Traditionalism and the Tour de France
The Political History of the World’s Greatest Cycling Event
Tess Stogner
Advisor: Dr. Nina Furry
A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of French and Francophone Studies in the
Department of Romance Languages.
Chapel Hill
2019
Approved by:
Table of Contents
Introduction ……….……… p. 3
Chapter 1: A Modern Tour for a Modern France ………..………. p. 10
Chapter 2: French Nationalism and the Tour ………...………... p. 20
Chapter 3: The Patriarchy of the Tour de France ……… p. 29
Chapter 4: Les Géantes de la Route: Women’s Efforts to Join………...…………. p. 37
Conclusion ………...………p. 47
Introduction
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE TOUR DE FRANCE
In this paper, I will argue that throughout its one hundred-plus years of existence, the
Tour de France, while claiming to be an apolitical sporting event, has in fact made many political
and ideological statements to bolster French nationalism and reinforce the traditional values of
patriarchy. Firstly, I will argue that the Tour sought to establish itself as a moral and cultural
compass for the nation by projecting a traditionalist vision of modern France that placated
national fears in a historical moment of political upheaval. Then, I will show that the Tour used
its status to define and propagate French nationalism, especially during the interwar period, and
lastly, to reinforce traditional gender roles. Examining the origins of the Tour de France provides
insight into the role it assumes as part of a nationalist and traditionalist narrative.
It all began with the Dreyfus affair, an infamous and widely publicized case that tore
France into two factions; mostly anticlerical, pro-republican Dreyfusards and Catholic anti-Dreyfusards. Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer, was accused of selling French military secrets
to Germans in 1894 and was sentenced to degradation and deportation for life on charges of
treason. Four years later, the case reopened when Dreyfus’ brother, Mathieu, found sufficient
evidence that it was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy who had attempted to sell the
information; Esterhazy was quickly acquitted. In 1898 it was found that Colonel Henry of army
intelligence had forged much of the evidence used against Dreyfus, but Dreyfus remained in
found guilty on extenuating circumstances and was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was
granted a pardon by President Loubet. The case remains a lasting example of systemic
antisemitism in France – ironically one of the most democratic nations in Europe at the time.
(Columbia)
The idea for a Tour was born from an intense rivalry between two competing sports
publications amidst the controversy of the Dreyfus Affair. In 1900, Le Vélo’s editor in chief, Pierre Giffard, a Dreyfusard, spoke out against the false accusations, which infuriated his
anti-Dreyfusard aristocratic financier, Albert, Marquis de Dion. The Marquis had founded the
Automobile Club de France in 1895, which was briefly shut down as a den of conspirators
against the Republic in June 1899 after Dion and several other members of the group were
arrested for attacking President Loubet at the Auteuil races. Dion was elected as the
Departmental-Councillor in the Loire region on a Nationalist campaign the same year. Once
Giffard refused to advertise the Dion-Bouton brand in his paper, Dion decided it was time to act.
With the deep pockets of like-minded friends, Dion created l’Auto-Vélo in 1900 and appointed Henri Desgrange, a retired cyclist, as its editor in chief. The paper was to deal strictly
with matters of locomotion, as Giffard’s political statements had, in Dion’s view, violated the
sacrosanct neutrality of sports reportage. In its first publication on October 16th, Desgrange
states the mission of the quotidien: “Il chantera chaque jour vaillamment la gloire des athlètes et les victoires de l’Industrie… nous serons complets en ajoutant qu’il ne sera jamais, à l’Auto-Vélo, question de politique.1” (Desgrange) (Weber, 207)
Le Vélo and l’Auto-Vélo were vying for the same audiences, and the latter was losing the battle, with diminishing readership and a defeat in the lawsuit Le Vélo brought against their
1 “It will bravely sing each day of the glory of athletes and victories of the Industry… we will finish by adding that
name. Now simply l’Auto, the sports daily was desperate for ideas. In December 1902, Desgrange met with his young assistant and former employee of Giffard’s, Geo Lefevre, to
discuss their options. Lefevre suggested beating their rival at their own game; Giffard had
organized several recognized cycling stage races such as Paris-Roubaix and Bordeaux-Paris. If
l’Auto wanted to succeed, they would have to make these races disappear in the shadow of
something larger - a Tour de France.
The first Tour took place from July 1st to the 19th, in 1903. It spanned 2,428 kilometers
in six stages, and of the sixty cyclists who showed at the starting line, 21 finished. It was a quick
success, and the circulation of l’Auto rose from 20-30,000 to 65,000 daily (Dauncey et al., 7). This dealt a fatal blow to Le Vélo, which closed in 1904. As the product of a newspaper, the
event has always relied on media coverage for its success. L’Auto won over Le Vélo, claiming an apolitical stance in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair debacle, however the paper advanced a
specific vision of France’s identity and future that saw widespread male athleticism as the
answer to France’s national revival:
“Mais voici que nos petits gars français trouvent aujourd’hui au lycée, presque partout,
une association athlétique qui les prend, les façonne, leur apprend à se défendre, à
attaquer surtout. D’eux-mêmes, soit au football, soit à la course à pied, ils deviennent des
lutteurs avec le besoin de vaincre l’humiliation de la défaite, l’esprit de solidarité quand
ils sont constitués en équipes. Ils acquièrent du tempérament, de la décision, du jugement,
de l’audace, de l’initiative. Les voilà hors du lycée, tout armés pour combattre, refusant la
protection des jupes maternelles, prêts à faire leur chemin, là où faudra, fût-ce très loin,
fût-ce aux colonies.” 2- 1st edition of l’Auto, October 16th, 1900 (Desgrange)
(Augendre, 2-4) (Dauncey et al., 6-7) (Thompson, 18-19)
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TOUR
To better understand the scope and the impact of the Tour as it has evolved, it is useful to
review a brief history up through the present day. L’Auto continued to organize the Tour from 1903 to 1914 and 1919 through 1939, with Desgrange steering the ship until his retirement in
1936. Desgrange’s leadership and direction enabled the Tour to reach the status it now has as a
symbol of French patrimoine3, and developed the sport of cycling as a whole. In the pre-World
War II era, the number of contestants starting the Tour ranged from 60 to 162. Until 1926, it
averaged fifteen stages and 5,193 kilometers. In the early years, the Tour was an exceedingly
grueling affair with high attrition rates that dramatized the feat of survival, and poorly surfaced
roads and primitive equipment (Desgrange did not permit derailleurs until 1937) added to its
difficulty. The cyclists confronted the Pyrenees for the first time in 1910, making the Tour the
first race bold enough to include mountain stages. In 1919, the Belgian Firmin Lambot was the
first to wear the famous maillot jaune4, the emblem of the Tour (Augendre, 17). National teams
supplanted individual riders and sponsored teams in 1930, and the caravane publicitaire5, a
parade of advertising cars that precedes the racers, was created, along with the first live radio
reportage of the race. For its thirtieth anniversary in 1933, the Grand Prix de la Montagne6 was
inaugurated and the following year, individual time-trial stages were implemented. During
Desgrange’s dynasty, the Tour continually transformed itself, changed routes and pioneered the
sport, but always kept certain features of previous races as constants, such as the yellow jersey
are formed into teams. They acquire temperament, decision, judgment, daring, initiative. They leave high school, fully armed to fight, refusing the protection of the maternal skirts, ready to make their way, wherever it may be, even if it is very far, even to the colonies”
and its grand finale in the Parc de Princes in Paris. L’Auto refined and complicated competition rules to build a Tour culture and invent a sense of tradition.
