ABSTRACT
Early Life Baron Pierre de Coubertin was born into a wealthy French aristocratic family in Paris on New Year's Day, 1863. The third of four children, he enjoyed a privileged upbringing. Serious beyond his years, he was an intense young man of rather small stature and average appearance (later made more distinguished by an enormous, carefully groomed mustache), who developed attitudes much too liberal for his conservative, Catholic, royalist parents. The disastrous defeat suffered by the French in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) was a disturbing reminder to him and other patriots of France's decline and convinced the young man that the old values of his family were no longer realistic in a "Bismarckian" world. The shaky beginnings of the Third Republic made the country's future uncertain, but Coubertin became a firm supporter of the new regime. He developed interests in social criticism, journalism, history, and, most important, educational reform.
