Not only romantic hindsight makes the époque into which the new race was born look belle, nor the century between 1815 and 1914 seem a golden age, but retrospect certainly adds to its attractions. Those years of peace would be gazed back at with yearning by a Europe which, in the subsequent decades, did its best to tear itself to pieces. And Paris in 1903 was not merely the ville lumière or city of earthly delights beloved of visitors, and deplored by stern moralists (one of whom found it ‘very significant that when well-to-do Victorians gave way to vice they commonly went to Paris to indulge it’), but the place that the Impressionists had made their (not always welcoming) home and that was about to see another artistic explosion: Matisse, Derain and de Vlaminck exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants that March. Paris remained the world’s undisputed capital of civilization.
Already there were portents that the golden age which it adorned was nearing its end. Elsewhere in Europe that year, there were savage pogroms against the Jews in Russia and massacres by the Turks in Bulgaria. An unlikely new movement called Zionism was considering whether to accept an unlikelier proposal to found a Jewish homeland in east Africa, fierce clashes between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia had flared up again, and in Switzerland the police were watching an obscure extreme left-wing agitator from Italy called Mussolini. France itself was far from placid, as the Dreyfus Affair finally reached a sour outcome. In 1899 Dreyfus had reluctantly accepted a pardon rather than complete vindication, but in April 1903, shortly before the great race that was an indirect consequence of l’Affaire had begun, startling new evidence transpired of the forgeries which had been used to convict him. Underlying the affair had anyway been a much deeper Kulturkampf; far from fading away, this battle between Left and Right, aggressive laicism and the Catholic Church, radical republicanism and its unreconciled foes, was now more bitter than ever. This was the very year that the government (under President Emile Combes, himself ironically a ‘spoilt priest’ or sometime seminarian) abolished religious instruction in schools, and troops were sent in to remove the monks from the Chartreuse monastery as part of what would be a larger expulsion of religious orders from France. With all of that upheaval, a bicycle race could only be a welcome distraction.
From the beginning Henri Desgrange treated the Tour as his private property. The Auto was sponsor and ‘journal organisateur’, and it provided Géo Lefèvre, the course director, time-keeper and judge, as well as Desgrange himself as Directeur Général, not to say lord high publicist, who followed Beaverbrook’s principle that if you don’t blow your own trumpet, no one else will. On 1 July 1903 Desgrange marked the birth of his brainchild with no false modesty in an editorial headed ‘La Semence’ (The Seed): ‘With the grand and powerful gesture that Zola gave his working man in La Terre, the Auto, newspaper of ideas and action, will from today send across France those unconscious and hardy sowers of energy, the professional road racers.’
Grandiloquent as his words might have been – and they certainly set the tone in which le patron would write about the race for almost four decades – ‘inconscients et rudes’ was a fair description of the cyclists as they set off on what by later – or any objective – standards was a terrifying three weeks. It was an individual event with no teams; riders paid no more than 10 francs to enter (with bread costing 40 centimes a kilo, this may be reckoned about 115 euros or £100 in 2013 values), competing for a first prize of 3000 francs (26,500 euros or £17,000) out of a pool of 20,000 francs. The race covered 2428 kilometres and lasted almost three weeks, with three lengthy periods of rest. But what made it such an ordeal to later or indeed contemporary eyes was that, although those répos interspersed no more than six étapes or stages, these stages were all enormously long, lasting more than twenty-four hours at a stretch, by night as well as day, punctuated only by pauses to grab food and effect repairs. Even the starting times of these stages were at notably unsocial hours: 2.30 a.m. in Lyons, 11.30 p.m. in Marseilles, 11 p.m. in Bordeaux.
