Anglomania (23 page)

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

A S
PORTING
M
AN

P
IERRE, BARON DE
C
OUBERTIN
(
1863
–
1937
)
CAME OF AGE
at the height of the gentlemanly cult. His idea of reinvigorating the French through a regime of cold baths and cricket was unusual. But the fortunes of France were low and Britain seemed invincible. Coubertin was not the only French Anglomane of his time, nor perhaps even the most influential, but his particular ideal of the English gentleman as the great sportsman ruling the world became a model that lasted, in many different places, to this day.

Coubertin was the first organizer of the modern Olympic Games, hence his unofficial title of
le Rénovateur
. Without him, there would be no Olympics. He founded the International Olympic Committee, consisting mostly of gentlemen with fancy titles eating their way through rich and interminable dinners. I was present at the Olympic games in Seoul, in 1986, and remember seeing the various national Olympic Committee members, and other sporting grandees, hanging about the restaurants of the fancier hotels. And I noticed something odd: the poorer the country, the fatter and more expensively dressed its representatives would be. And I noticed something else: all the grandees, the
sleek, gold-Rolexed Bangladeshis and Ugandans, as well as the more modest Swedes and Japanese, were dressed like stage Englishmen: blue blazers, club ties, brown suede shoes. Some of them ruled their countries; all of them pretended to be ruling the world.

Coubertin was born in Paris on New Year’s Day 1863. The Coubertin
hôtel
at 20 rue Oudinot tried hard to live up to the pretensions of a family with noble bloodlines stretching to the early fifteenth century: huge rooms, fine Louis XIV furniture, the well-thumbed
Almanach de Gotha
readily to hand, and large historical paintings on the walls. Some of these were by Pierre’s father, Charles Frédy, baron de Coubertin. There was in the hall a great tableau painted by him of an illustrious sixteenth-century ancestor offering a marble Laocoön to Pope Leo X. (Pierre’s nursery was more modestly decorated with English sporting prints.)

By the time Pierre arrived in this world, the grandeur of the Coubertins was largely a matter of presentation. The old baron was not a man of great consequence, but his appearance was splendid: tall, blue-eyed, bearded—the sort of man who looked good on a horse. Pierre, on the other hand, was unusually small, with piercing dark eyes in an oddly lopsided face, whose symmetry was hardly restored by his luxuriant mustache. The mustache, which protruded from his face like two foxtails spliced together, made him look even smaller. You could have mistaken him for an Italian ice-cream vendor.

Baron Charles Frédy had some modest success as an artist: an honorable mention at the Salon of 1861; commissions from various churches; a sale to Napoleon III, whom he detested as a vulgar upstart. He went in for grand historical or religious themes, celebrating nobility, the classical heritage, and the Church. The titles give us a flavor of his work: “Promenades of a Roman Cardinal,” “The Pontifical Cortege,” “The Martyr’s Last Mass.”

Pierre’s mother, Agathe, was even more pious than her husband and made sure that her four children were perpetually surrounded by images of bleeding martyrs. As toys for the children, she selected chalices and altar candles. Hers was an aristocratic and deeply conservative Catholicism. Much attention was paid to good works in the spirit of noblesse oblige. From the family château, she dispensed her homemade medicines to the deserving poor, who lined up at the door, holding up their ragged children for her inspection. This practice came to
an end, however, when a “radical” young doctor with modern ideas denounced her as a quack.

It was a sign of changing times. Professionalism was replacing patronage. And the Coubertins were not born to be professionals. Pierre’s ambition in life was always to be a patron. But even as a child his parents’ views struck him as antiquated. They were so conservative that Agathe’s uncle, a priest, was considered beyond the pale for being a disciple of a liberal cleric named Félicité Robert de Lamennais, whom the family regarded as a dangerous free-thinker. After his death, the uncle’s letters were burnt, and the family fasted in atonement for his sins on the anniversaries of his birth.

Of course the Coubertins were staunch legitimists. That is, they prayed every day for the return to France of the Bourbon pretender, the count of Chambord, whose throne had been usurped by Louis Philippe, duc d’Orléans, in 1830. Louis Philippe, the “Citizen King,” was swept away by the 1848 revolution and succeeded on the throne by Emperor Napoleon III, after a coup d’état in 1851. The count of Chambord, whom the Coubertins insisted on calling King Henri V, had been living in exile in Austria since 1830, brooding over the twin evils of the French Revolution and constitutional government. His birthday was observed religiously by the Coubertins.

