Selling the Yellow Jersey

by Eric Reed

  isolés. L’Auto increased the prize money steadily to entice riders to compete for the crown. Total prize money rose from 20,000 francs in 1903 to 45,000 in

  1914 and to 150,000 in 1929.18

  Desgrange fashioned the race into an event tailored to the needs of the

  press. He scheduled the stage starts so that the riders would arrive at the fi nish line in the mid- to late afternoon. Until the 1930s, starts generally took place at night between midnight and six in the morning so that L’Auto’s correspondents could write their stories and send them to Paris in time for the morn-

  ing edition the following day. At fi rst, Desgrange attempted to guarantee for

  L’Auto exclusive coverage of the race. Hoping to negate the ability of other newspapers to “scoop” L’Auto by simply rushing the results of each stage to press faster, during the 1906 Tour Desgrange mailed postcards with results

  directly to fans. Desgrange also attempted to conceal the Tour’s itinerary both to limit the cyclists’ ability to cheat and to give L’Auto a journalistic advantage over its competitors. Until 1909, L’Auto kept secret the location of the various checkpoints on the itinerary before the start of the race. Nevertheless, Desgrange could not prohibit other newspapers from following and covering the

  race, and since L’Auto had defeated Le Vélo by 1904 and dominated the sporting press ever since, there was little need to continue to try.19 In any event, Desgrange probably concluded that press coverage by competitors helped to

  further popularize the Tour. By 1921, Desgrange even began to encourage his

  confrères (“dear colleagues”) to follow the race by offering automobile transportation to journalists from Belgium, Italy, and provincial France.

  A key component of the “newspaper persona” of the Tour was the devel-

  opment by journalists of a writing and storytelling style that captivated read-

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  c h a p t e r t w o

  ers and that created and then continually added to a body of popular lore.

  Tour journalists, led by Desgrange, developed a melodramatic narrative style

  that transformed the competitions into epic struggles pitting stylized cari-

  catures of riders against one another and against nature. Everything about

  the race became gigantic in the hands of Tour journalists, who created a new

  lingo that French people employed when referring to the event. The Tour

  was not merely a bicycle race, but a “colossal rally” ( le raid colossal) or the

  “Big Loop” ( La Grande Boucle) that bound together the nation. Writers personifi ed the countryside traversed by the race. Nature herself became a living enemy who “[threw] incredible obstacles on the road in front of the riders” while mountains like the “terrible col d’Aubisque [rose] to confront [the

  cyclists].”20 Journalists transformed cyclists into wondrous, mythical beings.

  Riders were “giants of the road” ( géants de la route) who were engaged in a

  “grand calvary” ( grand calvaire). They were distilled by athletic competition into basic typologies such as machinelike “pedal workers” and “unthinking

  and rugged sowers of energy.”21 The melodramatic, hyperbole- ridden writing

  style developed by Desgrange and others was later adopted by much of the

  press industry when sports coverage increased in mainstream newspapers in

  the 1920s.

  Perhaps as important as L’Auto’s dramatization of the race was gradual

  emergence of a self- referential, historical style of coverage, which helped to establish a sense of tradition around the Tour and which embedded the event

  in the popular historical and geographic consciousness. Desgrange and the

  other journalists continually referred to previous Tours in their coverage,

  evoked the great battles and the pantheon of cycling heroes from the past,

  and connected them to France’s physiognomy. The Nord, by 1920, became

  famous in Tour legend and in L’Auto’s columns for its cobblestone roads that had caused the dramatic crashes by Tour heroes Lucien Petit- Breton, Philippe

  Thys, and Eugène Christophe in prior years.22 The great Pyrenean stage from

  Luchon to Bayonne, and specifi cally the Tourmalet climb, became synony-

  mous with Eugène Christophe’s incredible feat during the 1913 Tour. Chris-

  tophe, nicknamed “Le vieux Gaulois” because of his penchant for wearing his

  moustache long, worked as a locksmith in Paris before becoming a profes-

  sional racer early in the new century. By 1913, Christophe was a veteran rider

  on the powerful Peugeot professional team — Desgrange allowed corporate

  teams to compete as units that year — and a top contender for the Tour

  crown. He broke away from his rivals after leaving Luchon, climbed rapidly

  up the Tourmalet, and built a large time advantage that would put him in the

  overall race lead at the Bayonne fi nish line. An offi cial vehicle swerved across his path and forced Christophe to crash, breaking the front fork of his bicycle

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  in the process. Strict rules dictated that a rider could not change bicycles and could not accept any outside assistance whatsoever during the race. Christophe had to repair the machine himself or forfeit. “Le vieux Gaulois” hefted

  the bike on his shoulder and ran ten kilometers down the mountain to the

  village of Sainte Marie- de- Campan. He found the village smithy and got to

  work. Over the next four hours, under constant surveillance by Tour offi cials, Christophe forged a new metal fork for his bike. With his racing machine

  repaired, Christophe fi nished the stage but lost the Tour in the process. To

  add insult, race director Desgrange assessed Christophe a ten- minute time

  penalty for allowing a young boy to work the bellows during the repairs.