The men who were prepared to race in these conditions were no longer good bourgeois like Charron and Ruinart, still less sprigs of fashion like the Comte de Vogue’s boy. Staring out of the first photographs of the Tour, the riders seem less like well-fed and well-trained modern athletes than the rough artisans they in fact were. From the beginning, one of the Tour’s deleterious traditions was the riders’ nicknames bestowed by the press, babyish or facetious or whimsical, with great sportsmen like Raymond Poulidor or Bernard Hinault reduced to ‘Pou-Pou’ or ‘Le Blaireau’. When Maurice Garin was called ‘Le Petit Ramoneur’ in 1903 it may have been tiresome, but it wasn’t whimsy: he was in fact petit, no more than 5 foot 3 inches (1.60 metres) tall and 64 kg (140 lb, or 10 stone), and he had in fact been a ramoneur or chimney sweep by trade. Other racers were bakers’ apprentices like Constant Huret and Edmond Jacquelin, butchers’ boys like Louis Pothier, errand boys or labourers. A few years earlier the British governing classes had been dismayed when large-scale enlistment for the Boer War had revealed the appalling physical condition of the industrial poor, whose social status could be deduced when they were naked from the state of their limbs and teeth. These first Tour men were far from physical wrecks, but they have the unmistakable proletarian appearance of their time, gnarled and knotty.
As Georges Abran, the eccentric martinet who had been appointed official starter, sent them off at 3.15 p.m. from the inappropriately named Reveil-Matin café at Montgeron, they faced an extraordinary challenge. The longest stage of this new race was the first, 467 kilometres from Paris to Lyons. Twelve hours after they had departed, at 3 a.m. on a moonlit night, officials caught up with the cyclists, ‘riding like sleepwalkers’ and strung out in groups of two or three. Ahead of most of the riders were Léon Georget and the German Josef Fischer, but the two leaders were only identified when an official descried two more figures looming in the dark and shouted, ‘Who are you?’ They proved to be Garin, and Emile Pagie from Tourcoing.
At 8.45 a.m., after 27 hours 47 minutes in the saddle, Garin crossed the line ending the first étape of the first Tour. He was followed a minute later by Pagie, exhausted almost to the point of collapse, and then after thirty-five minutes by Georget. The race had already taken its toll: Hippolyte Aucouturier had abandoned at La Palisse suffering from stomach cramps despite – or not necessarily despite – fortifying himself with bumpers of heavy red wine on the road, setting a pattern of dangerous artificial stimulation for the riders that would last eleven decades. He made his way to Lyons by train, and announced his intention of riding in the next stage to Marseilles, after three days’ rest. Although the regulations then permitted this, it posed a problem for Desgrange when Aucouturier won that second stage but couldn’t be placed in the classification générale, the general classification (GC) that determined who was the overall leader at any moment and thus who, come the last stage, had won the race. Aucouturier’s victory distorted the placings for Georget and Garin, and so Desgrange for the first but very far from the last time made up the rules of the Tour as he went along, and found the ingenious if unsatisfactory compromise of declaring that the next stage would be started in two groups, one merely ‘Marseilles–Toulouse’, the other the Tour de France proper.
And so, at 10.30 a.m. on 8 July, a starting pistol sent off the thirty-two remaining Tour competitors, followed an hour later by the others. This ingenuity was almost frustrated by ‘le terrible Aucouturier’: riding with a will, he gradually caught up with the Tour group and then, from afternoon to night, ticked off one worn-out rider after another. But he couldn’t catch the leaders, and reached Toulouse twenty-eight minutes after a group of four, Eugène Brange, Samson (the nom de guerre of Julien Lootens), Garin and Pothier.
On the next, 250-kilometre, stage from Toulouse to Bordeaux, the field split into bunches, and then the second group crashed. For bike racers, crashes remain an ever-present dread, which interrupt many stages of the Tour to this day. The worst crashes of all are on descents, when the riders have breasted the top of a climb and are careering downhill at high speed with an exhilarating sense of release that sometimes leads to lapses of concentration. Only one rider needs to lose his wheel’s grip on the road to bring down all those behind him who can’t take evasive action in time. Next worst, and all too common, are crashes in bunch finishes sprinting to the line. But a tight group of riders can all be brought down together at any time, even on a flat road at quite modest cruising speed.
