LINCOLN PARK PÉTANQUE CLUB

The current form of pétanque originated in 1907 in La Ciotat, a mediterranean coastal commune in the Provence region of southern France. The English and French name pétanque comes from la petanca [peˈtaŋkɔ] in the Provençal dialect of the Occitan language, deriving from the expression pès tancats [ˈpɛ taŋˈka], meaning “feet fixed” or “feet anchored”.

Social pétanque is played regularly by tens of millions of people in 160 countries around the world. As many as 17 million people play social pétanque in France during the summer holidays. For more structured games and competitions, the French Fédération Française de Pétanque et Jeu Provençal has 600,000 licensed members. The 2025 Mondial la Marseillaise attracted 14,352 competitors and more than 150,000 spectators and 51 competing nations, including the USA, participated in the 2025 World Championships Pétanque in Rome!

Pétanque is played by several thousand people in cities and towns throughout the United States and the Federation of Pétanque USA has more than 2,000 individual members and more than 50 affiliated clubs, including the Lincoln Park Pétanque Club.  

The Ancient Greeks as early as the 6th century BC are recorded to have played a game of tossing coins, then flat stones, and later stone balls, called spheristics, trying to have them go as far as possible. The Ancient Romans modified the game by adding a target that had to be approached as closely as possible.

This Roman variation was brought to Provence by Roman soldiers and sailors. A Roman sepulchre in Florence shows people playing this game, stooping down to measure the points.

After the Romans, the stone balls were replaced by wooden balls with nails to give them greater weight. In the Middle Ages, Erasmus referred to the game as globurum, but it became commonly known as ‘boules,’ or balls, and it was played throughout Europe. King Henry III of England banned the playing of the game by his archers and in the 14th century Charles IV and Charles V of France also forbade the sport to commoners. Only in the 17th century was the ban lifted.

By the 19th century in England the sport had become “bowls” or “lawn bowling”; in France it was known as boules and was played throughout the country. The French artist Meissonnier made two paintings showing people playing the game, and Honoré de Balzac described a match in La Comédie Humaine. In the South of France it had evolved into jeu provençal, similar to today’s pétanque, except that the field was larger and players ran three steps before throwing the ball. The game was played in villages all over Provence, usually on squares of land in the shade of plane trees. Matches of jeu provençal at the turn of the century are memorably described in the memoirs of novelist Marcel Pagnol.

Pétanque in its present form was invented in 1907 in the town of La Ciotat near Marseilles by French boule jeu provençal players Jules Lenoir and Ernest Pitiot. Rheumatism prevented Lenoir from running before he threw the ball and his friend Pitiot, a local café owner, developed a variant of the game in which boules were thrown from a fixed position (feet planted) and with a shorter playing area.

Pétanque is played with hollow metal balls (boules) and a small target ball called the cochonnet (literally piglet in French) or jack. The game is played by two opposing teams of one, two, or three people on a compacted gravel surface area (called a terrain) with individual courts (called pistes) that measure 15 meters long (49') by 4 meters wide (13').

A plastic ring (le rond) is placed on the ground to define the throwing position. The first player stands inside the circle and throws the cochonnet 6 to 10 meters away from the circle, keeping both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Play and Objective

Players take turns throwing their boules based on which team is closest to the cochonnet. The goal is to position your team's boules closer to the cochonnet than any of the opposing team's boules. After all the boules are thrown, the points are tallied and play continues by tossing the cochonnet again towards the opposite end of the piste.

Scoring

After all boules are thrown, the team with the boule closest to the cochonnet scores points. This team receives one point for each boule closer to the cochonnet than the closest boule of the opposing team. The first team to reach 13 points wins the game.

Tactics

Precision and strategy are key in pétanque. Players can choose to either place their boule close to the cochonnet or knock their opponents’ boules away to improve their own position.

Pétanque is not only a game of skill, but also a social sport that embodies the spirit of leisure, friendly competition, and camaraderie typical of southern France.