literature in the curriculum furtherunderscored the argument that manliness involved a distinct element of malecamaraderie: “the cult of the classical thereby joined hands with the cult of themedieval, which also highlighted and celebrated the beauty and spirituality ofthe virgin boy, the Galahad whose purity, athleticism, and moral rectitudewould serve as a tonic for a nation.”159 In this sense, Hellenism, medievalism,Muscular Christianity, and Olympism all drew from the same ideological well-spring.

Advocating for an athletically purified masculinity, Coubertin summarilydismissed women from Olympic participation, advocating instead that theideal Olympic athlete was “the individual adult male.”160 The notion of a femi-nine Olympiad was to Coubertin “impractical, uninteresting, ungainly, and …improper.” At the core of the Olympics was “the solemn and periodic exalta-tion of male athleticism, based on internationalism, by means of fairness, in anartistic setting, with the applause of women as reward.” Furthermore, Couber-tin added, “This combination of the ancient ideal and the traditions of chivalryis the only healthful and satisfactory one.”161 References to chivalry rational-ized both the increasing moralization of sport—the sublimation of the athletesand their ambitions to the dictates of sportsmanship and fair play—as well asthe model of male athletic camaraderie and exclusivity which relegated

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women to the sideline. Although never instituted, Coubertin contemplated aprize ceremony, modeled after the Games at Much Wenlock and grounded in“the chivalrous customs of the Middle Ages,” whereby “the winner received hisprize from a lady before whom he knelt.”162

Within the context of national revitalization, the fears of an apparenteffeminacy, and national expansion, sport also served a burgeoning imperial-ism, and it did so on the basis of a transparent Eurocentrism. “In the face offears of racial degeneracy,” Braudy writes

amid the new burdens of empire, sports could be energizer and thepurifier, creating the right sort of man, but also the right sort of sol-dier-imperialist, bringing civilized order and fair play to the frontier,along with rituals of initiation, physical pain, and manly stoicismthat were not unlike those undergone by the more barbarous foe.163

The now famous aphorism that ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playingfields of Eton’ reveals the relationship between the philosophy of athleticism inthe English public schools and the practical and ideological exigencies ofempire. “If asked what our muscular Christianity has done,” Cotton Minchinhaughtily proclaimed, “we point to our Empire.”164 Or, as the narrator in TomBrown’s School Days put it: “My dear sir, a battle would look much the same toyou, except the boys would be men, and the balls iron; but a battle would beworth your looking at for all that, and so is a football match.”165 In the contextof empire, it is not surprising that sport acquired a significance, even a holi-ness, that carried indisputable moral weight. “The spirit of sport has sustainedmany a healthy and productive oasis in the desert of artificialism and com-mercialism,” John Ashley Cooper wrote, “the underlying philosophy of ourNational and Imperial games is not only to produce skill, discipline, loyalty,endurance, steadiness in attack, patience in misfortune, and other physical andmental qualities, but to encourage unselfishness, which is synonymous withgood temper, good humour and honour.”166 The resurrection of Arthurian leg-ends in the 19th century allowed boys, and men, living in the world of imperi-alist expansion to believe that they were engaged more in a spiritual andbenevolent quest than a materialist and military conquest. The rhetoric ofhonor, gentlemanliness, and chivalric athleticism became a comforting justifi-cation for ethnocentricity, chauvinism, and imperialism, as well as for theexclusiveness of the Olympic Games.

As social theorist Ben Carrington rightly notes, there were strong analo-gies between Olympism and humanism. Olympism was a compelling admix-ture of the ‘renaissance,’ ‘romantic,’ and ‘Enlightenment’ traditions of Frenchhumanism found in the various works of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant,as well as the athletic ideology of the English public school.167 Coubertin’s con-ception of humanism also claimed its roots stretching back to medievalismand its chivalric idealism, and antiquity, linking mind, body, and spirit in the