That day in the Garonne valley the culprit was a dog sauntering across the road, which brought down fifteen riders, Aucouturier among them. He picked himself up, cursing roundly and glaring at his blood-covered legs. Declaring that he had finally had enough, he took the train to Paris. By this point Garin had established an unassailable three-hour lead, and although he lost a little time, he won the final stage from Nantes and reached the finish 2h49'45" minutes ahead of Pothier in second place, a record margin to this day. He had completed the Tour at an average speed of 25.68 k.p.h. (15.96 m.p.h.), almost walking pace by later standards. Magne would break 30 k.p.h. for the Tour in 1934, Walkowiak 35 k.p.h. in 1956, and Lance Armstrong 40 k.p.h., or 25 m.p.h., in 1999. In all, seventy-eight riders had entered for the 1903 race, sixty had actually taken part, and twenty-one had finished: twenty-first was Millocheau, holding the place that would become sardonically known as lanterne rouge, red lamp for the last place.
The first winner of the Tour was a wiry little 32-year-old of Italian parents, but the true winner may have been Desgrange. His race had succeeded far beyond his or Dion’s expectations, with great numbers turning out to watch, even when their enthusiasm had been tested by the absurdity of a race passing through their town or village in the small hours. When the twenty-one riders who completed the race reached Ville d’Avray south-west of Paris, a crowd of 100,000 greeted them, with another 20,000 at the Parc des Princes for the Arrivée.
In several senses the Tour was rudimentary, in this first year, and for some years to come, with few of the features that would later seem inescapably part of the race. With only half a dozen albeit enormous stages, large parts of France couldn’t be visited; there was no real distinction between sprinting and plain road racing; and no serious hills were climbed. All the same, if not yet fully formed, the Tour de France was born. But it very nearly didn’t survive infancy.
In only the second year of its existence the Tour did its best to illustrate Marx’s saying that history repeats itself as farce, with a race marred by every kind of irregularity and skulduggery. Desgrange had tried to tighten up the regulations, insisting that no one could compete in just one or two stages: it was all or nothing. In a field that had grown to eighty-eight riders, Garin and Aucouturier started as warm favourites, but Aucouturier came a cropper at the start and never recovered from his fall, finishing the first Paris–Lyons stage two and a half hours behind Garin.
On the next stage, after a tedious five-day rest, violence erupted. Garin was chased and harassed by a car whose occupants shouted that he would get no further than St-Étienne before he was ‘dealt with’. And although nothing had happened by the control station at St-Étienne, Garin was menaced as the field was leaving the town by a mob waving cudgels, apparently supporters of the stephanois rider Alfred Faure, and badly beaten. When the caravan of official cars belatedly arrived on the scene, the mob vanished into the night. Faure duly won the stage, though not much honour. Trouble was far from over. Ferdinand Payan had been disqualified for hanging on to cars, to the rage of his supporters, and on the next stage from Lyons to Bordeaux there was more violence in Nîmes, where barricades were put up to stop the race and Aucouturier had to fight his way through using his bike as a shield.
When the field managed to escape the town it was under a fusillade of bottles and stones, the road between Bellegarde and Lunel was covered with broken bottles and nails, and those following in cars could only make their way through another mob by flourishing pistols. Aucouturier won the stage, though Garin still led the GC, observing that, ‘If I’m not murdered before Paris, I’ll win the race again.’ The culprits appeared at first to be a claque supporting Payan, but the broader trouble was ferocious local patriotism, hooliganism of a kind that later in the century would all too often be associated with football.
