COUBERTIN, PIERRE DE | The Olympic Manifesto

COUBERTIN, PIERRE DE
The Olympic Manifesto

Autograph manuscript, 14 pages (11 x 7 1/8 in.; 280 x 180 mm) on 14 leaves of unwatermarked wove paper, in French, neatly written in sepia ink on the versos of unaccomplished registration forms for the June 1889 “Congrès pour la propagation des exercices physiques dans l'éducation” (Congress promoting physical exercise) organized by Coubertin, numbered [1]–14, first page headed in another hand “Conférence faite à la Sorbonne au Jubilé de l’U.S.T.S.A [sic. U.S.F.S.A.] Nov. 1892” (Address given at the Sorbonne during the Jubilee of the U.S.T.S.A Nov. 1892), final leaf with Coubertin’s autograph notes for the preparation of the lecture, the whole extensively revised and emended by the author in the course of composition, occasional pencil underscoring; lightly browned, first leaf with minor marginal chipping and a one-and-a-half inch tear at right margin not affecting legibility.

The very moment of conception of the modern Olympic Games: Pierre de Coubertin's first public call for the revival of the Olympic games, delivered as the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques in 1892, more than eighteen months before Coubertin organized the first International Olympic Committee. At the conclusion of a detailed survey of the history and current state of sport in modern life, Coubertin boldly proclaimed that the time had come to reintroduce the concept of the ancient Greek athletic festivals that he so revered—indeed, he argued that a world tottering on the brink of a new and uncertain century both demanded and necessitated a return to Olympian ideals:

"As for athletics in general, I do not know what its fate will be, but I wish to draw your attention to the important fact that it presents two new features, this time in the series of these secular transformations. It is democratic and international. The first of these characteristics will guarantee its future: anything that is not democratic is no longer viable today. As for the second, it opens unexpected prospects to us. There are people whom you call Utopians when they talk to you about the disappearance of war, and you are not altogether wrong; but there are others who believe in the progressive reduction in the chances of war, and I see no Utopia in this. It is clear that the telegraph, railways, the telephone, the passionate research in science, congresses and exhibitions have done more for peace than any treaty or diplomatic convention. Well, I hope that athletics will do even more. Those who have seen 30,000 people running through the rain to attend a football match will not think that I am exaggerating. Let us export rowers, runners and fencers; this is the free trade of the future, and the day that it is introduced into the everyday existence of old Europe, the cause of peace will receive new and powerful support.

"That is enough to encourage me to think now about the second part of my program. I hope that you will help me as you have helped me thus far and that, with you, I shall be able to continue and realize, on a basis appropriate to the conditions of modern life, this grandiose and beneficent work: the re-establishment of the Olympic Games."

Remarkably, less than four years after planting this first seed at a domestic sporting conference, Coubertin would witness the Games of the I Olympiad, held at Panathenaic Stadium and other venues around Athens and featuring 241 athletes from fourteen nations competing in forty-three events across nine sports. Writing of Coubertin and the resurrection of the Olympic Games, John MacAloon declares that "no modern institution of comparable significance owes so much to a single man."

Charles Pierre de Frédy, later Baron de Coubertin, was born into an aristocratic French family on the first day of 1863. He was shaped by his education (the Jesuit Externat de la rue de Vienne, the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, the Faculte de Droit, the École Libre des Sciences Politiques) and by the tumultuous times of his youth (France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the establishment of the French Third Republic). Coubertin became a prolific author, publishing more than a dozen books on a variety of subjects, but his principal interest was education and, in particular, physical education and the role of sport in developing character.

His interest in physical education took him on tours of schools and universities in the United Kingdom and the United States, and he was particularly influenced by his onsite study, in 1883, of English public schools, including Rugby. During his time in England he also encountered Charles Kingsley's concept of "muscular Christianity."

Coubertin was familiar with Rugby School from reading Thomas Hughes’s didactic novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857; French translation 1875), and he also owned Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D...