You always have to reckon with the unexpected. For the revolutionaries of forty years ago, there was little doubt that the advent of the Human International, uniting the peoples of the earth into a great family, would be the result of the economic process and of an intellectual evolution. .

Now, what certainly would not have been supposed by the disciples of Blanqui and Karl Marx, nor by Bakunin's companions in struggle, anarchists from the very beginning, it appears, and more and more, that the internationalism of sport penetrates crowds and young people much more than intellectual internationalism.

Revenge of the long-disdained muscle!

Without doubt, we must see here a very natural reaction of the human organism which, burned in a century of overheated and artificial life, crushed and imprisoned among the people, both in the prisons of work and in the slums, relaxes, thirsty for fresh air, eager for movement, so as not to end up withering away and dying.

Among many young proletarians, this reaction, relaxation of being, was instinctive. Many, fleeing the factory, pumping with human sap, where the smelly cobbles, wandered in the street and got lost there. Others, on Sunday, after completing the monotonous task, feeling the same need for a different muscular activity, went to join sports groups.

Physical education was once derisively neglected. We were pained to see, in the working class circles of the towns, the pale and hollow faces with dull looks, or, sometimes, burning with fever, the narrow chests, stigmata of a debilitation of the race, and we were well obliged to note that, if the common man once had the superiority of physical strength over the privileged, nobles or bourgeois, this superiority he had lost. Niceforo has published moving documents on this in his book “Wealth and Misery.»

We could therefore only rejoice to see the development of physical education, the handsome and robust athlete with harmonious movements evoking a memory of the best Hellenism, if the tendency of the crowds was not to entirely sacrifice intellectual culture to bodily culture. .

Without the slightest bias to prefer the past to the present, I remember the young people of yesteryear, who were passionate about a political, social or literary ideal.

These took sides with an enthusiasm that was often ingenuous, but very respectable, for the threatened republic, for or against Boulanger, for or against Dreyfus; they argued over Déroulède or Louise Michel, were feverish over Les Blasphèmes and La Chanson des Gueux by Richepin, then a fiery atheist, since converted and failed at the Academy. All this was mental life and the crowds themselves, so resistant to reasoning, nevertheless allowed themselves to be penetrated from time to time, carried away by a generous impulse.

Today, there are certainly still young people, but those who speak the loudest seem foreign to any philosophical, social or aesthetic thought. We know Criqui but we ignore Branly.

The craze for disgusting and cruel spectacles like combat boxing, which does not even have as an excuse the decorative power of bullfights de muerte and for the cunning brutes who get busy dismantling jaws, is an ignominy worthy of cannibals . We cannot think without blushing of the idolatry aroused by Carpentier, whose defeat by Dempsey was considered a national mourning.

How different from this savagery, a school of bestiality, is the beautiful athleticism which develops the limbs without breaking the teeth, turning the eyes black and cracking the brains! The athletics that Géo André describes to us with the authority of a master practitioner and which reminds us of the luminous ages of heroic Greece.

The development of the body in flexibility and strength alongside the development of the mind, what could be healthier and more beautiful? Lifting and carrying loads, leaping, running, swimming, getting used to the precision of the eye and the hand, this is a physical refresher that the humanity of our industrial age greatly needs. But let the same individual not remain, like the fanatics of the ring, an uneducated snob, worshiper of the surcing and the uppercut, inaccessible to any impression of art, of poetry, to any science; inaccessible to any passion for social progress.

Come as soon as possible the day when sport as we currently experience it will be purified, pruned from the charlatanism of the profiteers and the crudeness of the malotrus to become a great school of hygiene and an international fraternization in beauty.

I am not an athlete, even a very incomplete one, and I am, alas, past the age of becoming one. I will therefore apologize for having, at this Olympic moment, expressed my personal impressions concerning an area which is not mine.