25

quest for individual and collective moral improvement and progress. But, asphilosopher Tony Davis points out, humanism is a two-edged sword. Human-ism can serve “as an ideological smokescreen for the oppressive mystificationof modern society and culture” and cause “the marginalization and oppressionof the multitude of human beings in whose name it pretends to speak,” and “aphilosophical champion of human freedom and dignity, standing alone andoften outnumbered against the battalions of ignorance, tyranny and supersti-tion.”168 For those such as Matthew Arnold, humanism was synonymous withcultural development and the expansion of European civilization. For thosesuch as Coubertin, Olympism was synonymous with physical developmentand the perfection of the dominant race:

We must establish the tradition that each competitor shall in hisbearing and conduct as a man of honor and a gentleman endeavorto prove in what respect he holds the Games and what an honor hefeels to participate in them … Such is my view of the developmentwhich ought to take place in the institution of the modern OlympicGames … The work must be lasting, to exercise over the sports of thefuture that necessary and beneficial influence for which I look—aninfluence which shall make them the means of bringing to perfectionthe strong and hopeful youth of our white race, thus again helpingtowards the perfection of all human society.169

In short, like medieval chivalry, and even ancient Hellenism, especially to theextent that the ancient Olympics fostered exclusive, racial Greekness, Couber-tin’s Olympism was predicated on an elitist doctrine which lead to the overtmasculinization and racialization of the Olympic athlete. Eurocentric doc-trines of internationalism and Olympism, dignified and historicized by refer-ences to chivalry and concomitant concepts of honor, achievement, and loyaltyto an ideal, rationalized Olympic class, gender, and ethnic exclusivity. On theone hand, Coubertin’s persistent references to chivalry endowed Olympismwith a nobility of character and purpose; on the other hand, they bequeathedOlympism with a regressive proclivity to trumpet the disreputable narrative ofan identifiably Eurocentric historicism.

Coubertin's Historicism

The great German historian Jacob Burckhardt insisted that the interest of thehistorian must be personal, authentic, and participatory, and he admonishedhis students to understand the difference between Parteilichkeit and Vorliebe,the difference between partisanship and elective affection. The serious histo-rian, he argued, must eschew partisanship because it posited a view of historyas essentialist, as consisting of discernible patterns which simply required iden-tification and celebration.170 American historian Jacques Barzun said some-thing very similar, arguing that to seek patterns and rhythms in history “is not

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enlightening but productive of superstition.” Further, Barzun writes, the histo-rian who “gazes at history and sees a grand design in its unfolding, shows thathe takes men for stones acted upon and not acting.” In so doing, “he deniesreality to history’s most conspicuous feature, which is active change.”171

In many ways, Coubertin was guilty of historical partisanship, of impos-ing on his Olympic history a master narrative that spoke to the hallowed heri-tage of Olympism, a view of the Games as the culmination of a line of historythat spanned the centuries and that he drew from ancient Hellenism to medie-val chivalry, and, ultimately, to the athletic cosmology of his own time. In1896, he wrote:

When a new idea springs up, assumes a practical form and becomesa reality, it is not always easy to explain why this particular idea,more than any other, has emerged from the stream of other thoughts,which are as yet awaiting their realization. This however is not thecase with the reinstitution of the Olympic Games. Their revival isnot the result of a spontaneous dream, but the logical consequence ofthe great cosmopolitan tendencies of our times.172

In other words, rather than a passing fancy, the Olympic Games were con-strued by Coubertin as the culmination of an identifiable movement acrosshistory.173 “I lift my glass to the Olympic idea,” he wrote, “which has traversedthe mists of the ages like an all-powerful ray of sunlight and returned to illu-mine the threshold of the 20th century with a gleam of joyous hope.”174 Simi-larly, when acknowledging the contribution of the 7th Olympiad, he declaredthat “when the new Olympic Games were inaugurated at Athens two yearsafter the proclamation of their coming revival, the institution received at thefoot of the Acropolis a classical baptism which linked it to the illustriouspast.”175

