by Eric Reed
[He is] one hundred percent Breton. Even though he spends more time in the
capital, the great Ferdinand Le Drogo has not become less attached to Breton
traditions, and he discusses the race action in his mother tongue each time
that he has the pleasure of running into a local ( un pays). At the fi nish line . . .
he obliges the numerous fans who ask him for an autograph . . . in the Celtic
language.18
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Cyclists who won the adoration of the Breton public were often rewarded with
nicknames linking them to the local heartland, such as François “Fañche”
Favé, Lucien Petit- Breton ( né Mazan), and Jean- Marie Goasmat, the “Breton fl ea.” Riders who left Brittany, as almost all professionals had to do to earn a living, and gave up their Breton lifestyle and language were rejected as “Parisians” instead of “pure- blooded Breton” competitors.19 To be adored and
supported by the Breton public, a rider had not only to win races but also
to demonstrate his Breton loyalties, speak the local tongue, and display in
competition the brusque, no- nonsense orgueil (pride) and stubborn stoicism that were understood as the stereotypical personality traits of natives of the
region.20
These perceived cultural differences exploded into literal confrontation
between Brest and the Tour organizers. Although the Tour visited Brest ev-
ery year, race organizers and local authorities fought frequently over logistics and money, which sparked larger confl icts. In one episode, Brest’s mayor refused to pave over large potholes in the road leading to the fi nish line in the Kérabécam velodrome, despite Henri Desgrange’s warning that they would
probably cause a major accident in the peloton if the cyclists arrived en masse as predicted (in the end, the riders arrived safely in the velodrome).21 Despite rising fi xed costs to stage the Tour in the 1930s, Brest’s cycling club refused to renegotiate an agreement with L’Auto that allowed the club to keep the lion’s share of receipts from ticket sales to the city’s velodrome.22 In part because of this dispute and similar disagreements with other host towns in the region,
the Tour completely avoided visiting most of Brittany between 1931 and 1937,
and the event did not return to Brest until 1939. Many Brestois believed that
the Parisian organizers’ cultural and historical bigotry motivated them to
avoid Brittany. Their beliefs may have been justifi ed: Brest’s major daily newspaper quoted one of Desgrange’s lieutenants as joking that the Tour avoided
Brittany because it was a “land of chouans,” the term for separatist, royalist counterrevolutionary Bretons during the French Revolution.23
The vitriol that welled up due to these confl icts served to unite residents
of the Finistère sporting community in opposition to a common enemy. Al-
though Brest competed with Quimper, on the peninsula’s southern coast,
for leadership in the département, Quimper’s cycling community joined with Brest’s in criticizing the Tour in the 1930s and called for regional unity in
opposing the cavalier attitudes and actions of the race’s management.24 Fol-
lowing the exclusion of most of Brittany from the Tour in 1931, regional news-
papers and cycling enthusiasts organized a rival multistage race, the Circuit
de l’Ouest, meant to showcase regional riders. Local editorialists attacked the Tour by calling it a coalition of the Parisian press and bicycle makers against
t h e t o u r i n t h e p r o v i n c e s
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regional athletes. The head of Quimper’s cycling club complained of a “sys-
tematic campaign of denigration” directed against Breton racers by L’Auto
and Edmond Gentil, president of the bicycle manufacturers’ syndicate.25 Lo-
cal riders complained that L’Auto and the Parisian team sponsors refused to pay Bretons the same salaries as other riders and accused race offi cials —
Parisians — of literally cheating them out of victories when they competed
against “national” cycling stars.26 Although the Tour returned once again to
Brittany in 1938, the event remained for the Bretons a forum for the expres-
sion of cultural differences and tensions well into the post – Second World
War era.
Despite such tensions, even the staunchest defenders of Breton culture
recognized that assimilation into the broader world went hand- in- hand with
modernity. Bretons themselves helped to move the process of change for-
ward. In the same passages in which he disdained the linguistic and cultural
colonization of the Finistère in the interwar years, Pierre- Jakez Hélias ex-
plained how he and other Bretons eagerly pursued the new opportunities
for advancement afforded by modernization and the French educational
system. Hélias’s peasant family mustered all their meager resources to pay
for his schooling. Meanwhile, he and others of his generation became agents
of dramatic change as they adopted the behaviors, outlooks, language, and
culture they learned in the urban lycées and brought them to rural Finistère:
“Everything was changing everywhere all at once. And we were to blame for
[sustaining] the convulsion, we who were studying elsewhere.”27
Many of the same Bretons who viewed the Tour as an encapsulation of
cultural divisions also believed that the event was a unique and signifi cant
boon to regional commerce and tourism.28 The arrival in Brest of the Tour’s
massive entourage and thousands of spectators resulted in a one- day gorg-
ing of local travel- related businesses. Noël Kerdraon, the Brest sportswriter
who wrote so critically of the Tour organizers’ cultural bigotry, reported that the demise of the traditional Brest stage after 1931 was a “loss for local commerce,” a sentiment echoed by local restaurateurs, hotel owners, and politi-
cians.29 Kerdraon also pointed out that the Tour relied heavily on provincial
cycling stars and fans and argued that the event’s popularity in France — and
its bottom line — suffered when the race organizers selected foreign cyclists
over provincial riders to participate in the race.30
This dichotomy —
seemingly rabid regional traditionalism coexisting
with a relish for profi ting from the modernizing tourism economy — came
through clearly even to foreign visitors to Brittany. In a July 1923 travelogue published in New York Times Magazine the day after the Tour ended, American Doughboy- turned- columnist Hudson Hawley described returning to Brest
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after the Great War. Hawley recreated conversations with his overbearing
Breton hosts, whom he dubbed the “George F. Babbitts of Finistère” for their
single- minded, ridiculous attempts to convince the foreign correspondent
that Brittany was a tourist paradise and burgeoning commercial dynamo.