On 24 July a weary and nerve-racked twenty-seven surviving riders reached the Père Auto restaurant at Ville-d’Avray, the official finish, before processing to the Parc des Princes, where Garin, still alive after all, was acclaimed as the winner. And still the dramas hadn’t ended. A storm of protests now erupted. Garin and Pothier among other riders, it was alleged, had received illicit feeding from their soigneurs (a soigneur is literally a ‘carer’: in a factory, a machine-minder, in a boxing ring, a second, in bike racing, a trainer cum physio cum masseur), and, on more than one occasion after puncturing, Aucouturier had returned to the head of the peloton – the bunch – with suspicious speed. The lengthy rap sheet was examined for several months, before the devastating announcement came: the first four riders, Garin, Pothier, Maurice’s brother César Garin, and Aucouturier were all disqualified. A new final classification was announced, with the original fifth, Henri Cornet, now the winner, followed by Dortignacq and Catteau. Pothier was disqualified for life, Garin for two years. He retired from the saddle, returning in 1911 at the age of forty when he managed a creditable tenth in the Paris–Brest–Paris race, and also rode once more in the Tour. Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust, and ‘the little chimney sweep’, truly a golden lad after the first Tour, spent the rest of his long life running a garage at Lens and complaining at the injustice of the 1904 disqualification, until his death in 1957 aged eighty-six.
To say the least, none of the original first four was happy at this outcome, but no one was unhappier than Desgrange. ‘The Tour de France is finished,’ he wrote in his characteristically irate tones, ‘and its second running will be, I am sure, also its last.’ But it wasn’t. Desgrange changed his mind, decided that he would lead ‘a grand crusade’ to restore cycling, appointing the journalist Victor Breyer as commissaire général to clean it up. In truth Desgrange was doing very well out of the Tour, even after the scandal: the circulation of the Auto was going up, while the Vélo folded, and Giffard went bankrupt, to be magnanimously (or patronizingly) given a job by Desgrange.
The third Tour was longer, at 2994 kilometres, and increased to eleven stages. Much more significantly for the future, it essayed serious climbs for the first time. A new points system was introduced, ostensibly to make cheating harder, and trainers or pacers were permitted on the first and last stages. Despite Garin’s absence, the field of sixty was a strong one, with Aucouturier, Cornet, Louis Trousselier, René Pottier, Lucien Petit-Breton, and the previous year’s révélation – then and ever after a beloved word of the Tour journalists – young Jean-Baptiste Dortignacq. And bikes were divided for the first time by type, those for ‘speed riders’, and machines poinçonées or standard models (poinçonées for ‘punched’ or stamped, as a document is authorized). If Desgrange thought that increased regulation would expunge last year’s disgraces and absurdities, he was soon disabused.
After leaving Noisy-le-Grand just to the east of Paris early in the morning of 9 July, the field rode to Nancy. Before they left the riders had all been offered a new invention by an enterprising tradesman from Toulouse, M. Calvade’s nail-puller: ‘With my gadget it’s impossible to puncture.’ Some riders may have taken up the offer, but Calvade’s device could not prevent the disaster that awaited. Between Chalons and St-Dizier the road had been strewn with nails, and one bike after another punctured. The ‘cracks’ were able to borrow their trainers’ bikes, but the culs-de-plomb, the lead-arsed lesser cyclists riding on their own account, had to effect their own repairs. Only fifteen out of sixty finished the stage, led by Trousselier ahead of Dortignacq. With rare humility Desgrange begged everyone to rescue his race.
And so they did. The second stage reached the mountains, and, as a reporter put it, ‘for the first time in cycling history a supposedly unpassable peak was attempted’, in the form of the Ballon d’Alsace. At 1247 metres it was only half the height above sea level of the greatest Alpine cols that would later be climbed, but forbidding enough at the time. Maybe there was some political arrière pensée in this choice. The Ballon then lay on the border of the French Republic and the German Empire that had taken Alsace (or, as it might be thought, reclaimed Elsass) and much of Lorraine as prizes of war in 1871. Even though Alsace (or Elsass) is historically, geographically, linguistically and culturally German, French nationalists saw in this an irredenta and a bitter grievance, and for almost half a century they drank revanchist toasts ‘A l’Est’.
