Father Henri Didon, the other inventor of the Olympic Games

Alongside Pierre de Coubertin, another Frenchman brought the Olympic Games to the baptismal font in 1894: Father Henri Didon. Yvon Tranvouez, professor emeritus of contemporary history at the University of Brest, has just devoted a rich and very interesting biography to him, published in Le Cerf: Faster, higher, stronger, Father Dido, inspiration for the Olympic Games. This Dominican who said he “entered his century and his time to the marrow of his bones”, a renowned, inspired and contested preacher, believed in education through sport.

Sport, modernity and the love of God

Born in 1840 in Touvet, near Grenoble, Henri Didon is marked by this mountain landscape which invites the elevation of the soul and the practice of walking. If he plays sports in his childhood, it will be mainly to strengthen a weak nature, prone to bronchial diseases. The student from the Rondeau minor seminary successfully participates, thanks to his will, in the Olympiads organized by his college. He will never forget the education based on trust, on the love of Antiquity and on the balance between physical culture and intellectual culture that he received there.

He is passionate about science, the engine of progress, even if he criticizes the atheistic materialism of certain scientists, and this arouses mistrust.

He is the son of a liberal and republican bailiff who passed on his enthusiasm for the Revolution of 1848, but also the son of a deeply pious and strong-willed Catholic who passed on to him her faith in God and her love of the Church. . From this marriage between two worlds so opposed, the young boy will keep anchored in him the conviction that it is possible to reconcile the Church and the Republic, Christianity and modernity, since he himself is the fruit of it. A pilgrimage to the Grande Chartreuse, at the age of 13, allowed him to discern God’s call. To answer this question, he turned to the Dominicans, whom he had seen at the study convent of Chalais, attracted by their state of life which was both monastic and apostolic. This is how the main lines that will structure its existence emerge.

A successful but contested preacher

Ordained in 1862, Father Didon experienced a meteoric rise in the first part of his religious life. After two years of teaching at the convent of Saint-Maximin, he stood out as a preacher during a sermon at the convent of Marseille. He set London ablaze, then it was the turn of all intellectual and bourgeois Paris, who flocked to his sermons in Saint-Louis d’Antin or Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. But his freedom of speech does not only win him friends. Eager to awaken a Catholic conscience which has mostly been outside the world since 1789 and dreams of a return to the old order instead of anchoring itself in its time, the preacher provokes an outcry with his big question : “How can we be Catholic at the heart of modernity and not on the sidelines or in rejection?” He is passionate about science, the engine of progress, even if he criticizes the atheistic materialism of certain scientists, and this arouses mistrust.

And then, he is an enemy of the Jesuits, whom he finds too monarchist, and he does not share the momentum of the great devotions of his time: Mary, the Sacred Heart have less meaning in his eyes than Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc… Some people wonder if he really has faith! Incapable of resisting a witticism, intoxicated by his oratorical verve, he blunders. Even the favor shown by Leo XIII, in 1878, for his modernism, was not enough to protect him from disgrace with his superiors. After another blunder, he was exiled to Corsica in Corbara, in 1880, to pray and meditate for an indefinite time. Here is Father Dido forced to let go of the wings of Icarus and fly towards the sun of oratorical glory. He submits, that’s all his greatness.

The fight by the pen

Corbara’s parenthesis, which costs him the sacrifice of his presence with his dying mother, ends after a year and a half. Father Dido plans to write a great work on the divinity of Christ to counter the Jesus materialist by Ernest Renan, because the dechristianization of minds that he sees progressing before his eyes worries him terribly. To carry out his work, he obtained permission to travel to Germany, where biblical exegesis was experiencing great growth, and to the Holy Land, to immerse himself in the atmosphere where Christ lived.

To those of his colleagues whom he annoys, we would explain today that he was a gifted multi-potentialite, basically a tiring “jack of all trades”.

Here again, he encounters misunderstandings. His first travel destination made him commit a work, The Germans, which praises the merits of the German school system and denigrates the French system, while France has just suffered defeat in the war of 1870 against Germany… His second trip enriched him with many emotions and impressions, but his work on Christ, even if it enjoys real publishing success, will be criticized for not being consistent in terms of erudition… Combating atheism and academic sclerosis through the pen is still playing with dragons from two opposing sides, which does not earn Father Dido much success in the newspapers. End of the game: the teaching Third Order calls him to head the Arcueil college, founded in 1832 but which is in decline.

