Prologue

Paris, 1903

During his sad last years of exile, Oscar Wilde was staying in Paris when he dined with the symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck and ‘his wonderful mistress’, Georgette Leblanc. The author of Pelléas et Mélisande, somewhat implausibly dubbed ‘the Belgian Shakespeare’ by Octave Mirbeau, lived with Leblanc, the great soprano of the Opéra Comique and creator of several of Massenet’s roles, at their ‘lovely little house’ near the Bois de Boulogne, and had abandoned writing, or so Wilde told a friend. ‘He only thinks of making life sane and healthy, and freeing the soul from the trammels of culture. Art seems to him now a malady . . . He rests his hope of humanity on the Bicycle.’

Whatever touch of irony there may have been on Wilde’s part, or Maeterlinck’s, this would not have been the most foolish of hopes in July 1898. In the past few years the machine and the phenomenon called the bicycle had begun a social revolution that would do far more for humanity than many other more exalted inventions. It was also the fulfilment of a centuries-old dream. Although the bicycle’s origins are not quite lost in the mists of time, they go back much further than the nineteenth century. From the moment the simple fulcrum was discovered, men knew that energy could be transmuted, by magic as it must seem to any tribesman encountering a wheel for the first time. Earlier in that century, one extraordinary breakthrough had seen steam power harnessed to iron vehicles mounted on rails, but long before that the ingenious had dreamed of some mechanical substitute for the horse, a mechanism that could allow a man to travel faster and further with no more – or even with less – expenditure of energy than in walking.

Although the drawing of something looking like a bicycle attributed to Leonardo da Vinci is almost certainly an ingenious fake, more or less serious experiments continued over the following centuries. In London in 1769, as Boswell records, the astronomer and ‘self-taught philosopher’ James Ferguson told Dr Johnson of his ‘new-invented machine which went without horses’. Then in Paris in 1790, at a time when the city was an asparagus-bed of strange notions and projects, a M. de Sivrac rode out in a wooden horse mounted on four wheels. It became known as the célérifère, and then the vélocifère, and it was used for races of a sort round the Champs-Élysées, adumbrating the great final sprint now seen there every July. Vélocifère became velocipede, or ‘fast foot’, in 1818, when Baron Karl von Drais of Karlsruhe unveiled in Paris his improved version that could be steered round bends. This ‘Draisienne’ soon spread to London, as Keats reported: ‘The nothing of the day is a machine called the Velocipede. It is a wheel-carriage to ride cock horse upon, sitting astride and pushing it along with the toes . . . They will go seven miles an hour’; but alas, ‘a handsome gelding will come to eight guineas’, an impossible price for such a toy. Many years later, in 1987, the riders in the greatest of all bicycle races would ride out of Karlsruhe in tribute to the baron.

Despite its cost, the new toy crossed the Atlantic: Oliver Wendell Holmes recalled how, well before the Civil War, ‘Some of the Harvard College students who boarded in my neighbourhood had these machines they called velocipedes, on which they used to waddle along like so many ducks.’ In the 1840s Kirkpatrick Macmillan, a blacksmith, staked arguably a better claim to be the grandfather of the bicycle when he produced a form of hobby horse with pedals that for the first time took the rider’s feet clear of the ground and were linked by rods to the back wheel. And at the Great Exhibition of 1851 there were three velocipedes on show, one designed by William Sawyer. He made a later model to present to the Prince of Wales (it is not known whether Sawyer’s machine was ever actually ridden by the prince, a man designed neither by physique nor temperament for doing so), which was then put on sale in 1860 for the enormous sum of £17 2s. 6d., many months’ pay for a labourer.

In France meantime, at their workshop near the Champs-Élysées, Pierre Michaux and his sons had adapted the old Draisienne with a crank to power the front wheel. This was introduced in turn at the Paris Exposition of 1867, one of the great events of the Second Empire in what proved to be its last years. And the ‘bicircle’ or ‘veloce’ was soon the rage, Michaux producing 400 a year, despite its expense, its impracticability, and its considerable discomfort. A year after the Exposition a revue opened called Paris-Vélocipède, Daumier drew a cartoon light-heartedly showing the figure of Death astride the new contraption and, in Vienna, Josef Strauss wrote a ‘Velocipede Polka’. One, albeit unutilitarian, use was shown by the great stunt-man Blondin when he rode a velocipede on a high wire across Niagara. Although his agility and balance were unusual, for most people it was still difficult to ride one of these machines over any distance, with its pedals mounted on the hub of the front wheel. The nickname ‘boneshaker’ spoke for itself, and not everyone was enamoured of the novelty. One French paper, the Gaulois, thought that ‘velocipedists are imbeciles on wheels’. In return, a velocipedic magazine pointed out that the two-wheeler compared favourably with the horse, as it ‘does not cart loads of hay, and does not wax fat and kick. It is easy to handle. It never rears up. It won’t bite.’

