François Baucher was born in Versailles in 1796 and was the most controversial figure in the history of classical riding. His critics called him the gravedigger of dressage. His admirers called him a genius. Both were partially right, and the confusion between them has shaped the sport we have now.
The First Manner: The Error That Spread
In his First Manner, Baucher used cervical flexions — lowering the neck, working the head toward the chest — to dissolve resistance in the horse's poll and jaw. The idea was sound in principle: a horse bracing through its neck and jaw cannot be correctly ridden, and releasing that brace is the prerequisite for everything else.
The problem was the method. The neck bent at the withers rather than at the poll. The head went behind the perpendicular. As Fillis later documented with photographs and mechanical analysis, this position loaded the forehand rather than lightening it. The bit that was supposed to collect the horse instead worked upward from below — tucking the chin toward the chest rather than lifting the forehand.
This was the Baucher that spread. His pupils taught his First Manner. The German military tradition, which encountered Baucherism through various channels, criticised it — and was right to do so — but never adequately distinguished between what Baucher ultimately arrived at and what he had started with.
The Second Manner: The Correction That Was Lost
Baucher published his Twelfth Edition in 1864. It was notably different from everything that had come before. The deep flexion work was gone. The head behind the perpendicular was gone. In its place: main sans jambes, jambes sans mains — hands without legs, legs without hands. The aids cleanly separated, applied sequentially, never conflicting. The horse in genuine self-carriage, the contact barely perceptible.
Dying — he had been crushed by a falling chandelier in 1866 and spent his final years in significant pain — he told L'Hotte, one of his most gifted pupils: Always this stillness, never that pulling.
The Second Manner was published as an addendum to the Twelfth Edition, not as a replacement for the whole. Most of his pupils and virtually all of his imitators were still teaching the First. The correction that represented the culmination of his life's work reached a fraction of the audience his errors had already reached.
What the Sport Inherited
The sport inherited Baucher's errors and discarded his corrections. What was taken from him was the deep flexion work, the head behind the perpendicular, the neck bent at the withers. What was lost was the Second Manner's light hand, the separated aids, the stillness he described in his final years as the destination.
Sjef Janssen, who trained in the Nuno Oliveira lineage before developing the system known as rollkur or LDR, took Baucher's transitional tool — the brief lowering of the neck to dissolve resistance — and made it a working frame. The 30-second exercise became the training session. The temporary became the permanent. And a generation of riders, watching Anky van Grunsven win everything, copied the sustained position without understanding what had been lost in the translation.