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At that time influential circles in Copenhagen also began to be interested in systematic body movements. The leading circles here already in the 1780’ies showed interest in bodily activities in the direction of bodily civilisation. They wanted to fight the voluptuous life that was said to dominate among the Copenhagen upper class, and they also wanted to fight the common people’s unruliness and coarseness. The doctor Johan Clemens Tode was the leading figure within this interest. He was the leading writer within the Danish literature on health information during this period and could swagger about having readers among the most prominent persons in Copenhagen from the royal family and the most important nobility to the most important representatives of the new trading upper class (Mellemgaard and Kayser Nielsen 1996).

Regarding the physical exercises, the important questions of the time were discussed in “educated” places as Dreyer’s Club and in the literary circles of “Bakkehuset”. They represented the social and intellectual places where the progressive upper class socialised with pride and joy, and where, among others, the writer Knud Lyhne Rahbek took actively part in the novel healthy outdoor movement. Altogether the desire to form and stage the body was great during this period up until about 1800. This desire was particularly stated by civil circles, dominated by landowners, theologians and philosophers who not only wished to discipline, but also to educate the body with refinement which should develop and strengthen the senses. This is, among other things, expressed in the tendency to use nature, not only as a recreation room but also as a movement room.

The longing for a more natural life was great in these educational and educated circles. Since life in the city represented the unnatural, unhealthy and disharmonious, life in the countryside or at least a periodic life in the countryside and a more natural life in the city became an ideal. The young crown prince Frederik – the later Frederik the 6^th – therefore was brought up after Rousseau’s principles. At the same time Frederiksberg Garden, like many other gardens of that time, changed from the stiff geometric French garden style to the sensitive, alternating, organic and romantic English Garden.

In the 1790s progressive circles of citizens started a systematic education of the body. It took place in so-called “institutes” of which Christiani’s Institute in Vesterbro from 1794 is the most famous – not least because it is the background of Jens Juels’ famous painting “The Running Boy” from 1799. With his portrait of a boy in the puberty running light and elegant with supple movements, this painting marks a new ideal of the body as a contrast to the stiff, almost geometric body posture of the time of courtesy. Just as the outer nature would be renewed in a more sensitive way, the human body would also be formed more supple and more sliding.

The leading figure in the breakthrough of the athletics/gymnastics in Copenhagen was V.V.F.F. Nachtegall. He started his gymnastic career in the institute that Court Chaplain Christiani had established in 1794 in the Vesterbro-district where the gymnasium, according to Nachtegall, was more often being used for informal amusement than for methodical physical exercises. We know from other sources that the “amusements” were running and swimming as well as ordinary movement pleasure, as it also appears in Jens Juels’ painting of the running boy which probably was one of Christiani’s pupils (Dragehjelm 1933). In 1799 Nachtegall was employed in Schouboe’s Institute that had been established a year before as a competitor to Christiani’s institute. However, he had more ambitious plans. In 1799 he established the Society of Gymnastics in Copenhagen where students and dealers came, and at the end of the year he took the step in full and established his own Institute of Gymnastics. Now he was ready to enter the field. The institute immediately got five pupils and before the end of the year it had 25 pupils. In a handwritten book from 1840 about the beginning of gymnastics in Copenhagen, he even claimed that “the number was more than 150 boys and juniors” (Nachtegall 1840: 3).

From the beginning Nachtegall’s initiatives benefited from the fact that influential persons within politics and culture sent their children to his institute (Kayser Nielsen 1995b). He became the main character within the body culture and the history of athletics after the turn of the century, not least due to Crown Prince Frederik’s keen interest in his project. It is, however, characteristic for both Nachtegall and the Prince that they were not quite as interested in the psychic-philosophical questions as the leading circles of the 1790s.

The close co-operation between Nachtegall and Crown Prince Frederik moved the body culture away from civil society into the state authority regime. In 1834 when he published his last book Lærebog i Gymnastik til Brug for de lærde skoler i Danmark, there is nothing about reflections of good manners, not even educational reflections. His main purpose for letting pupils in schools be trained in climbing was that it was good for preventing dizziness (!) – besides the book is mostly about swimming, drills etc.

It is striking that Nachtegall in the two works he wrote in his old age on the history of gymnastics, neglects the Reventlows and their pioneer works. He directly mentions the Vesterborg and Skaarup educational seminars and their principals’ ideas that gymnastics was a subject every school teacher should know about. C.D. Reventlow was even the “father” of the Vesterborg College of Education. He also points out that it was to Saxtorph’s merit that the Blågård College of Education was the first school that combined methodical teaching of physical exercises with the other teaching subjects (Nachtegall 1830: 6). He fails to mention that J.L. Reventlow had had considerable influence on the set up of Blågård College of Education in 1792. Furthermore it is mentioned that “Count Holstein of Holsteinborg was the first landowner in the Kingdom to introduce gymnastic exercises in his schools” (Nachtegall 1830: 16). Not a word about Johann Ludvig and Christian Ditlev Reventlow – even though it is written already in the school regulations of 1791 for C.D. Reventlow’s estate that physical exercises increase the strength and the dexterity of the body and therefore should not be neglected in the schools, and that exercises like rowing, swimming and jumping with sticks, led by the rector P.O. Boisen, Reventlow’s right hand, had been practised at the Vesterborg College of Education (Holgaard Rasmussen 1979: 18).

Presumably, it is not only because of tactical considerations and the desire for making himself more important that the eldest philanthropic demand for gymnastics was consequently neglected, but also due to a fundamentally different conception of the “right” physical exercises. We are dealing with a change of attitude. The more sophisticated conception of the relation between body and soul from the days of Lunding, J.L. Reventlow and Villaume was now replaced by a robust devotion to the body. The interaction between body and soul was now reduced to causality and, consequently there was nothing to prevent the maximum development of the bodily organs. Surely Nachtegall arranged a number of sportive swimming contests in Copenhagen and was zealous in maximising the performances.

The Reventlow brothers had never dreamt that the physical exercises would go in that direction. The perspective of good manners lost some of its meaning in favour of a nationalistic toned performance, and around 1810 the old “noble” philanthropic perspective was disputed from several sides (Kayser Nielsen 1993: 63 ff.).

So eventually, the civil and locally characterised body culture lost the battle with the military about the framework of the gymnastics. Up until 1898 the military gymnastic institute was the only place where gymnastic teachers for public schools could be trained in Denmark. The ideas behind the introduction of the gymnastics in the Education Act stemmed from the military version of the conception of the body. The Brahetrolleborg College of Education was closed, and the Vesterborg College of Education was not able to uphold the philanthropic idea of education.