To a great extent, Coubertin was merely following in the footsteps of theclassical meta-narratives of history that dominated Europe in the late 19th cen-tury, all of which were couched in terms of some notion of progress. LikeHegel’s version of the Unfolding of World Spirit Realizing Itself, Marx’s materi-alist inversion in terms of Class Struggles and Human Emancipation towardsPure Communism, and the Whig version of the Onward March towards Lib-erty and Democracy, Coubertin’s Olympism, too, shared a common “nine-teenth-century faith in evolutionary progress towards some ultimate goals, ortelos, of all of human history.”176 Coubertin in fact was singularly eloquent inhis advocacy of sport as the purveyor of progress. “O Sport,’ he wrote, “you areFecundity! You tend by straight and noble paths towards a more perfect race…O Sport, you are Progress! To serve you well, man must better himself in bodyand in soul.”177

Idealist historicism as it may have been, references to Hellenism andmedievalism stood Coubertin in good stead in an era besotted by ancient


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Greek and chivalric forms. As Clastres argues, it was a question of endowinghis Olympic project with a noble appearance and, from a diplomatic point ofview, neutralizing it by depriving it of any national connotation, even a Frenchone.178 By suggesting that the modern Olympic Games were the teleologicaldestination of a trans-millennial cosmology that sprang initially from the soilof ancient Olympia, Coubertin popularized and justified his Olympic vision,elevating his creation above all other international sporting events and cham-pionships, including other Olympic Games,179 and endowing his version ofcompetitive, international sport with a sacred and privileged aura. Even ifCoubertin did not literally mean that “Hellenic Olympism had re-entered theworld after an eclipse of several centuries,”180 even if it was a rhetorical flourishmeant to inspire and appeal, like so much of his language, he nonethelessaligned himself with a tradition of historical scholarship that failed to recog-nize that the Olympic Games were, like all human institutions, the result not ofwhat the famed English historian H. A. L. Fisher called the harmonies of plot,rhythm, and pattern,181 but rather what the celebrated French philosopher andsociologist Raymond Aron characterized as “the irrevocable choice by falliblemen in unforeseen circumstances and semi-ignorance.”182

Conclusion

Coubertin may not have been a first class historian, or, for that matter, a firstclass philosopher; he was not, to use Clastres characterization, “a great connois-seur of the Ancient Games.”183 Nor was he an astute student of chivalry. Rather,he was a brilliant sports promoter, and he bequeathed to his Olympic Games aunique identity and a distinguished pedigree. Part of his success was that heknew how to appeal to history, especially a history that resonated with his era.While the most poignant and persuasive allusions were always those he made tothe Games of antiquity, and while he himself was clearly most smitten with theancient Olympic epoch, he was also heavily influenced by chivalry, both medie-val chivalry and the culturally filtered versions of chivalry he encountered inFrance and England. Chivalry impacted him in both direct and indirect ways:directly, in the sense that he was exposed to the history and literature of chivalrywithin his own education and culture, and within the cultural traditions, prac-tices, and ideologies of England, most especially the English public school; and,indirectly, in the sense that chivalric images, references, artifacts, architecture,and values were resplendent in both France and England, and, to some extent,throughout Europe in the 19th century. The values and morals of chivalry duringthis time informed many of the cultural paradigms and institutions that influ-enced his thinking and certainly constructed his cultural experience.

It is also worth remembering that Coubertin’s homeland, France, was thebirthplace of chivalry, chevalerie, and chivalric literature. Even to the Germans,

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France was the true land of the knights, das rehten ritterschefte Lant,184 and,while chivalry was nurtured within a broad European context,185 it was theFrench circumstance and cultural temperament that gave shape and definitionto chivalry. Chivalry was part of Coubertin’s cultural heritage, part of France’snational historical consciousness, and, no doubt, one of the ingredients thatengendered Coubertin’s sense of noblesse d’oblige.

