Before It Was Tennis, It Was Everything
The untold story of jeu de paume — the royal game that gave birth to modern tennis, parliamentary democracy, and an obsession with how to play.
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There is a moment in June 1789 that every French schoolchild knows, even if they've forgotten the details. The delegates of the Third Estate, locked out of their assembly hall at Versailles, made their way across the palace grounds and into a long, bare-walled building nearby. There, beneath a vaulted ceiling that had echoed with the thwack of balls for over a century, they swore an oath that would change the world. The building was the Salle du Jeu de Paume. The game it was built for had, by then, been played by kings.
We named our brand after that game. Not as a history lesson — but because we think it says something true about what tennis, and sport more broadly, has always been about: the pursuit of elegance under pressure, the marriage of physicality and mind, and the belief that how you carry yourself on the court matters as much as the score.
It was the sport of kings, the passion of poets, and the obsession of an entire civilization. It was jeu de paume.
The Game Before the Game
Long before there were baseline rallies and tiebreaks, before Wimbledon and Roland-Garros existed, there was jeu de paume. The name translates literally as 'game of the palm' — because in its earliest form, players struck the ball not with a racket but with their bare hands. The sport emerged in 12th-century France, likely in monastery courtyards, and spread with extraordinary speed across Europe. By the 16th century, Paris alone was said to have over 1,800 courts.
The game was played indoors, in long rectangular halls with sloping roofs, netted galleries, and stone floors that demanded a different kind of athleticism than today's open-air tennis. The ball was struck off angled walls; the scoring system — 15, 30, 40, game — is the same one we still use today, inherited directly from jeu de paume's centuries of tradition. When you call out the score in a modern match, you are speaking a language invented in medieval France.
Henry VIII was famously devoted to the game. So was Francis I of France, who built courts at Fontainebleau and played with the kind of competitive ferocity that suggested he took it slightly too seriously for a man who also had an empire to run. The sport became inseparable from power, from taste, from the idea that to play well was to demonstrate something fundamental about your character.
The Court Where History Turned
That day in 1789 — the Tennis Court Oath — is worth pausing on, because it captures something essential about the spaces the game created. The jeu de paume halls were among the largest covered spaces available in pre-industrial Europe. They were public in the sense that anyone with money could rent court time; they drew aristocrats and merchants and tradespeople into the same building, the same contest. The court was a leveler.
When the Third Estate delegates swore their oath to draft a constitution and not to disperse until the work was done, they were making an improvised gesture that became a founding symbol of modern democracy. They chose the paume hall not for its symbolism but for its practicality — it was simply the biggest room available. And yet the symbolism is hard to ignore. The game of kings became the room where the people stood up.
The scoring system you call out in every modern match — 15, 30, 40, game — is a language invented in medieval France.
From Palm to Racket to Paradise
By the mid-19th century, jeu de paume was giving way to its more accessible descendant. The invention of lawn tennis in 1873 by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield — who called his game 'Sphairistike,' a name so awkward it was immediately abandoned — took the fundamentals of the old game and moved them outside, onto grass, with rubber balls and lighter equipment. The sport democratized further. Courts spread from English country houses to American clubs to public parks.
But the soul of the original game persisted. The indoor precision, the tactical intelligence, the sense that tennis rewards the patient, the composed, the stylish mover as much as the powerful one — these are inheritances from paume. The players who get inside your head on a tennis court, who make the game look effortless even as they're dismantling you, they have something of the old game in them.
That spirit is what JDP is built around. When we name a polo shirt the 'Paradise Polo' or call a short the 'Agnès,' we're reaching for something — a sense that the court is a place where how you show up, not just how hard you hit, defines the experience. Tennis has always rewarded a certain kind of person. We make clothes for that person.
Why the Name Still Matters
Jeu de paume is not just a historical footnote. It's a philosophy. Play seriously, but with grace. Compete hard, but with style. Know the history of the game you're stepping into — because it is a long and genuinely remarkable one. The court you walk onto today has a lineage that runs through medieval monastery walls, royal palaces, and a hall where the modern world was born.
We think that's worth remembering. We think it makes the game better.
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