To this day, the peasant, landsman, has been neglected as far as his physical education is concerned, all concern has been directed towards the city worker, the factory or workshop worker, the office worker. Living in an environment of confined air, they need to breathe better; the man of the field who lives in the open air benefits from it. Here is the error. In terms of gaseous nutrition, air itself is less important than breathing habits. The landsman's breathing habits are faulty and poor through the very nature of his work, with his bent-over body which prevents him from properly ventilating his lungs and thus benefiting from the air in which he lives poorly as far as gaseous nutrition of his respiratory exchange is concerned.Footnote 1
The address made by Doctor Philippe Tissié, who was responsible for promoting a successful physical education method in France, recalled that the issue of rural people's bodily training was still not resolved in 1936.Footnote 2 It likewise confirmed that, contrary to certain presuppositions, a country dweller may be a fragile being that needed to be educated, in spite of the virtues of open air life.Footnote 3 Yet the rural man was considered to be strong and was even described, at times, as a brute. In effect, the stereotypes of bestiality and rusticity were recurrently associated with peasantry and were still frequently conveyed by physical education specialists. ‘The man of the country [. . .] may be compared to his oxen which labour long and hard’, announced the famous bodybuilder Georges Rouhet, by way of example.Footnote 4
Belief in peasant animality therefore paradoxically articulated vulnerability and masculinity. During the interwar period, these two notions ran through the pedagogical proposals put forward by advocates of physical education for rural people and led to the questioning of the significance of their initiatives. Relying on preconstructed representations of the peasant stereotype, agricultural elites, such as syndicates or rural horse societies, and fringe physical education advocates, including followers of Hébert in particular, appeared to legitimise rural sports imbued with virility by highlighting the forms of vulnerability that reportedly characterised peasants and justified their apparent need for this activity.Footnote 5
1. From the acknowledgement of fragility to the need for education
The foundations of the systems of thought that shaped mentalities during the interwar period were built during the second half of the nineteenth century. Descriptions given first by historians and geographers, then by psychologists and sociologists, durably established stereotypes of the peasant and peasantry in social imaginations and representations. They lost no time in finding their way into the discourse on education in scientific, pedagogical and political milieus, with the rural world as their target.
The legacy of the nineteenth century
The peasant still brings to mind, in more places than one, those wild animals La Bruyère speaks about, black, pale, burnt by the sun, attached to the soil they dig and turn over with invincible obstinacy, who live on water, black bread, roots, withdraw into their den in the evening, and look barely human.Footnote 6
In his famous work analysing the collective mentality of peasants, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs reiterates how far stereotypes affecting the rural environment were anchored in all social categories, sparing neither politicians nor scientists. As demonstrated by the ruralist historian Ronald Hubscher, the objectivity of these erudite commentators was tainted by the negative faces of the rural world, largely preconstructed by literary and artistic works which influenced the social imagination.Footnote 7 In this process, the nature-culture opposition, together with the stigmatisation of a supposed wild virility, contributed to the construction of pejorative images. Thus, for the philosopher Hippolyte Taine, the peasant represented the symbol of rural underdevelopment. Likened to a primitive and instinctive character, he had neither the fortune nor the education of the landowner. Third Republic historian Ernest Lavisse also described peasant nature as tainted with savagery. According to Hubscher, these representations led to an established psychologically-based conception of history in which the weakness of the cultural fabric and the power of passion meant that animality and brutality could penetrate humanity at any moment.
Like Albert Demangeon, known for his role in establishing geography in schools, nineteenth-century geographers highlighted the importance of natural determinism in the habits of peasant life.Footnote 8 Along with Paul Vidal de la Blache, they were ‘attentive to the queries of anthropologists’ in their interpretation of the relationship between the rural man and his environment.Footnote 9 Their analysis was similar to characterisation essays on the social group formed by peasants, put forward in the sociological studies first of François Simiand and then of Maurice Halbwachs.Footnote 10 The common feature of their work was the acknowledgement that the gruelling and repetitive nature of the peasants’ natural way of life and their professional activity combined to weaken them. Arguing along similar lines to the reports of Taine or Lavisse, Halbwachs pointed out that:
The life led by peasants as a group is deeply and wholly embedded in nature. From here come a particular flavour and bitterness, more spontaneity, primitive enthusiasm and even savagery. But it is weighed down by the weight of the earth, it progresses according to the slow pace of rural work. It is collective life that is both very strong and very simple, or simplified.Footnote 11
Both Lavisse and Demangeon were involved in producing school history and geography textbooks in France and participated in the Republican process of mass acculturation implemented in schools across the Republic.Footnote 12 When pupils became adults, they would remain immersed in the images and discourse relating to the rural world conveyed by their school teachers.
