Lance Tingay in The Fireside Book of Tennis If the “Tennis Court Oath” of 1789 gave power to the people, the creation of Open competition in 1968 gave power to the players. Tennis ...

The French Revolution, which began in 1789, distracted from the game, though one of the revolution’s founding moments, the Tennis Court Oath, took place in the tennis court at Versailles ...

The Jeu de Paume or Royal Tennis Court of Versailles, where the deputies of a newly formed National Assembly swore a revolutionary oath in 1789 to draft France’s first constitution, has been ...

with the Tennis Court Oath—the French never called it that, tennis. They called it jeu de paume, the “game of the palm,” or “handball,” if we want to be less awkwardly literal about it.