To the east rode Pottier, shaking off Trousselier and Cornet as he climbed the pass. This wonderful moment went sour when nails appeared on the road again between Lunéville and Epinal. When Pottier punctured, he had no more spare tyres, but Aucouturier generously lent him one as he passed; chivalry was rewarded when Aucouturier won the stage. Pottier was still leading the GC, but abandoned at Lyons, after tearing a muscle in a bad fall. Two more climbs faced the riders, the Col de Laffrey and Col Bayard, respectively 900 and 1246 metres, won by Aucouturier and Julien Maitron. Aucouturier reached Toulon alone, twenty-four minutes ahead of Trousselier and Dortignacq, after riding this tough stage at what then seemed an incredible average speed of 26 k.p.h. (16 m.p.h.). But, just as in 1903 on the first Tour, he was undone on the next stage by stomach cramp after he had drunk too much heavy red wine, and finished eighteenth. The race was now Trousselier’s for the taking. Aucouturier revived enough to win the Bordeaux–La Rochelle stage, and Dortignacq took the last two stages, but Trousselier, ‘le Fleuriste’, florist’s assistant and part-time cyclist, rode in his disciplined and determined way to hold the overall lead at the finish. As to the sabotage, the Paris police learned that 125 kilos of nails of the type found on the roads had been bought at a Paris ironmongers the day before the Tour began, by two men whose identity was never discovered.
A complex system of classification by points continued for eight years in all, frequently modified, so that from 1905 to 1912 there are no écarts or distances by time separating the winner from second or second from third. This didn’t mean that those results were spurious. As far as can be judged, Trousselier was a worthy winner in 1905 and Pottier still more so in 1906: more so, that is, because it was a much harder race. In the space of the three years 1904–6, the Tour’s distance increased dramatically, in fact almost doubled, from 2428 to 2994 to 4637 kilometres. In 1906 the race crossed the French frontier for the first time, into ‘occupied Alsace-Lorraine’ at Metz, Italy at Ventimiglia, and Spain at Irun. For the first time a flamme rouge marked the last kilometre of a stage and, for the first time also, there was a departure from a different place from the previous arrival, so that the race had to be transferred lock, stock and barrel – or riders, bikes and team cars – from Lille where the first stage ended to Douai where the second began. Today this is the rule rather than the exception: in the 2003 Tour, only four towns saw both one stage finish and another begin the next day. The change did not bring good fortune. After Emile Georget, Léon’s brother, had won the first stage, the riders found nail-strewn roads yet again, and on that Douai–Nancy stage every single rider punctured except Petit-Breton. On the next stage to Dijon there was a different kind of villainy: Maurice Carrère, Henry Gauban and Gaston Tuvache were ejected when it was discovered that they had taken the train.
But the story of the race was the domination of Pottier. He won five out of thirteen stages, including four consecutive stages, Douai–Nancy–Dijon–Grenoble–Nice, making several long, brave escapes to break away from the other riders, and confirming in the most striking way the unofficial title ‘King of the Mountains’ informally awarded after his conquest of the Ballon d’Alsace the year before. On that same climb this year he again toyed with his rivals, winning the stage by forty-eight minutes, before continuing to crush them over the Col de Laffrey and the Col Bayard. He was beaten into Marseilles by Georges Passerieu, just turned pro, after the two had fought wheel to wheel over the Turbie and Esterél. Aucouturier abandoned on the next stage with stomach cramps, Trousselier was declassified for an irregular change of bike after beating the local hero Jean-Baptiste Dortignacq to Bayonne but won the next three stages also, to Bordeaux, Nantes and Brest, and one reporter described his performance in a vivid phrase: ‘il pétait le feu’ – he was farting fire. But Pottier took the last stage into Paris by a wheel from Passerieu, and beat him into second in the final classification, winning the Tour narrowly on points. A total of ninety-six riders had entered, all French apart from three Belgians, two Germans and an Italian; only fourteen completed, all of them French; and one marque as well as one country dominated the race, with Peugeot riders taking the first four places. Trousselier was philosophical in defeat – or defiant: ‘It’s a pity there weren’t another dozen stages. I’d have beaten the lot!’