And yet even enthusiasts ruefully admitted that riding the machines of the period was exhausting and often painful, and that ‘a railway bridge or a very slight rise in the ground brought us to a standstill’. The English Mechanic thought that it was a sport only for those ‘possessed of legs of iron and thighs of brass’, and warned that riding ‘to any great extent, results in depression, in exhaustion and in wear and tear’. Another false turn in the search for a less depressing or exhausting machine came with the ‘ordinary’, or penny-farthing, which had a front wheel several times larger than the rear and, although surprisingly fast, was extremely ungainly and perilous, and one more came with the safer but slower tricycle.

Both boneshaker and ordinary could at any rate be raced. The social history of the nineteenth century saw few more important developments than the advent of competitive sports, or more accurately ‘games’. The word ‘sport’ had always meant in England – which was very much where this change originated – country pursuits, hunting, shooting, fishing, coursing, archery; games meant teams competing on a field of play with a ball. Cricket had emerged from rural chaos and corruption in the eighteenth century, football had been played immemorially in English villages, in some towns at Shrovetide, and at public schools following their own arcane codes (still played today at Winchester, Harrow, and – in two versions – Eton), which made a common national game difficult. One school gave its name to the game from which two different forms of Rugby football as well as American football all now descend. And on a historic day in 1863, at a pub in London, sportsmen from Oxford and Cambridge, and from different schools, met to lay down a common code for Association Football, sometimes known by the dire Oxonian diminutive ‘soccer’ but most often and in most countries simply as ‘football’ or some version of that name. As A. J. P. Taylor truly said, this ‘game of eleven men against eleven’ first codified there that day was one of his country’s greatest gifts to mankind: ‘By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished.’

Five years later just outside Paris came a scarcely less historic moment, when competitive cycling began. On 31 May 1868, a 1200-metre race was run from the fountains to the entrance of the park of St-Cloud. It was won by an 18-year-old English expatriate called James Moore, who confirmed this victory on 7 November by winning the first road race in France, from Paris to Rouen over 135 kilometres against a large local field; sadly, not an augury of much future English success on the roads of France. The 10 hours 25 minutes it took Moore included a good deal of time spent walking his bicycle up the steeper hills. Since none of them is particularly steep in that part of France, it was clear that racing over real mountains was some way in the future. Indeed, although French roads may well have been the best in Europe, Moore’s average speed of less than 13 k.p.h. spoke for itself about the conditions for road racing there, let alone in other countries, and also about the quality of the machine he was riding, still some way short of technical excellence. Although the Pickwick Bicycling Club was founded in London in 1870, the first such in England, followed by seven more within another four years, and although the Hon. Mr Keith-Falconer beat a professional at Cambridge over a two-mile race in June 1882, it wasn’t surprising that bicycle racing in this incunabular period was mostly confined to tracks.

Certainly that was so in the United States. The first bike race there seems to have been in Boston on 24 May 1878, which is to say two years after professional baseball had begun and thirteen years before basketball was invented. Almost all early American racing was on tracks, and largely took the form of paced races, with some riders setting a fast early speed and then dropping away. By the 1890s there were about 100 dirt, cement or wooden tracks around the country, mainly in big cities. More than 600 professionals travelled on this national circuit, which ranged from Boston to San Francisco, with competitions in such cities as St Louis, Salt Lake City, Denver and Los Angeles. The sport received an enormous boost on 30 June 1899, when one of these riders, Charles M. Murphy, rode on a wooden track behind a Long Island Rail Road train and covered a mile in 57.8 seconds, to become inevitably Mile-a-Minute Murphy.

