Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, was born in Paris in 1863. His father, Charles de Frédy de Coubertin, was a painter. Coubertin had a classical education at the Jesuit College of St Ignatius in Paris. In 1880, he passed his baccalaureate in literature. Although accepted by the Military School of Saint Cyr – like many sons of noble families at the time – he chose instead to study at the Law Faculty of the Political Sciences School. However, with little enthusiasm for a career in this field, he turned to education, which became a veritable passion. Thus it was that, in 1883, influenced by the work of French philosopher and historian Hippolyte Taine, and that of the Englishman Thomas Arnold (the Head of Rugby School), he went to England to compare the British and French education systems. After this trip, he began his life’s work, namely reforming the education system through sport. Convinced of the importance of including sport in the balanced education of a person, he then devoted himself to spreading this idea using all means available: lectures, publications, setting up sports or educational societies, etc. These included the Union des sociétés françaises de course à pied (1887), l’Association pour la réforme de l’enseignement (1906), the Olympic Museum and Library (1925), l’Union Pédagogique Universelle (UPU, 1925) and the Bureau international de pédagogie sportive (BIPS, 1928). Beginning in 1890, Pierre de Coubertin worked actively on re-establishing the Olympic Games.. After a failure in 1892, he organised the International Athletics Congress in Paris, in 1894, after which the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was created and the OG re-established. For Coubertin, this represented the consecration of his huge education reform project. Indeed, he regarded the OG as the ultimate means of promoting sport, and sought – as he wrote in 1894 – “to make them able to better fulfil the educational role incumbent upon them in the modern world” (Coubertin, quoted in The Olympic Movement, IOC). The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896. After these, Coubertin took over from Demetrius Vikelas as IOC President. He held this position until 1925, when he became Honorary President for life. Throughout his life, Pierre de Coubertin wrote a great deal. His various publications are estimated to run to some 15,000 printed pages, without counting his personal correspondence. This large written output mainly concerns Olympism, sport and education, but also subjects as varied as history, geography, sociology, psychology or politics. It was Coubertin who produced the “founding” texts of modern Olympism, including the Olympic Charter, and numerous works like his Histoire Universelle published in 1926-1927 and his Olympic Memoirs, published in 1932. A renowned humanist, Coubertin received several distinctions during his career. Among other things, he was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936 and received the Virginie Heriot Prize in the same year. On 22 June 1937, he was made an Honorary Citizen of Lausanne – the IOC headquarters since 1915 thanks to the Baron’s initiative. Thanks to the generosity of certain friends, this honour enabled Coubertin to overcome the financial worries affecting him at the end of his life, as he had spent his whole personal fortune on funding various projects linked to Olympism and education.