By the 1890s, as industrial development radically changed the conditions of modern working life, the condition of the ordinary citizen's body in France had become increasingly important to the state.. Marey and Demenÿ’s studies had resulted in the army’s revision of their training manuals. And their methods were incorporated into the national physical education curriculum and disseminated in a series of instructional and inspirational books that Demenÿ wrote on the physiological basis of his training methods.

1892 - Photographie instantanée - Georges Demenÿ, divers exercices de gymnastique

Marey and Demenÿ were more interested in restoring the muscles of the ordinary citizen and soldier than in increasing the physical superiority of the upper classes. Marey was concerned that the over-stimulated modern citizen had become nervous and weakened by urban life, and that the French nation was on a degenerative slide to suraffination. In 1895, With the anthropologist Felix Regnault and Albert-Charlemagne-Oscar de Raoul (chef d'escadron au 34e régiment d'artillerie), Marey used chronophotography and film to show that the French military walk could be improved through the adoption of the marche en flexion - said to be the natural gait of “savages: and prehistoric man.

1895 - Chronophotographie géométrique - locomotion de l'homme, marche et course (pas militaire)

In his preface to Regnault’s 1896 book, Comment on marche, Marey notes how the anthropologist’s research will contribute to perfecting the national body. Rather than being condemned to the artificial walk of the elegant citizen, Marey writes, chronophotography “will educate us. It will show us to imitate the walk of the primitive, will returning us to a more natural gait, health, and the conservation of energy. It will provide our army with a walk that will give it an unquestioned superiority.”