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Jean Joseph Renaud
From The Martial Arts Encyclopedia
Jean Joseph Renaud (1873-1953) was a French self defense instructor and writer on various self defense and combat sport topics.
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Early life
Renaud had been born to a prosperous middle-class Parisian family on January 16, 1873. At the age of sixteen, he became the champion secondary school foil fencer of all France, and he graduated from Cordecet College in 1891.
Renaud’s interest in fencing expanded to encompass virtually all of the self-defense arts available to a young Parisian gentleman of la belle epoque. He studied the traditional French kick-boxing art of savate (la boxe Francaise) and various related combat skills with Joseph Charlemont and Julien LeClerc, two of the most prominent masters of the day.
Around 1905, Renaud released his first written work related to the arts of self defence, a privately published monograph in three parts entitled Method of Fencing - the Mechanics (120 p.), General Tactics (131 p.) and The Attack in One Time and the Duel (109 p.). These writings were only made available to people who were committed to fighting duels with the epee, and consisted of personalised advice on using a sword to wound and, if necessary, to kill an adversary, as opposed to fencing according to the conventions of genteel sport.
Further study
Seeking to extend his knowledge of self defense, in 1905 and 1906 Renaud travelled to London to pursue an intensive course of study in the art of jujitsu, which had been introduced to Europe some six years earlier by E.W. Barton-Wright, the founder of Bartitsu. Renaud studied at the Oxford Street dojo of Japanese instructors Taro Miyake and Yukio Tani “for two summers, that is two periods of three months each, each day and sometimes twice a day”. Along with a fellow Parisian, the wrestler Ernest Regnier, Renaud was thus one of the first French nationals known to have trained in the Japanese martial arts, and he was subsequently instrumental in popularising these arts within France.
In 1908 Renaud represented France in the sabre competition at the Olympic Games held in London, winning the first round but failing to advance to the finals.
Jean Joseph Renaud was a prolific freelance journalist, novelist and playwright, eventually producing over eighty titles covering topics as diverse as feminism, literary criticism and Parisian history, along with numerous play scripts and works of romantic and detective fiction. Of his non-fictional writing, a significant proportion of titles was devoted to sport, most especially the sports de defense including both fencing and street fighting. His most significant work on the latter subject was the massive Defense dans la Rue (Defence in the Street), published in the year 1912; a 420 page tome presenting his system of self defense against almost every conceivable type of assault.
Renaud’s Defense dans la Rue
Following in E.W. Barton-Wright’s tradition of pragmatic eclecticism, Renaud’s Defense dans la Rue system sought to meld various self-defense methods together into a unified whole. With reference to the stylistic chauvinism that had been displayed by some of his predecessors in this field, Renaud wrote:
… the professors of each one of these sports will, ridiculously, deny the other methods. English boxers mock French boxing, declaring that apart from the kicks, it is not worth giving the time of day; the articles lauding Jiujitsu pretend that a follower of the Japanese science will be capable of pulverising any colossus, in any circumstances, in but three seconds, etc, etc.
One will not find any trace of similar sentiment in this eclectic volume; I simply endeavour to harmoniously gather the really practical methods of defense, whatever their origin, and especially to combine them.
Renaud’s system was notably scientific and largely eschewed the more typical early 1900s approach to self-defense writing, which was to present the reader with a series of individual “tricks” or techniques. Instead, Renaud presented his students with a comprehensive progression of training methods and fighting tactics, with an emphasis upon combative practicality that had been influenced by his own earlier experiences in preparing foil fencers for real duels.
Later life
From the post-WW1 period onwards, Renaud became increasingly involved in the performing arts as a playwright, screenwriter and director of both theatre and motion pictures. However, he maintained his interest in self-defense throughout his life, continuing to produce articles on fencing, boxing and duelling right up until the year of his death, at the age of eighty, in Paris during November 1953.
Sources
Freundschuh, Aaron: 'New Sport' in the Street: Self-Defence, Security and Space in Belle Epoque Paris (Oxford University Journal of French History, 2006)
Renaud, Jean-Joseph: La Defense Dans La Rue (Paris, 1912)
Wolf, Tony: "How to fight when you have to” – the defensive arts of Jean Joseph Renaud (Western Martial Arts Illustrated magazine, 2007)