When Pierre met the exiled count, in 1879, any chance of a comeback had been ruined by the pretender’s insistence that he should be welcomed as an absolute ruler under the Bourbon fleur-de-lis, and not the detested
tricolore
. Pierre was sixteen at the time. The Coubertins had traveled all the way to the village of Frohsdorf, in the Austrian Tyrol, for an audience with
“le roi.”
Visiting grandees was to be a lifetime occupation for Pierre, but this occasion proved a disappointment. Pierre thought the count had the “face of a melancholy and resigned Flaubert.” The morose pretender, cursing the republican age, was pathetically out of touch, overtaken by history, without a role to play, but then so in a way were the Coubertins, and indeed most other French aristocrats.

Pierre grew up in the sour and violent atmosphere of national humiliation. Napoleon III had been foolish enough to declare war on Prussia in 1870. This fit of imperial hubris was quickly punished. The French army was crushed at Sedan, Napoleon was taken prisoner, mobs flooded the streets of Paris, and a republic was proclaimed once
more. Peace was exacted in 1871 on German terms, only to be followed weeks later by the uprising of the Paris Commune. The people of Paris rebelled against the monarchists, who still dominated the Assembly. British tourists peered through their lorgnettes at the thrilling sight of the Louvre and the Tuileries on fire. Two generals were lynched in Montmartre. And after a last stand against government troops at the Père Lachaise cemetery, twenty thousand Communards lay dead. Monarchists and bourgeois liberals were happy to see order imposed, but royal restoration failed to materialize, and the Republic became more republican by the year. By the time Pierre went to college, the nobles had nothing left but memories of old glory, usually sweetened by enough cash to hang around the Jockey Club and keep their mistresses from the Folies-Bergère in some style.

Pierre reacted against his aristocratic breeding by being a bit of a rebel himself, even though in many respects, not least in his taste for pomp and pageantry, he would remain true to his roots. He became fascinated by his great-uncle, the unmentionable priest, and laid flowers on his grave. Agathe was outraged. And when he suggested they celebrate the unmentionable’s birthday with a mass, there was a family crisis. Pierre also secretly took up boxing, an unusual sport in that it was both English and distinctly proletarian. And his politics, too, were designed to provoke his parents. Pierre proposed that Léon Gambetta, the radical republican who became minister of war after the Germans arrested the French emperor, was a patriot. Worse than that, Pierre refused to rule out a glorious future even for a republican France.

Hence, it was decided he should be a priest. The Jesuits of the Collège St-Ignace could be counted on to banish sinful thoughts, such as republicanism or socialism, from the minds of their charges. Even as republican politicians were setting up a secular state education system, Coubertin was raised as though the ancien régime had never disappeared. St-Ignace, whose gray daytime uniform was modeled after that of Eton, was an expensive little island of reaction in a nation that had seen, in the space of a decade, a Bonapartist empire, a radical rebellion, and a new Republic.

Such violent upheavals, thought Coubertin, were too much even for a people as great as the French to bear. He described the French of his youth as “a people dissatisfied with themselves. The government
that dissatisfied the monarchists was not good enough for the republicans. And a feeling of national impotence to produce anything stable weighed on everything.” What was needed, in his view, was a moral revival, preferably through education. The old aristocracy, marginalized and distrusted by the republican bourgeoisie, was no longer able to inspire the
patrie
. A new elite was called for. A new set of
notables
should show the way and “rebronze” the nation. Naturally, Coubertin would be one of those
notables
. He wanted to play an aristocratic role in a bourgeois world, be a true amateur among professionals, or, in sporting terms, a Gentleman among Players. Before saving France, however, he first had to deal with his own sense of impotence. He had to rebronze himself.

Coubertin certainly had no desire to be a priest. As his odd behavior at Dr. Arnold’s tomb suggests, he was not without religious feeling. But it tended to be expressed in a liking for vaguely Hellenistic rituals or exalted jamborees of universal brotherhood, with torchlight parades and hymn singing. The life of salons, Jockey Club, card games, and mistresses in the corps de ballet was not for him either. He did not want to be imprisoned, as he put it, “in the ruins of a dead past.”

