Degeneration, moral regeneration, and Swedish gymnastics

As Cyrus Schayegh has shown, improving the Iranian “race” and reversing the “degeneracy” of Iranians was an important item on the modernists’ agenda, and a healthier life style that included vigorous physical exercise was one of the ways this could be achieved.³³ Preoccupation with “degeneracy” was of course widespread in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe,³⁴ and vigorous physical exercise was considered the best way to remedy it.³⁵ Iranian modernists were influenced in their conceptualizations of the problem by the writings of Europeans, but let us not forget that there was a strong material basis for the anxieties of modernists. The state of public health, for instance, was terrible: to give but one example, syphilis was widespread, and it is estimated that 20-40 per cent of Tehran’s population was infected, including many 8-10-year-old boys.³⁶

The ideas that Varzandeh propounded in his few extant writings to improve the general well-being of the Iranian nation clearly show the influence of the Swedish school of gymnastics he studied in Belgium. The Swedish school was created at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Per Henrik Ling (17761839), a man who also achieved fame as a patriotic poet.³⁷ Sweden’s decline as a world power, exemplified by the loss of Finland to Russia in 1809, was the impetus behind his search for ways to revive the nation’s strength. The exercises Ling devised sought to combine the military virtues of his Viking forefathers with the qualities of self-restraint and control demanded of citizens in the modern age. Like other continental European proponents of gymnastics, he had no use for competitive games, but he differed from the German Turnen in his rejection of rings, ropes, bars, and other equipment.³⁸ Instead, he devised callisthenics which aimed at fostering a harmonious development of all the body’s organs and limbs. After Ling’s death, his successors at the Central Gymnastics Institute (Gymnastiska centralinstitutet), which he had created in Stockholm in 1814, “were all preoccupied with the moral and physical decadence that they thought characterized Sweden: exaggerated love of pleasure, weakness, sickness, self-indulgence.”³⁹ The resistance against competitive sports became less fierce, and they were accepted as a complement to noncompetitive exercises. By the 1870s, Social Darwinism crept into the movement, and with it a certain militarism. The influential director of the military division of the Institute, Viktor Balck, believed that competitive athletics promoted “patriotism, a sense of duty, the will to defend, [and a reduction of] social conflict”; for Balck, athletics “became the cure for all evils that threatened man and society: social unrest, sexual temptation, decadent entertainment, and so on.”⁴⁰

Ling’s system became popular in France in the aftermath of its defeat against Prussia in the War of 1870, when notions of national decline were popular and led to a search for ways to halt it.⁴¹ The main institution for the training of French physical education teachers was the Ecole normale de gymnastique de Joinville-le-Pont, founded in 1852, which served as a model for the Belgian

Ecole normale de gymnastique et d’escrime, founded in 1894 in Brussels, the school Varzandeh attended. In 1902 Clement Lefebure, an admirer of Swedish gymnastics who had studied at Stockholm’s Central Gymnastics Institute, became its director and replaced the previous, French-inspired system of physical education with Swedish gymnastics, arguing that only it was capable of counteracting the moral and physical degeneration which threatened the Belgian nation and thus “regenerate the race.”⁴² In 1903 he published L'Education physique en Suede,⁴³ and two years later a course on Swedish gymnastics which was translated by Selim Sirri Tarcan into Turkish.⁴⁴ Varzandeh may very well have made his first theoretical acquaintance with Swedish gymnastics through this translation, published while he was living in Istanbul.