notably the comte d'Artois (afterward Charles
X.), the duc de Chartres (Philippe Egalite), the marquis de Conflans
and the prince de Guemenee who fancied themselves obliged, in their
character of Anglomaniacs, to patronize the race-course; but the public
of that time, to whom this imitation of English manners was not only an
absurdity, but almost a treason against the state, gave but a cold
reception to the attempted innovation. Racing, too, from its very
nature, found itself in direct conflict with all the traditions of the
ancient school of equitation, and it encountered from the beginning the
severe censure and opposition of horsemen accustomed to the measured
paces of the _manege_, whose highest art consisted in consuming a whole
hour in achieving at a gallop the length of the terrace of St. Germain.
The professors of this equestrian minuet, as solemn and formal in the
saddle as was the dancer Dupre in the ballets of the period, predicted
the speedy decay of the old system of horsemanship and the extinction
of the native breed of horses if France should allow her soil to be
invaded by foreign thoroughbreds with their English jockeys and
trainers. The first French sportsmen--to use the word in its limited
sense--thus found themselves not only unsupported by public opinion,
but alone in the midst of an actively-hostile community, and no one can
say how the unequal contest might have ended had not the graver events
of the Revolution intervened to put an end, for a time at least, not
only to the luxurious pleasures, but to all the hopes and ambitions, of
the noble class of idlers.

The wars with England that followed retarded for a quarter of a century
the introduction of racing into France. The first ministerial ordinance
in which the words _pur sang_ occur is that of the 3d of March, 1833,
signed by Louis Philippe and countersigned by Adolphe Thiers,
establishing a register of the thoroughbreds existing in France--in
other words, a national _stud-book_, by which name it is universally
known. The following year witnessed the foundation of the celebrated
Society for the Encouragement of the Improvement of Breeds of French
Horses, more easily recognized under the familiar title of the "Jockey
Club." The first report of this society exposed the deplorable
condition of all the races of horses in the country, exhausted as they
had been by the frightful draughts made upon them in the imperial wars,
and concluded by urging t