Not A Game, It's A Religion

 

 I am not sure to whom to give the credit for the  title but he is almost certainly French. Boules games have a long, long history, allegedly dating back through the Middle Ages to ancient Rome and quite probably before that to ancient Greek and Egypt. ,But the form of boules known as the jeu provencal or boule lyonnaise, became incredibly popular during the second half of the 19^th

Ernest Pitiot, a resourceful friend

1910.

Le Joueur de Boules. Gavarni. 1858.

century in France. In this popular form of the game, players rolled their boules, or ran three steps before throwing the boule. Petanque proper, as we might label it, developed as an offshoot or variant of jeu provencal in 1910, in what is now known as the Jules Lenoir Boulodrome in the town of La Ciotat, near Marseilles. A former jeu provencal player named Jules Lenoir was afflicted by rheumatism so badly that he could no longer run before throwing a boule. In fact, he could barely stand. A good friend, Ernest Pitiot, a local cafe owner, wanted to accommodate his friend Lenoir, and he developed a variant of the game in which the length of the field or pitch, was reduced by approximately half, and the player, instead of running to throw a boule, stood stationary within a marked circle. They called this new version, pieds tanques, feet planted [on the ground], a name that eventually evolved into the game’s current name, Petanque. In the same year, Ernest Pitiot and his brother, Joseph, organised the first Petanque tournament in La Ciotat; it was a great success and subsequently the newly-adapted game spread quickly and soon became the most popular form of boules in France.

Petanque, France 1950s perhaps.

Before the mid 1880s, European boules games were played with a solid wooden ball, usually made from boxwood root, a particularly hard wood. The late 1880s saw the introduction of the production of cheap, mass-produced nails and gradually it became the fashion to cover the wooden boules balls with nails, called boules cloutees. After WW1, the adaptation of technology for producing cannon-balls, allowed the production of hollow, all metal balls and from the mid 1920s, les boules integrales were introduced by Paul Courtieu. The integrale was cast in a single piece from a bronze-aluminium alloy and this was further modified by Jean Blanc who invented the process of manufacturing steel balls by stamping two steel blanks into hemispheres and then welding the two halves together to create a boule. With this technological advance, hollow all-metal boules rapidly became the norm we know and love today!

Contemporary women's game

Thus, during the last one hundred years since the all-metal ball has become established, the global spread of the game has accelerated; first from Provence to the rest of France; then to most of Europe and onward to Francophone colonies and countries. In South-East Asia, for instance, countries with French colonial influence such as Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia are strong supporters of Petanque with many countries worldwide having established national governing bodies similar to the world’s oldest governing body, in France, La Federation Francaise de Petanque et du Jeu Provencal.

And today three of us happily re-started our girls’ Petanque sessions at Minnewater, adjacent to the sun-dappled water and beneath a green forested canopy nearby. The birdsong-filled peace echoing with faint lapping from the lake was soon broken with shouts and whoops from the triumphant and the dejected. Been wondering if Petanque shouldn’t be on the prescription list for various emotional/psychological illnesse

 Rear view of Woman of the Match.

s. 

Blogger in action

View from the Petanque court of the 
Poertoren, now temporarily changed from mediaeval
monument into a Triennale exhibit,
'And The World Keeps Turning.'
by Nnenna Okore.