In 1896, the same year that Coubertin consummated his beloved Olympicrevival, Martin du Gard’s fictional hero Jean Barois was founding his periodical,Le Semeur. Not unlike Coubertin’s ambitions for le pedagogie sportive and levirilité scolaire, Le Semeur was also designed to insert a new élan into a tired andenervated world. While du Gard probably gave little if any thought to Couber-tin’s achievements, the work of both men reveals the possibilities that a particu-lar moment in time presented to a privileged social group. Both men aimed at“moral rearmament education,” to use Weber’s apt phrase.186 While du Gardchose literature, Coubertin chose sport. In order to legitimize, and, in fact, sellhis Olympic project, both politically and ideologically, Coubertin reachedacross history and invoked medieval chivalry in much the same way as he sum-moned up memories and images of ancient Olympia. Though Olympia maywell be the most evocative reference in his Olympic rhetoric, chivalry was anequally critical historical ingredient in the realization of his Olympic dream.

Endnotes

1 Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1992), 1.

2 Pierre de Coubertin, “Why I Revived the Olympic Games,” FortnightlyReview 90 (1908), 111.

3 S. von Kortzfleisch, “Religious Olympism,” Social Research 37 (1970), 231.4 See, for example, Sigmund Loland, “Coubertin’s Ideology of Olympism

from the Perspective of the History of Ideas,” Olympika: The InternationalJournal of Olympic Studies IV (1995), 49-77; John A. Lucas, “The Influenceof Anglo-American Sport on Pierre de Coubertin—Modern OlympicGames Founder,” in: The Modern Olympics, eds. Peter J. Graham and HorstUeberhorst (West Point, NY: Leisure Press, 1976), 27-36; John J. MacAloon,This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olym-pic Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Roland Renson, M.Lämmer, James Riordan and D. Chassiotis, eds., “The Olympic GamesThrough the Ages: Greek Antiquity and its Impact on Modern Sport,” Pro-ceedings of the 13th International HISPA Congress, Olympia, Greece, May 22-28, 1989; David C. Young, The Modern Olympics: A Struggle for Revival (Bal-timore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).


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5 Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings (Lausanne: Interna-tional Olympic Committee, 2000), 218.

6 Ibid., 287.7 Ibid., 218.8 Ibid.9 Pierre de Coubertin, “A Typical Englishman: Dr. W. P. Brookes of Wen-

lock,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 15 (1897), 64-65.10 Coubertin, Olympism, 314.11 Ibid., 374.12 Pierre de Coubertin, The Olympic Idea: Discourses and Essays (Stuttgart:

Carl-Diem-Institut, 1967), 113.13 Ibid., 80.14 Ibid., 112.15 Lucas, “The influence of Anglo-American sport on Pierre de Coubertin,”

35.16 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 107.17 Coubertin, Olympism, 535.18 Ibid., 218. 19 Ibid.20 Ibid., 535.21 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 6.22 Coubertin, Olympism, 570.23 Ibid., 218.24 Russell Kirk, “Foreword,” in: Historical Consciousness: The Remembered

Past, John Lukacs (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1994), xii.25 See Gerit Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).26 There is, not surprisingly, an extensive body of literature on chivalry, but,

see, in particular, Ian Anstruther, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Accountof the Eglinton Tournament, 1839 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963); Clifford R.Backman, The World of Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003); Richard Barber, The Knights and Chivalry (London: Longmans,1970); Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Mangan (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1961); Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, andthe Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Mark Girouard,The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1981); Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence inMedieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Maurice Keen,Nobles, Knights, and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages (Rio Grande, OH:Hambledon Press, 1996); Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale Uni-

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versity Press, 1984); Sidney Painter, French Chivalric Ideas and Practices inMedieval France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940); Nigel Saul, Chiv-alry in Medieval England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

27 Saul, Chivalry in Medieval England, 3.28 See, W. H. Rice, “Deux Poems sur la Chevalerie: Le Breviare des Nobles

d’Alain Chartier et Le Psaultier des Vilains de Michault Taillevent,”Romania, lxxv (1954), 54-97.

29 Quoted in Joachim Burke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in theHigh Middle Ages, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1991), 302.

30 R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1964), 115.

31 Quoted in Conrad Greenia, trans., Treatises III: On Grace and FreeChoice. Praise of the New Knighthood in The Works of Bernard of Chair-vaux. Volume Seven. Daniel O’Donnovan and Conrad Greenia (Kalama-zoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977), 132.

