“Hard words and hard blows”: Réflexions sur l’éducation à la sociabilité citoyenne par la boxe à l’époque révolutionnaire

Abstract

« Turning the crowd into a people » becomes a major issue during the revolutionary period (1790-1815) debated in plebeian and patrician societies, in pamphlets, sermons, novels and collected poems. The control and channeling of passions by reason is seen as a prerequisite for human improvement. But how can the people’s passions, and more specifically the mob’s passions, be harnessed for the formation of civic values if they do not have the necessary intellectual faculties to distinguish between truth and error in newspapers or sermons? Media and political debates on prize-fighting provide us with a few interesting clues. At that time, some reformists believed that boxing could be a formidable instrument for the political and civic socialization of the people. As journalist Pierce Egan underlined, this practice could affect sympathetically both the body and the mind, reinvigorating the corporal frame while educating the mind to “those principles of generosity and heroism” that characterize and elevate the English nation. In some political discourses, the “fancy,” the name given to the social group that gathers around the boxing ring, is posited as the prototype of a social group that operates agonistically and values the conflict as long as it is channeled by rules; this indeed allows the “controlled liberation of emotions,” considered as essential in times of peace, and the transmission of the founding values of a manly and conquering Englishness. This article will examine the role played by various political and medical discourses in the formation of a nationalist sporting ideology and will conclude with Hazlitt’s advocacy of another form of patriotism in his essay “The Fight.”