by Eric Reed
de France tests.39 After the Second World War, the bicycle Tour de France
emerged as an even more important publicity venue for automobile builders
who became primary sponsors of the entire competition rather than just of
an individual team or cyclist.
Thanks to the Tour, which Desgrange referred to as the “National Bicycle
Festival,”40 and to massive press publicity, manufacturers expanded the bi-
cycle market continuously. The unit sales of bicycles in France jumped dra-
matically from 981,000 in 1900 to 3,552,000 in 1914 to 6,371,000 in 1924.41 In
addition to the boost given to bicycle sales by publicity generated by the Tour and in the press, the further infi ltration of the bicycle industry by mass production techniques led to a substantial drop in prices. Advertisements in Le Petit Parisien on July 7, 1929, indicated that one could purchase a new bicycle for as little as 250 francs.42 Real wages had increased signifi cantly by the interwar years, which meant that more French people, even those with very
modest incomes, could realistically plan to purchase new bicycles. In 1927,
for example, a screw cutter working at an airplane factory earned 5.09 francs
per hour while a semi- skilled worker at the same factory earned four francs
per hour.43 These laborers could purchase a new, 250- franc bicycle with ap-
proximately one week’s wages.
By the late 1920s, the bicycle industry alone could no longer support the
Tour de France. Despite the increasing affordability of bicycles, the growth
curve of the bicycle industry fl attened by the mid- 1920s. While the number
of bicycles in France increased 45 percent between 1920 and 1924, it grew
less than 15 percent, from a little more than six million to seven million,
between 1924 and 1936.44 As sales growth tapered off, diminished fi nancial
resources forced some bicycle manufacturers to renounce full- time team
sponsorship. Professional racer Antonin Magne recounted that just before
the 1930 Salon du Cycle, the annual bicycle trade show where manufactur-
ers formally signed contracts with professional riders, the Alleluia brand of
bicycles abruptly canceled its sponsorship for Magne’s team and announced
that the company would withdraw from racing competition for lack of funds.
In the era before sports agents, Magne was forced to shop for a new contract
38
c h a p t e r t w o
himself at the Salon.45 Even the top team in France, Alcyon, whose riders had
won three Tours in a row, pressured its cyclists to accept a 10 percent pay cut in 1930.46 The bicycle industry found itself “without exterior alliances [and]
without any publicity support (sponsors)” by 1930.47
With fi nancial resources increasingly scarce, the bicycle builders tried
even harder to monopolize the top riders and control the outcome of races.
Two teams, Automoto and Alcyon, sponsored all the Tour winners from 1923
to 1929. The drama of the event grew stale, and the Tour became bad business
for Desgrange. The Tour’s growing lack of competitiveness and the fact that
team sponsors relied more and more heavily on Belgian and Italian riders to
anchor their professional teams eroded to a certain extent the French sports
fans’ interest in the Tour. During the mid- and late 1920s, no French riders
contended seriously for the Tour’s crown. These developments hit Desgrange
where it hurt the most: L’Auto’s distribution never again attained the huge volume of 1924, when the “galley slaves of the road” scandal provoked a large
spike in circulation.
In response, Desgrange tinkered with the Tour’s formula in the late 1920s.
In 1926, L’Auto organized the longest Tour in history — 5,795 kilometers (3,601 miles). The next year, Desgrange staged sixteen team time trials in an
effort to end the domination of the event by the powerful teams. In 1928,
Desgrange added competition among regional teams from France so that
spectators could root for their hometown riders. The following year, he re-
versed a rule change enacted in 1925 and outlawed all collusion among riders,
even among those on the same team. None of these innovations seemed to
work. Following the 1929 victory of Maurice De Waele, a mediocre Belgian
rider for the Alcyon team whom critics said won only because of his team’s
hegemony over the fi eld, an exasperated Desgrange exclaimed, “We have let a
cadaver win!”48
Desgrange decided to overhaul completely the organizing principles and
business strategy of the event. In late 1929, Desgrange devised the national
team formula and decided to implement it during the 1930 race. He predicted
that professional cyclists would race for the glory of their nations rather
than the profi t of their corporate sponsors, fi nally rid the event of sponsor-inspired collusion, reinvigorate the sense of drama, and create a new gen-
eration of French cycling heroes. L’Auto’s editor in chief personally selected eight riders from fi ve major cycling nations — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain,
and Germany — and grouped them into teams according to their countries
of origin. “No more brands of bicycles, no more X or Y brands of tires, no
more Z brand of accessories. Suppression of all commercial rivalry; no lon-
ger in anyone’s interest to tip the scales of victory to this or that side. No
g r e a t e s t o f t h e t u r n - o f - t h e - c e n t u r y b i c y c l e r a c e s 39
obstacle, truly, to a victory by the best man,” proclaimed Desgrange.49 The
national team formula, according to L’Auto, would also highlight the innate qualities of each country’s populace, such as French “patience, tenacity of effort, inability to be discouraged,” Italian “discipline,” German “obedience,”
and Belgian “cohesion.”50 In addition, Desgrange reinstituted the popular
French regional team competition, which he created in 1928 but had not
implemented during the 1929 event. These alterations of the Tour formula
offered French fans a chance to cheer for their hometown heroes as well as
for national champions.