32 Quoted in Carl Erdmann, The Origins of the Idea of Cruscade, trans. Mar-shal Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1977), 339-340.

33 Kaeuper, Chivalry, 80.34 Ibid., 77.35 Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the

Investiture Contest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 36.36 Bloch, Feudal Society, 318; Backman, The World of Medieval Europe, 129.37 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (New York:

Bantam Books, 1982), 82.38 Quoted in Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 169.39 Ibid., 308-31040 See A. B. Furgeson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham:

Duke University Press, 1960).41 An Accession Day tilt seems to have taken place at Westminster on

March 24. John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Fes-tivities of King James the First (London: J. B. Nichols, 1828), IV, 968.

42 Barber notes of the demise of chivalry that: “The ideals of chivalryappealed to the emotions, and they flourish best in a gothic and romanticclimate; neoclassicism appeals to reason and to the sense of order. Whenthe seeds sown by the Renaissance humanists became the classical move-ment of 17th century France, chivalry was driven from the land which hadfor so long been its chief refuge.” Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, 341.

43 Edith. J. Morley, Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance with the ThirdElizabethan Dialogue (London: Henry Frowde, 1911), 51, 58.


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44 Quoted in Girouard, The Return to Camelot, 113.45 See Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Nobles and French Medie-

val Art (PhD diss., New York University, 1996).46 See Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Evolution (New York: Frederick

Unger, 1965).47 See Janine Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature, 1851-1900

(London: Oxford University Press, 1973).48 See Peter Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations

Through Eight Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).49 See Elizabeth Emery, “The Truth about the Middle Ages: La Revue des

Deux Mondes and Late Nineteenth Century Medievalism,” in: Medieval-ism and the Quest for the ‘Real’ Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Simmons (Port-land: Frank Cass, 2001), 98-114.

50 Ludovic Vitet, “Une Novella Histoire de France, de M. Guizot,” La Revuedes Deux Mondes 95, no. 2 (May 15, 1872), 439.

51 In particular, see Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 1-50. Weber paints thecultural context which motivated many of Coubertin’s peers to invest inreenergizing France.

52 Quoted in Michel de Lézinier, Avec Huysmans (Paris: Andre Delpeuch,1928), 193. Also quoted in Fernande Zayed, Huysmans: Peintre de sonEpoch (Paris: Nizet, 1973), 432.

53 Pierre de Coubertin, Une Campaigne de 21 Ans (Paris: Libraire de L’Édu-cation Physique, 1908), 2.

54 Joseph Duggan, “Franco-German Conflict and the History of FrenchScholarship on the Song of Roland,” in: Hermeneutics and Medieval Cul-ture, eds. Patrick J. Gallagher and Helen Damico (Albany: State Univer-sity Press, 1989), 103.

55 Fustel de Coulanges, “L’Organization de la Justice dans L’Antiquité et lesTemps Modern. III. La Justice Royale au Moyen Age,” La Revue des DeuxMondes 94, no. 2 (Aug. 1, 1871), 536-537.

56 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 51.57 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 134.58 Pierre de Coubertin, The Evolution of France under the Third Republic,

trans. Isabel Hapgood (New York: Crowell, 1897), 6. 59 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 23.60 W. L. Wiley, The Gentlemen of Renaissance France (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1954), 8.61 François de Mézeray, Abrégé Chronologie de l'Histoire de France, 3 Vols.

(Paris: Esprit Billiot, 1717), III, 3.

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62 Quoted in N. Tommaseo, Relations des Ambassadeurs Vnétiens sur lesAffaires de France au XVIe Siècle, 2 Vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale,1838), I, 283.

63 Honneur has always remained one of the desirable qualities in a gentle-man. Rabelais, for example, argued that it was the instinct in well-bornand cultured people that encouraged them to engage in noble rather thanignoble deeds (François Rabelais, Gargantua, LVII). Ronsard admired theman who was upright and not a servant to vice, who scorned the greedand materialism of the Court, who would rather die than become corrupt,and a man who loved honneur more than the mandate of a king (Pierre deRonsard, Discources a M. De Chevorny, I, 911).