Women didn’t interest him much anyway, even though he did marry one in the end. He preferred horses and bicycles and working up a sweat on the fencing court. His erotic feelings were deflected perhaps into sudden cultish enthusiasms—for nudism (“air-bathing”) or taking baths in “virile perfumes.”

Although he had literary ambitions, to be dashed again and again, Coubertin was no intellectual. His prose had the overblown quality of an after-dinner speech. Since he was to spend much of his life giving after-dinner speeches, this wasn’t a disadvantage. But he wanted to be a man of action as well as a public figure of substance. The civil service was not an option, he didn’t want to be a diplomat, and business was out of the question. This left the army, the one national institution that still welcomed patriotic aristocrats. So Coubertin followed his brother, Albert, into the St-Cyr military academy. But even the army was no longer what it used to be. Bureaucratic efficiency took precedence now over chivalry. Professionalism was the thing, not the cut and dash of noble prowess. So he got bored and left before graduation.

Coubertin was not the only young Frenchman of his time with thoughts of lifting the nation from its decadent state. France in the
1870s and 1880s was a bit like the Weimar Republic: you could, if you had sufficient funds, be a
flâneur
, forget about politics, and indulge in more or less elegant dissipation; or you could dream of revolution, if you were a man of the Left, or revenge, if you belonged to the Right. Even to be a
flâneur
could be a political gesture, as it had been earlier in the century. Baudelaire was a generation older than Coubertin, but his dandyism—the fastidious black suits, black cravats, and black shirts—and cultivated aloofness were ways to forge a new, spiritual aristocracy of artists and intellectuals, standing out against the banality of the bourgeois age. Not for nothing was Baudelaire given the nickname His Eminence Monsigneur Brummell. Baudelaire was neither an aristocrat nor an Anglophile, but he admired the airs of an ancien régime in Britain. “Dandies,” he wrote, “are becoming rarer and rarer in our country, whereas amongst our neighbours in England the social system and the constitution (the true constitution, I mean; the constitution which expresses itself through behaviour) will for a long time yet allow a place for the descendants of Sheridan, Brummell, and Byron …”

Coubertin would not have had much in common with Baudelaire, let alone Brummell, but he shared their discomfort with the bourgeois age. He felt socially dislocated, or as he often put it
déclassé
. His enemies were not the Jockey Club dandies, however, but the right-wing revanchists and left-wing radicals. Both Left and Right were united in their extremism: either the people should rule absolutely, or the king; nothing short of these would do. Coubertin’s allies and mentors were the liberals, that is to say the conservatives, who were forever fending off men with too much zeal on all sides. They wanted power to be shared, which is why many admired the British constitutional monarchy, governed by a parliament of gentlemen and nobles.

Charles Maurras, five years younger than Coubertin, and a far more influential thinker, was a typical man of the Right. He loathed Germany but loathed Britain even more. Not an aristocrat, but from a respectable Provençal family, Maurras had one thing in common with Coubertin: he, too, wanted to create a new elite, or as he put it, “a new knighthood in service of Beauty and the Good” (
Chevalerie nouvelle au service du Beau et du Bien
), And he shared Coubertin’s enthusiasm for ancient Greece. In the event, Maurras’s knighthood turned out to be
L’Action Française
, that sinister band of right-wing extremists that he
helped to found in 1899 in response to the Dreyfus Affair—he was of course a ferocious anti-Dreyfusard. Far from being chivalrous, the
Action Française
was often violent, always revolutionary, and, during World War II, supported the Vichy regime.

Maurras was not only an Anglophobe, he hated Jews, liberals, republicans, Freemasons, Protestants, and Americans too. Normally, thinkers with such extreme and bitter views are not noted for subtlety or wit, or a graceful prose style. Maurras was blessed with all these things. He blamed Anglomania for the decadence of France. The French, he said, were once the Greeks of Christendom. France under the governance of kings and the Catholic church had been the flower of civilization, a social order of classical logic and beauty. This had been fatally undermined by the deluded admiration of British institutions by Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others, who had been corrupted by Jewish chicanery, Freemasonry, and mendacious British propaganda. The virus of Anglo-Saxon liberalism had rotted the classical order of France like a cancer, causing the catastrophic revolution of 1789. Perfidious Albion, meanwhile, royalist, aristocratic, and happy in its splendid isolation, continued to reap its reward from the debasement of France.