‘The’ peasant as seen by scientific experts in physical education
These preconstructed images influenced scientific, political and pedagogical milieus through the use of vocabulary, behavioural typologies and descriptions of rural habits. Doctor Fernand Lagrange, inspirer of the physiological reform in physical education at the end of the nineteenth century and known for his research on overwork, turned his attention to the peasant population in his studies of nervous fatigue.Footnote 13 In his opinion, people who did daily physical exercise were, in fact, vulnerable because of it:
The peasant, withered by his daily work and insufficient food, does not have the luxury of having any of what we call body tissue reserves. For this reason, fatigue for him does not result in poisoning of the body and infectious typhoid-like fevers, but in a state of exhaustion at different levels, in which nervous forms play a large part.Footnote 14
While scrupulously selecting the population groups he analysed, the scientist focused on the circumstances in which overwork appeared in peasant women. For him, ‘country women are outstanding subjects for studying exhaustion. They too, like men, work, sweat and are malnourished’, yet they also showed characteristics liable to make them vulnerable.Footnote 15 Eleven years of medical practice in the countryside had, in fact, enabled Lagrange to identify the factors most likely to cause excessive fatigue in peasant women and allowed him to conclude that they had ‘as many neurotic disorders in the country as in the town’. The author characterised the risks to which they were exposed when combining agricultural work and housework, while looking after and feeding their children. He demonstrated that, in spite of this ‘continual exhaustion’, it was not customary to moan within the pastoral community. For Lagrange, abstaining from complaining was the best cure and may differentiate women of the country from those of the city: ‘The salutary fear they have of epilepsy in the country is a powerful deterrent from the convulsive movements and contortions of any fit of hysteria, in which morale plays a large part’.Footnote 16 The need for physical work and daily effort accepted by rural women may therefore prevent them from focusing excessively on their malaise. Yet this effective therapy for certain forms of ‘melancholic madness’ caused Lagrange to refute the idea of a physical education model specific to peasant women. Such a stance differed somewhat from the observation made by American historian Linda J. Borish concerning rural New England women in the nineteenth century. In effect, combining housework and farm work damaged peasant women's health, but, contrary to France, the recommended solution was to do voluntary exercise.Footnote 17
The approach adopted by French physical education specialists concerning men was quite different. At a time when studies relating to the scientific organisation of work suggested balancing work and rest time, the studies of Lagrange and subsequently of Georges Démenÿ, two major theorists of physical education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, must be considered in their relationship to professional utilitarianism.Footnote 18 Démenÿ likened peasants to uncultivated and grasping beings, little inclined to look after their bodies. He stated that ‘the peasant's love of lucre takes away the field worker's concern for his hygiene, and that if he was able to include moderation in his work, he would remain vigorous and healthy’.Footnote 19 Yet he went further in his reasoning when, as a scientist, he attempted to explain premature ageing of ‘creatures lacking that greatest stimulant, thought’. In fact, for him, peasants did not know how to enjoy the benefits of the healthy and natural milieu in which they lived, due to their lack of moral culture and intellectual occupation. Their brains were drowsy and ‘with this came reduced body vitality’.Footnote 20 The anthropotechnical approach developed by this former gymnast, colleague of Marey at the physiological station of Parc des Princes and professor at the highly influential Military Academy of Joinville-le-Pont, could not escape the eugenic considerations aimed at regenerating the French ‘race’.Footnote 21 It was, however, clear that Démenÿ was also aware of milieu oppressiveness which, when added to professional fatigue, would contribute to heightening the fragility of rural populations:
The man of the field makes movements and produces work, but this work tires him, it is often excessive, concentrates on the same body areas and does not relax in the same way as varied and extensive movements. With skincare totally unknown to him, uncleanliness completes these very strong habits, and his house, bed, yard and manure hill all create a most unhealthy milieu in which he wallows.Footnote 22
‘The’ peasant in official texts on physical education
The Règlement Général d'Education Physique [General Rules for Physical Education], was published in 1925 although a previous and provisional 1919 version had been used as a reference for physical education by the 1923 Léon Bérard Directives defining the new primary school curriculum. The Règlement dealt only briefly with the case of the rural population yet managed, in a mere few lines, to stigmatise the people. Notably, the text regretted that by being so focused on progress in agricultural machinery, rural people failed to enjoy the beneficial effects of having contact and working with nature and thus sacrificed the most basic hygiene.Footnote 23 This vilification of the rural population was still present in 1936 and 1937, when physical education and leisure became the pillars of a new health and cultural policy thanks to the Popular Front.Footnote 24 The issue of peasant hygiene was revived with the idea uppermost in lawmakers’ minds that country people neglected body care, loathed washing and knew nothing about keeping clean. In 1937, examination of the law proposal intended to organise compulsory physical education thus reiterated the need to involve rural children in regular physical exercise.Footnote 25 During the ensuing debate in the Senate, advocates of the proposal based their arguments on mortality statistics, which proved to be much more worrying in the country than the town.
