History of Pétanque
The Ancient Greeks are recorded to have played a game of tossing coins, then flat stones, and later stone balls, called spheristics, trying to have them go as far as possible, as early as the 6th century BC.
The Ancient Romans modified the game by adding a target that had to be approached as closely as possible. This Roman variation was brought to Provence by Roman soldiers and sailors. A Roman sepulchre in Florence shows people playing this game, stooping down to measure the points. After the Romans, the stone balls were replaced by wooden balls, with nails to give them greater weight.
In the Middle Ages Erasmus referred to the game as globurum, but it became commonly known as ‘boules,’ or balls, and it was played throughout Europe.
King Henry III of England banned the playing of the game by his archers, and in the 14th century, Charles IV and Charles V of France also forbade the sport to commoners. Only in the 17th century was the ban lifted.
By the 19th century, in England the game had become “bowls” or “lawn bowling”; in France, it was known as boules, and was played throughout the country. The French artist Meissonnier made two paintings showing people playing the game, and Honoré de Balzac described a match in La Comédie Humaine.
In the South of France it had evolved into jeu provençal (or boule lyonnaise), similar to today’s pétanque, except that the field was larger and players ran three steps before throwing the ball. The game was played in villages all over Provence, usually on squares of land in the shade of plane trees.
Matches of jeu provençal around the start of the 20th century are memorably described in the memoirs of novelist Marcel Pagnol.
Modern Pétanque
Pétanque in its present form was invented in 1907 in the town of La Ciotat near Marseilles by a French jeu provençal player named Jules Lenoir, whose rheumatism prevented him from running before he threw the ball. The length of the pitch or field was reduced by roughly half, and the moving delivery was replaced with a stationary one.
The first pétanque tournament wit`h the new rules was organized in 1910 by the brothers Ernest and Joseph Pitiot, proprietors of a café at La Ciotat. After that the game grew with great speed, and soon became the most popular form of boules.
The Fédération Internationale de Pétanque et Jeu Provençal was founded in 1958 in Marseille and has about 600,000 members in 52 countries (2002).
The first World Championships were organized in 1959. The most recent championships were held in Faro (2000), Monaco (2001), Grenoble (2002, 2004 and 2006), Geneva (2003), Brussels (2005), and Pattaya / Thailand (2007). Fifty-two teams from 50 countries participated in 2007.
Pétanque is not currently an Olympic sport, although the Confédération Mondiale des Sports de Boules – which was created in 1985 by three international boules organizations (and has since been joined by a fourth) specifically for this purpose – has been lobbying the Olympic committee since 1985 to make it part of the summer Olympics.
Frankfield Pétanque Cork 