A majority of l’Auto’s stake was purchased by Raymond Patenôtre in 1939, who sold it to the Germans in November 1940. After the war, papers that had appeared during the German
occupation of France were outlawed by the provisional French government, so l’Auto was shut
down and lost their rights to the Tour. Jacques Goddet, Desgrange’s chief assistant during the
1930s, founded L’Equipe and bought half of the rights to the Tour, with the remainder purchased
by Le Parisien Libere, whose editor, Felix Levitan, co-organized the race with Goddet. During this period, the Tour commenced for the first time in foreign capitals: Brussels in 1947 and
Amsterdam in 1954. Following a pattern set by Desgrange, at its fiftieth anniversary in 1953, the
Tour inaugurated the green jersey for the best sprinter. With the advent of television coverage
and live TV, the Tour became increasingly commercialized in the post-war era. The riders’
became advertisements themselves, with logos allowed on even the yellow jersey.
In 1964 l’Equipe was bought by the media mogul Emilien Amaury, who already owned
Le Parisien. The sixties were dominated by the reign of Jacques Anquetil, who won his fifth
Tour in 1964, and tainted by a rising doping epidemic amongst cyclists, which would continue in
the coming decades. The pinnacle of this was the death of Tom Simpson, the English champion,
on Mount Ventoux in 1967 after a suspected overdose. In the following decade, Eddy Merckx
overshadowed his competitors with five wins, and commercial brand teams officially replaced
national teams. International interest continued to grow, with 50 million TV viewers tuning in for
the 1973 finish. In 1975, the cyclists participated in the first iconic finish at the Champs Elysées,
and the maillot à pois7rewarded the best climber.
From 1980 onwards, the Tour was organized by a subdivision of the Amaury press group,
the Société du Tour de France. The race has since trended towards larger pelotons, or groups of
cyclists, and occasionally exceeds 200 racers, who average around 3,500 kilometers over roughly
twenty days of racing. In 1981, the Australian Phil Anderson became the first non-European to
wear the yellow jersey, and American Greg LeMond was the first to win the Tour in 1986.
Levitan lauched a women’s version of the Tour in 1984, which ran for the next six years.
However, the longtime organizer of the event was ousted by his partner, Goddet, under the
supervision of the Groupe Amaury in 1987. Goddet retired the following year, and the former
racer and sports journalist, Jean-Marie LeBlanc, became its technical director in 1989. European
unity and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 were celebrated through a European route, and in 1994
the Tour went to England via the Channel Tunnel. The trend continued with the 1998 start in
Ireland, but this was overshadowed by the Festina affair, which caused two teams to withdraw
after performance-enhancing drugs were discovered. 1999 marked Lance Armstrong’s first
victory in his seven-year streak, now discounted by Armstrong’s admitted doping. In 2007,
Christian Prudhomme took the reins from Leblanc as the Tour’s director, and has strengthened
the Tour’s opposition to doping.
The Tour de France celebrated its one-hundredth edition in 2013, and brought Amaury
Sports Organization over €36 million in profit. (INRNG) It is inarguably the world’s premier
cycling event; in 2018 it was broadcasted by one hundred television channels in 190 countries,
and had 12 million spectators along its route (Augendre, 109). But as it begins its second
century, it is arguable that the cultural significance it carries is jeopardized by its stubborn
event, and reinvent the sporting hero they have constructed, as suspicion hovers over every
cyclist. (Augendre, 4) (Dauncey et al., 8, 268-273) (Thompson, 32-36)
We can see that even though the Tour’s first organizers claimed not to be beholden to any
political ideology, l’Auto was in fact the product of a political crisis, and two stakeholders taking sides. By labeling itself as apolitical, l’Auto, and its creation, the Tour de France, made the claim
that its programming was unmotivated by any ideological agenda, that it was simply a sporting
event. However, the two sides of the Dreyfus Affair provide a symbolic microcosm of the
competing versions of France as it entered modernity. On the one hand, there were the
Dreyfusards; the secular-minded, cosmopolitan Republicans who were committed to the separation of the Church and the State. On the other were the anti-Dreyfusards, the nationalists
who sought to uphold the integrity of the French military at the expense of exacerbating
xenophobia and antisemitism in the country. From its establishment, l’Auto intentionally
distinguished itself from the Dreyfusards, insisted this degradation of the federal justice system and French democracy did not concern it. In so doing, they helped to build the constructed
ideology that French nationalism was inherently politically neutral, when in reality, it
disseminated a vision of France that excluded and marginalized minority groups in the name of
Chapter I: A Modern Tour for a Modern France
FRANCE’S IDENTITY CRISIS AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
In order to understand how the Tour de France situated itself in a nationalist and
traditionalist political narrative, it is necessary to provide some context as to what defined French
traditionalism leading up to the moment of the Tour’s inception. The Tour de France emerged
historically as a reassertion of tradition in the context of a modern industrial age. Over a century
earlier, the French Revolution brought about a republican, civic and secular ideology that
unraveled traditional conceptions of what it meant to be French as defined by the Church and
social status. Philosophers of the Enlightenment attested that power was not bestowed from God
by divine right but founded on the rationale of men, that the government functioned under a
social contract, that men were created equal in nature. These beliefs ran counter to France’s
centuries-old feudal system that held the peasant masses fiscally accountable to a distant
monarchy to which they were indebted with little recompense. Catholicism was entrenched in
political and social life; citizens were required by law to pay tithes of one-tenth of their income
to the Church. The majority of the population was relegated to the Third Estate, which
effectively had no voice in the government. In 1798, the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen rearticulated the role of the government in democratic terms and provided a cohesive
national ideology founded on liberty, equality and brotherhood.
Then, throughout the nineteenth century, France was caught in the current of relentless
change. In the 1890s, about half of France’s population was rural. The Industrial Revolution
transformed France’s historically agrarian and artisanal economy and this came with political
implications. The French spent the century struggling over conflicting articulations of their rights
different political regimes. Anti-republican groups were on the rise after the demoralizing defeat
of the Third Republic in the Franco-Prussian War which left the French keenly aware of their
unstable political atmosphere as they confronted a new neighbor vying for power, Germany. The
Third Republic took stronger interventionist measures to consolidate itself and garner the support
of France’s vastly rural population. They introduced a series of protective tariffs to appease
landlords and large farmers, and subsidized railway expansion to open rural communities to
commerce, connecting disparate and remote regions to one another at an unprecedented level.
