French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History

Abstract

Such is the familiarity of French cycling that it might easily be regarded as always already known, if not necessarily understood. The cultural centrality of the Tour de France has ensured not only the event's instant recognition as a marker of la francité, but also its appeal to such diverse champions as Louis Aragon and Antoine Blondin, as well as to such incisive analysts as Roland Barthes, in Mythologies (1957), and Georges Vigarello, in Pierre Nora's Les Lieux de mémoire (1992). Writing in English, Eugen Weber (1970, 1971), Geoffrey Nicholson (1978), Richard Holt (1981) and, most recently and comprehensively, Christopher S. Thompson (2006) have similarly engaged with the moral and material complexity of France's great bike race, widely regarded as a touchstone for the nation's mental cartography and collective memory. This focus on societal ‘deep structures’ has previously led Hugh Dauncey, with Geoff Hare, to characterize the event as ‘a pre-modern contest in a post-modern context’ in their edited volume The Tour de France, 1903–2003 (London: Frank Cass, 2003, p. 1). However, as Dauncey underlines at the outset of this erudite but always engaging monograph: ‘The Tour is cycling, but cycling is not just the Tour’ (pp. 1–4). Consequently, his survey not only gives appropriate attention to la grande boucle but also, crucially, to la petite reine, the miraculous machine that makes the entire sporting spectacle possible. So, on the one hand, Dauncey guides us authoritatively through the ‘sports-media-industrial complex’ (p. 45) central to the practices and discourses of French cycle sport since the launch of the Tour de France in 1903; on the other, he charts clearly and concisely the broader history of cycling as both leisure activity and utilitarian practice, showing it to be quite as worthy of his sensitive scholarly attention. The real strength of Dauncey's wide-ranging, innovative book is to locate this most iconic of elite French sporting events within a broader landscape of mass participation, juxtaposing professional competition and varieties of individual practice persuasively and elegantly. Lance Armstrong, whose ultimate and comprehensive disgrace came just too late for inclusion in Dauncey's historical narrative, rubs shoulders with city commuters as the book's final chapter explores ‘French Cycling in Quest of a New Identity’. Impressively interdisciplinary, this work's particular strengths include the sustained attention given to gender issues, untold stories and forgotten figures, and countercultural phenomena. We thus read of the moral and medical debates surrounding female cycling in the later nineteenth century, as well as the chronic undervaluing of multiple champion Jeannie Longo a hundred years later; we learn of the wartime demise of L'Auto (the conservative forerunner of L'Équipe), and the post-war rise and fall of the Communist Miroir du cyclisme; and we discover the proto-environmentalist cycle-tourer ‘Vélocio’ (Paul de Vivie), the Paris-Roubaix travailliste, and the pioneering role of La Rochelle as France's first ville cyclable. This fascinating history will be required reading not simply for sports specialists, but for anyone interested in the social and cultural manifestations of France's most emblematic form of personal mobility.