64 His notion of benevolent paternalism would ultimately find its way intothe structure of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

65 Eugen Weber, “Pierre de Coubertin and the Introduction of OrganizedSport into France,” Journal of Contemporary History 5 (1970), 3-26.

66 Kenelm Henry Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour (London: EdwardLumley, 1822).

67 Sir Walter Scott, Essays on Chivalry (London: Frederick Warne and Com-pany, 1824).

68 Stacey Grimaldi, A Suit of Armour for Youth (London: Proprietor, 1824).69 Mill, The History of Chivalry. 70 Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (London: Rand McNally, 1855). Also, in

the 1830s, an aggressive group of journalists and novelists published in avariety of incursions into life, literature, and politics in the popular Fra-ser’s Magazine that was clearly conditioned by the spirit of chivalry. SeeGirouard, The Return to Camelot, 76.

71 Digby, Godefridus, in The Broad Stone of Honour, 87.72 Quoted in Marie-Thérèse Eyquem, Pierre de Coubertin: L’Épopée (Paris:

Calmann-Lévy, 1966), 58.73 Sir Walter Scott, Miscellaneous Prose Works (London: Wells and Lilly,

1878), 525.74 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 51.75 Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England, trans. Edward Hyams (London:

Thames and Hudson, 1957).76 Ibid., 168. 77 Ibid., 144.78 Ibid., 145.79 Weber, France, 18. 80 J. A. Mangan, “Duty unto Death: English Masculinity and Militarism in

the Age of New Imperialism,” in Tribal Identities: Nationalism, Europe,and Sport, ed. J. A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 12.


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81 Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour, 575.82 Coubertin, Olympism, 360. Coubertin’s perspective on amateurism was

actually complex and nuanced. Coubertin was not the stringent apologistfor amateurism that he is often made out to be. But, he was the consum-mate pragmatist and recognized that the success of his Olympic projectdepended to a great extent on his ability to work with the world leader-ship of sport and the prevailing norms. He later declared in 1936 that“there is not and never has been any such thing as amateurism… Only theOlympic spirit matters. All the rest is of trifling importance.” Ibid., 521.

83 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 166.84 Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour, 556.85 Edward FitzGerald, Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth (London: William

Pickering, 1851), 222.86 Ibid., 230.87 Sir Henry Newbolt, The Book of the Happy Warrior (London: Longmans

Green & Co., 1917), vii.88 See Frederick Gale, Life of the Hon. Robert Grimston (London: Longmans

Green & Co., 1883), 308.89 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School:

The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), 197.

90 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 43-82.91 Pierre de Coubertin, L’Éducation Anglaise en France (Paris: Hachette,

1887), 636.92 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 7.93 Coubertin, L’Éducation Anglaise, 643.94 Ibid., 20. The following message, sent by Coubertin to the Los Angeles

Games in 1932, was displayed on the scoreboard: “The important thing inthe Olympic Games is not winning but taking part.” For a discussion ofthe derivation of these words and the associated sentiments, see TureWidlund, “Ethelbert Talbot: His Life and Place in Olympic History,”Citius, Altius, Fortius: Journal of the International Society of Olympic His-torians 2, no. 2 (May 1994), 7-14, and David C. Young, “On the Source ofthe Olympic Credo,” Olympika: The International Journal of OlympicStudies III (1994), 17-26.

95 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 103.96 Patrick Clastres, “Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937): The chivalry of

sportsmen. A political biography.” Paper presented at the Annual Confer-ence of the North American Society for Sport History, Halifax, Nova Sco-tia, Canada, May 24-27, 2013; Jeux Olympiques: Un siècle de passions(Paris: Les Quatre Chemins, 2008).

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97 A. P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold D. D. (Lon-don: Fellowes, 1844), Ch. V, Letter 7.