  The Tour also became an occasion for L’Auto and its readers to revisit, through sport, an idealized and stylized version of France’s geography and

  history. Desgrange viewed the Tour as both a sporting challenge and a peda-

  gogical tool. He believed that the Tour, in addition to being a for- profi t sporting spectacle, was obligated to visit as many corners of France as was logis-

  tically possible. Desgrange evoked the Tour’s larger purpose while writing

  about the return of the race to Alsace and Lorraine after the First World War:

  The Tour de France, as her name indicates, owes it to herself to ride along the periphery of our country and not to be run in zigzag. Our contest did not

  have her defi nitive physiognomy until the day where, abandoning stage towns

  like Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse, Lyon, we made her climb the slopes of the

  Pyrenees and the Alps.23

  L’Auto’s coverage was as much a running commentary on French history and geography as it was a race narrative, with Henri Desgrange’s L’Auto in the role of tour guide.

  Desgrange often evoked the literary and military glories associated with

  the towns and regions traversed by the riders. For example, Desgrange re-

  minded his readers that the 1920 Tour would follow the Gave River in south-

  western France and would skirt “right along the land where our immortal

  [Edmond] Rostand wrote his most celebrated works” before climbing into the

  Pyrenees.24 Visits to Alsace and Lorraine in 1906 and 1919 evoked memories of

  the lost and reconquered provinces. The Tour’s 1906 incursion into occupied

  Lorraine provoked “sadness at the memories evoked by the innumerable . . .

  funeral monuments” of French soldiers who died in the Franco- Prussian War

  and “recalled the so
mber days of Gravelotte, Saint- Privat and Reichoffen,”

  sites of French defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 – 71.25 Desgrange

  dubbed the 1919 Strasbourg- Metz stage the “Stage of Remembrance” ( l’étape

  de souvenir) that would commemorate the reconquest of the lost provinces and the “triumph of French muscle . . . against Aryan barbarism ( la barbarie

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  c h a p t e r t w o

  boche).”26 With their tourist- brochure imagery, Desgrange’s articles evoked France’s traditional historio-geographic regions rather than the politi-

  cal administrative zones established after the Revolution. Grenoble was the

  “fl owery- shorelined capital of Dauphiné, where the Mediterranean storms

  die” as they hit the Alps,27 while the Midi in south central France was the land of “olive groves, eucalyptus trees, mimosas, aloes, and orange growers.”28

  As the general- interest press expanded their coverage of the event in

  the 1920s, more and more journalists participated in fashioning the Tour’s

  newspaper persona and narrative. The stories, personas, and feats of famous

  cyclists became integral, sometimes contested, components of the literary

  Tour’s lore. The Pélissier brothers, Charles, Francis, and Henri, were the top

  French Tour stars of the 1920s. In the 1924 Tour, Henri Desgrange penalized

  popular French rider and defending Tour champion Henri Pélissier for a mi-

  nor uniform infraction before the start of an early stage. Pélissier had worn

  a second jersey early in the morning to protect himself from the cold. When

  the temperature rose, he threw the jersey away. The Tour director penalized

  Pélissier for discarding his sponsor’s property, even though Pélissier claimed

  that he owned the extra jersey. The punishment prompted Henri and his

  brother, Francis, to quit the race in protest.

  Journalist Albert Londres took up the Pélissiers’ cause in the pages of

  Paris’s largest daily newspaper, Le Petit Parisien. Londres dubbed the Tour riders “galley slaves of the road” who were forced into servitude by Desgrange, their draconian taskmaster. In Londres’s somewhat embellished rec-

  reation of his conversation with the brothers after they abandoned the race,

  Henri Pélissier described the pattern of humiliation endured by the Tour rid-

  ers at the hands of Desgrange:

  [The Tour] is hard labour . . . . [Work] that we would not make mules do, we do it. . . . We accept the pain, but we don’t want humiliation! . . . I put a newspaper on my stomach, I started with it, I have to ride to the fi nish with it. If I throw it away, penalty! . . . When we are dying of thirst, before we can refi ll our bottles under a spigot, we must make sure that someone isn’t fi fty meters

  away, pumping the water. Otherwise: penalty. To drink, one has to pump it

  himself! The day will come when they put lead in our pockets, because they

  fi nd that God has made man too light.29

  Londres’s 1924 articles transformed the Pélissiers and the other Tour contes-

  tants into veritable working- class heroes.

  Confl ict and controversy continued to surround the Pélissiers after 1924.

