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4 Managing Postwar Naturisme Albert Lecocq and Montalivet When her husband Albert died suddenly in 1969 of complications from anesthesia for minor surgery, Christiane Lecocq received hundreds of letters and telegrams from around the world expressing sympathy for her loss; more than 10,000 people signed the livre d’or [guest book] at the funeral home.1 Perhaps most astonishingly, well-wishers were not seeking access to power but expressing gratitude. Nor were writers remembering a “great man” in the sense of an important statesman or businessman. Rather, Albert Lecocq was, in essence, a professional nudist of lower-middle-class origins with a modest ego. He was known affectionately to many simply as Pépé, after the character from Toulon in the 1937 film Pépé le Moko, a nickname he received after the Lecocqs returned well-tanned from the Île du Levant to Paris.2 “Pépé” did as much as anyone in Europe, and far more than anyone else in France, to channel the postwar European interest in nudism into tourism, further fostering its evolution. His manifold contributions reflected virtually all of the most important developments in French nudism between World War II and Lecocq’s death in 1969. In many respects, Albert Lecocq was an organizer-in-chief who brought together strands of naturism and nudism into a unified movement, redefining naturisme along the way. He did not create demand for nudism in France or in Europe, but he managed it, attempted to control it, and leveraged it within France. In the interwar years, he founded local clubs. During World War II, he established yet another club and began to bring various groups within France into one, more powerful association. He then folded that national association into an international one, thus increasing its reach and, over time, its power. With an acute sensitivity to public opinion, Lecocq progressively made nudism seem acceptable to ever larger numbers of French people, whether they chose to practice or not. He joined with others to create Montalivet, the largest nud- 126 Au Naturel ist vacation center in the world by the 1960s, ultimately eclipsing the Île du Levant in the number of overnight visitors. Lecocq was not a medical professional like the Durville brothers or a bold advocate for nudism like Marcel Kienné de Mongeot. He was not terribly original, repackaging their ideas for ever larger numbers of potential nudists. But he managed, often behind the scenes, to channel the strong international demand first manifest at the Île du Levant in order to encourage the phenomenal expansion of nudism, and especially nude tourism, in post–World War II France. creating clubs and defining naturisme at home and abroad Albert Lecocq’s personal experience with the effects of naturist medicine led to a strong lifelong dedication to sun cures, and a desire to organize everlarger groups practicing nudity in the open air. Born in 1905, young Albert suffered from osteoarticular tuberculosis (tuberculosis of the hip) at age fourteen. After surgery, he spent several months at the seaside hospital of Berck, under the treatment of Dr. Albert Monteuuis, naturist pioneer in sea air and sunshine treatments.3 Although Lecocq remained physically disabled throughout his life, walking with a limp, he attributed his relative recovery to the effects of the sun. In 1927, as Vivre intégralement began to trumpet the desirability of mixed-sex, collective nudity, Lecocq got in touch with Marcel Kienné de Mongeot. While working as a journalist in Lille for the cinematic review L’Écran du nord, Lecocq went with like-minded friends on a camping trip to Knokke-le-zoute in northern Belgium, where they secretly and illegally frolicked nude on the vast and relatively isolated beach.4 But Lecocq wanted a site closer to home, and he soon oversaw meetings in his office that resulted in the creation of one of the first sections of Vivre in the provinces, the Club Gymnique du Nord, which began meeting in 1931 in the former military installation of Fort-Seclin, some twenty kilometers outside Lille. His enthusiasm and organizational abilities were obvious even in these difficult, early years of the movement; soon the Club Gymnique du Nord had more than two hundred members, including a local mayor, a government worker who later became a deputy in the National Assembly, and a young couple with a friend named Christiane, who married Albert Lecocq in 1933.5 Required to move for work, Lecocq spent 1933–34 in Le...

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