Christian Vivier

Les plaisirs nautiques au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles: les mises en scène sportives organiséessur le Léman (Suisse) et sur le Doubs(France)

Résumé Au tournant des xixe et xxe siècles, les fêtes nautiques sont, pour les sociétaires, l’occasion d’une exubérance fondée sur l’exaltation des sens les plus variés. Sur les rives du Léman et du Doubs, les animations offertes par les cercles nautiques suisses et français remportent de vifs succès. Ces mises en scène culturelles et sportives modifient alors le spectateur par les émotions qu’elles suscitent. Elles autoriseraient d’autant plus l’embrasement des passions qu’elles s’inscrivent dans un cadre social garant de leur maîtrise.

Engines at top speed! Using the adventures of a comic book motorsports hero as an approach to understanding recent French history

ABSTRACT Jean Graton created a series of comic books called Michel Vaillant, and its motorsports hero bore the same name. Michel Vaillant made his first appearance in 1957 in the weekly Tintin. Young French boys who loved adventure, sports and car racing greeted this publication with great enthusiasm. We studied the first series of Michel Vaillant, composed of 16 comic books produced in the 1960s. We have departed from traditional approaches and have based our method on the analysis of the sources of Graton’s inspiration. We link these sources to the comics’ text bubbles, visual signs and iconic meanings of the drawings. Our analysis of the comics’ iconography based on the establishment of a mass culture dedicated to the automobile brings to light the existence of an urge to go beyond the limits of tradition. Our research highlights that the success of Michel Vaillant is due, in the main, to the series’ detailed knowledge of the automobile sports industry, and to the myths of speed, youth and progress that it promulgates – myths in which its young male readers could see themselves reflected and which would also prepare them for the future.

The French snow class: How the focus of a school innovation changed from physical education to academic learning (1953–1981)

In 1953, for the first time in the history of French public education, elementary school students lived and learned in the Alps for one month. They were from Gambetta Elementary School in Vanves, France, and the inventor of this innovation was Dr. Max Fourestier, the school doctor. Praised for their therapeutic benefits for the students, ‘snow classes’ gradually spread to other schools during the period 1960–1970, appearing in programs across the nation. Our study aims to show how the teachers in Vanves moved the original focus of the snow class, from skiing classes (physical education), towards an academic study of the environment, in which students studied the characteristics of the Alps and their assets.

Exercise in French Physical Education Teaching Since 1945. A Civilising Intellectualisation as the Consequence of Sport and School Standardisation

In France, since the Second World War, physical and sports education (PSE) methods have seen considerable renewal. However; the word “exercise” has remained in the professional vocabulary. This permanence inevitably raises questions about the conditions under which the term is used. The mutations undergone by this basic unit of the students physical activity reflect the profound changes that have occurred in the discipline. Desiring to give greater coherence to their teaching and thus work towards greater school legitimacy, French PSE teachers have progressively developed a more and more complex argument. This argument has permitted them to rationally link the body movements that have to be performed with the aims that can thus be achieved, in a dynamic which bears the imprint of the “civilising process”. This study is a historical analysis of a particular element in the teacher-student relationship: exercise. Hexagonal physical education, through its incorporation of norms, makes it possible to fully understand the educational concepts of the moment and their evolution throughout the second half of the 20th century. Although often neglected in university research, the notion of exercise nonetheless represents a remarkable indicator of a society’s educational approach.

La mode du ping-pong en France en 1902: une autre façon de questionner les classiques transferts culturels dans le domaine du sport

ABSTRACT This study offers to follow the path of a parlour game and allows to seize the cultural transfers of this physical practise and to measure the part of the ambient anglomania in its reconfiguration in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. The ping-pong become a fashion within the French high society in 1902. By joining the bourgeois codes, this parlour game contributes to the perpetuation of the uses of this select population far from the effort of English sport. This fashion seduces because it’s not only perpetuation of the social conventions of elites. It’s also built on the idea of emancipation which the impossible meets between men and women symbolise. Fashion is surprisingly fed with paradox.

Autant de temps, autant de loisirs si tentants

Loisir. Que de difficultes surgissent a l�idee de cerner l�acception de cette notion. D�aucuns se sont evertues a en definir les contours (Veblen, 1899 ; Dumazedier, 1962 ; Baudrillard, 1970 ; Sue, 1982 ; Rauch, 1986 ; Dumazedier, 1988 ; etc.) ! Mais le temps a passe qui n�a eu de cesse d�en accroitre encore l�imbroglio. Au pluriel...