The Popular Front's plan to give physical education a more universal scope by addressing a whole generation quickly reached its limits. The sporting trend gained ground with the introduction of the new Brevet sportif populaire [popular sports certificate], but the necessary equipment was lacking. As the social and geopolitical situation deteriorated to the extent that peace was threatened, physical education for young people in the rural environment became a less pressing concern.
During the Second World War, the desired National Revolution of the Vichy Government was intended to restore the country's traditional values. A new plan for schools and civilian life, entitled Education Générale et Sportive [general and sport education], put forward a versatile programme, of which Hébert's natural method of physical education was the backbone owing to its supposedly more authentic links with nature.Footnote 26 Education for the rural young was one of its main themes. In reference to country people's work in the fields and daily activity, it was to enable rural youth to rediscover the benefits of rusticity, the need for productivity and solidarity and gain a taste for effort and rough life. As reiterated by Roger Vuillemin, a staunch Hébert follower, ‘The peasant has little leisure! . . . Work is in command. Activities are subject to the inexorable beat of nature, while being influenced also by uncertainties attributable to atmospheric conditions or concerning livestock’.Footnote 27 After praising its rustic qualities, however, the author acknowledged that the young country person frequently faced further difficulties: ‘Lack of entertainment and contact makes him awkward and gloomy. He often feels embarrassed in the presence of other young people from outside his milieu’.Footnote 28 In the same way as late nineteenth-century intellectuals and scientists before him, Vuillemin thus portrayed peasants as bent-over beings, with tensed muscles. He recalled that country work required static muscle contraction, that it produced slow movements and lack of inspiration. Such working conditions ‘can hardly achieve the full and harmonious physical development of those engaging in it’.Footnote 29 In accordance with official directives, it was, therefore, advised to apply a physical education method based on the natural method to rural youth. The ‘trail lesson’, at the centre of the method, places the performer in ‘nature’ in order to overcome ‘real’ difficulties and conquer ‘real’ obstacles. According to the author, this lesson made it particularly possible to develop virility and rusticity. It ‘encourages mental escape by creating a sort of animal joy that is particularly healthy and invigorating’.Footnote 30
The physical education plan for rural youth served the objectives of the National Revolution. If it first addressed the young of the country, it was with the aim of hardening their characters, not of making up deficiencies in their genetic constitution. For all that, peasant vulnerability was acknowledged in a fairly similar way in both intellectual milieus and the realms of physical education and sport. Faced with acknowledgement of the physical, moral and economic destitution of rural people exposed to difficult living conditions, all agreed on the need to educate them, often with analogous arguments using stereotypes of bestiality and brutality.
2. The implementation of adapted physical education and the promotion of virility
From the 1920s to the 1940s, educational programmes in physical education and introduction to sport emerged, influenced by particularly resistant stereotypes of rurality. Sheepdog trials, while known to take place in Great Britain and Germany, remained mainly undeveloped in the programmes.Footnote 31 On the other hand, agricultural athletics in its different forms, rural athletic trail runs and rural horse events spread fairly widely, with particular emphasis on their role in building virility. Although covering a large part of French territory, their development remained precarious however, undoubtedly because they were based on negative representations of the population concerned.
