• Source: Charles Bernat

      • Charles Bernat (1876 – unknown) was a French footballer who co-founded Club Français in 1892, with whom he won the 1896 USFSA Football Championship.


      Biography




      = Football

      =
      Charles Bernat was born in Paris in 1876, and as the son of a well-off family from the wealthy districts of Paris, he was sent to Britain for a language study trip, doing so at the Catholic St Joseph's College, Dumfries, Scotland, where he developed a deep interest in football, and where he might have met José María Barquín and Enrique Goiri, the latter being just one year younger than him, both of whom being fellow football enthusiasts from the European mainland. He returned to Paris to complete his studies at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, eventually meeting Eugène Fraysse, who had also become a football fan while studying abroad, so they decided to join forces to import the sport into France, and together, they founded Club Français in October 1892, which was the first club reserved exclusively for the French, hence the club's name.

      Club Français joined the USFSA in March 1894, and on 22 April of the same year, Bernat played as a midfielder in the semifinal of the inaugural USFSA championship, which ended in a 0–1 loss to The White Rovers. On 24 February 1895, Bernat and his teammate Fraysse were the only Frenchman selected to play for the first representative team of Paris in a friendly match against the London-based Folkestone at the soggy pitch of the Seine Velodrome, which ended in a 0–3 loss.
      Together with Lucien Huteau, Marcel Lambert, Gaston Peltier, Georges Garnier, and captain Fraysse, Bernat was a starter in the Club Français team that won the 1896 USFSA Football Championship, doing so without losing a single match. On 13 December 1898, Bernat was one of the five players from Club Français who featured in a selection of the best Parisian players from the USFSA in a friendly against a German national selection in front of 200 people; Paris lost 1–2.
      Following the death of Lucien Canelle in 1905, his son Fernand took over the presidency of the Club Français, which he ran with Bernat until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.


      = Rugby

      =
      At some point, Bernat became the director of the Stade Buffalo in Montrouge, which was inaugurated in 1922 and could accommodate 20,000 spectators for football or rugby union matches. Following a pioneering tour of England, Bernat filed the statutes of the "French Rugby League XIII" on 6 April 1934 in Paris, and the entity's board was then elected, with François Cadoret being appointed as president, Charles Bernat as secretary general, and Louis Delblat, new director of Stade Buffalo, as treasurer.


      References

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