Marie Marvingt (20 February 1875 – 14 December 1963) was a French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, and journalist. She won numerous prizes for her sporting achievements including those of swimming, cycling, mountain climbing, winter sports, ballooning, flying, riding, gymnastics, athletics, rifle shooting, and fencing. She was the first woman to climb many of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps. She was a record-breaking balloonist, an aviator, and during World War I she became the first female combat pilot. She was also a qualified surgical nurse, was the first trained and certified flight nurse in the world, and worked for the establishment of air ambulance services throughout the world. In 1903 M. Château de Thierry de Beaumanoir named her the fiancée of danger, which newspapers used to describe her for the rest of her life. It is also included on the commemorative plaque on the façade of the house where she lived at 8 Place de la Carrière, Nancy.
Biography
Early life
Marie Félicie Élisabeth Marvingt was born at 6:30 p.m on 20 February 1875, in Aurillac, the prefecture of the French department of Cantal. Her father was Félix Constant Marvingt, a senior postmaster, and her mother was Élisabeth Brusquin. They married in Metz on 16 July 1861 when he was 48 and she was 32. Before Marie was born, the couple lost three sons in infancy.
The family, including younger brother Eugène (born 1878), lived in Metz, at that time part of Germany, from 1880 to 1889. When Marie's mother died in 1889, the fourteen-year-old found herself in charge of the household, and the family moved to Nancy, where she remained for the rest of her life.
Félix Marvingt was a local billiards and swimming champion, and a dedicated sports fan. With his only son in fragile health, he shared his love of sports with Marie and encouraged her already apparent abilities. By the age of four, she could swim 4 kilometres. She grew to also enjoy many other sports: mountaineering, riflery, gymnastics, horseriding, fencing, tennis, skiing, luging, ice skating, boxing, martial arts, golf, hockey, and football. In 1890, at the age of 15, she canoed over 400 kilometres from Nancy to Koblenz, Germany. She had also learned a number of circus skills, and obtained a driver's license by 1899.
Sporting successes
Marvingt became a world-class athlete who won numerous prizes in swimming, fencing, riflery, shooting, skiing, speed skating, luge and bobsledding. She was also a skilled mountaineer and between 1903 and 1910 she became the first woman to climb most of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps including the Aiguille des Grands Charmoz and the Grépon Pass from Chamonix in a single day. In 1905 she became the first Frenchwoman to swim the length of the Seine through Paris. The newspapers nicknamed her "the red amphibian" from the color of her swimming costume.
In 1907 she won an international military shooting competition using a French army carbine and became the only woman ever awarded the palms du Premier Tireur by a French Minister of War. She dominated the 1908 to 1910 winter sports seasons at Chamonix, Gérardmer, and Ballon d'Alsace, where she achieved first place on more than 20 occasions. On 26 January 1910, she won the Léon Auscher Cup in the women's bobsledding world championship.
She enjoyed cycling and rode from Nancy, France, to Naples, Italy, to see a volcanic eruption. In 1908 she was refused permission to participate in the Tour de France because the race was open only to men. Marvingt chose to cycle the course anyway, riding some distance behind the entrants. She successfully completed the grueling ride, a feat which only 36 of 114 male riders had managed that year. On 15 March 1910 the French Academy of Sports awarded her a gold medal "for all sports," the only multi-sport medal they have ever awarded.
Achievements in early aviation
Ballooning
Marie Marvingt ascended as a passenger in a free-flight balloon for the first time in 1901. On 19 July 1907, she piloted one. On 24 September 1909, she made her first solo flight as a balloon pilot, and on 26 October 1909, Marvingt became the first woman to pilot a balloon (The Shooting Star) across the North Sea from Europe to England. She won prizes for ballooning in 1909, 1910, and 1911. On 18 July 1914, competing in the 10th Grand Prix of the French Air Club, she became the first woman to cross the English Channel in a balloon. She earned her balloon pilot's license (#145) from the Stella Aero Club in 1910, the second woman to do so (the first was Marie Surcouf).