ABSTRACT
Swimming became both the topic of independent publications and a component part of the pedagogical, military and natural scientific writings of the time. Enlightened writers stressed the value of swimming for strengthening the body, but even more as a life-saving skill. Swimming was something practised by 'savages', the methodical step-by-step learning to move through the water, in contrast, was as much a handicap as it was an expression of European rationality. Jean Baptiste de la Chapelle took human anatomy into account, but the picture he painted of human weightiness was more dramatic. Jean Charles Poncelin de la Roche-Tilhac, publisher of the Thevenot swimming manuals of 1781, 1782 and 1786, probably started off better situated than Gabriel Feydel. With all due respect to the explicit concerns of the Enlightenment, it appears that both the authors and publishers of late eighteenth-century French manuals on swimming belonged to the group of hack writers whose economic status was precarious.
