La méthode du plancher d’Hippolyte Triat : Genèse et transmission

Abstract

Hippolyte Triat’s floor method has remained famous in the history of gymnastics. We see it appear in the title of the booklet written by Nicolas Dally to present the Parisian Gymnasium launched with Triat in 1847: Milonian Society for the exploitation of gymnastics “according to the method of Mr. Triat of Nîmes”. But what is the genesis of this method, the shaping of which probably began when Triat settled down with the opening of its first gymnasium in Liège in 1838? And what was its diffusion before falling into oblivion? It seems to be linked to the progress of its author from his performances of acrobatic gymnastics with Paul Mathevet during the 1830s. Starting from documentary material from the press of the time and helped by recent historiography relating to the sport and physical activity from a social perspective, the spectacle of acrobatic gymnastics played a driving role in the creation of the first civilian gymnasiums. The practice of gymnastics then responds to new objectives of health, educational value and bodily beauty. This study shows how the Triat method was disseminated by several articles by the writer Paul Féval and partially illustrated by Dr. Jules Massé in La Santé universelle: Guide médical des familles in 1853–54, then transmitted after his death by his students like A. Personne who still practised it in 1917 and had it stenographed by Victrix of the sports newspaper L’Auto, and by his disciples like Edmond Desbonnet who often referred to in his journal La Culture physique or in his works. This stenography not having been published, from the descriptions contained in L’Education Introduite dans les Masses par la Régénération de l’Homme by A. Personne, published by Dubreuil in Paris in 1905, and the Traité de gymnastique d’application by Pierre Schmitz, published in Liège in 1871, compared to the articles of Jules Massé, our problem is to reconstruct in theory the chronology of the exercises of this forgotten Triat floor method, in the hope that gymnastics instructors put it into practice with a tutorial recording promoting its dissemination.