Meantime another race was on, to find a vehicle that really worked. James Starley’s improved Coventry Gentleman’s Bicycle appeared in 1875. Although it still cost a huge £16, it earned him the title of ‘father of the bicycle’ and a monument in Coventry. But the consummation came in 1885, when James’s nephew John Kemp Starley introduced his Rover Safety bicycle. It was safe, that is, by comparison with all previous models; and by comparison with all of those, it was a work of genius. At last the bike had found its true shape, the diamond or lozenge frame whose perfection is attested by the fact that it has remained essentially unchanged for almost 120 years. There were two horizontal parallel bars, one from the handlebars back to the base beneath the saddle, another from pedals back to the hub of the rear wheel hub. Another two more or less parallel bars sloped backwards, the forward one from handlebars to pedals, the rear from saddle to back axle. And in young Starley’s other masterstroke, those two points on the lower bar were also connected by a chain, linking one cogged wheel next to the pedals with another attached to that hub, a principle which has been modified or improved since, but not basically changed. The bicycle thus designed was at once much stronger and much lighter than previous mechanisms: tricycles had weighed 40 or even 60 kilos and earlier bicycles some 20 kilos. The first Rover racer weighed 16 kilos.

One more technological breakthrough was still to be found. When the Rover Safety first appeared, its wheels had solid rubber tyres, an improvement on earlier metal or wooden wheels but still no great shakes, or rather many great shakes for the rider. In 1888 the Scot John Boyd Dunlop patented the pneumatic tyre, which he developed more fully between 1889 and 1891, while the Frenchmen André and Edouard Michelin perfected the detachable inner tube. With all these, both recreational and competitive cycling began to enjoy an explosive success. Social life was transformed: in Jane Austen’s time and for nearly a century later, the extreme limit for a day’s visit in the English country was about fifteen miles, though more normally the extent was about six; both distances were doubled by the bicycle. And speed was dramatically improved also. A new record was established on the Rover, 100 miles in 7h5'16", or 12 m.p.h., half as fast again as Moore’s ride to Rouen.

Cycling for pleasure was still a pastime of the rich, or at any rate the better off. Even when the price of a Rover had fallen to £10, that was many weeks’ wages for a miner or a mill hand. In France likewise, a bike might cost 500 francs in the early 1890s, which was three months’ pay for a schoolteacher. But a great breakthrough was in the offing. More than 800,000 bikes were manufactured in England in 1895, and even though France lagged a little behind, there were at the same time reckoned by H. de Graffigney (in his Manuel pratique du constructeur et du conducteur de cycles et d’automobiles) to be 300,000 bicycles in the country. And as output increased, prices fell. By the late 1890s a bike could be bought for between 100 and 150 francs, and the schoolteacher could now afford one. If in 1893 a French factory worker had needed to work an unimaginable 1655 hours to earn the price of a bike, by 1911 falling prices and rising wages meant that a bike cost the equivalent of only 357 hours, and the bicycle was before long within reach of many working men as well as clerks and teachers.

One such teacher in Normandy acquired his first bike in 1898, and exulted that ‘henceforth I was king of the road, since I was faster than a horse’. This wasn’t literally true of the fastest horses: except in the peculiar circumstances of short, artificially paced sprints, cyclists can barely match the 65 k.p.h. or 40 m.p.h. that a thoroughbred racehorse touches over five furlongs (American ‘quarter-horses’ are faster), or even the steady 55 k.p.h. or 35 m.p.h. of a staying horse in the twenty-furlong Ascot Gold Cup. The speed was exhilarating all the same. More than a hundred years on, it’s possible to feel something of the excitement this revolution brought, and to feel still that it was wholly admirable: ‘that most beneficent of all the period’s machines, whose contribution to human emancipation was immediately recognized,’ as E. J. Hobsbawm calls ‘the modest bicycle’, had so many virtues, marred by no vices. Is there any other invention of modern times of which the same can be said? With every other innovation, costs as well as benefits don’t need dwelling on. The internal combustion engine almost defines ‘blessing and curse’: it has hugely enhanced the lives of millions, in the United States first of all and then elsewhere; and, in the course of the twentieth century, five times more Americans were killed in automobile accidents than died in war. So it went with powered flight, and nuclear fission. The bicycle was and is unsullied. As one of Iris Murdoch’s characters says, ‘Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. The bicycle alone remains pure at heart.’

