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California Press.Savate
Savate (from the French for “shoe”) is an indigenous martial art of France
and southwestern Europe that developed from the fighting techniques of
sailors, thugs, and soldiers. Although it has a reputation for being a kick-
ing style, savate also includes hand strikes and grappling, as well as
weapons. Two separate sports have derived from savate, the first a form of
sport kickboxing called Boxe Française,the second a form of fencing with
sticks called la canne de combat.Two related arts, called chausson(French;
deck shoe) and zipota(Basque; boot), also existed but today are considered
part of the style of savate called “Savate Danse de Rue.”
The use of kicking techniques in Western martial arts like boxing and
wrestling probably started with the Greeks and Romans in the art known
as pankration.The early history is often vague, but sword manuscripts
from the 1400s, such as Talhoffer Fechtbuch,also included sections on
wrestling that included kicking and striking techniques along with grap-
pling. Several of these manuals were recently collected together in a Ger-
man book on wrestling that shows what appears to be the continuation of
savate-like techniques from 1447 to 1700. The earliest references to savate
itself come from literature and folklore: In the 1700s a poem describes a sa-
vateur(practitioner of savate) as part angel and part devil. In Basque folk-
lore, the heroic half-bear, half-man Basso Juan uses zipota, the Basque form
of savate, in his fights. In the mid-1700s, the term chausson, from the type
of shoe worn on board ship, was being used to describe the fighting tech-
niques of French, Spanish, and Portuguese sailors. As time passed, the more
northern style of foot fighting was called savate while the southern style
was called chausson. Chausson was more a form of play or sport, while sa-
vate was more combative.
In 1803, Michel “Pisseux” Casseux opened the first salle(training
hall) of savate in Paris. He had codified the techniques of savate into fifteen
kicking techniques and fifteen cane techniques. About the same time, Emile
Lamand began teaching savate in Madrid. Lamand adopted the local style
of knife fighting (called either navaja,for a type of knife, or saca tripas[gut
Savate 519