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So, who was François Baucher?
By
Jean-Claude Racinet
(Extracted from Chapter 1 of Racinet Explains Baucher 1997 Xenophon Press, Cleveland Heights, Ohio)
François Baucher (Bo-shay) was born in Versailles near Paris on June 16, 1796. Twenty-nine year old General Napoleon Bonapart's "Coup d'Etat" was to take place on December 2, 1798, so the childhood and youth of Baucher was to unfold during the Napoleonic era, which the French call the "First Empire."
At age 14, François Baucher was brought to Italy by an uncle who was managing in Milan the stables of Camille Borghèse, Prince of Sulmone, and husband of Pauline Bonaparte, a sister of Napoleon. Four years later, at the fall of Napoleon, Baucher came back to France. He worked for a short time in the stables of the Duke of Berry in Versailles, then decided to work for himself and by 1820, settled in Normandy where he managed first one, then two riding establishments, in Lè Havre and Rouen.
Baucher evinced outstanding qualities as a rider, trainer, and riding teacher. Yet he deplored that the way horsemanship was taught at the time was unclear, vague, and futile, and he set out to create his own system which, he hoped would be based on rationality and "scientific" observations.
His intellectual endeaver reminisces much of René Descartes', the famed French philosopher of the 17th century. Descartes' tool to investigate the field of philosophy was the "doute systèmatique," or "systematic doubt," by which he would eliminate all which could not be proven beyond any doubt, seeking some primordial truth on which he would base his "reconstruction" of the whole edifice. What he found out as an irrecusable postulate ws the famous cogito ero sum, "I think, therefore I am."
In a similar way, discarding systematically the old theories inasmuch as they did not satisfy his need for rationality, Baucher discovered that the sources of the resistance of a horse lay in the wrong division of his mass on the ground, added to the poor mastery, by the rider, of his forces, which he called "instinctive."
The stiffness, the contraction of the forehand -- neck, poll, and jaw -- was to Baucher's eyes what a horse uses in order to oppose his rider's attempts at establishing a better division of his mass, and/or at curbing his "instinctive" forces. These contractions increase as the movement creates more momentum.
Hence the proper education of a horse should start at a halt and from the ground by a set of flexions of the jaws, poll, and neck, added to some suppling exercises of the shoulders, haunches, and hindquarters.
Then the same flexions should be made on horseback at a halt.
Having in this way worked a horse "part by part," Baucher would undertake the "reunion" of the horse through an exercise he called "effet d'ensemble," which is sometimes translated, poorly in my opinion, by "coordinated effect;" Fillis in Breaking and Riding calls it "general effect," which is fairly good. "Comprehensive effect" would have been preferable, since the "effet d'ensemble" is an effect upon the whole of the horse, as opposed to the partial flexions which have preceded and aprepared it. So I will, in these lines, sim
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