COUBERTIN, PIERRE, BARON DE

born Jan. 1, 1863, Paris, Fr. died Sept. 2, 1937, Geneva, Switz. originally Pierre de Frdy French educator who was primarily responsible for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, after nearly 1,500 years of abeyance. He was a founding member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and served as its president from 1896 to 1925. As a republican born to the French aristocracy, a patriot with an internationalist's outlook, and a child of the French defeats of 1871 yet a committed progressive and optimist, Coubertin struggled in his 20s to find a satisfying vocation. Inspired by study tours of British public schools and American colleges, he resolved "to attach his name to a great educational reform," embarking upon life-long campaigns for secondary school improvement, workers' universities, and the popular study of world political history. These efforts attained little success and are largely forgotten today. But as le Rnovateur ("the reviver") of the Olympic Games, Coubertin managed to alter modern cultural history on a global scale. The idea of a new Olympic Games, which in Coubertin's case emerged from a focus on the liberal democratic and character-building properties of school sport, was hardly original. Whenever Europe renewed its fascination with ancient Greece, the charismatic phrase "Olympic Games" came to the fore. Historians have discovered dozens of fanciful evocations of the Olympics from the Renaissance through early modern times, and in the 18th and 19th centuries sporting, gymnastic, and folkloric festivals bearing this name are known from Canada, Greece, France, Germany, Sweden, and Great Britain. These local or national expressions often asserted the superiority of indigenous physical culture over that of rival peoples. By contrast, Coubertin and his colleagues were committed from the beginning to a quadrennial festival of strictly international character and featuring many kinds of modern athletic contest. Coubertin's extraordinary energies, his taste for cultural symbolism, his social and political connections, and his willingness to exhaust his fortune in pursuit of his ambitions were critical to launching the Olympic Movement. At the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition, Coubertin launched a series of congresses on physical education and international sport that coincided with inspiring new archaeological finds from Olympia. His public call for an Olympic revival at one of these congresses in 1892 fell on deaf ears, but he persevered and in 1894 a second Sorbonne congress resolved to hold an international Olympic Games in Athens. The success of Athens 1896 was followed by embarrassments in Paris and St. Louis, Missouri, U.S., where the Olympics were swallowed by world's fairs and control was all but lost by the young IOC and its president Coubertin. Stockholm 1912 put the Games back on track, and during the World War I era Coubertin reconsolidated the Olympic Movement by moving its headquarters to Lausanne, Switzerland, and by articulating its ideology of "neo-Olympism," the pursuit of peace and intercultural communication through international sport. After the highly successful 1924 Olympics in Paris, Coubertin retired from the IOC presidency. His final years were marked by personal isolation, penury, and family tragedy, while the Games themselves, as evidenced by Los Angeles 1932 and Berlin 1936, stepped closer to the centre of world affairs. Coubertin died in Geneva in 1937 and was buried in Lausanne, save for his heart, which upon his instructions was removed from his corpse and interred in a memorial stele adjacent to the ruins of ancient Olympia. John J. MacAloon Additional reading Coubertin compiled his remembrances in Olympic Memoirs (1979; originally published in French, 1931). Pierre de Coubertin: Textes Choisis, ed. by Norbert Mller, 3 vol. (1986), collects his works related to all aspects of the Olympic phenomenon. John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games (1981), is the standard biography of Coubertin through the foundation of the modern Olympic Movement. Geoffroy de Navacelle, Pierre de Coubertin: Sa vie par l'image (1986), provides photodocumentation of Coubertin's life and work. International Olympic Committee, 18941994 The International Olympic Committee: One Hundred Years, ed. by Raymond Gafner, vol. 1 (1994), contains useful studies of Coubertin's later years.