‘When was Wales?’ the Marxist historian Gwyn A. Williams asked in the title of a book about his native land. The same question could be asked of many other countries, not least of France; and not only, When was France? but, What was France? or even, Where was France? How to define this country of which the great race makes its Tour, the hexagone that’s such a well-worn part of the vocabulary of cycling journalese, and which the grande boucle buckles? Answers fade from the page at first glance.
That somewhat irregular hexagon has six sides, four of them formed by nature, the Channel from Dunkirk to Brest, the Atlantic from Brest to Bayonne, the Pyrenees from Bayonne to Perpignan, and the Mediterranean from Perpignan to Nice. The other two, landward sides – from Nice north to Strasbourg, and then north-west from Strasbourg to Calais – are found on no map of France in the time of Louis IX or Henri IV. Until quite recently France took a decidedly different shape; and many of those parts that were formally included in its territory 500, or 300, years ago, were French only in the most dubious or tenuous sense.
That includes the south-west. The brave but unlucky Fontan came from the Béarnais, on the western edge of the Pyrenees, and rode for a Pyrenean team; or he was sometimes called a Basque, like several other good cyclists, from either side of the Franco-Spanish border; or he was a Gascon; and he was a citizen of the French Republic. But how French is Gascony, and when was it? At different times in its history it belonged to the kings of England rather than the kings of France, and very many centuries after it became French in a full political sense, it was not French culturally and linguistically, not at least in the view of Parisians.
At the time the first Tour crossed Gascony, much of south-western France was far less well known than today. It was unknown even to most northern Frenchmen, let alone the English, who had not as yet come to explore the lovely valleys of the Lot and Garonne, nor made a cult of Périgord and Quercy and especially Dordogne, whose very name now produces a frisson of excitement in the educated upper-middle classes greater even than ‘Provence’ or ‘Tuscany’. The classic text here is Cyril Connolly’s readable if risible The Unquiet Grave, written in wartime London amid blackout and intolerable shortage of such necessities of life as French cheese and wine. It daydreams of ‘a golden classical house, three storeys high, with oeil de boeuf attic windows and view over water . . . a sheltered garden, indulgent to fig and nectarine,’ a room within ‘book-lined like that of Montaigne, wizard of the magic circle, with this motto from him: “La liberté et l’oisiveté qui sont mes mâitresses qualités.”’ And Connolly (who most certainly and sincerely loved freedom and sloth) provided a map of that magic circle, from Brive in the north to Toulouse in the south, Rodez in the east to Tonneins on the confluence of Lot and Garonne in the west before they meet the Dordogne. The very first Tour crossed the south-west corner of the magic circle on its way from Toulouse through Agen to Bordeaux, and occasionally the race has penetrated deeper into the circle, nine times to Albi between 1953 and 1999, to Rodez in 1984, to Cahors in 1994 when the great escapologist Jacky Durand won the stage.
Bordeaux itself has been visited by the Tour more than any other apart from Paris, seventy-eight times between 1903 and 2003, and is one of the handsomest cities in France, with its lovely squares and its great theatre, which can still produce the feelings Arthur Young experienced more than 200 years ago: ‘Much as I had read and heard of the commerce, wealth and magnificence of this city, they greatly surpassed my expectations.’ Apart from the wine trade, and a number of fine restaurants (including the wonderful Chapon Fin with its soupe de potimaron and its cod poached in chervil, distinctly nicer than it sounds, and the splendid Tupina with an array of regional dishes), it has particularly rich literary resonances, of Montesquieu, of François Mauriac – who was born in the old city and who set many of his novels in the region, either in Bordeaux, like La Pharisienne, or like Thérèse Desqueyroux in the Landes, or like Le Noeud de Vipères, in Verdelais – and above all the incomparable Montaigne, hero to Connolly and so many of us. He was born in the eponymous family chateau of Montaigne thirty-six miles west of Bordeaux, and after his travels returned there to spend the last two decades of his life, and to write the essays that changed the way Europe thought about itself. You can stay there, at the Jardin d’Eyquem, and adventure eastwards into the magic circle to do as Connolly would have done and eat foie de canard and duck with truffle sauce at the manoir de Bellerive in Le Buisson-de-Cadouin.
But as Michelet says, ‘Rich and beautiful as is this valley of the Garonne, we cannot linger there; the distant summits of the Pyrenees are too powerful an attraction.’ On the way is the strange watery waste of the Landes, haunting rather than lovely, if no longer quite as savage as French soldiers found the region in the 1840s, when they described it like something out of the remotest corner of Asia. And then there are ‘the fleas that tease in the high Pyrenees’, which had bitten Hilaire Belloc on his tour through the Gavarnie, before the cyclists reached those great mountains already beloved of walkers like him, and of climbers, and more recently of skiers.
Although Michelet is quite right to speak of the fantastic beauty of the Pyrenees, this most distant corner of France may be said to be richer in scenic grandeur than literary associations, or gastronomy for that matter. As John Ardagh observes, the Béarn and Basque countries are curiously lacking in writers well known even in France, let alone outside. Biarritz itself is a special case, once one of the grandest and most famous resorts in Europe, surprisingly visited only twice in a hundred years by the Tour but much more often by royalty and writers: Edward VII sojourned there every spring (and in 1908 even summoned Asquith thither, with what many thought grave lack of constitutional propriety, to kiss hands on his appointment as prime minister), Shaw stayed there, and so did Kipling.
