A little of history
Origins of the Cadre Noir: a first generation of civil riders.
If the wars of the Revolution and the Empire certainly confirmed the legendary bravery of the French cavalry, they also revealed the incapacity of the equestrian formation. The contagious diseases, the ferocity of the fights and the bad quality of the military equitation in this time annihilated its troops. After the Napoleonic wars, the French cavalry is decimated. From 1825, to reform the horse's troops, a cavalry school was created in Saumur with the mission of normalize the employment of the war horse. In front of the urgency of this go back in riders and in horses, we establish teacher's body composed of some big riders, civilians, stemming from Riding school of Versailles, from "Tuileries" or "Saint Germain". Considered as the elite of time, they form officer cadets of cavalry: it is the birth of the Cadre Noir de Saumur.
If the first vocation of this elite corps, in the time, is naturally to form the officers and the non-commissioned officers of cavalry and to train horses for a military usage, the academic principles inherited from Versailles are maintained by the riders, whose taste pronounced for the Equestrian Art can limit itself only to the military vocation. The Cadre Noir becomes very fast the guarantor of the French equestrian doctrine, by the preservation and the practice of the principles of the academic equitation. So, when on June 20th, 1928, Her Royal Highness Duchess de Berry comes to visit the School of Cavalry of Saumur, a Carousel is given in its honor: the Cadre Noir appears for the first time in public.
The mechanization of the cavalry imposes the reconversion
But at the beginning of the XXth century, when the cavalry mechanizes (tanks and aviation having gradually replaced horses on battlefields), asks the question of the utility of the Cadre Noir within the army. The government of time cannot be resolved to remove what became in the course of time a real living heritage for France.
The sport orientation of the Cadre Noir.
The seventies knew a spectacular development of the equitation of leisure with the creation of uncountable riding schools.
So, France wished to organize the education of the equitation by creating a school which would have vocation the preparation for teacher's superior diplomas and the preparation for the high-level competition. Entrusted to the ministry of sports, the French national riding school is created by decree in 1972.
She naturally leaned on the know-how and the knowledge of the écuyers of the Cadre Noir, which, by becoming the teaching profession of this school, found its missions of origin: teach the equitation adapted to its time, military yesterday, sportswoman today, and train horses. The Cadre Noir so passed from the military status to the civil status.