Spectacular Surveillance: Capturing Biopouvoir at the 1900 Paris Olympic Games

No sooner had France won the most medals at the 1900 Concours Internationaux d'exercises physiques et de sports than its success was headlined by Le Temps as “La Renaissance physique”. In Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s Darwinian terms, it demonstrated that in “la lutte pour la vie”, as Le Temps called this international rivalry, France had proven to be the ‘fittest’ nation’. Its fitness was not just trumpeted daily by La Vie sportive reports of France’s Olympian feats but especially by the relentless photography of the Olympian body as a spectacle of Neo-Lamarckian regeneration by the new sporting press, particularly such new sporting magazines as Edmond Desbonnet’s L’Athlète and La Vie au Grand Air.

Conterminously the Olympian body was extensively photographed, mostly nude, by Jules-Étienne Marey, Georges Demenÿ, Paul Richer and Albert Londe on the Olympic site for their Commission d’Hygiène et de physiologie. Deploying biometric photography and chronophotography, as well as detailed systems of measurement, it was this so-called “truly scientific” investigation that exposed the biopolitical surveillance underlying this spectacle of international bodies rivalling one another. While the detailed measurements of “la vitesse” were designed to ascertain the “variations” between sport, exercise, and their enhancements of energy, the comparisons drawn between competitors of different nations, ethnicities and races were designed to yield “the secret of the superiority of certain bodies”. Hence when the Olympic spectacles of biopouvoir are juxtaposed with the biometric photography and chronophotographic scrutiny of the Commission d’Hygiène et de physiologie, Coubertin’s Olympic Games revival may be reviewed as both a strategy to inculcate ‘the fitness imperative’ to regenerate eugenically the French race, and a spectacular surveillance of international fitness and preparedness for sporting rivalry and warfare.