Boosters persuaded Hawley to visit during the “Finistère Tourism Week,” a
festival that showcased, in the words of one Breton businessman, “our little
corner of France that is so French yet not French at all.” The American war
veteran’s memories of Brest, a major port of entry for American troops dur-
ing the First World War, were tainted by nightmares of tough military police,
duckboarded streets and “Mud. Slush. Fog. Cold, drizzling rain. Muddy cof-
fee. . . . Bedraggled girls, with the look of drowned rats.” Tongue in cheek,
Hawley described Tour
ism Week’s endless folk festivals and processions of
Bretons clad in traditional country costumes. In one comic passage, Hawley
recounted how his hosts, upon arriving with him in Locronan to discover
that the town had not bothered to decorate for Tourism Week, claimed that
the residents had consciously avoided festooning their streets with bunting
and streamers because tourists “would prefer to view this petit morceau of
the medieval just as it is every day, dans sa superbe nudité!” Whether Hawley
inquired about developing the Port of Brest, the manufacture of Finistère’s
famous lace and pottery, or breeding the region’s sturdy farm horses, booster
experts provided ready answers.31
It is clear, then, that the Tour and other facets of modern mass culture
like tourism held several, sometimes confl icting meanings for the Brestois in
the interwar years. Although the Tour served as a forum in which to express
cultural tensions and distinctiveness, the Brestois acknowledged and valued
the power of the race to spur the local economy. After the Second World
War, the commercial uses of the Tour took center stage, and new generations
of Bretons used the race as a vehicle to promote the region’s integration into
France and Europe.
2. Brest and the Tour after the Second World War
Brest never regained its position as a favorite Tour stage town. The race vis-
ited the city only six times after 1947, and not at all between 1974 and 2008.
The evolution of the Tour after 1930 did not favor Brest. First, after 1930,
Tour management demanded much larger municipal subsidies and far more
elaborate, time- consuming, and expensive preparations and receptions by
the race’s host towns. Competition for the Tour leadership’s favor increased,
too, as many new towns bid for the right to host the race. Second, as Jacques
Goddet and his associates took over Tour planning, they began to abandon
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Desgrange’s organizing precept for the race, that it was an event meant to
“beat the bounds” of the French frontier. After the Second World War, they
often chopped the event’s itinerary into incongruous segments. In light of
these developments, it is very likely that Tour management decided that Brest
was simply no longer worth the trouble to visit every year.
Despite this, the Tour’s visits to Brest in the postwar era illuminate how
commercial concerns shaped cultural relations among local, national, and in-
ternational communities in new ways after the Liberation. In 1952, 1974, and
2008, the Tour chose Brest to host the fi rst stage of the competition. This was a great honor for which French cities competed ferociously, because hosting
the opening day of the race generated immense national and international
attention. Worldwide media’s arrival in Brest in these years provided the city
and its region with unusual opportunities to engage vast audiences while pro-
moting local cultural and commercial amenities.
In many ways, 1944 was “year zero” in Brest’s twentieth- century history.32
Because of its protected natural harbor and preexisting naval facilities, Ger-
many stationed a submarine squadron at Brest. The Allies bombarded the
submarine base frequently for several years and intensively in the months
leading up to the Normandy landing, which caused terrible collateral dam-
age to the city. In the late summer of 1944, with Brest’s liberation imminent,
locals claim that the German occupying force set ablaze what remained of the
downtown area. By the end of the war, between 90 and 95 percent of Brest’s
centre- ville had been leveled and more than 70 percent of the homes in the greater metropolitan area were condemned.33 Two thousand wrecked ves-sels clogged Brest’s harbor.34 The terrible destruction rained upon the town
forced the Brestois to rebuild the city from the ground up.