Agricultural athletics: a male sport
In the mid 1920s, an original experiment concerning rural athletics was launched, supported by the newspapers l’Echo de Paris and l’Action agricole. Three types of events were initially scheduled: ploughing, horse and cart driving and bag porterage. They were held as local competitions, then regional ones before a final national competition between the best contestants. It was therefore a standardised competition with, according to the organisers, the attributes of a real sport:
Yes the most productive and noble of all sports! And also the one which is practised with the greatest perseverance during the long days of agricultural work. The one with the most followers since we can count hundreds of thousands of them, the one which develops the most male virtues as could be seen during the Great War where, in the trenches, the sons of the earth died obscurely as heroes for the salvation of the world.Footnote 32
This speech, delivered in 1925 by A. Monmirel, President of the Agricultural Syndicate of the Paris region at one round of the agricultural contest, left no room for ambiguity. The athletic qualities of country people appeared here as the result of long and hard training in daily activity. Their main effect was reportedly to increase virility. The call for masculine virtues developed through the tradition of rural labour was reinforced as a result of their association with sporting performance whose contribution to masculinity was, at the time, deeply rooted in the imagination.Footnote 33 In the different agricultural athletics events, rural people proved, moreover, to be formidable performers: ‘There is not one part of their body that has not played its part, there is not one of their mental qualities that has not been stimulated’.Footnote 34 Daily toil, habitual deprivation and climatic hazards harden up men, develop their strength and endurance, and are finally expressed in newfound bodily excellence.
Despite wide coverage in both the regional and national press, as well as in the specialist agricultural press, the experiment met with limited success. The initial enthusiasm faded within a few years, and attendance at the events decreased. The rough features of uncouth country people raised a smile, causing gibes in the Parisian press. For example, in an article with a particularly stigmatising title, ‘Decadence in the Country: A Rural Orgy’, the newspaper L’Auto of 31st January 1926 compared depraved rural life with the civilised behaviour of city dwellers, proclaiming that ‘bedlam, chronic and ritual drunkenness constituted the favourite sports of the majority of our contemporary young rural adults’.Footnote 35 The words reinforced the comparison of the country person to an uncultivated lout, interested in debauchery. Yet, by circulating stereotypes about natural strength, physical excellence and depravity which were markers of popular masculinity often present in sport, they simultaneously portrayed rural people as exemplary.Footnote 36 In this sense, the descriptions of their character, way of life, physical behaviour and appearance represented a combination of rurality, bestiality and masculinity.Footnote 37
Rural horse events
At the beginning of the 1930s, agricultural leaders took action to revive equestrian activity, which was being threatened by the progress of mechanisation. The issue was addressed on 3rd May 1934 at the French Agriculture Congress, where delegates agreed in principle to set up a rural horse society to bring together the horse societies established locally.Footnote 38 Rural horse events, which were already familiar following a number of pioneering experiments in Brittany, were held in a more regulated way, instigated by Louis Miquel, Director of the Angers national stud farms. The organisers sought to ‘popularise rural cavalry’ and ‘strengthen faith in the horse’ which, ‘just like his companion worker in the field hides, under a not very flattering appearance, energy reserves which not even the hardest work can exhaust’.Footnote 39 While remaining focused on professional movements, the events included horse games to provide light relief from the dull and boring livestock displays. For this reason, contestants in the Château-Gontier competition were encouraged to show imagination and enthusiasm in order to reduce the repetitive impression of the displays. Games including the rose game and rings, chair, bowl and wheelbarrow games were organised continuously.Footnote 40
Utilitarian concerns remained central, however, since ‘the essential purpose of the rural horse is to serve the farm, and the quest for sporting pleasure must not result in reducing its worth as a working tool’.Footnote 41 Furthermore, the National Committee wished to strengthen the complicity between man and his mount. Yet the objective, by its very nature, was established on disrepute. The events proposed were based on a negative image of the countryman who was, in a context of crisis, suspected of rejecting the horse for progress and an easier life, of letting himself go, disliking animals or even showing brutality. Last but not least, events that were intended to valorise breeders’ work and horsemen's skill paradoxically became a place for denigrating peasant people. By denouncing their shortcomings and seeking to make them a spectacle to amuse the audience, the events projected a caricature. There were, for example, wheelbarrow races in which a work accident was simulated. In this event, two teams of two rural men in their work clothes competed against each other on a two-way track. In the first leg, mounts raced at full gallop to a point where wheelbarrows were waiting and where the simulated accident would take place. Here, one of the riders rushed to the rescue of his team mate, supposedly injured. He then had to bring him back in the wheelbarrow, along with the two horses he was holding by the bridle. The amusing nature of the event was unquestionably to the detriment of the countryman's image.
