Edmond Desbonnet

25 September 1867 – 12 December 1953 · Pas-de-Calais → Paris

Edmond Desbonnet was the central French chronicler of the late-nineteenth-century strongmen, the founder and editor of La Culture Physique, the operator of a network of training schools across France and Belgium, and the author of Les rois de la force (1911) — the standard French-language history of the music-hall era.

Origins

Desbonnet was born in 1867 in the Pas-de-Calais. He took up dumbbell training as an adolescent for reasons of poor health, opened his first training school in Lille in 1885, and expanded the operation through the 1890s into a chain of écoles physiques across northern France, Belgium, and into Paris. The schools combined private instruction, group classes for the bourgeoisie, and equipment sales, and were the principal route by which serious lifting reached French amateurs in the late nineteenth century.

The work

Desbonnet founded La Culture Physique in 1898 and edited it for the next forty years. The magazine was the French equivalent of Sandow's London magazine and, after 1914, of Calvert's Strength: a serious lifting periodical that combined contest reports, instructional articles, biography, and equipment advertising. Its complete run, scattered across French libraries and the Stark Center collections, is the principal documentary source for French strongman culture in the period.

He also taught and trained directly. Charles Rigoulot was his most successful pupil; the lifters Pierre Bonnes, Maurice Deriaz, and a generation of French Olympic team members trained at his Paris establishment in the 1900s and 1910s. Desbonnet was an early advocate, in France, of progressive plate-loaded barbell work over the lighter dumbbell drill that Sandow's system had popularised.

"Une histoire de la force se compose de témoins, et de témoins seulement." — "A history of strength is made of witnesses, and witnesses only."

Notable contributions

• Founder, the Desbonnet schools, from 1885 — the principal route by which serious weight training reached the French amateur public.
• Founder and editor, La Culture Physique, 1898–c. 1940.
• Author, Les rois de la force (Berger-Levrault, 1911) — the standard French-language strongman biographical reference.
• Author, Comment on devient un athlète (1901) — instructional manual.
• Teacher and witness to the careers of Apollon, Pierre Bonnes, Charles Rigoulot, and many others; principal contemporary documentary source for the French and continental tradition.

Method

Desbonnet's training method, as set out in Comment on devient un athlète and in his La Culture Physique articles, was structured progressive resistance with a barbell and adjustable dumbbells, combined with calisthenic and gymnastic work. He was sceptical of the mail-order programmes that proliferated in the 1900s — particularly the lighter Sandow-derived courses — and his teaching emphasised heavy, well-spaced sessions with careful technique. He documented the working programmes of his pupils, including Rigoulot, in detail in the magazine.

Legacy

Desbonnet's photographic archive — accumulated across his career of school-keeping, magazine-editing, and friendship with the strongmen of his generation — is one of the most important visual records of the early Iron Game. A substantial portion of it survives at the Musée de la Force in Paris and in the Académie Edmond Desbonnet collection. The photographs of Apollon, of the Saxon Trio's French tours, and of Rigoulot's Olympic-era training are largely Desbonnet's. Les rois de la force remains in print in French and is the source on which English-language accounts of Apollon and the French tradition almost universally depend.

Desbonnet himself lived through both world wars and continued to write into his eighties. He died in Paris in December 1953.

Disputed and unresolved

Desbonnet's reporting of figures, like every contemporary chronicler's, varied in reliability with the source. His own pupils' lifts are well-documented and reasonably checkable; figures repeated from older or non-Francophone sources are less reliable, and his account of Cyr's career (filtered through North American press at considerable remove) is less firm than his account of Apollon's. The standard scholarly position, taken in Iron Game History, is to treat Desbonnet as authoritative on the figures he knew personally and as a useful but secondary source on those he did not.