(Schwartz, 251)
In addition, the Industrial Revolution created an urban working class who challenged
political thought by demanding regulation against their inhumane working conditions and greater
representation in the government. There was a stark contradiction between the theoretical
equality that the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme introduced and the social reality of
economic inequality. Marxism became increasingly appealing to the proletariat in the wake of
the Franco-Prussian War, and the government quelled dissent with the implementation of
Solidarisme, a political theory developed by Leon Bourgeois that fused liberalism and socialism,
and acknowledged that “l’individu isolé n’existe pas”; the individual does not exist in isolation.
Solidarisme finally incorporated the ideals of liberté, egalité, fraternité into legislation with the
belief that citizens are interdependent and pay their mutual debt to society in order to maintain
solidarity, and it was the State’s responsibility to organize, structure and support it. Under this
ideological framework, free medical assistance was introduced in 1893, legislation for the
mutualisation of risks incurred at work was put into place in 1898, retirement pensions for the
working and farming populations were established in 1910, among a host of other reforms
greater responsibility to ensure the welfare of its citizenry, heightening its relationship to the
individual citizen.
There were also cultural consequences of these changes. Among the sweep of reforms,
the French established a standard of laïcité in affairs of the state that diminished the role of religion in society. As the twentieth century began, a new secular, meritocratic culture was
disseminated through public schools opening their doors across the country with the 1881 Jules
Ferry legislation that made primary education compulsory and free. Historically, education had
been a privilege relegated to the landed elite and controlled by the Catholic Church. Now,
nationalist ideals supplanted religious erudition, and were incorporated into curriculum. Ferry
launched a program for citizenship education as part of the reform, which moralized education
by focusing on duty, effort and seriousness of purpose. A quote from an 1862 civics textbook
reads,
“(1) French society is ruled by just laws, because it is a democratic society. (2) All the
French are equal in rights, but there are inequalities between us that stem from nature or
wealth. (3) These inequalities cannot disappear. (4) Man works to become rich; if he
lacked this hope, work would cease and France would decline.” (Heater, 75)
The country was becoming increasingly interconnected, and the idea of what it meant to
be “French” was shifting. Cycling quickly became a rallying force for the French to collectively
create and celebrate their nationality.As a public event, the Tour de France provided a
communal platform for the French to articulate their social visions, to define what was normative
and praised by society, to bolster nationalism and shape French identity.
Cycling emerged out of Paris as a popular sport during the Belle Époque, a moment in
French history when industrialism was booming. New possibilities for transportation and
communication were quickly developing and the agrarian society that had for centuries defined
France was diminishing as urbanization increased. Until the late 1800s, sport and leisure were
luxuries relegated to the upper class, but the bicycle revolutionized the accessibility of these
pastimes. First modeled after the likeness of a horse, the draisienne was seen as a modern form of equitation, made for the amusement of aristocrats. Working pedals were invented in 1861, and
by the 1880s, its form began to resemble the bicycle we know today, with the addition of
derailleurs8, rotating chains and rubber wheels (as opposed to wooden ones) (Gaboriau, 104).
As the bicycle became increasingly affordable and its production grew, this object of
industry crossed socioeconomic barriers and became accessible to those who produced it. In
1890, 50,000 people owned registered bicycles in France, and in 1910, just 20 years later, there
were over 2,700,000 (Thompson, 15). It became the common mode of transport for commutes. It
was also a symbol of freedom and autonomy, in particular for women, whose fashion evolved to
accommodate the bike, liberating them from restrictive corsets towards the end of the twentieth
century. (Gaboriau, 112)
The bicycle was a product of industrial progress which challenged notions of distance
and time. Many blue-collar workers’ jobs became more efficient thanks to it; mail carriers,
policemen and milkmen could complete their commute in half the time once required. Much like
the railroad, the bicycle connected rural areas with the rest of the nation into a more unified
whole. It was opportunity; an accessible sort of magic which changed the daily lives of ordinary
citizens and multiplied possibilities. (Pudlowski) By the first decade of the twentieth century,
society began taking the new contraption seriously and the mass commercialization of bicycles
brought the machine to the bourgeoisie and working classes. Racing tracks started popping up
around Paris to capitalize on this newfound popularity with vélodrome races, where people from
all backgrounds came together and commingled in stadiums. (Thompson, 13) Soon after, road
racing developed into an organized sport. Because the action played out at one’s doorstep as
opposed to an enclosed stadium, it was more accessible to spectators than other popular sports of
the period, which allowed it to quickly develop a following.
Professional cyclists embodied the traditional values of agrarian France that many felt
were in danger of disappearing; hard work, training, technical skill. With the open road as its
stadium, cycling demanded a ruggedness that other sports of the time which took place on
manicured courts and lawns (such as tennis) did not (Gaboriau, 26). Many of the first long
distance races ran into the night, requiring competitors to spend hours in tedium, cycling up to
1200 kilometers a day (Pudlowski). It was too grueling an undertaking to appeal to the upper
classes and became a path to social mobility for those in the working class. The pedals promised
potential fame and wealth to those who dared to challenge what man was capable of through
industrial advancement.
REVIVING NATIONALISM
The French as a people also seemed in danger of disappearing. The sentiment that
France’s situation at the turn of the twentieth century was precarious - after the defeat of 1870
and the establishment of the foreboding German Empire – was reinforced by a stagnant
demography. As Jackson explains in France: The Dark Years,
“Once the most populous state in Europe, France’s birth rate had started to decline at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. This came to be conceived as a problem in the
the number of deaths exceeded births. Between 1871 and 1911, France’s population
increased by only 8.6 percent, Germany’s by 60 percent, and Great Britain’s by 54
percent. Dénatalité became the most palpable evidence of French national decline.” (31) While people struggled to find a working solution to this crisis, sports nationalism arose and
offered a practical answer. Dr. Philippe Tissié, a prominent figure in sports medicine at the time,
believed that the moral and psychological weakness of the modern French was to blame for the
degeneration of the country, and this could be solved with physical activity and education.
According to Tissié, “l’éducation physique est la grande régénératrice physique,
intellectuelle et morale9” (Tissié, 20). This outlook spread, grew into sports clubs appearing all
over the nation; Tissié himself channeled his patriotic and hygienic concern into the foundation
of the Ligue girondine in Bordeaux in 1888, and associations vélocipédiques determined to produce a generation of healthy patriots (Weber, 87). Physical education programs were
implemented in schools, for youth from all backgrounds. Sports nationalism held an appeal for
all classes and political parties; it allowed those deviating from the Republican consensus
(namely Catholics and Socialists) to be reincorporated into the community and dialogue of the
nation as full participants (Nye, 328).
In this climate of national anxiety, the Tour de France was created, as the French were
“investing the bicycle with their deepest hopes and fears while they digested recent traumas,
experienced dramatic change, and confronted an uncertain future.” Henri Desgrange founded it
on the belief that a nation’s greatness must be measured not only by its artistic and political
achievements, but also by the strength of its athletes, who symbolized the nation’s health, the
strength of younger generations, and its modernity. (Thompson, 32).
