Marie Marvingt was one of the most versatile female athletes in history. Her long list of adventures seems impossible to believe: skier, mountaineer, balloonist, nurse, cyclist, aviator, journalist, inventor, the list goes on. She was the first woman to climb the highest peaks of the Alps. Marie won numerous prizes in swimming, cycling, skiing, skating, and bobsledding. She tried to participate in the Tour de France, but was refused due to her gender. Marie biked it anyway. She flew in World War I as a French combat pilot and served as a surgical nurse in WWII.
Marie Marvingt was simply a phenomenon, forging a path for women in athletics, aviation, and military service. Combining her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, she invented the concept of air rescue ambulances, and later promoted med-evac services around the world. Who was this amazing woman most outside of France have never heard of?
Marie Félicie Élisabeth Marvingt was born in 1875 in Aurillac, France. She became an exceptional athlete at a very young age. Marie’s father, Felix, was postmaster of Aurillac. Her father was already 48 when Marie was born. When Felix retired, the family lived modestly on his pension. A champion swimmer in his youth, he encouraged young Marie to excel in sports. She followed Felix on his swims in the River Moselle and on treks in the French Alps. At just 5, she could swim over a kilometer. Once in school, she proved a bright student, so Felix saw no reason to restrict her participation in athletics.
Though she dressed fashionably and flirted with boys, Marie devoted herself to sports. At 15, she canoed nearly 400 km between Nancy and Koblenz. That same year, she trained with the Alphonse Rancy Circus, learning to do acrobatics on horseback! While attending high school in Metz, she learned archery, riflery, tennis, golf, and track & field. While later studying medicine at the University of Nancy, she competed in sports, winning in swimming and track, and beating men in shooting. More passionate about sports than medicine, she stopped with a nursing license and supplemented her income as an adventure writer.
“Women do not do that,” was the wrong thing to say to Marie Marvingt.
Her love of sports, and in particular its challenges, led her to achieve unimaginable feats. She became one of the first women to compete in fencing. Marie was the first female to climb numerous peaks in the Alps including Dent du Géant and Mont Blanc. At age 31, she took up skiing. As a skier, she competed in cross-country and downhill events at a time when women rarely skied, let alone competed. As in her other endeavors, she proved that women belonged in any sport.
At the second Chamonix ski meet in 1908, she ran in the first cross country race for women, a 3 km sprint. While the French press covered the men’s races, reporters paid no attention to the women. She showed up in culottes, rather than a long skirt, winning the race and setting ski fashion forever. Marie Marvingt also won medals in downhill skiing, bobsledding, skating, and rifle shooting.
During the summer of 1908, Marie made cycling history.
Many women rode bicycles, but few entered races. Marie did, of course. She won the Nancy-Bordeaux race (600 mi), Nancy-Milan race (350 mi) and Nancy-Toulouse race (560 mi). In 1908, the Tour de France denied her entry because of her gender. So, at age 33, she cycled anyway and finished the entire course. Only a third of the male competitors managed to finish.
The race covered 2,800 miles over 14 stages, an average of 200 miles/day on dirt roads with single-speed bikes. It was punishing even for the strongest male cyclists. She completed the same course as the men, starting a few minutes after them each day. She finished handily, while 76 of the 114 men dropped out.
Riding alone without the support of a team, she proving a woman was more than capable. This time, the press reported her unofficial performance as an athletic achievement for a woman. She was so successful in sports, Marie was named in a 1914 anti-feminist book as setting a poor example for young women. This was because she did not participate in sports for entertainment, but rather displayed unladylike competitive fervor.
Marie Marvingt even took up ballooning in 1901.
She became the first woman to obtain a balloon pilot’s license. Marie won several competitions and set numerous records for balloon pilots (male or female). She was the first woman to pilot a balloon over the English Channel and the North Sea in 1908.
A year later, at age 35, Marie Marvingt became only the 3rd woman licensed to fly an aeroplane. Naturally, she quickly set distance and duration records here as well. Flying in the decade of the 1910’s was still notoriously dangerous, but she managed 900 consecutive flights without a single crash.
Women attempting aviation in that era were supported by wealthy families or husbands. Marie however was not married and had to work to support each of her adventures. She became the holder of the first woman’s flying record – a 42 km, 53 min. flight. Newspapers around the world featured Marie’s aviation records. Her fame enabled her to earn money flying in exhibitions and giving speeches.
One of Marie’s greatest achievements was not in athletics.
