Obituary: Christiane Lecocq, champion of 'social nudity'

25 January 2015 - 02:03 By The Daily Telegraph
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Christiane Lecocq, who has died aged 103
Christiane Lecocq, who has died aged 103

1914-2014 Christiane Lecocq, who has died aged 103, was regarded as the doyenne of the naturist movement. With her husband, Albert, she founded the world's first naturist holiday resort in France and spearheaded the International Naturist Federation, an organisation that now has some 16 million members in 38 countries.

She was born at Tourcoing, northern France, on April 6 1911, and grew up at a time when women were beginning to expose their ankles and arms, but otherwise remained strictly covered up. Naturism, defined by the International Naturist Federation as "a lifestyle in harmony with nature, expressed through social nudity, and characterised by self-respect of people with different opinions and of the environment", was not invented in France. Nude bathing had been traditionally practised in Scandinavia and Russia, but it was in Germany that an ideology of social nudity, known as Freikörperkultur (free body movement), originated in the 1870s. The practice was introduced into the rest of Europe, including France and Britain, in the 1920s.

Christiane first came across the practice in 1932, when she was invited to join a sports club where members played sports in the nude. It was there that she met her future husband Albert Lecocq. They married in 1933 but for many years had to keep their naturist activities clandestine.

For the Lecocqs naturism was a way of life: they did not drink or smoke, followed what would now be called a macrobiotic diet, and promoted "social nudity" as offering health and social benefits.

In 1944, during the German occupation, the Lecocqs founded the Club du Soleil France, an underground organisation dedicated to promoting what it called "family" and social naturism.

Christiane Lecocq continued to promote the cause after her husband's death in 1969, regularly attending the General Assembly of the French Federation of Naturism, of which she was honorary president. She continued to follow the naturist way of life until she was more than 100 years old, by which time France had become the world's leading naturist destination, spawning an industry said to be worth à250-million to the French economy.

In later years, however, Christiane Lecocq felt that the movement had lost some of the idealism of its founders. The development of naturism as mass tourism meant that the spirit had largely gone.

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