A MODERN RELIGION
“Tout autant qu’une kermesse, le Tour de France est une Eglise. Une épiphanie plus
soucieuse de tradition que de changements qui n’a de cesse de chanter ses grands prêtres
et ses saints martyrs, comme pour mieux asseoir un dogme que les organisateurs rêvent
de figer pour l’éternité10.” - Benoit Heimermann (Ils ont Ecrit, 20)
With the rise of secularism, there was a need for a new way of instilling hope into people
and for a place to rearticulate the relationships between humans outside of the Church. The Tour
de France helped to fill a space in the French cultural consciousness that the Church had left in
its diminishing influence. The event was laden with religious undertones, with its own system of
beliefs, and set of saints and martyrs. Some of the traditional roles of the church became part of
the Tour de France’s cultural appeal; as a public event, it allowed people of all social strata to
commingle. The Tour inhabited a space in the collective imagination of the French much like
that of religious holidays, as the spectacle was carried across the country year after year, in a
three-week festival that marked the apex of summer. It was a communal gathering that offered a
haven from the drudgery and worries of the modern world. As Henri Troyat heralded in a July
1939 issue of l’Auto,
“Il me plait qu’a l’approche des vacances un pur sujet d’enthousiasme soit offert aux
esprits fatigués par le tamtam funèbre des évènements politiques. Les premières pages
des journaux se disloquent et accueillent en leurs titres gras … Les effigies de
parlementaires au front travaillé de soucis … s’écartent devant l’image d’un coureur …
Son nom peu importe. C’est: ‘Le Coureur’. … Le Tour de France, c’est une sorte
d’armistice au cœur même de la menace.” 11(Ils Ont, 144)
10“For as much as the Tour de France is a festival, the Tour de France is a Church. An Epiphany more concerned with tradition than with changes that never ceases to sing of its priests and martyrs, to enforce a dogma which the organizers dream of keeping for eternity.”
11 “It pleases me that at the approach of the holidays a subject of pure enthusiasm is offered to the minds weary of
Troyat describes the “coureur” as a new sort of iconographic image, a timeless, universal symbol
of peace amid the political chaos of the years leading up to World War II. Since l’Auto was the
newspaper that sponsored the Tour, it was the primary source for coverage in the pre-World War
II era. Articles such as this one from l’Auto told the story of the Tour in great detail, aggrandized it as, “une épopée qui mélange le spontané et la légende … qui glorifie les qualités dites
héroïques: courage, générosité, cruauté, ruse, passion amoureuse, grandeur d’âme et
patriotisme12.” (Gaboriau, 51)
Sports journalism emerged alongside the Tour, cultivating a cultural imagination around
the sport: as there was no television broadcasting at the time, writers and radio hosts painted the
scene with their words. (Pudlowski) The Tour has its own vocabulary and grammar, and the
early reporting resembles a fantastic novel more than a spectator’s summary. Much of this is
owed to its founder, Desgrange, whose literary personality has been described as “sorte de Père
Martinet au lyrisme exalté13” (Popovic)
L’Auto’s intentional coverage glorified the feat to Odyssian proportions, and personified the French landscape as a capricious, and at times menacing, god: “L’apocalypse ! Une vision
terrifiante des éléments se déchainant en pleine montagne pyrénéennes, à quelques kilomètres de
la frontière espagnole, pour déverser soudainement sur la route du Tour de France des cataractes
opaques par la densité et la violence de la tornade14”- L’Equipe, July 13th, 1971 (Gaboriau, 66)
The effigies of parliamentarians their brow furrowed with worries ... move aside from the image of a rider ... His name does not matter. He is: 'The Rider' ... The Tour de France is a kind of armistice at the very heart of the threat” 12 “an epic that mixes spontaneity and legend … which glorifies heroic qualities; courage, generosity, cruelty, ruse, passion, greatness and patriotism.”
13 A kind of Father Martinet with exalted lyricism
It was characterized as a sort of pilgrimage, a feat of extreme effort and suffering for glory and
honor.
Desgrange utilized religious language to heighten the semantic value of circumstances on
the road. For example, in one article titled “Acte d’adoration” from the July 11th 1911 publication
of the sports daily he writes,
“Aujourd’hui, mes frères, nous nous réunirons, si vous le voulez bien, dans une commune
et pieuse pensée à l’adresse de la divine bicyclette. Nous lui dirons toute notre piété et
toute notre reconnaissance, pour les ineffables et précieuses joies qu’elle veut bien nous
dispenser ; pour les souvenirs dont elle a peuplé déjà nos mémoires sportive … Voici,
que du geste vainqueur de leurs muscles légers, ils se sont élevés si haut qu’ils
semblaient, de là-haut, dominer le monde ! Apôtre des religions nouvelles15”
Here, Desgrange builds upon the idea of national fraternity, addressing his audience his
compatriots and using “nous” to draw the readers into the scene. In this article, the climb
becomes a Dantean journey; the cyclists must cross through hell to find salvation: “lorsque nous
avons pensé que nous entrions dans le paradis en longeant les bords du lac d’Annecy, l’enfer,
tout à coup, s’est dressé devant nous.16” When peasants appear, the cyclists ask them if the
summit is still far away, and it becomes clear that the story of the stage is a nationalist metaphor
for France reaching unprecedented pinnacles of achievement in the new century, including its
strongest traditional social base as part of the process. This typical elevated language sacralized
15 “Today, my brothers, we will meet, if you please, in a common and pious thought addressed to the divine bicycle. We will tell her all our piety and our gratitude, for the ineffable and precious joys she is willing to bestow on us; for the memories with which she has populated our collective memory of sport ... Behold, from the victorious gesture of their nimble muscles, they rose so high that they seemed to dominate the world from above! Apostle of new religions”
the sport, constructed it as a sort of modernizing crusade that ensured the physical and national
resurrection of France. (Popovic)
The French struggled to reconcile their traditionally religious and agrarian identity and
with the increasing urbanization, industrialization and secularism of the early twentieth century,
and the Tour articulated a vision of a modern France that embraced traditional values while
simultaneously hailing the value of industry. At a moment when the nation was preoccupied with
fatalist fears of national decline, the Tour offered a hopeful depiction of a France that did not
have to abandon her ideals in order to embrace industrial progress. From the outset, the
organizers of the Tour were keenly aware of the historical moment in which they found
themselves and capitalized upon France’s sensitivity to change by constructing the event’s image
around traditionalist ideas of nationalism for a country that historically associated its nationhood
with its religious beliefs.
Chapter 2: French Nationalism and the Tour
In traditional agricultural communities, the idea of territory consists of a community
bonded by the shared knowledge of their local landscape, which contains their shared livelihood.
By contrast, nation states affiliate citizens with one another through an imagined community,
which must find a way to transpose its ideology onto local scales and incorporate local values
into the national ideology. (Dauncey et al., 160) France’s own sense of nationalism evolved
through The Tour de France, which brought the country a new level of imagined and real unity.