  Henri often butted heads with Desgrange and other race organizers in the

  press. In 1929, in the sunset of his career, Henri Pélissier endured the disgrace

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  of being sued by organizers of a minor race for allowing himself to be beaten

  too easily by lesser cyclists. A court in Quimper found against Henri and

  forced him to pay damages to the organizing club for ruining the event.30

  After his career ended, scandal continued to follow Pélissier. His wife, fi lled with despair as the Pélissiers’ marriage deteriorated amid Henri’s infi delity, committed suicide in 1931. Four years later, Henri’s lover murdered him during a drunken fi stfi ght in the same house and with four shots from the same

  pistol his wife had used to commit suicide.31

  In 1927, Communist daily L’Humanité joined in the invective directed

  against Desgrange and infused its attacks on the Tour with imagery of work

  and the language of the workplace. The Communist daily evoked Albert

  Londres’s English- language term “hard labour” and characterized the Tour

  as a workplace and the confl icts between the riders and Desgrange as “class

  confl icts between employers and employees.”32 L’Humanité ’s editorialists nicknamed Desgrange the “Napoleon of the Big Yellow [ L’Auto]” and described riders as “sandwich- board men” and “proletarians” involved in “class

  struggle” who could only combat Desgrange by striking.33 Long after the class

  confl ict- infused imagery faded from the popular imagination, the infamous

  “galley slaves of the road” remained an oft- referenced chapter in the Tour’s

  history.

  3. The Tour and Selling Things: Mass Markets, Entertainment,

  and Consumerism in Third Republic France

  The case of the Tour and L’Auto demonstrates how the mass press and modern industry sparked the transformation of France into a nation of consum-

  ers. Modern newspapers transmitted news, information, opinion, and enter-

  tainment to mass audiences. They were also commercial ventures that sought

  to sell themselves and the products of their advertisers in ever- growing

  quantities. These dual functions of modern newspapers helped to forge the

  links between public culture and mass consumerism in the modern era.34

  The Tour, a mass entertainment spectacle located at the nexus of the press,

  manufacturing, and consumerism, provides an opportunity to examine this

  process in action.

  The early Tour and L’Auto were excellent promotional vehicles for the

  bicycle manufacturers. The commercial power of the Tour lay in its ability

  to allow manufacturers to contact their markets directly through newspaper

  advertising or, more simply, to publicize their bicycles to millions of road-

  side spectators as the riders raced their brand- name machines through the

  towns and villages of France. The event became a battleground for compet-

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  c h a p t e r t w o

  ing brands of cycling equipment both on and off the road, and the race often

  kicked off important promotional campaigns. The Tour riders themselves

  were important fi gures in the advertisements, and their victories garnered

  fame and respect for the products that they employed during the race. The

  large automobile /bicycle manufacturers devoted much of their publicity

  money to sponsoring professional cycling teams and to paying for print ad-

  vertisements that touted the successes of their machines.

  The publicity generated by the Tour shaped the business of building and

  marketing bicycles. For bicycle manufacturer Alcyon, whose sponsored rid-

  ers won four Tours before 1914, the increased product visibility led to tremen-

  dous sales increases. Alcyon sold 9,772 bicycles in 1906, 18,458 in 1908, and

  31,813 bicycles by 1910. Alcyon created a special line of products to maximize

  the impact of Tour- related publicity. Sales of the “Tour de France” line of

  bicycles depended on the name recognition generated among the millions

  of Tour spectators as the Alcyon team pedaled across the country during the

  race. Alcyon priced the “Tour de France” bicycle at 325 francs, equipped it

  with the “Tour de France” handlebar, and
painted the machine the same

  “Alcyon Blue” color as the bicycles used by the team riders. Advertisements

  boasted that the name of the line of bikes was “not an arbitrary designation

  and without justifi cation . . . Our ‘Tour de France’ bicycle is absolutely the same as the ones upon which Faber and Lapize won the Tour de France [in

  1909 and 1910, respectively].”35

  Alcyon and Peugeot, another top cycling team, both built automobiles.

  Desgrange carved an important niche for L’Auto as a primary publicity venue for automobiles as well as bicycles. L’Auto organized reliability trials, fashioned along the lines of cycling’s Tour de France, for the major brands of au-

  tomobiles. Desgrange invited car builders to enter an annual competition — a

  3,000- kilometer race, divided into fi fteen 200- kilometer stages — that pitted machine against machine and machine against nature. Alcyon parlayed its

  success in L’Auto’s endurance races into advertising for its line of lightweight, economical, and slightly underpowered twelve- horsepower torpedo automobiles. In its 1911 brochure, Alcyon bragged that of the nine builders that

  entered, only its cars completed the race without breakdowns, crashes, or

  penalization.36

  For decades, the reliability trials organized by L’Auto remained impor-

  tant competitions and a key source of publicity for the automobile builders

  and vendors in France and around the world. Newspapers in New Zealand,

  Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States carried dozens of news sto-

  ries and advertisements for cars that competed in the reliability trials. A New Zealand newspaper advertisement explained that the 1914 Tour de France re-

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  liability tests were “considered by the Motoring World as the most severe test

  ever given” and trumpeted the prizes awarded to Buicks that year.37 Large ads

  in the Reading (PA) Eagle and at least a dozen other American newspapers in 1929 heralded the victory of the Hudson Essex Challenger over “a fi eld of

  high priced American and European entries” in the Tour de France reliability

  tests as evidence to back up the vehicle’s claim to the title “Reliability Car of the Year.”38 The following year, large ads appeared in the Straits Times (Singapore) touting Hudson cars’ victories and accolades in the 1929 and 1930 Tour