Not everyone was immediately convinced of this. Although one French enthusiast, Baudry de Saunier, could think of only two reasons ‘to refuse to taste velocipedic delights: poverty and piles’, medical science amplified that last anxiety. The Nantes Medical Society wondered in 1893 whether the new machine might be not only undignified but dangerous for the spinal column, a question that was, it is to be supposed, quietly forgotten ten years later when the inaugural Tour de France visited Nantes, the first of many times the Breton capital would be a ville-étape. In 1894 the Congress of the French Association for the Advancement of Science took up the matter again, with the improbably named Dr Ludovic O’Followell warning against the dangers of riding a bike too soon after sexual intercourse (foreshadowing in his way an anxiety that would one day trouble team managers in many sports, including cycling); and, while denying that riding a bike must inevitably lead women to the same hysteria and ‘nymphomania’ into which, it was agreed, seamstresses were led by the use of sewing machines, he was concerned that it could nevertheless ‘procure genital satisfactions, voluptuous sensations’ or even ‘sportive masturbations’.

If not necessarily for that reason, the fashion grew apace. Cycling clubs multiplied in France, and became more popular in the full sense of more plebeian. Clubs defined by occupation in the late 1880s had been distinctly mercantile or professional, for businessmen, civil servants, professors. The following decade saw a dramatic expansion and ‘declassing’, as clubs were formed for clerks, artisans and NCOs. The Société des Cyclistes Coiffeurs-Parfumiers and the Union Cyclistes des Postes et Télégraphes began in 1896 and 1897 respectively, while the socially exclusive Club Vélocipédique de Bordeaux prompted in response the founding of the petit-bourgeois Cyclistes Girondins in 1897; and Eugen Weber notes that before long ‘dignified labels like Club Vélocipédique and Véloce Club are outnumbered by light-heartedly vulgar ones: Société des Cyclistes Rigolards Argentonnais, La Bécane d’Ecueillé, or Le Rasoir Sportif Montpellerain’: the Larking-About Lads from Argenton, the Risky Bike, the Sporting Razor of Montpellier, all names redolent of hearty Victorian facetiousness.

As the nineteenth century closed, sportsmen were rarely as yet the public idols they later became, not least because the ‘mass media’, which is to say in the first place the popular press, had barely emerged; but they were beginning to be well known. Dr W. G. Grace, the Gloucestershire and England cricketer, became a national figure, but he was at least technically a ‘Gentleman’, or amateur, and there were unmistakable class tensions that held back the emergence of professional sportsmen as heroes. In England the pattern had been for the educated classes to take away games from the populace and make them their own, so that the Football Association Cup was dominated in its early years by patrician clubs like Corinthian Casuals and Old Etonians, before the masses gratifyingly reclaimed their inheritance. French racing cyclists weren’t necessarily ‘varsity men’, but the first generation of French cycling heroes were bourgeois boys. Two of them in the 1880s, Frederic Charron and Paul Ruinart, were heirs to prosperous business concerns, grocery and wine merchant respectively.

When in 1892 a cycling stadium was built on the site in Paris of Buffalo Bill’s Circus and called the Vélodrome Buffalo to commemorate its origins, it was run by another bon bourgeois, Tristan Bernard. That was soon joined by several more velodromes in Paris alone, the Clignancourt, the Parc des Princes and the Vel de l’Est, with the most famous of all, the ‘Vel d’Hiv’ – winter stadium, Vélodrome d’Hiver – to come in the new century. Even now there was an element of the craze about cycling; and it was still a craze of the superior classes. ‘BCBG’, Parisians say, and bicycles were bon chic for the bon genre. The famous dandy Robert de Montesquiou – certainly the model for Des Esseintes in Huysmans’s novel À Rebours, and possibly for Proust’s Charlus also – was photographed with a bicycle, and one of the Comte de Vogue’s sons was riding in a race watched from Madame de Rochetaillée’s box by the young Pauline de Broglie, who thought that, despite those aristos in the saddle, the sport was ‘brutal, smelly and barbarous’.

If track racing was exciting, there was a different kind of excitement to come with road races. From early on these had a close economic link with the new manufacturing interests: the Paris–Brest race in 1891 was run on Michelin tyres, and the next year Michelin promoted a Paris–Clermont race specifically to demonstrate the superiority of its tyres to Dunlop’s. At the same time a new kind of popular journalism was emerging, epitomized in England by the Daily Mail, the first ‘halfpenny paper’. This burgeoning press included an array of sporting papers. Some had long been devoted to horse racing and sometimes to boxing, but in France especially publishers now began to see commercial possibilities in cyclisme.