Desgrange’s reforms increased dramatically the cost of staging the Tour
for L’Auto, which now had to pay for the housing, equipment, bicycles, and other costs incurred by competitors racing in the Tour. André Leducq estimated that by 1929 his Alcyon team spent 200,000 francs to sponsor a profes-
sional team in the Tour.51 To pay for the new expenses, Desgrange coupled
his innovations with a novel mode of fi nancing the race through corporate
sponsorship and increased subsidy payments ( subventions) from the host
towns. Desgrange aimed to craft the Tour into a promotional event open to
all interested parties, not just bicycle industry sponsors. The Tour evolved
into a spectacle that combined even more closely and overtly entertainment,
sport, and commerce.52
The publicity caravan ( caravane publicitaire) and corporate- sponsored
prizes were the most signifi cant of Desgrange’s 1930 innovations. The public-
ity caravan was a motley assortment of vehicles that followed the race from
town to town. Businesses provided the vehicles and paid a fee to L’Auto to join. Membership in the caravan accorded businesses the right to publicize their products to spectators along the itinerary during the passage of
the race. The fi rst publicity caravan in 1930 was tiny — only ten enterprises were represent
ed, each with one vehicle. Because the 1930 caravan followed
the race course after the riders had already passed, fewer roadside spectators
remained to take in advertising than Desgrange and the caravan participants
had hoped. After 1930, Desgrange allowed the caravan to precede the riders
by one or two hours and thereby maximized the number of spectators in
range of the caravan’s publicity. Thereafter, the size of the publicity caravan increased tremendously and quickly: in 1935, forty- six fi rms participated.53
Fees from the publicity caravan, in addition to larger subsidy payments de-
manded by Desgrange from host towns after 1930, helped the Tour’s masters
pay for the organization of the race for the next thirty years.
The publicity caravan enhanced the fun and enjoyment of the roadside
fans, as well. The sheer variety of participants made the procession of Tour
sponsors interesting. Anyone willing to pay the entry fee could join, includ-
40
c h a p t e r t w o
ing the “Fakir Birman,” a Parisian magician, fortune teller, and ladies’ under-
wear merchant; the Holo- Electron company, which produced an electric
wrinkle- removal machine; and “La Vache qui Rit” (The Laughing Cow), a
cheese maker. Advertisers built elaborately decorated, colorful, and often ri-
diculous conveyances meant to attract the fi ckle eyes of spectators. Many ve-
hicles played festive music over loudspeakers. The creativity and showman-
ship of the participants endowed the publicity caravan with a carnivalesque
quality. While the riders sped through villages on the itinerary in a matter of seconds, the advertisers’ colorful procession sometimes took up to an hour
or more to pass. Sponsors worked the crowd into a frenzy with their manic
bullhorn advertising and by occasionally distributing free gifts — pamphlets,
toys, candy, key chains, collectibles, hats, or samples of their products — as they drove through the countryside. Several years after the creation of the
publicity caravan, Desgrange concluded, “[When the caravan passes] it holds
the public spellbound. . . . If the publicity caravan did not exist, we would
have to create it; it is, fi rst of all, of tremendous commercial benefi t to all that participate in it. . . . Not only does it facilitate sales, but it provokes them.”54
Desgrange also encouraged businesses and other interested entities to
sponsor the race’s prizes. Sponsors responded with tremendous interest, and
the amount of prize money to be won on the Tour rose markedly after 1930.
The prize money sponsored by L’Auto totaled 150,000 francs in 1929, including a 10,000- franc fi rst- place award. By 1937, total prize money had grown to 800,000 francs, and the fi rst- place award to 200,000 francs,55 all of which was sponsored by businesses, organizations, or other entities.
Corporate sponsors also purchased advertising space in L’Auto. In return for sponsorship and ad purchases, Desgrange often provided the Tour’s corporate clients with free, seemingly unsolicited advertising, publicity, or product plugs. For the company’s contribution of 12,000 francs in prizes to the 1931
Tour, L’Auto plugged Cointreau as the “marvel of marvels of the after- dinner liqueurs . . . that the entire world knows and loves.”56 After describing on page one of L’Auto the 15,000- franc contribution of the Belgian tire company Englebert in 1937, Desgrange informed readers that “Englebert Enterprises is
currently building a very large factory in France, which will be inaugurated
by December 31 of this year.”57 Desgrange and his writers sometimes incor-
porated sponsor plugs directly into their race narratives. For example, amid
L’Auto’s reporting on the 1931 Tour’s third day of racing, Desgrange dubbed the Brest – Vannes stage “The Stage of ‘La Vache qui Rit,’” producers of “the
most delicious crème de gruyère cheese that one can fi nd . . . a veritable dessert as well as a fi rst- rate, nutritious staple.”58
g r e a t e s t o f t h e t u r n - o f - t h e - c e n t u r y b i c y c l e r a c e s 41
A wide variety of businesses and organizations participated in the pub-
licity caravan or sponsored prizes during the 1930s (see appendix, table 1:
Classifi cation of Tour Sponsors, 1930s). As one would expect, bicycle- and
automobile-
related businesses were heavily represented, accounting for
slightly more than 14 percent of sponsors. However, the most important
commercial partners of the event were alcohol- related businesses — brewers
of beer, distillers of liqueurs, aperitifs, and digestifs, and wine makers — and food sponsors (meats, cheeses, candy, soups, and so on). Together, food and
alcohol sponsors accounted for more than 40 percent of the Tour’s sponsors.