A famous victory was followed by the saddest story ever told about the Tour de France. René Pottier might have been a very great champion, maybe winning the race several times. But ‘le Boucher’ – the sobriquet again from his occupation rather than any reflection on his character – was a melancholiac, notorious for never smiling. He sank into deeper depression, and on 25 January 1907 a mechanic from Peugeot found him hanged from the hook where his bike usually hung. His brother André said that René was unhappy in love, or suffering from a ‘sentimental disappointment’, but the full reason for his suicide was never established. He left a widow and orphan.
Six months later, Pottier’s death still cast a pall over the 1907 race. The race itself was much like the one that Pottier had won, though with some further developments: fourteen stages with a rest day after each, a stage into occupied territory at Metz again, a visit to Switzerland for the first time, passing through Geneva on the way from Lyons to Grenoble, more mountains to climb, the Col de Porte and Col du Sappey in the Massif de la Chartreuse. By that point a duel had developed between the Luxembourger François Faber and Emile Georget, with Georget winning a succession of stages. He had won the Roubaix–Metz stage from Trousselier ‘by a tyre’, as the race now nicely called what in horse-racing is known as a short head (or in French racing as un nez), though Desgrange and the commissioners, after a form of stewards’ inquiry, decided to treat it as a dead heat and the two were awarded the stage ‘ex aequo’. Then Georget increased his lead over Faber across the Col de la Porte, a technical as well as a personal victory since Georget was riding a bike with a free wheel.
In this year’s Tour, eighty-two out of ninety-three riders used standard poinçonées machines, which could be repaired but not use fresh parts, but the cracks stuck to the old model. All bikes were inspected and guarded by armed gendarmes at night to ensure that a rider finished the race on the machine he had begun on. No one had won on a poinçonée bike for the first two years they were used, and very likely no one would have done in 1907 but for the events of the Toulouse–Bayonne stage. It was won by Petit-Breton with a long breakaway. But Georget had punctured, borrowed a bike from Privat, another rider, and taken another again at the control, only to find that it hadn’t been authorized and sealed by the officials, whereat he changed yet again to another. After all this ado, he was relegated to last place and fined 550 francs.
Some riders complained that the punishment was insufficient, and several, led by Trousselier, left the race in protest at Bordeaux, handing final victory in Paris to a distinctly fortunate Lucien Petit-Breton – or rather to Lucien Mazan. That was the name under which he was born in 1883 in Plessé, in Loire-Inférieure, but he had gone as a boy with his family to Buenos Aires where he became familiarly and inevitably the ‘little Breton’. His family disapproved of the idea of professional cycling, and when he began riding he used his nickname as a nom de guerre, though his Tour nickname was just as inevitably also geographical: ‘L’Argentin’.
Plenty of carpers took a dim view of his victory, but he silenced them the following year by becoming the first man to win the Tour twice. He did it methodically rather than excitingly, riding an intelligent and careful race, taking five stages of the 1908 race to the four won by the eventual second, Faber. There was a deeply poignant moment at the Ballon d’Alsace, where a monument had been placed to René Pottier. When his brother André reached the spot he was overcome and broke down in tears, though he was gently coaxed into continuing, and eventually finished the Tour in seventeenth place. More drama came on the Belfort–Lyons stage when Faber emerged on his own out of an unseasonal blizzard to win, but the hero of the stage was Gustave Garrigou, who had a six-minute lead on one climb, crashed badly while descending, watched the field pass him, but then recovered remarkably to finish in third. From Nice to Toulouse the stages were shared by Petit-Breton and Faber, as one rider after another suffered some or other défaillance, with Trousselier, the brothers Hippolyte and François Aucouturier, Dortignacq, Georget and Maurice Brocco among the many who abandoned.