Even La Bretagne hippique agricole et économique, the official organ of the Syndicate of Breton Horse Breeders and the Federation of Breton Horse Societies and thus hardly expected to have an anti-rural bias, gave way to caricature of country horsemen at times. For example, when reporting on the proceedings of a meeting held in Landerneau on 7th June 1938, the columnist could not resist the temptation to describe the indomitable character of Breton horsemen: ‘it would appear that training Breton horses is relatively easy; but it is of the utmost necessity to first train the horsemen’.Footnote 42 Similarly, in several of his speeches quoted in the columns of La Bretagne hippique et agricole, the editor Y. Duigou spoke highly of rural horse societies, yet also considered them to be ‘a perfect opportunity to try to rid the Breton breeder of his harmful individualism, obstacle to sustainably improving his lot’.Footnote 43 In addition, despite the organisers’ intention to stimulate cooperation among partners and build the ‘team spirit’ that is found at the heart of all sports associations, the columnists reported on the difficulties encountered in getting ‘isolated and fundamentally particularistic people’Footnote 44 to accept the principles of organised grouping and collective discipline.
Rural athletic trail runs
Unlike the pioneering experiments of the interwar period that combined professional know-how and sporting competition, Hébertist contests were aimed primarily at physical education. The ‘agricultural athletics championship’ was transformed into a ‘rural athletic trail run’. In September 1945, the Federation of the Seine-et-Oise Agricultural Syndicates updated a 1925 plan to honour field workers by praising country values such as strength and endurance during a professional athletics championship. The report of the Fédération Française d'Education Physique [French Federation for Physical Education], an organisation set up in 1937 to widen dissemination of the natural method, described this variant as ‘a trail run inspired by pure Hébertism’.Footnote 45 Moreover the Fédération implemented a larger programme of events for rural people in 1948, including a range of exercises based on the ten motor skill categories theorised by Georges Hébert. The rural athletic trail therefore began sliding towards a more educational form, while preserving a professional and masculine dimension. The utilitarian movements selected were those of the fields and the farm. Events such as driving a horse on foot with a snaffle bit; knocking in stakes; wheelbarrow rolling; climbing an espalier, wall or obstacle; bag porterage; loading then unloading; sheaf throwing to a height of three metres; jumping over bundles of firewood and intermediary races, all corresponded to the rural man's habitual activities. This is confirmed by iconography illustrating the contests, which showed the countrymen in field clothes, with hats on their heads and wooden shoes on their feet.Footnote 46
For Hébertists, professional skills may only be the basis of such instructional contests because country people did not actually have any. The series of articles that Commander Stéphani dedicated to the issue in the Hébertist press organ L’Education physique included endless observations concerning rural people's shortcomings. The articles bluntly painted a depreciatory picture which highlighted ‘the physical mediocrity of a large part of the rural population’.Footnote 47 They forged a gap between nature and those who lived in it, when they stated that ‘country people live in fresh clean air, (but) they do not all know how to take advantage of it’.Footnote 48 Similarly, while advocates of the natural method claimed to feel undisguised admiration for the ‘uncivilised’ and strove to illustrate rural people's rusticity by likening them to ‘primitives’, they nonetheless presented them in a negative light.Footnote 49 Their limitations were represented as prevailing over their resourcefulness:
Country people too often have joints which more or less seize up, sometimes completely stiff through lack of exercise. More than anyone else, they should take care to mobilise them daily. [. . .] The countryman is a man of nature, yet it would appear he is too often overwhelmed by it. Hence, the tenseness and withdrawing into himself that are so characteristic and affect his nerves, the muscles on his skeleton . . . and also his morale.Footnote 50
These remarks confirm how difficult it was for rural physical education, designed by pedagogues from outside the milieu, to free itself from the power of the clichés discrediting rural people. Presented as lacking awareness of sanitary issues and impervious to any educational approach, their entwinement with nature and deep-rooted attachment to the earth rendered them brutal and shady. Such examples demonstrate the extent to which agricultural athletics championships, rural athletic trail runs and rural horse events brought to light the image of the rebel, resistant, unsophisticated and gruff countryman that was held by those who developed the desire to provide the rural poor with physical education. It was only because ‘primitive’ and virile ‘beings’, modelled by nature, were in need of being guided that Hébertists offered them rural runs, and the Rural Horse Society planned to instil in them a love of horses.
3. Physical activities and agricultural policy
While all experiments in physical education and rural sport were clearly based on assumptions about the moral and physical shortcomings of the peasantry, they could also serve different political and economic aims.
