Abstract EN:

While at the turn of the nineteenth century, boxing in England remained a criminal practice and obscure, it is promoted, on the eve of the Great War, the rank of sport of the most fashionable. Embodying an ideal of physical regeneration, this staging of the body is then a show of flagship Parisian nights. The frequency of the demonstrations, the number of spectators during the big fights, the interest carried by a big part of the press and, finally, the social heterogeneity of a public, composed in particular by the principal artistic elites of the Belle Époque, constitute the most significant testimonies of this "triumph of the fist".What can be called "The Belle Époque of Boxing in France" is also marked by a correlation between the success of this practice and the advent of the first tri-colored sports star: the boxer Georges Carpentier. Born in 1894 in Liévin, in the mining basin of Pas-de-Calais, this champion embraces the profession of pugilist at the age of 14 years. In 1914, aged 20, he has already delivered more than 77 clashes and conquered, to the annoyance of the British, four titles of European champion! Such a journey invites to think the question of the factory of the champion at the Belle Epoque. It is all the product of a competent sports entourage and hard work that the result of a kind of "gift" amplified by the precocity and difficulty of the fighting. Not to mention, an economic environment favorable to the sport show marked by the synergy, even consanguinity of sports show entrepreneurs and media outlets who work for the construction of a "national idol".Unlike most of the winners of this sport, who entered the career as an adult, Carpentier chose this hard job at the end of childhood. Also, he argues the majority of his struggles during his adolescence. Because the spectacle of boxing can serve as a prism through which the historian analyzes the French society and culture of the pre-war period, this atypical trajectory, even enigmatic by its brilliance, questions the relationship to the physical violence maintained by this young man. pugilist and more widely by a whole generation. Sometimes considered as a game of brute, sometimes as a noble art, boxing is also the mirror of a Belle Epoque, shared in the words of the Italian historian Emilio Gentile between "triumphant modernity" and "barbarism of splendor". Its success, like that of air or motor sports, is part of a "culture of aggression" that seems to announce the violence of the First World War.Between 1908 and 1914, at the rate of many and improbable victories, the popularity of Carpentier continues to grow. It reached its peak in the two years preceding the war, especially when there were convincing triumphs against the finest pugilistic British flower. On the occasion of matches mobilizing the springs of anti-English nationalism, these clashes continue the long historical enmity between France and the "perfidious Albion", while nourishing and growing the fame of the boxer. At the dawn of celebrity worship, the extent of its notoriety can be evaluated by a regular visibility in the media, the birth of an industry and an economy centered around its image and emergence of a form of adulation and heroism of his person. In a kind of allegory, his face, and in particular the contradiction between his first young physique and the extreme aggressiveness that he shows once in the ring, embody then the ambivalence of boxing and by the same that of the Belle Epoque. Strangely echoing the famous sentence pronounced by the philosopher Hegel, "Woe to the people who need heroes", the elevation, a few years before the Great War, of a boxer to the rank of national hero, would appear as a testimony of the inability of the country to find in the collective, moral springs to avoid the cataclysm that grew in the shadows.