Bâton de Combat (French Long Staff)
French two-handed staff fighting, 140 cm long, with nine codified strikes; the sporting twin of canne de combat.
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About Bâton de Combat (French Long Staff)
Bâton français, French combat with a long two-handed staff, is a sport discipline governed by the Fédération Française de Savate Boxe Française together with canne de combat. The staff measures 140 centimeters, weighs around 400 grams, is made of chestnut wood and tapers conically. It is held with both hands and wielded in line with the extended arm. Unlike canne, which is shorter (95 cm) and one-handed, bâton derives from the movements of the medieval longsword and from the longer rural staff; only later was the footwork of canne grafted onto this base. Nine strikes are codified: croisé tête and croisé bas, latéral extérieur and latéral croisé, coulissé horizontal and coulissé vertical, piqué, enlevé and brisé. Valid targets are the head, the flanks and the legs; some sequences reach a rate of over a hundred strikes per minute, so decision-making is as demanding as the fighting itself. The history of the discipline is often confused with the history of its teachers. It was Maurice Sarry who brought it into its present sporting form: in the nineteen-seventies of the twentieth century he codified the techniques of canne, at the start of the nineteen-eighties it became a separate sporting discipline, and bâton as its own field returned to prominence only in the nineteen-nineties. The record gives neither a documented founding year nor a single founder, since this is a tradition older than any of its codifiers.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.