The cure d’exercice: Understanding the therapeutic value of sport and physical exercise in the Paris region, c. 1880-1950

Abstract

The chapter focuses on the emergence of ideas about the therapeutic nature of sport and physical exercise in early to mid-twentieth-century France. It argues that the medicalization of physical education in the years after the First World War was both cause and effect of the conviction that physical movement would improve individual and national health. Public authorities and private associations were equally invested through mid-century in the 'exercise cure' as an effective remedy for tuberculosis, the effects of poor living conditions, and in some quarters the decline of the 'race'. Yet this investment cannot be reduced to a eugenicist commitment to social hygiene. It also speaks to the purchase of medical naturism, and to a widespread if diffuse commitment to addressing emotional health through the power of an imagined mind-body connection. Exploring the deployment of the ‘exercise cure’ in open-air schools and a civic association from the 1920s to the post-1945 years, the chapter ultimately sheds light on the emergence of wellbeing as a category of experience and analysis.

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