As Pudlowski writes, “Avant le Tour, les gens des campagnes ne connaissent que leur village,
ils vont rarement au-delà. Et voilà soudain que la France leur est contée, par les mots, par le Tour
de France, par les journaux et la radio. C’est indissociable. La perception de la nation s'est faite
par le Tour de France pour la première fois.”17
In contrast to other widely broadcasted sporting events, such as the World Cup or the
Olympics, the Tour was held every year on the same soil as the last. This gave the French a
space to collectively commemorate their past, make sense of the present and imagine hopes for
the future. It served as a platform to evaluate the changes and continuities that shaped their lives,
to tell stories about what it meant to be French and to be modern. As one journalist from the
Paris-Presse commented in 1947,
“Le Tour de France, plus que jamais, entre dans les moeurs, s'incorpore de plus en plus
dans la vie française comme le beau roman feuilleton du mois de juillet. On évalue à plus
de 12 millions le nombre de ceux, sportifs ou profanes, qui virent se dérouler, devant
leurs yeux, un épisode de ce film grandiose, unique dans les annales du sport mondial18. ”
(Gaboriau, 53)
As writer Pierre Bost puts it, “Le Tour de France est aussi une des dernières grandes fêtes
populaires de notre triste époque. Fête gratuite, et seul spectacle qui puisse rassembler une foule
illimitée… La France entière est devenue une pelouse autour de laquelle se déroule une ronde19”.
(Heimermann, 164) The Tour was suffused with nostalgia, and the itinerary of the Tour also
familiarized the French with their country’s landscape and heightened their appreciation for their
patrimony. In recollecting their childhood memories of the Tour, journalist and author François
Salvaing writes, “La France était ce qu’on n’apprenait pas en classe, un territoire mythologique
où tous les ans s’écrivait un drame essentiel, et chacune de ses régions ne valait que pour ce
qu’elle savait apporter d’obstacles et de gloire aux héros à vélo20” (Heimermann, 60)
The itinerary of the Tour de France has articulated many conceptions of the country that
communicate versions of national strength relevant to the historical moment. For example, in its
first year, the Tour celebrated the country’s booming industrial centers of trade, visiting Paris,
Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Nantes by following traditional trading routes. These
cities were also coincidentally where the largest markets for bicycles and sporting newspapers
could be found. (Dauncey et al., 161) Every year, the reivents a tradition by passing through new
iterations of familiar terrain. The route highlights different parts of France, incorporates small
towns and provinces into a larger, palatable national narrative, celebrating regional diversity.
18 “The Tour de France, more than ever, is widely accepted, incorporated more and more in French life as the wonderful saga of the month of July. One estimates more than 12 million in number, athletes or spectators, who see unfold, before their eyes, an episode of this grand film, unique in the annals of global sports.”
19 “The Tour de France is one of the last great festivals in our sad era. Free celebration, and the only spectacle which
can assemble an infinite crowd …The entirety of France becomes a lawn that on which the Tour unfolds”
20 “France wasn’t something you learned in a classroom, it was a mythological territory where every year an
However, the patterned exclusion of certain regions from the Tour’s itinerary calls into question
whether the Tour is truly a tour of France.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Brittany had a reputation for being a backwards,
agrarian and autonomous region, struggling against a demographic exodus and infrastructural
underdevelopment. While the region produced some of France’s earliest cycling clubs and the
Tour’s first stars, including Lucien Mazan21, it was overlooked on the itinerary. The capital of the
region, Rennes, was rarely featured on the Tour’s route; once in 1905, and not again until 1933.
Several journalists commented on this neglect, one from La Bretagne Sportive in 1935 contested the organizers’ claim that Brittany’s flat terrain did not offer enough excitement for the Tour,
citing the many steep inclines in the province and the long list of good climbers it had given the
competition, and chastised them for not racing a Tour de France in its entirety. These grievances
emphasize the Tour’s status as a ubiquitous symbol of nationalism that made it an effective
device for communicating Brittany’s dissatisfaction as the pariah of France. In this way, the Tour
acted as a point of reference used as a tool for advancing political conversations. (Thompson,
71-76)
The idea that the Tour was a cooperative effort of regions was consistently emphasized
by l’Auto; one article from June 7th 1907 titled, Et les régions continuent à donner ! 22contends,
“Il n’existe pas une seule ville en France, pas une communauté sportive qui se refuserait
l’occasion de collaborer au succès du grand raid classique.” 23 (Desgrange) Riders hailed from
every department, representing exemplary attributes typical of their region. For example, the
famous winner of five Tours, Jacques Anquetil, was constantly associated with his rural Norman
21 known as Petit-Breton, winner of the 1907 and 1908 races 22 And The Regions Keep on Giving!
23 “There is not one city in France, there is not one sports community that would refuse itself the opportunity to
upbringing, and given the nicknames, “Monsieur Chrono,” and “le Normand,” 24 for his stoic and
methodological persona, tropes of the Norman temperament. (Heimermann, 80) The provincial
aspect of the Tour reinforced nationalism as year after year, every corner of France was brought
into the national eye through the itinerary and the riders drafted from the regions.
Spectating was an incredibly accessible way for people to appreciate the landscape and
the countryside, and if unable to come join the masses, fans were given a singular narrative
through l’Auto’s accounts of the race that allowed them to experience the racers’ route
vicariously. One article from the 1935 Tour shows this meticulous detail in its description of
Aix-le-Bains, personifying the landscape “les grosses molaires de la chaine des Aravis, l’angine
caractérisée des forêts de sapins au fond des gorges, l’allure bien champêtre de ce Tamié
serpentin, au milieu des blés, des vignes, de vergers25…” (Desgrange, l’Auto, July 11th, 1935)
As a free and public event, the Tour escaped social constraints. Taking place during the
peak of summer, the Tour has been compared to one giant picnic for the whole of France, where
everyone gathers to celebrate the weather, community and the nation.
“Le 19 juin dernier, si quelqu’un m’avait dit: vous allez voir sept à huit millions de
Français danser la gigue sur les toits, sur les terrasses, sur les balcons, sur les chemins,
sur les places et au sommet des arbres, j’aurais dirigé aussitôt mon informateur vers une
maison d’aliénés. C’eût été une erreur. Mon homme ne se serait trompé que sur le chiffre.
C’est dix millions de Français qui glapissent de contentement26.” - Londres, Le Petit Parisien, July 9th, 1924 (Gaboriau, 47)
24 Mr. Stopwatch, the Norman
25 the huge molars of the peaks of Avaris, the tonsilitis of the pine forests at the base of its throat, the bucolic allure
of the serpentine Tamié, amongst wheat, vines and orchards…
This French unity, as the Tour exemplified it, was threatened by World War II and its
aftermath, with the divisions drawn between Vichy France and the French Resistance. Just weeks
before Vichy France signed the Armistice with Germany in 1940, Desgrange proposed holding a
week-long Tour with a star-shaped itinerary around the capital, to rally national unity. Once the
Vichy regime took hold, they vetoed the idea due to insufficient monetary resources to allocate
to such a race. However, two years later, as Vichy’s popularity was dwindling because of its
decision to send French workers to Germany in exchange for French prisoners of war, the
collaborationist paper La France Socialiste attempted to convince Jacques Goddet (who took over L’Auto upon Desgrange’s death in 1940) to organize a tour, but Goddet refused. La France Socialiste went ahead with the project, hoping to convince the French and the international
community that wartime France was normal and peaceful.
