ABSTRACT
The French naval commander Georges Hébert, Director of the Collège d’Athlètes de Reims from 1912 to 1914 and Editor of the journal L'Éducation Physique (1902–1972) after 1922, developed a naturist or naturalist approach of the human body, movement and action that revolutionised the concept and practice of gymnastics. Hébert can therefore be considered as an early 20th century forerunner of the Body Ecology movement. However, Hébert’s method went into decline after the 1960s and 70s. At a conference in 1995 organised by the Centre for Research and Innovation in Sport at the University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, sports historian Pierre Arnaud (1942–2016) described how it had been ‘[rejected] as a thing of the past in the history of education, teaching and sport’. Since then, the method has made a remarkable comeback, internationally, both in the civil and military world. Despite this rehabilitation, there are still misunderstandings about Hébert’s method because the approach to his work has been historicist, seen from the perspective of certain institutions and only considering the French context. For instance, the key concepts, Natural Method (NM) and Hebertism, are often mistaken to mean the same. Hebertism is a holistic pedagogical approach.