Vulnerability as an ulterior motive for the development of an agricultural policy
At the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly following the First World War, transformations in society led to the demographic, social and political decline of the rural population and the weakening of their traditional values. Rural inhabitants soon represented barely half of the economically active population.Footnote 51 Recognition of both the fragility and the economic and moral instability of a rural population faced with modernisation stimulated the vague concerns of educators and state intervention, which was particularly visible at agricultural athletics championships and rural horse events. As early as the very first events, moreover, the contribution of agricultural athletics championships to Republican acculturation was clear. It was shaped by a subtle balance between the rights of the farmers and the duties of the State. The primary duty of agricultural institutions, as conveyed by syndicates, specialist press (l’Action agricole) and generalist press (l’Echo de Paris), was notably to recreate, with regard to country people, ‘this atmosphere of warm pleasantness that society owes the one who provides its daily foodstuff’.Footnote 52 Political plans were aimed at curbing the rural exodus and desertion of the countryside. Although ideas abounded for this purpose, it is useful to focus on the social aspiration of rural youth for sports competitions.Footnote 53 Agricultural athletics championships contributed to highlighting the farmers’ professional worth and promoting them indirectly helped to prevent youth emigration and maintain a pool of potential agricultural workers in each region.
The objectives were clearly expressed in the columns of the syndicate review of l’Action agricole. The latter defended farmers by reminding readers, on several occasions, of the citizenship aims of the events, while deploring the scorn of the generalist press for the sporting performances: ‘Alas; it [agricultural athletics] does not fill newspaper columns with accounts of the performances achieved by its participants. They only just manage to escape opprobrium and mockery. Agricultural workers! What a thought!’Footnote 54 Belief in the social utility of rural people took precedence over all other considerations and justified the recourse to sport: ‘And yet, if driving and cycling champions work towards progress in industry, which is no mean feat, horse cart drivers, cowherds and farm labourers work together to feed men, which is likewise no mean feat’.Footnote 55 It would even seem that rural people were all the more justified in practising sport since their daily professional activity had the same characteristics, with utility as a bonus: ‘The agricultural worker who engages in working the earth, drives the horse and cart he is given, albeit not without difficulty or skill, who tramples the soil and remains ready to produce rich harvests, practises sport and athletics’.Footnote 56 The discourse relayed and constantly reiterated in the syndicate's official organ powerfully demonstrated how the plan proved to be more political than for sport. The presence of five former agriculture ministers, eight confederation or agricultural academy presidents and three professors of agricultural engineering, as well as two syndicate leaders, two deputies and an academician among the twenty-three Central Committee members of the championship provided additional proof of this.Footnote 57
In the case of rural horse events, similar objectives for the revival of agricultural activities were to be found, as confirmed by Louis Miquel when he declared that the Rural Horse Society was above all a ‘professional economically-oriented group’.Footnote 58 For the Agriculture Minister, it was notably a question of creating an opinion trend in favour of the horse, of developing its use in all forms and ‘rekindling rural people's faith in their work companion, which had been profoundly weakened by propaganda judged to be sometimes devious, sometimes violent, but at all times unfair’.Footnote 59 The aim, which led to the institutionalisation of the Rural Horse Society and increase in the number of rural horse events, was definitely linked to agricultural policies. Farmers and breeders were reminded of their duties. The sports process was chosen as a result of the favour it enjoyed with them and, more broadly, in general opinion. From now on, agricultural athletics and rural events fulfilled the dual roles of acculturation and livestock promotion.
Fighting male peasant roughness: a challenge for rural economy
Promoting agricultural athletics was probably aimed less at improving countrymen's health than at increasing their productivity and yield within a wider process of tailoring agriculture to the requirements of modern society. It was a question of:
Showing the common people, perhaps unaware of the fact, that their actions are the most noble of all, that they are the most necessary since it is thanks to them that the earth is opened, dug and turned over, giving the sun the means of making it fertile.Footnote 60
One of the consequences of the economic challenges was to think in terms of a gendered distribution of work in order to justify physical education in the rural environment: men should do the daily work in the fields; women the tasks based within the farm itself. The main part of agricultural work, or at least the visible part, was indeed predominantly performed by men who thus appeared as central agents in rural economy. A 1930 study led by Professor Max Ringelmann, member of the Agriculture Academy and Professor of rural engineering at the Grignon National Institute of Agronomy, was particularly illuminating on this point.Footnote 61 Referring to statistics on the amount of work accomplished, it highlighted the relative fragility of the men whereas, on the contrary, rural women were, in certain limited circumstances, very efficient in the fields: ‘Being more skilful and energetic, albeit not as strong as male workers, women often contributed as much useful effect as the latter’.Footnote 62 Scientists, however, immediately counterbalanced the statement by reiterating that agricultural work for women was limited to haymaking, harvesting and grape picking, and often occurred during a part of the day only.Footnote 63 Consequently, there were fewer problems with the repetitive nature of the work and it was less likely to cause them chronic fatigue or wear them out. For Ringelmann, however, men proved to be much more productive on average than women since, according to his calculations, ‘about 10 women’ were needed ‘to do the same work, each day, as 6 men’, and if the number of annual working days should be counted, a woman only produced the equivalent of roughly 130 man days.
