Читать книгу The Olympics - Stephen Halliday - Страница 8

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was born in Paris on 1 January 1863 and was descended from nobility on both sides of his family, his father tracing his lineage back to medieval Rome. When Coubertin was seven years old, in 1870, France suffered humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, an experience that prompted many influential Frenchmen to look across the Channel and ask themselves how the British had managed to build a world-wide empire while France languished. One of those Frenchmen was the writer Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) who visited England and, in 1872, published Notes sur L’Angleterre which praised the English system of education, particularly as created by Dr Thomas Arnold at Rugby, and noted approvingly the role of sport in English schools. De Coubertin later read Taine’s work which also praised the ‘muscular Christianity’ of the Reverend Charles Kingsley and other Englishmen whom he associated with the cult of sports and games. Taine’s contemporary Edmond Demolins (1852–1907) went further with a book brutally entitled A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? Not all their fellow-citizens were happy with such Anglophile views. Another writer called Pascal Grousset criticized the ‘Anglomaniacs of sport’ and objected to the formation of a rugby club in Paris called ‘Racing Club de France’ for its early use of ‘Franglais’.

Baron de Coubertin