Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin (; born Pierre de Frédy; 1 January 1863 – 2 September 1937), also known as Pierre de Coubertin and Baron de Coubertin, was a French educator and historian, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and its second president. He is known as the father of the modern Olympic Games. He was particularly active in promoting the introduction of sport in French schools.
Born into a French aristocratic family, Coubertin became an academic and studied a broad range of topics, most notably education and history. He graduated with a degree in law and public affairs from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). It was at the Paris Institute of Political Studies that he came up with the idea of reviving the Olympic Games.
The Pierre de Coubertin World Trophy and the Pierre de Coubertin Medal are named in his honour.
Early life Pierre de Frédy was born in Paris on 1 January 1863, into an aristocratic family. He was the fourth child of Charles Louis de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, and Marie-Marcelle Gigault de Crisenoy. Family tradition held that the name had originally arrived in France during the early 15th century, and the first recorded title of nobility granted to the family was given by Louis XI in 1477 to an ancestor, also named Pierre de Frédy, but other branches of his family tree delved even further into French history. The annals of both sides of his family included nobles of various stations, military leaders and associates of kings and princes of France.
His father Charles was a staunch royalist and accomplished artist whose paintings were displayed and given prizes at the Parisian salon, at least in those years when he was not absent in protest of the rise to power of Napoleon III. His paintings often centered on themes related to the Catholic Church, classicism, and nobility, which reflected those things he thought most important. In a later semi-fictional autobiographical piece called Le Roman d'un rallié, Coubertin describes his relationship with both his mother and his father as having been somewhat strained during his childhood and adolescence. His memoirs elaborated further, describing as a pivotal moment his disappointment upon meeting Henri, Count of Chambord, whom the elder Coubertin believed to be the rightful king.
Coubertin grew up in a time of profound change in France – defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the establishment of the Third Republic – but while these events were the setting of his childhood, his school experiences were just as formative. In October 1874, his parents enrolled him in a new Jesuit school called Externat de la rue de Vienne, which was still under construction during his first five years there. While many of the school's attendees were day students, Coubertin boarded at the school under the supervision of a Jesuit priest, which his parents hoped would instill him with a strong moral and religious education. There, he was among the top three students in his class, and was an officer of the school's elite academy made up of its best and brightest. This suggests that despite his rebelliousness at home, Coubertin adapted well to the strict rigors of a Jesuit education. As was common in the French educational system at the time, Coubertin studied ancient Greece and Rome, which led to an appreciation of the Olympics at an early age.
As an aristocrat, Coubertin had a number of career paths from which to choose, including potentially prominent roles in the military or politics but he chose instead to pursue a career as an intellectual, studying and later writing on a broad range of topics, including education, history, literature and sociology.
Educational philosophy
The subject which he seems to have been most deeply interested in was education, and his study focused in particular on physical education and the role of sport in schooling. In 1883, at the age of twenty, he visited England for the first time and studied the program of physical education instituted under Thomas Arnold at the Rugby School. Coubertin admired Thomas Hughes's novel Tom Brown's School Days (published in 1857), which was set at the Rugby School. He referenced both the Rugby School and the novel as helping him to appreciate the role of athletics in education, saying that students who learn about fair play and morality on the sports field will be able to apply those lessons in various aspects of their adult life. He credited Arnold's methods with leading to the expansion of British power during the 19th century and advocated their use in French institutions. The inclusion of physical education in the curriculum of French schools would become an ongoing pursuit and passion of Coubertin.
Coubertin viewed Thomas Arnold as "one of the founders of athletic chivalry." However, the character-reforming influence of sport with which Coubertin was so impressed is more likely to have originated in the novel about Arnold's school rather than exclusively in the ideas of Arnold himself. Nonetheless, Coubertin was an enthusiast in need of a cause, and he found it in England and in Thomas Arnold. "Thomas Arnold, the leader and classic model of English educators," wrote Coubertin, "gave the precise formula for the role of athletics in education. The cause was quickly won. Playing fields sprang up all over England".Physical exercises in the modern world. Lecture given at the Sorbonne, November 1892. He visited other English schools to see for himself. He described the results in a book, L'Éducation en Angleterre, which was published in Paris in 1888. The hero of his book is Thomas Arnold, and on his second visit in 1886, Coubertin reflected on Arnold's influence in the chapel at Rugby School.Pierre de Coubertin, Une Campagne de 21 Ans 1887–1908 (Librairie de l'education physique, Paris: 1909)
What Coubertin saw on the playing fields of the English schools he visited was how "organised sport can create moral and social strength".Pierre de Coubertin. The Olympic Idea. Discourses and Essays. Editions Internationales Olympiques, Lausanne, 1970. Not only did organized games help to set the mind and body in equilibrium, it also prevented the time being wasted in other ways. First developed by the ancient Greeks, it was an approach to education that he felt the rest of the world had forgotten and to whose revival he was to dedicate the rest of his life.