For nearly two decades after the Second World War, the campaign to re-
build Brest’s lodgings, businesses, and infrastructure dominated the daily lives of the Brestois and city planning initiatives. The lack of housing for the local populace was the fi rst and most critical problem. Approximately 50,000 of
Brest’s 80,000 prewar residents fl ed the city when the Allied bombardments
began. Forty thousand of them returned after the end of hostilities — even
though their homes had been destroyed — and Brest’s population rebounded
to approximately 75,000 in 1946.35 During the next decade, reconstruction
authorities built two sizable cities next to one another. In Brest’s fl attened centre- ville, architects and engineers designed and erected concrete- and- steel apartment complexes, commercial edifi ces, hotels, and offi ce buildings inspired by the neoclassical style. Architects and planners believed that Brest
would serve as a model of modernity and of rational urban planning. They
replaced Brest’s infamous labyrinth of cramped, winding, cobblestone- paved
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streets with wide, straight, asphalt boulevards organized around traffi c circles and a grid system. The government built twenty- fi ve sprawling “temporary
cities” ( villes provisoires) to house the population during the reconstruction.
Each temporary city was built almost entirely of wood and contained lodging,
shops, and services for several thousand residents.36 The French government
did not declare central Brest’s reconstruction offi cially completed until 1965
and did not demolish the last of the “temporary cities” until a decade later.
The town’s immense reconstruction effort overshadowed local prepara-
tions for the 1952 Tour. Maurice Piquemal, a civil engineer and bureaucrat,
had become the driving force behind Brest’s postwar rebirth in the late 1940s.
He was also a central fi gure on the local Tour organizing committee in 1952.
City leaders, with Piquemal at the fore, viewed hosting the fi rst stage of the 1952 Tour as a crowning achievement of their town’s postwar reconstruction
and used the occasion to issue an open invitation to the rest of France to visit and spend their money in Brest. Mayor Chupin declared that the arrival of
the Tour “marks a great victory in the rebirth of Brest [and] confi rms the
resurrection of her hotel infrastructure and of her public services.” Piquemal
added, “The Departure of the Tour de France from Brest is a measuring stick
and stepping stone on the path to [Brest’s] rebirth. It furnishes, in effect, an opportunity to show to our visitors, French and foreign, the results of our
communal efforts.”37
Brest devoted many of its scarce resources to preparing for the Tour’s ar-
rival. The town offered Tour organizers a three- million- franc subsidy to en-
sure that Brest was chosen to host the fi rst stage.38 Especially for the Tour, the town renovated the Halles St.- Louis, the downtown’s indoor marketplace, at
a cost of 1.5 million francs and furnished it with special electrical hookups
and offi ce equipment to serve the race’s large administration and logistical
caravan.39 In honor of the race’s visit, Brest spent more than a million francs to organize a ten- day commercial exposition, stage a “pugilistic soirée,” and
pay for the services of eleven regional folk groups to spice up the celebration and endow the Tour- related festivities
with a Breton fl avor.40
At the heart of Brest’s reception lay a commercial imperative. Several
weeks before the race, a government report on the livability of French cities
named Brest the “most uncomfortable town in the country.”41 Civic leaders
denounced the report’s conclusions as misleading, since they were based on
information compiled in 1946 when Brest lay in ruins. The report neverthe-
less injected great urgency into the Tour preparations and raised the local ex-
pectations for the impact of the Tour’s publicity. Local businessmen believed
that Brest’s brand new hotels and rebuilt, rationalized downtown would at-
tract swarms of tourists. In his public response to the government livability
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report, the president of the local hotel owners’ association predicted, “In a
year, Brest will be the premiere hotel town in France. . . . Although [our
hotels] will not rival the palaces of the Riviera, they will have the advantage of being accessible to people of all classes.”42 The local organizing committee spent more than 150,000 francs to stage a grand reception for several hundred
Tour journalists the night before the race. The president of the regional tour-
ism commission hoped that the reception would have “good repercussions
in terms of tourism” and urged the reporters to “relate in [your columns]
the impression that you have taken away from your stay in Brest, certainly an
impression that can only be excellent.”43 The reception was, at least, a social success. Brest’s major daily newspaper claimed that some of the foreign reporters enjoyed themselves so much that they overslept and missed the start
of the Tour the next day.44
Television afforded Brest a new medium to transmit the images of its re-
construction to a growing audience of French viewers. RTF’s newsreel cover-
age of the Tour’s departure shined the best possible light on Brest’s reconstruction. Producers dedicated an unusually large portion of the newsreel— three
and a half of its eleven minutes — to conveying hopeful images of a Brest
reborn and ready for tourism. RTF cameras panned over Brest’s undamaged
seventeenth-century fortifi cations and captured footage of locals clad in tra-