The word is crucial to the Tour: défaillance is literally a lapse, decay, weakness or dereliction, and for a rider it means any form of breakdown of body or sometimes morale – the spirit may be willing when the flesh is weak, though sometimes the spirit is none too willing either – which forces him to abandon. If he broke down on the road he would be swept up by the car balai, the broom wagon decorated with a witch’s broomstick, and would then be formally removed from the race, his numbers taken from his bike and from the back of his jersey: not quite the horror suffered by Dreyfus when he was degraded from the army, his badges of rank torn from his uniform and his sword broken, but a ritual with overtones of public humbling.
By the last stage Petit-Breton’s lead was unassailable but there was a fierce battle for second between Faber, Passerieu and Garrigou, fought with the help of pacing cars in the last stage from Caen, with Garrigou fading and Faber crossing the line in the Parc des Princes only two lengths of a bike behind Petit-Breton. Those absent riders weren’t the only ones to experience breakdown: Desgrange’s car packed up, and he reached the finish in a horse-drawn conveyance.
Petit-Breton collected the first prize of 4000 francs, while Faber picked up a handsome consolation of 3500 francs offered by the tyre manufacturers Wolber for the first rider to finish using its tubular démontable tyre; that is, the replaceable inner tube, which all sorts and conditions of cyclists would ever after come to know and love as they learned to remove and repair it with rubber solution and patches, or more simply replace it. Of the 114 riders who began in 1908, thirty-six were using Wolber’s product. And for another fifty years or more, one of the Tour’s most familiar images would be the cyclist riding with a spare tyre or two looped around his shoulders.
There were five Belgian riders in the 1908 Tour, an inkling of what would one day be a part played in the race out of proportion to the size of Belgium. By sombre coincidence this was the very year that the Brussels government bought the Congo Free State from King Leopold, whose personal fief it had been, and who had already made a vast fortune using atrocious methods to extract ‘red gold’ from the peoples of the country and satisfy the great new appetite for rubber, not least in the form of bicycle tyres.
That snowstorm from which Faber had emerged was not only unseasonal but untypical of this summer, whose weather was for the most part fine. And the French made the most of it, in town and village. After six years the Tour was now an established feature of national life, ‘a big event and front-page news’, as one chronicler recorded. People increasingly took the opportunity for a day out when the race passed by, with family picnics by the roadside, and excursions laid on to take spectators up hills where they could watch the climbing stages. The potential for local patriotism, and for commercial exploitation, was grasped by mayors and by businessmen, with hotels and restaurants booming as the Tour came to town, and with banquets laid on for the riders, which were then milked thoroughly for publicity value. And it was the great publicist himself who had best reason to be pleased: Desgrange had seen the circulation of the Auto nearly double, from 140,000 to 250,000.
Not that France could otherwise be called a country at ease with itself. There was continuing social upheaval, with a population still predominantly rural but slowly becoming more urban, there was harsh industrial unrest, there was sharp political conflict. A few weeks before the 1908 race had begun, a distant echo of its political origins was heard when, at a ceremony honouring Zola, a journalist tried to shoot Major Alfred Dreyfus. And across Europe there were signs of coming conflict this year. The Young Turk revolution in the Ottoman Empire meant, as few immediately recognized, that ‘the sick man of Europe’ would once again become a formidable military power. Kaiser Wilhelm II gave an extraordinary interview to the Daily Telegraph in which he spoke almost light-heartedly about the strength of anti-British feeling in Germany. In London national pride was puffed up by the many British successes in the Olympics held there, after the stadium at the White City had already been opened by the Prince of Wales for the Franco-British Exhibition, with an anthem composed by Sir Charles Stanford to the words, ‘Jolly Britons advance – here’s a health to old France. Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!’ Here was a public display of the recent entente between the countries, which might yet take very practical military form: one of too many intimations that the end of that golden age of peace was in sight.