As a historian and a thinker on education, Coubertin romanticized ancient Greece. Thus, when he began to develop his theory of physical education, he naturally looked to the example set by the Athenian idea of the gymnasium, a training facility that simultaneously encouraged physical and intellectual development. He saw in these gymnasia what he called a triple unity between old and young, between disciplines, and between different types of people, meaning between those whose work was theoretical and those whose work was practical. Coubertin advocated for these concepts, this triple unity, to be incorporated into schools.
While Coubertin was certainly a romantic, and while his idealized vision of ancient Greece would lead him later to the idea of reviving the Olympic Games, his advocacy for physical education was also based on practical concerns. He believed that men who received physical education would be better prepared to fight in wars, and better able to win conflicts like the Franco-Prussian War, in which France had been humiliated. He also saw sport as democratic, in that sports competition crossed class lines, although it did so without causing a mingling of classes, which he did not support.
Unfortunately for Coubertin, his efforts to incorporate more physical education into French schools failed. The failure of this endeavor, however, was closely followed by the development of a new idea, the revival of the ancient Olympic Games as a festival of international athleticism.
He was the referee of the first-ever French championship rugby union final on 20 March 1892, between Racing Club de France and Stade Français.
Reviving the Olympic Games
Thomas Arnold, the head master of Rugby School, was an important influence on Coubertin's thoughts about education, but his meetings with William Penny Brookes also influenced his thinking about athletic competition to some extent. A trained physician, Brookes believed that the best way to prevent illness was through physical exercise. In 1850, he had initiated a local athletic competition that he referred to as "Meetings of the Olympian Class"A Brief History of the Olympic Games by David C. Young, p. 144. Blackwell Publishing. 2004. at the Gaskell recreation ground at Much Wenlock, Shropshire. Along with the Liverpool Athletic Club, who began holding their own Olympic Festival in the 1860s, Brookes created a National Olympian Association which aimed to encourage such local competition in cities across Britain. These efforts were largely ignored by the British sporting establishment. Brookes also maintained communication with the government and sporting advocates in Greece, seeking a revival of the Olympic Games internationally under the auspices of the Greek government. There, the philanthropist cousins Evangelos and Konstantinos Zappas had used their wealth to fund Olympics within Greece, and paid for the restoration of the Panathinaiko Stadium that was later used during the 1896 Summer Olympics. The efforts of Brookes to encourage the internationalization of these games came to naught in his own lifetime before his death in 1895. However, Brookes did organize a national Olympic Games in London, at Crystal Palace, in 1866 and this was the first Olympics to resemble an Olympic Games to be held outside of Greece but while others had created Olympic contests within their countries, and broached the idea of international competition, it was Coubertin whose work would lead to the establishment of the International Olympic Committee and the organization of the first modern Olympic Games.
In 1888, Coubertin founded the Comité pour la Propagation des Exercises Physiques more well known as the Comité Jules Simon. Coubertin's earliest reference to the modern notion of Olympic Games criticizes the idea. The idea for reviving the Olympic Games as an international competition came to Coubertin in 1889, apparently independently of Brookes, and he spent the following five years organizing an international meeting of athletes and sports enthusiasts that might make it happen. In response to a newspaper appeal, Brookes wrote to Coubertin in 1890, and the two began an exchange of letters on education and sport. Although he was too old to attend the 1894 Congress, Brookes would continue to support Coubertin's efforts, most importantly by using his connections with the Greek government to seek its support in the endeavour. While Brookes' contribution to the revival of the Olympic Games was recognized in Britain at the time, Coubertin in his later writings largely neglected to mention the role the Englishman played in their development. He did mention the roles of Evangelis Zappas and his cousin Konstantinos Zappas, but drew a distinction between their founding of athletic Olympics and his own role in the creation of an international contest. However, Coubertin together with A. Mercatis, a close friend of Konstantinos, encouraged the Greek government to utilise part of Konstantinos' legacy to fund the 1896 Athens Olympic Games separately and in addition to the legacy of Evangelis Zappas that Konstantinos had been executor of.Memoire sur le conflit entre la Grèce et la Roumanie concernant l'affaire Zafdeppa Athens 1893, by F. Martens Moreover, George Averoff was invited by the Greek government to fund the second refurbishment of the Panathinaiko Stadium that had already been fully funded by Evangelis Zappas forty years earlier.