The race, called Le Circuit de France, would represent “the return to the virile age,” a
theme of the Vichy regime that blamed the weak and inconsistent Third Republic for corrupting
the French. This version of the race would run itself modestly, requiring racers to use ration
tickets, to use cheaper tires that were more durable than typical racing tires, all to demonstrate
that “our race still knows how to suffer and show courage” (Thompson, 79). The race was a
logistical disaster, due to the organizers’ insufficient supplies and inexperience. Goddet
maintained that the Tour would only occur after the war, because it was such a feature of French
cultural life, which ruptured under German occupation.
In the aftermath of the war, a convalescent France faced an uncertain future as it
confronted the ravages of war. The bombing of civilian targets during the war left almost a
quarter of all French buildings destroyed, and a million families homeless. Agricultural
were operational. Moreover, the beginnings of the Cold War drove a wedge between political
parties, as the Communists were expelled from the cabinet in May 1947. Goddet was determined
to keep L’Equipe (l’Auto’s successor) apolitical, as other prominent journals such as Le Figaro
took sides, in an effort to keep sports media a sacrosanct realm where politics did not intervene.
As plans for the first post-war Tour were underway, Goddet asserted that it would
“reopen the era of joie de vivre,” convening “a good-natured society that makes no distinctions
of class or political affiliation.” In a period of uncertainty and loss, the 1947 Tour symbolized
France’s postwar recovery, by providing evidence that France was not degenerating, but would
rebound from the war in solidarity and strength. The racers’ effort, their vigor and determination
proved that “France is alive” and gave a “lesson of national energy,” according to Ce Soir. It was
the symbolic revival of France, including cities ravaged by the war along its itinerary to
acknowledge what the country had sustained and valorize the resilience of the French. Caen, in
particular, represented the endurance of the French; it was chosen as the penultimate stage for the
Tour, but nearly three-quarters of the city had been destroyed by the war. In its coverage of the
stage, L’Equipe stated, “Caen can only show the Tour de France her skeleton. But a magnificent
heart continues to beat under the ruins. There was truly something moving about the welcome
provided the champions of the road.” (Thompson, 80-85)
The itinerary of the Tour de France showcases the country to a national and international
audience each year, and this is not lost on its organizers. Since the Tour’s inception, what is
included as part of the route sends a subliminal nationalist message to the viewers. From 1906 to
1910, l’Auto was able to persuade German authorities to permit the race to pass through Alsace-Lorraine, and after World War I, l’Auto’s 1919 edition of the Tour celebrated French
through the capital of Pétain’s Etat Français, Vichy (which had never before been selected as a
ville-étape) in a gesture of goodwill to reconcile the crimes of Vichy France with the postwar
reality. In the following decades as Western European unification became a political reality,
organizers looked to the future by visiting West Germany in the sixties and crossing the English
Channel in the seventies. After the Treaty of Maastricht, the 1992 Tour paid visit to all of
France’s European Union neighbors. (Thompson, 93) Though outright political commentary is
largely avoided by sports journalists, these decisions reflect the organizers’ intention of offering
viewers a tailored version of France to reinforce national identity, reconcile contesting historical
narratives, and collectively envision the country’s future. As writer Louis Aragon explains,
“c’est la fête d’un été d’hommes, et c’est aussi la fête de tout notre pays, d’une passion
singulièrement française … écrit dans les yeux anxieux des coureurs. La leçon de
l’énergie nationale, le goût violent de vaincre la nature et son propre corps, l’exaltation de
tous pour les meilleurs. La leçon tous les ans renouvelée et qui manifeste que la France
est vivante, et que le Tour est bien le Tour de France.” 27 (Heimermann, 148)
DISSEMINATING NATIONAL IDEOLOGY
The belief in the importance of appreciating patrimonial heritage and the geography of
the country was reinforced by the republican pedagogy introduced by the Third Republic. The
primary school textbook originally published in 1877, Le tour de la France par deux enfants
celebrated France’s regional diversity and its geographic, agricultural and artisanal identity
through the eyes of two children traveling across the country, erasing separatist and provincial
stereotypes in favor of educating a unified citizenry. The patriotic values of republican pedagogy
27 “it is the festival of a man’s summer, it is also a celebration of our whole country, with a singularly French
which actively reconciles diversity with unity continue in l’Auto’s coverage of the Tour, promoting a softened painting of France, as a harmonious country abundant with culture and
natural beauty. (Thompson, 57-59)
The Tour was born at a critical moment when industrial progress was in contradiction
with the harsh conditions of living imposed on the popular majority, and created a spectacle for
the masses, composed of heros from the working class. The bicycle race was one of the first
popular sports that initially enlisted blue-collar workers instead of professional athletes, riders
who knew how to weld a broken frame, who were willing to haul across poor roads into the
night. Up to 1914, competitors had to participate alone and repair their bikes by themselves.
Through the Tour, they were able to gain fame and a modest fortune. (Gaboriau, 26)
From one viewpoint, the Tour can be seen as a platform used to placate the working
class’ desire for liberation; diffusing the values of republicanism and industrialism from the
capital across the country. The system established by Desgrange was itself a total institution,
enforcing the bureaucratic paternalism typical of industrial occupations. The Tour took full
responsibility for competitors for three weeks and imposed its own rhythm and order: schedules,
routes, classifications, regulations and penalizations. (Gaboriau, 27) With the reintroduction of
universal male suffrage in the 1870s, the Third Republic faced the challenge of peacefully
assimilating the proletariat into a society regulated by bourgeois values and power structures, and
the Tour sacralized the tedious and repetitive, hard physical labor that the working class knew.
This sublated tensions against the bourgeois hierarchy through a domesticated event,
simultaneously sanctifying the existing regime and the rules that regulate the society and
validating the struggles of the working class. The Tour’s distinctive quality was its accessibility
The Tour redraws the country each year, reimagines what it has to offer the French. By
claiming the inherent neutrality of sports journalism, its directors obscured the fact that its
itinerary and coverage made political statements, that were cast as the national consensus. It did
so by giving the French an unprecedented sense of national community that united them around a
celebration of their country’s strength, by drawing the nation’s attention to places that held
political significance. Throughout the years, it confronted issues of political, social and cultural
concern and placated national fears by reinforcing France’s traditional identity within a
contemporary context. Its competitors not only retraced France’s border each summer, but
reconquered them, an act which required men of heroic stature.
Chapter 3: The Patriarchy of The Tour de France
As has been discussed previously, France was experiencing demographic stagnation at
the turn of the century, which contributed to a widespread anxiety about France’s national
decline as a populous German Empire was asserting itself. Between 1872 and 1911, the French
population increased by less than 10 percent, while Germany’s grew by more than half.
(Thompson, 299) This caused a variety of commentators, particularly on the Right, to theorize
that the feminist movement was the problem at the root of France’s impotency, and in response,
a cultural wave reinforcing traditional gender roles in the name of ensuring France’s viability as
a country emerged. The Tour de France took part in this trend, offering a reassuring vision of
archetypal gender identities through reportage and media that assuaged worries about France’s
future.
