Christiane Lecocq was regarded as the doyenne of the naturist movement. With her husband, Albert, she founded the world's first naturist holiday resort in France and spearheaded the International Naturist Federation, an organisation that now has some 16 million members in 38 countries.

She was born on April 6, 1911 in Tourcoing, northern France, and grew up at a time when women were beginning to expose their ankles and arms, but otherwise remained strictly covered up. Naturism, defined by the International Naturist Federation as "a lifestyle in harmony with nature, expressed through social nudity, and characterised by self-respect of people with different opinions and of the environment", was not invented in France.

Nude bathing had been traditionally practised in Scandinavia and Russia, but it was in Germany that an ideology of social nudity, known as Freikorperkultur (free body movement), originated in the 1870s. The practice was introduced into the rest of Europe, including France and Britain, in the 1920s.

Christiane first came across the practice in 1932, when she was invited to join the Club Gymnique du Nord, a sports club at Fort Seclin near Lille, where members played sports in the nude. It was there that she met her future husband Albert Lecoqc. They married in 1933 but for many years had to keep their naturist activities clandestine. There were no naturist camps or beaches: "We went to a place in the cliffs near Rouen where we were able to strip naked in secret at high tide," she recalled.

For the Lecocqs naturism was about much more than nude sunbathing and skinny-dipping. It was a way of life: they did not drink or smoke, followed what would now be called a macrobiotic diet, and promoted "social nudity" as offering health and social benefits to people of all classes.