<i>Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France</i>, by Joan Tumblety

Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France, by Joan Tumblety. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2012. xiv, 257 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). This is a deeply-researched and fully-documented, but not quite definitive study of many of the French proponents and practitioners of physical culture for men between 1920 and the mid-1940s. Based on documentation on the private, public, and military advocacy and provision of physical education in the national library and archives, the army archives, and the police and departmental archives in Paris, Remaking the Male Body presents engaging and informative sections on the marketing of physical culture for men, replete with analyses and illustrations of promotional material, and on physical culture at the Paris World Fair of 1937. Having consulted the holdings on private, public, and military exercise programs in the libraries of the national institute of sport and physical education (INSEP) and of the military school, Joan Tumblety delineates the differences between various systems of exercise, yet recognizes their interactions and similarities. In particular, she shows that implemented programs were often eclectic mixes of different regimens. Drawing on the resources of the municipal archives of Saint-Denis (a red suburb of Paris that promoted physical culture), and other material on the communist and socialist parties' and the Popular Front government's commitment to men's physical fitness, she challenges assumptions that physical cultists were politically rightwing. By extending her study to the Vichy years, she demonstrates that many of the interwar protagonists entered the Vichy administration and shaped some of its policies. Remaking the Male Body introduces many purveyors of physical culture and indicates their motivations: private fitness institutes and gyms, most of them associated with the large number of medical men interested in bodily health and strength; physical educators in the public schools, who started with military battalions in boys' schools to prepare Frenchmen for military duty; the military, sufficiently concerned about high rates of rejection in the yearly medical examinations of potential conscripts, encouraged physical preparation for future soldiers; government officials at the national and municipal level who mandated a series of physical education programs out of concern about national regeneration and military revenge; and political parties and factions from the left to the right. While many political groups shared governmental motives about regeneration and revenge, Tumblety shows that they also wanted to protect their adherents in the period of street battles during the political turmoil of the mid-1930s. Remaking the Male Body analyzes the arguments of these advocates, starting with common fears that (French) masculinity was fragile and could only be regenerated through muscle building. The fear was based upon theories of degeneration due to the softening effect of civilization, including sedentary professions, public transport, excessive food, and overwork, especially intellectual labour in the school system. Tumblety makes a compelling case for the effect of the surfeit of trained medical doctors seeking to make a living in the market. …

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