98 Coubertin, Olympism, 515.99 Ibid., 535.100 Ibid., 581.101 Quoted in Keen, Chivalry, 10.102 One of the most important classes in Coubertin’s Saint-Ignace education

was the class in rhetoric in which students were asked to “place noblewords into the mouths of great personages … lofty sentiments … Honor,dignity, virtue, nobility, courage, sacrifice, renunciation of the world.” SeeAntoine Prost, Histoire de l’Enseignement en France, 1800-1967 (Paris:Armand Colin, 1968), 52-53. In other words, there was an obvious conso-nance between his formal education and the established virtues of chiv-alry.

103 Coubertin, Olympism, 548. 104 Ibid., 514.105 See Ross G. Arthur, trans., Three Arthurian Romances: Poems from Medi-

eval France (London: Orion Publishing Group, 1996), 12.106 Martial prowess, honor, liberality and pride in loyal service were also the

hallmarks of the hero in the Caroliginian epics, the older Germanic epicliterature, Beowulf, and the Hildebrandslied.

107 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 13. 108 Honor took a central place in both medieval chivalry and late 19th century

European culture. Anthropologists and historians have long recognizedthat any society animated by a code of honor will be highly competitive.As Pitt-Rivers argues: “Respect and precedence are paid to those whoclaim it and are sufficiently powerful to enforce their claim. Just as posses-sion is said to be nine-tenths of the law, so the de facto achievement ofhonor depends upon ability to silence anyone who would dispute thetitle.” Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honor and Social Status,” in: Honor and Shame:The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1970), 24.

109 Backman, The World of Medieval Europe, 129.110 Keen, Chivalry, 249.111 Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, 32.112 Pitt-Rivers, “Honor and Social Status,” 38.113 Coubertin, Olympism, 322.114 Ibid., 588.115 Backman, The World of Medieval Europe, 129.116 Coubertin, Olympism, 525.


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117 See Barber, The Knight and Chivalry, 32.118 Coubertin, Olympism, 482.119 See Karel Wendl, “The Olympic Oath—a Brief History,” Citius, Altius,

Fortius (Winter 1995), 4.120 Chrétian de Troyes’s Perceval is the moral tale of a knight’s education,

where charity, faith and the demands of the common good, and especiallythe needs of the poor, supersede the yearning for glory, prowess, and fameas the ultimate goals. See Nigel Bryant, trans., Perceval: The Book of theGrail (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982).

121 Coubertin, Olympism, 581.122 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 9.123 Gregory M. Colón Semenza, “Historicizing ‘Wrastlynge’ in the Miller’s

Tale,” The Chaucer Review 38, no. 1 (2003), 68. For a summary of themedieval knight as hero, athlete and gentleman, see Sally North, “TheIdeal Knight as Presented in some French Narrative Poems, c. 1090-1240:An Outline Sketch,” in: The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood:Papers from the First and Second Strawberry Hill Conference, eds. Christo-pher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Rochester: Boydell Press, 1986), 111-132.

124 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 15.125 Ibid., 83-84. 126 Ibid., 15.127 Ibid., 97.128 Kaueper, Chivalry and Violence, 129-130. With regard to the obsessive

emphasis placed on personal prowess as the fundamental chivalric trait,Kaueper also notes that, “not simply one quality among others in a list ofvirtues, prowess often stands as a one-word definition of chivalry” in theworks of chivalric literature (135).

129 In German, Manheit.130 Corin Corley, trans., Lancelot and the Lake (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1989), 359. 131 Jesse R. Pitts, “Continuity and Change in Bourgeois France,” in: In Search

of France: Economy, Society and Political System in the 20th Century, Stan-ley Hoffmann, Charles P. Kindleberger, Lawrence Wylie, Jesse Pitts, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, and François Goguel (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1963), 235-304.

132 See MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 14-17.133 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 39.134 Ibid., 131-132.135 Ibid., 108.

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136 Ibid., 132. Hence, too, of course, the famed Olympic motto, “Citius, altius,fortius” (“Even faster, higher, stronger”).

