Le match Re-Nie Georges Dubois, October 23, 1905

Professeur Re-Nie Applies an Arm Bar. Source: L'Illustration, 4 Nov 1905, as posted in Project Gutenberg

Primary written sources are the lifeblood of sourced research and real history. While poking through a directory of old, public source martial arts manuals, I came across a copy of "Les Secrets du Jiu-Jitsu," published in 1905, in French, by "Professeur Re-Nie." His real name was Ernest Regnier, and there's a ton of information about him available.

For example, there's a set of 24 photographs showing him teach self defense, posted on YouTube. I haven't sourced these yet, but I wanted to mention them as an investigative lead.

The primary source I wanted to note however is a 4 November 1905 article on a "mixed martial arts match" Regnier fought against an opponent named Georges Dubois. That's Mr Dubois at the wrong end of an arm bar being applied by Le Professeur, above.

The image and the original story is posted on Project Gutenberg. I downloaded it into a separate document, and ran it through Google Translate in pieces. If I have time I might try to clean up the translation using my limited French skills. For now, you can access a Google Doc (which I may update) or a PDF (which I may not).

There's more coverage of this event online but I wanted to capture the primary source for future research.