From his first observations, Ringelmann drew the conclusion that the priority was to take care of those who toiled on a daily basis and represented the main power of agriculture, i.e. peasant men. The arguments developed in his lesson on rural engineering, together with the illustrations provided, demonstrated therefore that the strength produced was primarily male. Men were shown to be bent over or heavily laden, while the only print available of a woman showed her kneeling down and filling a sack with crops.Footnote 64 Yet, by aiming to develop the ‘human engine’, the plan made reference to a concept of masculinity whereby the strong and resistant man found himself, on account of the intensity of work required, in a vulnerable position.
Gender and rural vulnerability
Ringelmann's opinion was not the only one of its kind. Potential peasant vulnerability was the main argument put forward to justify the proposals for educational sporting experiences such as rural horse events and agricultural and rural athletics events proposed by the agricultural organisations and physical education groups. Thus when the Hébertists relaunched the rural athletic trail runs, they took particular care to emphasise the impact of rural milieu, living conditions and lack of education and professional activity on the health and physical development of rural people. Yet their conviction was such that they did not feel the need for any scientific basis. While the establishment of Hébertist rural athletic runs was inspired by the pioneering experiment of the agricultural athletics championship, the creators paid no attention to studies of the sporting efficiency of rural people, although these were published on a regular basis and associated with the championships. Nor did they mention Ringelmann's observations on the spade ploughing event held at the Créteil contest on 25th October 1925, during an agricultural athletics championship. Yet the eugenics engineer had cross referenced several criteria there to ‘measure the practical work that market gardeners are capable of doing in a given time unit’.Footnote 65 Depth of work, time spent and number of digs per minute, together with the weight of competitors and the tools used, made it possible to define a professional efficiency index. Results showed that agricultural workers below the age of twenty dug, on average, 10.26 m2 per hour, and those aged between twenty and thirty years old, 9.79 m2, i.e. ninety-six per cent of the younger workers’ output. As for men over the age of thirty, they were capable of spading, on average, 8.24 m2, i.e. eighty-one per cent of the younger workers’ output.
The theories of the educators were, in fact, based more on empirical morphological observations than on available scientific assessment. By omitting all references to the qualities of strength, physical power and endurance found in men of the fields, they created an artificial need for bodily training and reinforced, by the same token, the fact that rural people were defined as a vulnerable population. Peasant masculinity was likewise depreciated, whereas peasant women were not targeted. Rural contests were exclusively dedicated to men who were experienced and expert in agricultural work, whether young or older, in which case skill would sometimes compensate for a lack of strength. Competitions concerned male tasks only. As for the organisers, they were likewise strictly only men. There was no place in rural sport for peasant women. Moreover Hébertists remained sceptical about references coming from agronomy and accepted only measurements established by the army Medical Board, a male institution par excellence. This connection with a centre of gender based socialisation is hardly surprising since the rural athletic trail runs and their predecessors, the agricultural athletics championships and rural horse events, constituted variations of traditional ‘concours de majorations’Footnote 66 and popular games favoured in village fetes which were themselves for men only.
Yet Ringelmann himself provided evidence concerning the occupations of country women. Based on the work of agronomist Quetelet in Belgium and the Eugenicist Galton in England, he defined an index of ‘robusticity’ allowing comparisons between a man's strength and a woman’s. He mentioned for instance that during a dynamometer contraction exercise the average manual force produced by women represented only two-thirds of that achieved by men. As for strength when straightening up, which measured the effort required to straighten up from a bent-over position while pulling up a load (a frequent action for rural people), the experiment showed that a young woman of twenty could only manage to lift forty-nine per cent of the load a man could accomplish under the same conditions. Yet, these results were ignored by Hébertists, as they sought to justify the revival of rural athletic trail runs by demonstrating the physical shortcomings of the population concerned.