The organizers of the Tour created an image of cyclists as hypermasculine “giants of the
road” which countered the narrative that French men lacked virility, extolling them for
overcoming obstacles through their distinctively male qualities. This conventionally gendered
narrative is presented with a timelessness, as little has changed about the Tour’s praise for its
masculine heros and exclusion of feminine strength, allowing it to serve as a conservative
counterpoint to the fear that empowered women were “blurring fundamental sexual differences
and undermining social stability as they gained new rights and opportunities” (Thompson, 98).
As Georges Rozet wrote in 1911 “the competitors of the Tour provide young Frenchmen
with a beneficial lesson in energy,” advertising a hypermasculine ideal for young generations of
frenchmen to aspire to. (Gaboriau, 24) The narrative of the Tour and its géants de la route
offered a revival of legends of chivalric heroes for the modern era:
“Merci pour la chevalerie. Nous manquions de grands hommes, dans les années
de juillet, des silhouettes colorées sautaient, faute de destriers, sur des petites reines. Et
commençait la Geste. Recommençait le cœur à battre devant tant de hauts faits, tant de
batailles autrement plus exaltantes que les pauvres magouilles de Guy Mollet. Bobet
s’unissait à Mendes pour me faire savoir que la fierté était possible, dans la vie, que tout
n'était pas forcément morne, mesquin, magouille.”28 - Erik Orsenna, L’Equipe Magazine,
2003
These associations with conquest and chivalry reflect the sociological role of sporting
events during the twentieth century. The sociologist-historian Norbert Elias argued that athletic
competitions functioned as a way to collectively regulate social violence. Sports, says Elias, are
non-violent combats which offer our modern societies the benefits of battle without the moral
dilemma of warfare (Gaboriau, 20).
This assertion is supported by the language used by sports media to cover the event over
the years. L’Auto continually used military rhetoric in their coverage, referencing “attacks,” “alliances,” “armies,” “decisive battles,” “veterans,” and “road captains.” (Thompson, 125)
Headlines spoke of “massacres” and “Waterloo”, and a daily column provided a running list of
racers who had withdrawn, called “the eliminated of each stage” (Thompson, 127). Moreover,
racers’ wives were depicted as military spouses, left on the home front as their husbands went to
the front lines. As one woman told reporters, “when I go to sleep at night, I see an open grave
and him falling into it! (She wipes away a little tear.) … Popularity, glory, does that matter to us
women?” (Thompson, 126) Identifying itself as a military campaign, the Tour established a
sense of nostalgic heroism that appealed to the French who had undergone much loss and defeat
28“Thanks for the chivalry. We were in need of great men during the fifties. The Fourth Republic was scarce in
during the First and Second World Wars, as a way to combat national insecurities of France’s
waning military and political prominence on a global scale.
HALF MAN, HALF MACHINE: MALE HEROISM
The nature of the event lends itself to a saga-like quality, with its stages full of sudden
developments, uncertainty and manoeuvres; it is a modern epic that draws its competitors from
the working class, who become herculean cycling professionals. Whoever has overcome the
difficulties imposed upon him wins the right to wear the yellow jersey and is the crowned the
homme-soleil of the summer, a modern-day king and exemplary champion. For example, when Jean Robic, “le Petit Breton,” won the Tour in 1947, he was commended by the press, described
as “têtu, hargneux, ne doutant de rien même pas de lui, voulait gagner le Tour, et ne désespéra
jamais d’y parvenir,” “on reste confondu devant l'énergie, la volonté, et aussi la solidité
musculaire,” and “il a donné à tous une extraordinaire leçon de courage et de persévérance29.”
(Gaboriau, 73)
Cyclists were glorified as géants de la route, and every cyclists’ name is associated with a defining characteristic; as Roland Barthes explains, “Brankart, Geminiani, Lauredi, Antonin
Rolland, ces patronymes se lisent comme les signes algébriques de la valeur, la loyauté, de la
traîtrise ou du stoïcisme30.” (Heimermann, 156) One such name would be Raymond Poulidor, a
native of rural Limousin raised on a farm, who competed in fourteen Tours between 1962 to
1976, but never won. He was so popular with the French that, referred to his fans as “Poupou”,
the term poupoularité entered French slang in the sixties as a play on the word “popularity”. As
Bernard Clavel writes,
29 “stubborn, aggressive, never doubting himself, sought to win the Tour and never despaired at obtaining this goal,”
“we stand amazed at the energy, willpower, and the muscular sturdiness,” and “he has given us all an extraordinary lesson in courage and perseverance.”
30 “Brankart, Geminiani, Lauredi, Antonin Rolland, these surnames read like algebraic signs for valor, loyalty,
“Si j’avais la charge de rédiger un dictionnaire, ce n’est pas après les pages roses que
j’inscrirais votre nom, mais avant, parmi ces noms propres qui ont perdu leur majuscule
pour devenir des noms communs, des mots qui ont un sens pour tout le monde. Et le jour
où l'on dirait d’un enfant qu’il possède tout ce qu’il faut pour devenir un poulidor, ça ne
signifierait nullement qu’il a une chance de remporter le Tour de France, mais beaucoup
plus largement qu’il ira loin dans la vie, suivant sa route au mépris des obstacles,
s’accrochant à ce qu’il a décidé de réaliser31” - Miroir du Cyclisme, 1970
To the French, Poulidor represented the traditional masculine values of resilience, endurance,
willingness to sacrifice oneself for the greater good, and the ability to overcome obstacles. He
embodied classic, provincial Frenchness in an era during which France was becoming
increasingly globalized and modernized, threatening that traditional French values would
disappear into irrelevancy, thus providing cultural reassurance in their timelessness. (Yellow
Jersey, 97-100)
Poulidor’s antithesis was Jacques Anquetil, the five-time Tour winner who was known
for his tactfulness and stoicism, and the two were pitted against each other by media coverage
that sought to envision the Tour as a mythic battleground. This climaxed in the 1964 Tour, when
Anquetil was going for his fifth victory and Poulidor was riding his third. The two went
head-to-head during the climb at Puy de Dome on July 13th. Surrounded by journalists in cars and on
motorcycles, the two matched each others’ demonstrations of stamina and power and rode
shoulder to shoulder during the 1,400 meter ascent. Poulidor won the stage, but Anquetil won the
yellow jersey, and the confrontation became one of the defining moments of each cyclist’s
31 “If I was in charge of writing a dictionary, I wouldn’t write your name in the pink pages, but before, amongst the
career. (Yellow Jersey, 103) Jacques Goddet, director of L’Equipe at the time, magnified the
duel; “Leur souffle, leur sueur, et la laine de leur maillot se mélangeaient32.” (Decoster) Rivalries
such as this were inflated by the media and the organizers to heighten the competitive spirit of
the event and raise the audience’s stakes.
CRAFTING THE OUVRIER DE LA PÉDALE
The increased coverage in postwar France elevated professionals to the status of
celebrity, which media used to define ideals of respectability. The Tour’s stars were obliged to
exhibit morally upright public personas; Gino Bartalli was nicknamed “The Pious,” known to be
a practicing Catholic who always dined with a statuette of the Virgin Mary present at the table,
and Goddet said of Poulidor that people “need men of his caliber, who ennoble their acts through
their irreproachable conduct and their love of their work, the same way a peasant working his
plow ennobles himself.” (Yellow Jersey, 105) These depictions were constructed by the
organizers, who deflected harmful publicity by portraying their racers as morally upright.
