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The enlightenment project of rationalism comprised not only setting up agricultural commissions, school commissions, and poverty commissions, but also gymnastics commissions, all with their attendant rules and laws in these fields. To this end there had to be a drive not just towards material reforms but also towards social reforms and changes in consciousness and attitudes. All in all, it was a matter of neither purely material nor purely idealistic motives, but of a new outlook on life and the development of a new human type, not just in the nobility and in bourgeois officialdom, but everywhere in society, although primarily among farm owners and then down to the poorest lodgers and day labourers.

The agrarian reforms were thus part of a greater disciplining and civilizing whole in the form of a restructuring not just of farm management and breeding, but also of the attitude to production. The agrarian reforms were part of a major project that comprised both external and internal nature. Not just the farm but also social life and sexual life had to be reorganized, tightened, and rationalized. Both farming operations and the management of the mind had to be brought into the sphere of culture. Or to put it another way: to make the most of the reorganization, it had to be accompanied by improvements in sex life and reforms in the sphere of social policy.

It was in this context that J.L. Reventlow included physical exercise in his enlightenment and education measures. In his Pro Memoria from 1794 he declares that intellect and reason are a person’s primary and most important power, and that an ability to follow the insight of reason requires the right temperament, living emotion, and moral mastery of “sensual drives and desire”, and that diligence would here be one of mankind’s main virtues. He therefore asks rhetorically whether both body and soul should be educated. His point is that the soul makes “greater, more lasting, and more certain progress” if the body is also educated and cultivated, so that school managers are made capable of “playfully supervising, encouraging, and instructing young people in such exercises as make the body light and supple without depriving it of its strength”.

The direct incentive to take an interest in the welfare of the body is that hard agricultural labour makes the body heavy and stiff, which makes the peasant’s mind heavy and stiff. There are thus both general philosophical and concrete reasons underlying the suggestion to teach physical exercise in both theory and practice. According to J.L. Reventlow, the body should be both disciplined and stimulated:

To educate the body, young people must be provided with physical work and moreover encouraged to do games and exercises. For these exercises one must ensure that they have the necessary room, but one should see to it that they are not strained beyond their strength nor exerted too little. (Reventlow 1794/1900: 90 f.)

We see here a distinct example of the typical rationalistic and pragmatic view that the body should be educated and refined, that the body is the instrument of the mind, and that the education and disciplining of the body takes place “in the service of the good cause”, in other words, that it is subordinate to things outside the body, primarily a philosophically determined thesis: the suppleness of the body benefits the suppleness and functioning of the mind and of reason.

With this, modernity with its idea of progress and compensation for the lack of civilization in former times is also expressed in the field of bodily culture – and immediately we get the other side of modernity: the sense of loss and the emotional-sentimental lament of ancient innocence. This is most clearly expressed by one of the people closest to J.L. Reventlow, namely Jens Baggesen, in his poem Da jeg var lille (When I Was Little):

There was a time when I was very little

My body was no more than two feet long

And when I think this sweet thought, tears start flowing

And that is why I often think it now.

(Baggesen 1907: 287 f.)

What we see here is the distance of self-reflection which means that one not only is a body, one also has a body. Whether the standpoint is didactic-educational or sentimental makes no difference. In both cases there is a reflexive relation to the body, proceeding from the upright-walk attitude to the body, which now no longer exists as a fait accompli in raw immediacy, but on the contrary is perceived as malleable. With this distancing step, the way is open not only for the body to be reworked, it can also be reworked with style. The idea of the movement of the body and the soul, that is, the stylish plasticity and emotional diversity, makes it possible to have a conscious and reflexive attitude to having one’s body available for all manner of different undertakings.

This is an enormous change of mentality taking place here in the 1790s. Pragmatism is accompanied by emotionalism, as a result of which the body is now visible as a separate entity, which can be an object for disciplining efforts and sensitiveness. The body can now be made an object of planning, design, and stylistic endeavours. The condition for this is that the body should be segregated as a special entity and that this separated body should then be disciplined in a special institutionalized framework.

The new drive to both discipline and educate differed from the pre-rationalist castigation of the flesh, by which the body was perceived as a kind of chopping block. In the old perception of the body there was no faith in, let alone knowledge of, the progress of civilization and irreversible gains in the sphere of bodily culture. Here the body was either an abode of desire or an enemy, which always deserved a beating because of its unalterable inclination to laziness, lust, and drunkenness. This perception of the permanent and static character of the body differs radically from modernity’s view of the body as mobile, plastic, and mutable.

According to the pre-modern perception of the body, it could be flogged again and again: it did not help very much. This changed with the mentality of modernity. From having been an objectionable monster it became an occasion for intervention; despite being placed far down on the civilization scale, raw and undeveloped, it was seen as simultaneously equipped with rich, slumbering natural abilities which, if one devotes sufficient attention to them, can be made to blossom in full, and this in turn, it was held furthered the development of the mental capacities of the individual and hence of society as a whole.

This intervention took place, first and foremost, at schools and in the army’s military education.