As the new century approached, several factors thus converged. There was the wonderful new bicycle; there was the new passion for competitive sport; there was another highly characteristic trend of the late nineteenth century, publicity and advertising; there was a vogue for tourism and travel, not least by that other innovation, the motor car, to encourage which Michelin began to publish its famous Guides in 1900. And there was politics. Although Wilde did not live to see the birth of the Tour de France, he had by coincidence met one of its indirect begetters only months before he heard Maeterlinck make his startling pronouncement about humanity and the Bicycle. He had been ‘dragged out’ one night in Paris, Wilde told another friend, ‘to meet Esterhazy at dinner!’ during which this ‘astonishing’ man had of course talked ‘of nothing but Dreyfus et Cie’.

This dinner companion was one of the central figures in the drama by which, in the late 1890s, France was riveted and riven as by nothing else during the near seventy years that the Third Republic lasted. More exactly, Commandant Marie-Charles Walsin-Esterhazy was the villain of the piece, the traitor in place of whom the Jewish officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been falsely convicted of treason in January 1895, to howls of glee from the mob and the reactionary anti-Semitic Right, and sent to Devil’s Island. When Zola and Clemenceau, with the heroic assistance of Colonel Georges Picquart, recognized that Dreyfus had been framed, they began a campaign to right the wrong, and also conveniently enough to pummel their clerical and monarchist foes.

For years, l’Affaire – Dreyfus’s name didn’t need to be added – set France in a frenzy, dividing friend from friend, brother from brother, the Dreyfusard Monet from the anti-Dreyfusard Cézanne, the Prince de Guermantes from the Duc de Guermantes – and Albert, Comte de Dion from the Vélo. This was an early cycling paper founded in 1891 and taking as its name the colloquial word the French had adopted for the bike (although some frowned on this vulgar abbreviation of vélocipède, Samuel Beckett later apostrophizing his ‘Chère bicyclette, je ne t’appellerai pas vélo’). It was an instant success, claiming within three years to sell a remarkable 80,000 daily. The paper’s original backer was Dion, an enthusiast who sponsored such eccentricities as a steam-driven tricycle as well as early motor cars, founding the Automobile Club de France in 1895. The membership of this club was aristocratic, reactionary and anti-Semitic, like Dion himself. He was one of the group of anti-Dreyfusards who, at the height of the Affair in June 1899, were arrested at Auteuil racecourse for attacking President Emile Loubet. The Vélo was edited by Pierre Giffard, a Dreyfusard who also wrote for the Petit Journal, where he dared to criticize Dion for this episode. Dion was enraged, withdrew his patronage from the Vélo and, with a group of nationalist friends who included Michelin, began a new paper.

As its name suggested, the Auto was intended for motorists, but it took a keen interest in other fields as well. Its masthead read ‘Automobile – Cyclisme’ and then listed almost encyclopaedically athletics, yachting, fencing, weightlifting, horse racing, gymnastics and alpinism as the sports with which it concerned itself. Its editor was Henri Desgrange. Born in 1865, he had been an ardent cyclist on both bikes and tricycles, who had ridden races and had broken the one-hour record with 35 kilometres at Neuilly in 1893. He was neither a politically enlightened nor a very lovable man, as one episode showed. When he was running the Parc des Princes, a track event was organized pitting the French champion Edmond Jacquelin against Major Taylor, the first notable black cyclist (not that there have been many since). Taylor duly won, and Desgrange was so angered by this affront to the white race that he insulted the winner in turn by paying his large prize in 10-centime coins, so that Taylor had to take the money away in a wheelbarrow. Desgrange was bigoted, he was gifted, imperious and irascible, he was at times an obnoxious or even intolerable personage; all the same, he was one of the great Frenchmen of the twentieth century.

What the new paper needed was a truc, some publicity coup to boost its fortunes. Other papers in other countries were dreaming up their own such stunts. In New York the World sponsored a new baseball championship between the winners of the National and American Leagues, and although the paper later folded, it left behind what might have seemed (for a sport barely played outside America) the somewhat grandiose name of the World Series.

That was in 1903, the same year that the Auto gave birth to its great new race. The paper had already revived the Paris–Brest race; now it would sponsor something truly spectacular, a race all round France, ‘from Paris to the blue waves of the Mediterranean’. The idea of the ‘Tour de France’ was a very old one, at one time linked with apprentices’ initiation, recently popularized by more than one historian and travel writer, and the Tour de France par Deux Enfants, in which two intrepid boys called André and Julien made their way round the hexagone, had become one of the classic schoolbooks of the age, ‘le petit livre rouge de la République’ that consciously united the corners of France. Now intrepid cyclists would do the same.