Paschal Grousset et les éducations physiques françaises et étrangères dans le contexte géopolitique européen et impérialiste (1880–1914)

Abstract

Between 1880 and 1914, the initiatives of French actors in Physical Education and sport increased in France in order to recover geopolitical stability. Paschal Grousset was one of the most active French people to register his proposals in a national and an international debate. Being inspired by foreign systems of Physical Education, in France he aimed to protect physical exercise and participation in Physical Education as a celebration of French national identity. This placed him in opposition to his contemporaries, some of whom promoted Scandinavian, English or Germanic exemplars. He rejected British proposals and criticized openly the German model of Physical Education, Paschal Grousset highlights through his speeches and his practices the obstinacy of a man aware of the weight of international rivalries in the reconstruction of France at the end of the 19th century. Considered today as the inventor of the “republican sport”, he imposed on French territory the educational model of the “hereditary rival” through the demonstration of the role played by physical exercise in the British economic and colonial expansion. At the same time, and without giving up gymnastics, he denounced the model of the “hereditary enemy” by caricaturing German Physical Education and the German education system. However, in both cases, Grousset’s intention was always to retain from foreign exempla only what was in compliance with the values of the French Republic, both in the facts and in the principles.