Desgrange represented racers as ouvriers de la pédale, “pedal workers,” drawing on the association with hard physical labor in order to relate them to disciplined factory workers.
(Thompson, 142)
This rhetoric was also an attempt to shape working class identity by offering an example
for laboring male spectators to emulate, as cyclists were the first unskilled laborers to turn
physical capital into socioeconomic success, challenging the bourgeois social hierarchy. Their
potentially destabilizing social ascent needed to be channelled into a productive narrative that
would reinforce the validity of the Third Republic’s social order, while integrating the working
class into society. (Thompson, 148)
However, despite Desgrange’s dedicated effort to civilize his cyclists, from the start their
behavior tended to be less than respectable, and l’Auto received complaints of public urination,
violence, coarse language and a disrespect for property – all of which the Tour could scarce
afford if it hoped to be welcomed into villes-etapes. Taking action, Desgrange implemented strict
punitive measures and fines against any misbehavior. One of the rules that he mentions in the
June 8th, 1939 issue of l’Auto is “la collusion entre deux équipes peut valoir, outre des sanctions
frappant tous les membres de ces deux équipes, la sanction des départs séparés en deux groupes,
l'étape suivante, sanction redoutée des coureurs33.” He called on racers’ to adapt une tenue correcte (l’Auto, June 25th, 1907), but also defended their behavior as evidence of their
hard-earned status as working-class heroes. (Thompson, 157) During Desgrange’s reign, he managed
to uphold the status of cyclists as exemplary heroes, but the inconsistencies between this
narrative and character of the cyclists grew increasingly apparent in the post-war era with the
pervasive problem of performance-enhancing drugs.
HEROISM OR TOXIC MASCULINITY? : LE DOPAGE
The introduction of television coverage and the growing media presence at the Tour
made it difficult to maintain cyclists’ idealized public images. Cycling’s popularity was largely
constructed around the idea of the sport as noble, heroic labor; these champions were paradigms
of human suffering, endurance and survival. At the beginning of the 1960s, the French
government attempted to criminalize all drugs, which escalated drug testing of professional
athletes and threatened to turn the geants de la route into myth. Many stars were implicated;
Anquetil repeatedly refused to denounce drug use by athletes, claiming that stimulants made
possible the physical exertions required of athletes.
Controversy came to a head with the dramatic death of Tom Simpson in the 1967 Tour.
Champion of the 1962 Tour, the British cyclist collapsed during the ascent of Mount Ventoux of
a heart attack caused by mortal exhaustion due to overexertion. The amphetamines and
methamphetamines that autopsy tests found in Simpson’s blood had masked symptoms of
extreme exhaustion; Simpson rode himself to death.
After his tragic death, professional cycling, alongside other sports, began a decades-long
campaign to eradicate doping, to little or no avail. This can be attributed to several factors; for
one, the drugs developed faster than the methods of testing, enabling riders to use and go
undetected. Secondly, the French government turned the responsibility for drug tests over to
sports federations, which experienced an obvious conflict of interest, as enforcing testing could
reveal the breadth of the abuse and jeopardize the sport’s legitimacy. (Reed, 108) (Thompson,
241)
Scandals continued to litter the Tour’s reputation, up to the present. In 1978 the yellow
jersey was disgraced by the Belgian Michael Pollentier, who passed a drug test by using another
man’s urine which he inserted into a balloon in his armpit with a tube that ran to his shorts.
When the ruse was discovered, Pollentier was expelled from the race. The infamous Festina
Affair on the eve of the 1998 Tour caused police arrests of cyclists, the expelling and withdrawal
of a handful of teams, and the Tour fell apart. With the 2018 British winner, Chris Froome,
accused of doping allegations as well, the string of deceits resurfaces in French minds. As one
columnist for the Guardian wrote, “When the French look at Froome many see the latest in a
long line of suspicious foreigners who, since the traumas of 1998, have exploited the fragility of
The cult of attrition that characterized the Tour was not suddenly tainted by rising drug
abuse in the post-war period; it had been tainted all along. Only in the 1950s, when the
introduction of amphetamines saw instances of fatal overuse, did using to enhance athletic
performance become a public health concern. From the sport’s beginning, racers experimented
with caffeine, opiates, cocaine, arsenic and alcohol among other drugs used as stimulants and
pain relievers to fuel their superhuman efforts. Admittance to usage dates as far back as the
Pélissier brothers who competed in 1924, who unabashedly shared that stimulants were
necessary to survive the Tour (Thompson, 227). But as media coverage increased beyond the
organizers’ control and the tactics of racing grew more transparent, the unquestionable morality
of racers proved fictitious; the modern heros Desgrange had worked so hard to construct were
exposed as cheats. For the time being, however, the narrative of suffering and survival has
persisted in coverage, despite the acknowledgement of widespread usage; the Tour stands by its
tradition, unwilling to restructure itself enough to eradicate the issue.
Chapter 4: Les Géantes de la Route: Women’s Efforts to Join
The notion of the Tour de France as a democratizing affair that allows working class
competitors to climb the social ladder comes into question when the history of women and the
Tour is taken into account, a history of exclusion that continues up to present day.
Firstly, depictions of male cyclists as heroes and martyrs often utilized rhetoric that
focused on the month-long separation of riders from their loyal female partners or family,
awaiting their male provider’s return. L’Auto would publish letters written by these devoted women to their loved ones to emphasize the admirability of their endeavor; one such letter from
a fiance published during the 1908 Tour reads, “Je ne connais pas non plus encore le résultat de
Metz-Belfort, mais je connais assez ton courage et ton énergie pour te maintenir en bon rang.
Pour te récompenser, je t’envoie deux gros baisers et si ma pensée peut te soutenir, je te l’envoie
tout entière34.” On the letter, L’Auto commented, “C’est tout simplement adorable. Brave petite
Marie-Louise. Comme votre cœur va battre quand Soulié va signer au contrôle de Carcassonne et
quel crève cœur quand il va prendre juste le temps de signer et de vous donner un gros baiser ; il
vous faudra rester ensuite quinze grandes journées sans le revoir35!” (L’Auto, July 22, 1908, p 5)
In this excerpt, Soulie’s heroism relies on his fiance’s devotion and infantilization.
When they were not passive and loyal, women were depicted in reportage and novels as
dangerous temptresses who could seduce a serious cyclist and divert his attention from his
career, ultimately leading to his demise. Desgrange himself was one of the first to start this trend
with his training manual, La Tête et Les Jambes, published in 1897. He warned racers to avoid the “les fines mains gantées qui t’applaudissent à tout rompre, bon nombre appartient à de jolies
34 “I don’t know the results from Metz-Belfort yet either, but I know enough of your courage and energy that it will
keep you in good standing. To reward you, I send you two big kisses and if my thoughts can sustain you, I send them all your way.”
35 “Simply adorable. Brave little Marie-Louise. How your heart will pound when Soulié crosses the checkpoint at