The type of publicity afforded to sponsors by the Tour meshed well with
the interests of the alcohol and food industries. The government placed re-
strictions on alcohol- related advertising in the media. Alcohol producers
sought unauthorized “clandestine” advertising ( publicité clandestine) that circumvented laws restricting alcohol- related advertising. Through the Tour,
alcoholic beverages could be touted almost without restriction to a nation-
wide audience of millions of spectators. Likewise, the food industry seized
the opportunity to participate in the Tour. The publicity caravan resembled
a three- week, traveling foire, or agricultural fair, which was one of the traditional ways that food producers promoted their goods. Food- related busi-
nesses interacted with potential customers during the Tour in ways that could
not be mimicked in media advertising — face- to- face, by distributing sam-
ples for tasting, and by creating word- of- mouth publicity. As France’s food
distribution system became more and more integrated, the national reach
of the Tour’s mobile foire helped regionally based food businesses break into new markets and contact customers in other parts of the country.
An analysis of the Tour’s sponsorship demographics reveals an interest-
ing gender dynamic at play in the 1930s. Henri Desgrange devised the event
to showcase male honor, athletic prowess, and virility. Tour riders were ex-
pected to be role models of healthy masculinity for French men, especially
those of the working classes, and journalists frequently employed the lan-
guage of battle and soldiering when writing about cyclists to emphasize the
athletes’ masculine, martial qualities.59 Nevertheless, female spectators and
consumers occupied a signifi cant position in the marketing and promotional
strategies of the Tour and the businesses that sponsored it in this decade.
Businesses in “female” product categories — chain /department stores, food
products, furniture and housewares, cleaning products, beauty products, and
pharmaceuticals — accounted for slightly more than 36 percent of the total
number of sponsors. Other product categories — such as clothing manufac-
turers, producers of alcoholic beverages, and entertainment — carried no
42
c h a p t e r t w o
particular gender bent but probably hoped to reach female consumers. One
wedding- related clothing company named “Nuptia” sponsored the Tour for
several years in the 1930s.
A look at the estimated budget of the 1938 Tour de France demonstrates
how the event’s fi nancing shifted after 1930. The total budget for the 1938 Tour was 2.5 millio
n francs.60 Corporate- sponsored prizes that year amounted to
900,000 francs, or 36 percent of the budget. (Prior to 1930, L’Auto fi nanced all prizes.) The stage towns provided approximately 525,000 francs, or 21 percent
of the budget, if one assumes an average subvention of 25,000 francs to the Tour from each of the twenty- one stage towns.61 Although subventions varied greatly from town to town before 1930, it is safe to say that in the 1930s L’Auto demanded contributions that were between fi ve and twenty- fi ve times higher
than in the 1920s.62 In addition, Desgrange generally insisted after 1930 that
host towns pay for the service d’ordre— crowd and traffi c control by police —
out of their own funds, which passed on a signifi cant portion of the pre- 1930
cost of staging the Tour to local governments.63 The fees paid by businesses
to join the publicity caravan that year are unknown, but can be estimated
conservatively at 10 percent of the budget, or 250,000 francs. Thus, town subventions and corporate sponsorship accounted for at least 70 percent of the Tour’s budget by the end of the 1930s.
Rapid, profound changes to the French press industry also infl uenced
the Tour’s commercial and athletic evolution in the 1920s and 1930s. Above
all, L’Auto’s monopoly on sports journalism began to dissolve in the early 1920s. By the mid- 1930s, two Parisian dailies, Paris- Soir and Le Petit Parisien, dominated French publishing. Each of these dailies distributed on average
more than a million copies per day during the 1930s.64 After the Great War,
general- interest newspapers expanded and enriched their sports coverage to
attract more readers. The Tour’s most important sponsors directed a growing
portion of their advertising revenue to Paris- Soir and the other large dailies.
L’Auto also faced new competition in sports journalism specifi cally: many sports- focused periodicals appeared during the interwar years, including
Miroir des Sports, Match, Revue des Sports, Football, France Olympique, and L’Aéro- Sport.65 These publications covered the same sporting events as L’Auto and imitated the colorful, theatrical, and often hyperbole- ridden style upon
which the popularity and marketability of Desgrange’s newspaper rested.