Education through sport

For the Dominican, it was not the dream place: no pulpit to preach in a famous church, no association with a high university level… but it was a providential place that allowed him to achieve. He will be able to use his connections to publicize his establishment and find funds to develop it. It was there that he set about building “a youth of the future, Christian public morals on the current ruins” in the words of one of his faithful friends in 1890, quoted by Yvon Tranvouez. It is also there that he proposes a concrete realization of the educational vision on which he reflected in The Germans. Finally, it is there that he instills both his enthusiasm for modernity and for the Christian faith. Its name is enough to increase the number of registrants and to attract children from good Parisian or provincial society. From one school, it makes four establishments: a middle school, a high school, a set of preparatory classes for the grandes écoles and an establishment for preparation for practical careers, in order to constitute, in a Ralliement laboratory, the future elites of the country.

It was then that Pierre de Coubertin came to see him. Between Henri Didon, the apostle of Christianity in modernity and Pierre de Coubertin, the son of legitimist Catholics who followed liberalism to find his place in his time, the flow immediately passed. The cleric supported the gentleman diplomat in the cause of sport, took his young students to Olympia on a study trip in 1894, celebrated the inaugural mass at the first Olympiad in Athens in 1896 and the baron adopted his motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” for its Olympic Games project. Their friendship will remain, even if Father Dido quickly goes beyond the Olympic project to continue the educational mission of Arcueil as he had conceived it. In any case, he sees sport as the means par excellence of developing will, and competition as the means of deploying moral faculties as well as building team spirit.

Attacked from all sides

Arcueil enjoyed great success for ten years, despite the authoritarianism and volatility of Father Dido who was everywhere without really being in depth on his “construction sites”. To those of his colleagues whom he annoys, we would explain today that he was a gifted multi-potentialite, basically a tiring “jack of all trades”. His success made him essential, until his unfortunate position in the Dreyfus versus Zola affair, which was seized by a Republic that had become radicalized. Accused of being a supporter of subservience to the army, while he wanted to defend patriotism in these times of international tensions, the unpredictable speaker is destabilized. Especially since his establishment has debts. The one who wanted to be halfway between clericalism and radicalism is attacked from all sides, he is also on the verge of physical exhaustion.

This 33rd edition of the Olympic Games will perhaps see the fruits of his apostolate, he who, inflamed with “the living Spirit of God” in his own words, lived to communicate Christic energy to all.

Wanting to further serve the cause of the concordat, he died in 1900 of a heart attack at the home of his friend the Marquise de Saint-Vincent-Brassac, with whom he was stopping off before going to Rome for a diplomatic mission of conciliation to the Pope, having believed until the end that he could reconcile Church and Republic.

The great burial

The death of Father Didon, the closure of the Arcueil college in 1906, the radicalization of the increasingly anticlerical Republic and the resentment of all its adversaries, fueled by its excesses, plunged the memory of the religious into a great burial. We understand today that he was a conduit: one who accompanied the changes in Catholicism in the turbulent second half of the 19th century, before going out of fashion at the dawn of the 20th century. Military chaplain during the war of 1870, during which he was prisoner, sick and took refuge in Switzerland, he did not experience the war of 14-18. However, it is the latter which will be the crucible of reconciliation between the French people and their priests in the hell of the trenches. But the memory of the Dominican resurfaces on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the holding of the Olympic Games in Paris, thanks to his motto, to which he nevertheless attached little importance.

“Joy, that’s what I loved in him,” wrote Pierre de Coubertin in an article in Figaro in 1903, after the death of the religious. He continues thus: “Father Dido wrote enormously and always […] to raise, revive, restore the energy of its correspondents […] , he was a moral Bayard”. This 33rd edition of the Olympic Games will perhaps see the fruits of his apostolate, he who, inflamed with “the living Spirit of God” in his own words, lived to communicate Christic energy to all.