It was rather in her efforts to utilize aeroplanes as air ambulances. In 1910, Marie conceived the idea of combining her nursing and piloting skills to create an air ambulance service. She developed the medical air-evacuation concept and by 1912 had designed a practical aeroplane. She organized conferences to promote the idea and ordered a specially designed Deperdussin. It would carry a pilot and two stretchers. Unfortunately, the French aerial pioneer Deperdussin went bankrupt before it could be built.
Among Marie’s pilot friends was the dashing artillery officer Paul-Maurice Écheman, who was also an accomplished skier. The two were inseparable, constant companions in both the air and on mountains. She had finally found the love of her life. Écheman was promoted to captain and put in charge of one of the first French Army airfields. He encouraged her to presented the med-evac idea to the Army. Unfortunately, as no war was ongoing at the time, the War Department was not interested. Écheman sadly perished in a solo crash in 1911.
To manage her grief, Marie continued to press on.
In 1913, she survived her first crash after crossing the North Sea. The press dubbed her Le Fiancée du Danger (the Fiancée of Danger). “My helmet was completely buried in the earth, my face bathed in blood. Crushed under the mass of my device, I was breathing with difficulty. Fortunately, with my left hand, I was able to dig the earth near my mouth to allow me to suck in a little air.”
When World War I broke out in 1914, Marvingt was determined to make her own unique contribution. She first went to work as a Red Cross surgical nurse. The French Army wouldn’t let her fly military missions, even with over 900 flights. So along with her nursing, she became a part-time flight instructor instead, training new French Army pilots.
In 1915, one of her hospital patients was an injured pilot. She learned there was no replacement for him on a crucial bombing mission. Marie somehow talked her way into the cockpit and flew two bombing missions over airfields in German-occupied Frescaty. She had become the world’s first female combat pilot. The French army turned a blind eye to it. Officially, she was still just a nurse.
Unofficially, she only flew as a “scout” on reconnaissance flights. When she was wounded on a mission, that ended her air corps career. Marshal Ferdinand Foch assigned her next as a combat nurse in the Italian alps, where troops were fighting the Austrians in 1916. It suited her perfectly. As a skier and alpinist, she engineered the evacuation of wounded soldiers from snowy mountain passes, and the skiing in of food and medical supplies. She spent most of 1917 at the Italian front, this time as both nurse and war correspondent.
After WWI, Marie continued to campaign tirelessly for her med-evac planes.
Traveling with French forces in the Sahara in 1923, she designed skis for med-evac airplanes to land on the sand. Back in France in 1927, she found a metal shop that could forge aircraft-grade aluminum alloy skies. She tested them herself on both sand and snow.
By the early 1930’s, her flying ambulance idea was accepted and she held international conferences to promote the concept world-wide. She established the Captain Écheman Award for the best-equipped medical aircraft, and launched the first training course for med-evac nurses.
During World War II, at the age of 65, Marie returned as a Red Cross nurse during the Nazi occupation of France. After the war, she was honored for her “unspecified classified actions” on behalf of the French Resistance! With her flying, fighting, nursing (and spying), it’s no surprise that Marie Marvingt was decorated with more than 34 awards including the Légion d’Honneur (Chevalier 1935, Officier 1949), Croix de Guerre and Médaille de la Résistance.
Marvingt spent the rest of her life advocating her aerial ambulance service. She co-founded the Friends of Aviation Medicine. She lectured tirelessly. She created training courses for aerial nurses. She wrote documentaries on the use of aerial ambulances. In her spare time, whenever that was, she wrote and published poetry under the pseudonym Myriel.
On her 80th birthday, the woman who’d piloted balloons before the Wright Brothers, was given a ride in a supersonic Voodoo jet fighter and earned her helicopter pilot’s license. Though Marie was widely honored, in her late 80’s, she descended into near poverty, living off her pension. She died in a hospice in Laxou in 1963, at the age of 88. All over France, there are countless streets, schools, gymnasia and flying clubs named after her. She was named to the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1987.
Marie Marvingt opened doors, broke barriers, and proved that women belong everywhere, including a military wartime cockpit. Her life is an inspiring testimony of female audacity, perseverance, and courage. She pushed society, showing that no challenge was insurmountable, and that women could truly excel in any field.
Where did she find the time to get involved in so many activities. It is crazy. Once again, you’ve managed to dig up a person whom few have ever heard about. The mountain climbing is amazing. Back then folks didn’t have such comfortable equipment.