ABSTRACT
T the transformation of the earlier, universalist and civic classicism of the French Enlightenment and the Revolution, into the particularist, naturalist and ethno-racial classicism which followed the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The new French classicism rejected the city and turned to another motif from the classical repertoire, the healthy body. It called for national physical regeneration through revival of the ancient Greek cult of the body: the care for the body through its exposure to the sun and fresh air of the countryside and through physical activity in the countryside. It justified this return to yet another motif from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds whose close links and exemplary qualities for the Western world have caused them to be termed, jointly, ‘classical civilisation’, with scientific arguments.1 These arguments were ethnic/genealogical and racial. They were produced by and taken from the new life-science: physical anthropology. I have termed this new attachment to classical principles (in this instance, the ancient Greek physical ideals of health and strength) justifi ed by descent, that is, genealogical-cum-physical continuity of the modern French with the ancient Greeks, ethnoclassicism.2 Ethno-classicism reclaimed the body of the ancient Greeks for the French as a birthright: a biological inheritance of the French people.