The founder of the natural method, Georges Hébert, took an interest in women's physical education and asserted that ‘countrywomen lead an active life [. . .] which gave them better health and more strength than their city counterparts’.Footnote 67 Here, the myth of the rough and strong peasant woman replaced the myth of the fragile woman, which generally dominated discourse on physical education.Footnote 68 She was even declared to be resistant to cultural progress and closed to modern forms of education. This change was particularly marked when considering physical practices and hygiene. Hébert added that their occupation did not enable them to achieve integral development since ‘a peasant woman never runs, nor jumps, neither does she climb, nor throw or swim, let alone undress to expose her skin to air or light, or merely to bathe’.Footnote 69 Yet such comments highlighted the consequences of a way of life and a rejection of modernity, albeit without drawing any conclusion concerning the need for adapted rural physical education. Reports published in the review l’Education physique, regional and national newspapers and the syndicated press featured only masculine performances. For both Hébert and the creators of rural athletic trail runs, women's absence from the educational plan and the focus on the male population confirmed, more generally, that the physical education initiatives and sporting events of the interwar period were intended to contribute to the agricultural economy, while creating the outlines of a rural masculinity marked with the seal of fragility.
Conclusion
Initiatives in the field of rural sport were exogenous in nature since they were developed outside the peasant milieu by political leaders, such as Jean-Honoré Ricard for agricultural athletics and the Central Committee for the Rural Horse Society, and pedagogues such as Georges Hébert. Nonetheless they benefited from the lack of specific rural sports organisations, in spite of initiatives from the Jeunesse Agricole Catholique (Catholic agricultural youth association).Footnote 70 No doubt, as ruralist historians Michel Gervais, Marcel Jollivet and Yves Tavernier have argued, their appearance constituted a form of resistance to the decline of peasant folklore, which gained momentum after the First World War as carnivals, profane gatherings and religious celebrations ceased to exist.Footnote 71 Despite their differences, proposals put forward for physical education and sporting contests during the interwar period showed common ground. They all included the special relationship between country people and nature, the myth of savagery and the rejection of progress. They built a coarse portrait of a masculine and ‘primitive’ peasantry. When Stéphani recalled the peasant's attachment to the land, with the aim of caricaturing the rural morphotype and referring to skeletal deformation resulting from agriculture, he admittedly intended to justify the intervention of physical pedagogues, yet provided only a very partial description of peasant habits.Footnote 72 In effect, peasant people were attached to customs and traditions which expressed and strengthened the stability of their social group. This aspect was admittedly taken into account by rural horse societies and agricultural athletics championships in order to fight moral and physical vulnerability, and promote male sociability through professional-cum-festive activities. As for Hébertists, they omitted it when endeavouring to impose a model of rural trail runs which replaced traditional games with educational practices, while rejecting any development towards an agricultural athletics championship and disregarding what constituted the daily life of rural people. Comparison of the 1925 Agricultural Athletics Championship and the Hébertist version of the rural athletics trail run proposed in 1948 thus highlighted how peasant customs, habits and uses were neglected for the benefit of educational principles. In the rules for the 1925 Championship, the link between the peasant and his land permeated the ploughing or manure-mixing events, which required ‘physical’ contact. The final banquet was, in the same way as the gatherings of times past, an essential constitutive element of the festival. The Hébertist version, on the other hand, barely observed these customs and traditions. Even if the competitions featured professional know-how, events were set up, in fine, so as to respect the ten constitutive motor skill categories of the natural method, artificially attached in this case.
Whether it was to strengthen peasant male sociability in order to fight forms of degeneration or the decline of professional practices, or whether its purpose was to educate the ‘savages’, the masculine model remained the sole reference for educators’ descriptions and men the sole target of their proposals. Resurrecting various facets of peasant vulnerability, even if it meant putting an end to traditional virile, rustic representations, made sense when it came to gaining acceptance for rural physical activities and sports. Nonetheless, hygienist and health arguments, as well as humanitarian ones, lived on in the political aspirations for citizenship education and the revival of economic capacity, embodied in the manly force of the peasant population. Reinforced by negative preconceptions of peasant habits, sporting experiments were based on a model of masculinity that was peculiar to the imagined rural world. Educating the oafs, civilising the savages, giving them back the love of the horse and re-establishing direct contact with the land during agricultural work were the most significant elements of the implementation. These bodily and professional pedagogies were not equally applied to women who, often living as recluses on the farm, did not enjoy the same forms of sociability as their husbands, and also because, unlike their male counterparts, their work, being less routine and more intermittent, did not result in any irreversible morphological deformities. Between concepts of a ‘subordinated’ masculinity, far from the dominant urban models, and the announcement of accusatory vulnerability, sport and physical education practices designed for the rural world never really met the expectations of the peasant population.Footnote 73
