PARIS — “An antisemite?
“A racist?
“A misogynist?
“A fascist?”
I am reading these unflattering nouns on a chamber wall of the municipal hall in the elegant 7th Arrondissement of sizzling old Paree, tucked on a side street behind Les Invalides. The object of the accusations is an easy target; he died flat-broke and heartbroken 87 years ago. But maybe it is time to take it a little easier on the Baron de Coubertin.
“He wasn’t perfect,” his great-grand-niece is admitting in the glow of what may be his best Olympic Games. And in his home town, too.
Above her, “UN HOMME DE SONS TEMPS” is the writing on the wall.
A CHARMING SPORTS IDEALIST WHO BUILT A BETTER WORLD, proclaims another panel.
“He gets hammered,” Alexandra de Navacelle de Coubertin says. “You can’t hammer a whole generation. He was a man of his times.”
“He was human,” the latter-day de Coubertin insists, and there’s a photograph behind us of the alleged woman-hating, Adolf-loving snob, smiling through his prosperous, preposterous moustache, on a bicycle. The family has organized this exhibition of memorabilia and propaganda as a rearguard action against their ancestor’s cancellation. It may or may not already be too late.
We don’t think of Baron de Coubertin as an athlete, but he won his share of ribbons as a target shooter and cyclist and even served as a rugby referee. (He also was awarded the Olympic gold medal for literature in 1912. I wonder why.) We don’t think of him as a family guy, but he fathered two children – a daughter who never married, and son who in our era might be called developmentally delayed. The de Navacelle de Coubertins are branched from the Baron’s sister Marie.
“Yes, we’re protecting him,” Ms. de Navacelle de Coubertin confesses, and how splendid it must be to have not just one noble de in one’s name, but deux. “But we are also trying to clarify what it is he wanted.”
It is unlikely that the Baron wanted all of what his Games have become. He was born on the same day that Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation – January 1, 1863 – and he did say that “the Olympic Spirit is neither the property of one race nor of one age,” but as far as sex as concerned, he might have considered gentlewomen pounding each other in the face and shredding skateboards through the Place de la Concorde and diving into the Seine off the Pont Alexandre III a bridge too far.
“An Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper,” he once wrote.
That was stupid. But without great-grand-uncle Pierre and his Ancient Greece-o-philia and his decades of lobbying titled heads to make this thing happen and the soaring arc of his dream, Summer McIntosh and Simone Biles would not exist.
“He had one basic desire,” the Baron’s namesake and defender says. “How do you prepare the youth for the future?”
“It was not a magical wish.”
In 1870, Baby Baron de Coubertin was seven years old when the Prussian army blew through France in world-record time. Forty-four years later, they were back. And again, in the Olympic year of 1940. By this time, the Baron had perished penniless in Geneva, so he never got to see Herr Hitler preening for the newsreels beneath the Eiffel Tower, near the Beach Volleyball court.
By then, to the east, an independent Poland had been blitzkrieged. Thousands of Polish officers were in Prisoner of War Camps, house guests of the Thousand-Year Reich.
Exempted from forced labour by the Geneva Convention, and led by commanders who had, before the war, been gentlemen of erudition and culture, the Polish POWs of 1940, and again in 1944, reached for a rock on which to moor the flagship of their hopes. They remembered the Baron de Coubertin and the gift he had offered to a world consumed by immemorial hatreds.
Under a flag stitched from scarves and bedsheets, the hostages of the Nazis staged their own Olympic Games.
“Despite the conditions of war, and despite being in captivity, the Olympic idea survived,” Dr. Roman Babut is saying.
I am at the top end of the new immigrant Paris now, far from the elegant 7th, at the City of Sciences exhibition grounds. Dr. Babut, a retired engineer from Warsaw, is displaying the largest extant collection of ephemera from the forgotten POW Games.
“Imagine thousands of intelligent people sitting in the camps, day after day, year after year, doing nothing,” he says.
He shows me the Olympic diplomas and awards that the prisoners crafted, the pennants and emblems of the sports clubs they formed within their barracks, the postage stamps they carved from woodblocks to spread the news to other men in other Stalags.
A few months after the inmates’ homemade five-ringed flag was lowered, the Allies closed in on the Reich. The POW Olympians were force-marched back toward the Fatherland. Most of them died.
Eighty years later, the world balances again between tolerance and hatred, between sport and war.
“My goal has been reached and my work is done,” wrote the Baron de Coubertin. This one, he got wrong.