137 Ibid., 2.138 John A. Lucas, The Modern Olympic Games (New York: A. S. Barnes,

1980), 23.139 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 103.140 Quoted in Keen, Chivalry, 84.141 Coubertin, Olympism, 448.142 Ibid.143 Ibid., 149.144 Ibid., 151.145 Ibid.146 Ibid., 114.147 Ibid., 116.148 MacAloon, This Great Symbol, 69.149 N. H. Nicolas, The Controversy Between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert

Grosvenor in the Court of Chivalry (London: Bentley, 1832), 1, 155.150 Jan Broekhoff, “Chivalric Education in the Middle Ages,” in: Sport and

Physical Education in the Middle Ages, ed. Earle F. Zeigler (Vancover,B.C.: Trafford Publishing, 2006), 40-55.

151 M. Delbouille, ed., Jacques Bretel: Le Tournoi de Chauvency (Paris: Biblio-thèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de L'Université de Liège,1932), lines 2617-2624.

152 Interestingly, Coubertin’s romanticized notion about tournaments alsoinformed his judgments about spectator, not just, athlete behavior: “Moreand more,” he argued, “modern crowds lack the chivalrous spirit thatthrived in the middle ages among those attending tournaments and popu-lar jousts.” Coubertin, Olympism, 562.

153 Joanna Burke claims that the “language” of chivalry ennobled men to“emphasize love rather than hatred,” and in the end hid, or at least, mini-mized, the violence that knights were capable of perpetrating. JoannaBurke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in 20th CenturyWarfare (London: Granta, 1996), 359.

154 Keen, Chivalry, 101.155 Ibid., 283-284.156 Coubertin, Olympism, 582-583.157 Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, The German Art of Gymnastics (Northampton:

Simeon Butler, 1816), 12.158 Quoted in Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Chang-

ing Nature of Masculinity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 300.


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159 Ibid., 340.160 Coubertin, Olympism, 582.161 Ibid., 713.162 Ibid., 615.163 Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 343.164 J. G. Cotton Minchin, Our Public Schools: Their Influence on English His-

tory (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1901), 52.165 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School-Days (Boston: Atheneum Press,

1908), 118. 166 John Ashley Cooper, "The British Imperial Spirit of Sport and War."

United Empire, VII (1916), 581.167 Ben Carrington, “Cosmopolitan Olympism, Humanism, and the Spectacle

of ‘Race,’” in: Post-Olympism? Questioning Sport in the Twenty-First Cen-tury, eds. J. Bale and M. Krogh Christensen (New York: Berg, 2004), 82.

168 Tony Davis, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997), 5.169 Coubertin, Olympism, 546.170 Quoted in Lukacs, Historical Consciousness, 355. 171 Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History

and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 121-122.172 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 10.173 See Synthia Sydnor, "Essences of Post-Olympism: A Prolegomena of

Study,” in Post-Olympism, 165. 174 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 66-67.175 Ibid., 86.176 Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), 59 177 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 40.178 Clastres, “Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937).”179 See Gerald Redmond, “Prologue and Transition: The 'Pseudo-Olympics'

of the Nineteenth Century,” in: Olympism, eds. Jeffrey O. Segrave andDon Chu (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers, 1980), 7-21.

180 Coubertin, The Olympic Idea, 6. 181 H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London: Edward Arnold, 1936), v. 182 Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York: W. W. Nor-

ton, 1962), 12.183 Clastres, “Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937).”184 K. Lachmann, ed., Wolfram von Eschenbach—Willehalm (Berlin: Walter

de Gruyter, 1926), 229. Moreover, chivalrous ideas in Germany, especiallythe German cult of Ritterschaft and Ere, were profoundly influenced byFrench notions of chevalerie and honneur.

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185 On chivalry in Spain, see Carolina A. Jewers, Chivalric Fiction and theHistory of the Novel (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2000); in Ger-many, see Joachim Bumke, trans. W. T. H. Jackson and Erika Jackson,The concept of knighthood in the Middle Ages (New York: Ams Press,1982); on European chivalry in general, see D’arcy Dacre Jonathan Boul-ton, The King of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood inLater Medieval Europe, 1325-1520 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

186 Eugene Weber, My France: Politics, Culture, and Myth (Cambridge: TheBelknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 209.

coubertin, olympism and chivalry

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