A lovely country, then; but is it France; or when was it? Not 2000 years ago, before France was born or named; nor in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, when Aquitaine belonged to the kings of England; and nor, plenty of Parisians would have said, as recently as Napoleon’s time, or when the Third Republic was born, or even when the Tour de France was, a race that casts a fascinating light on these very concepts of France and Frenchness. Although the origins of the Tour lay in a political crisis, the race had no specific political object, not in the way that sport has often had, from the circus of Byzantium onwards. Even now when sport is held to be at worst a harmless (if commodified) distraction for the depoliticized or deluded masses, there are still soccer clubs in Scotland that shiver with sectarian – which is to say communal, which is to say in some degree political – animosities, Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow, ‘Hearts’ and ‘Hibs’ (Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian in Edinburgh): in either case the Orange–Protestant club first, the Green–Catholic second. And Israeli football clubs have names – Betar and Hapoel – deeply rooted in turbulent Zionist history.
Other sporting projects were even more avowedly political. The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded at much the same time as the Gaelic League was with the intention of reviving the Irish language, though with much more success, was a naked assertion of national distinctiveness, responding to Archbishop Croke of Cashel’s complaint that England had imposed on Ireland not only her manufactured goods and ‘her vicious literature’ but also her games and pastimes ‘to the utter discredit of our own grand national sport and to the sore humiliation, as I believe, of every genuine son and daughter of the old land’. The GAA’s ban on playing with ‘forces of the crown’ and on those who played ‘foreign games’ like rugby and soccer made the most important single vehicle for advanced or republican nationalism, and one of the most aggressive manifestations of that Trotzreaktion that was so much a part of modern nationalism in Ireland.
If it wasn’t as overtly political as the GAA or Betar, the Tour de France had patriotic overtones in its very name. For centuries the story of France was its gathering in of territories under royal control; then its expansion physically, until its present borders were achieved, more or less, in the eighteenth century; then and no less importantly the process in the past two centuries by which all of ‘France’ became ‘French’. Other European countries saw similar stories, as when Cavour said that it was not enough to unite Italy, ‘now we must make Italians’. The French version of that process is the title of Eugen Weber’s admirable book Peasants into Frenchmen, which tells the story of how those peasants, backward, barely aware of the state that ruled them, and unable to speak its language, were turned into French citizens as rural France was modernized between 1870 and 1914. And in this the grande boucle would play at the very least a symbolic part, by circling and buckling what, when Desgrange began his race, was a country, but as yet by no means obviously a nation.
Whatever the rhetoric of nationalism says, few European countries have ‘natural frontiers’, and very few have had permanent borders. Many have expanded over the ages, though they then sometimes contracted. Between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries England conquered and absorbed all the outlying parts of the British Isles, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and then began to lose them again in the twentieth century. The expansion of France was no less remarkable, but was a much later development: even in the early sixteenth century, when Henry VIII first united Ireland as a kingdom and brought it under the crown, later to be united in turn with Great Britain, many of the present-day departments of France, from Haut-Rhin to Haute-Corse, had no political connection whatever with Paris and the French kingdom. In 1066 William of Normandy took over a kingdom of England (or at least of the English, Rex Anglorum) stretching from Cornwall to Northumberland, at a time when no such kingdom of France stretched even from Nantes to Lyons, to take two of the towns visited by the Tour in both 1903 and 2003. Even the name was ambiguous: in any document from the twelfth century, ‘France’ or ‘Francia’ is as likely to mean the Île de France, the royal appenage surrounding Paris, as any larger territory; later still, ‘France’ was understood to stop at the Loire.
It was possible to claim that the hexagone always platonically existed – ‘une certaine idée de la France,’ in de Gaulle’s phrase – and this was attempted ambitiously by Michelet in his History of France. He begins with a ‘Tableau de France’, a bravura description of the country all of whose component parts had characteristics that, when combined, produced the essence of the country itself. And yet he knew perfectly well that many of those components had not been French at all in the Middle Ages, or indeed later. In its early years the Tour kept to the west of the Saône and Rhône, and its first stops were Lyons, a city of the kingdom of Burgundy in the time of St Louis, and Marseilles, a city of the county of Provence.
As the race expanded it visited other ‘French’ provinces that, like the Dauphiné or Venaissan, had been quite independent of France in the thirteenth century; or, like the Franche-Comté and Savoy, in the sixteenth; or, like Alsace and much of Lorraine, in the eighteenth. (The duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s minister, was born in Lorraine and was thus not even a French subject by birth at the time.) That first Tour stopped in Nantes, capital of what in the tenth century had been the county of Brittany, a dependency of the duchy of Normandy, before passing under English suzerainty in the twelfth, to become an autonomous duchy in the thirteenth. And the riders had cycled thither from Bordeaux in the duchy of Gascony, which for much of the later Middle Ages belonged to the kings of England, until the Hundred Years War finally saw them depart, leaving only an English toehold at Calais – visited by the Tour in 1994 and 2001 – until it was lost and engraved on Mary Tudor’s heart. And even though provinces like Périgord and Toulouse, Champagne and the duchy of Burgundy (to the west of the Saône, rather than the palatinate or Franche-Comté to the east) may have been French in the sense of wanting to belonging to the regnum, there was no way in which the royal writ could be said to have run there.
By the sixteenth century most of what was held to be the kingdom of France had at any rate come under royal authority, but much of what is now part of the République Française wasn’t as yet French at all. Even after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, such hallowed villes-étapes of the Tour as Besançon, Nancy and Lille belonged to independent principalities or bishoprics, and were part of the Holy Roman Empire. The borders were ruthlessly pushed westwards by Louis XIV, but the hexagone only took its present hexagonal form when the dust settled after Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
In the British case the absorption of the Celtic fringe came to be seen as a form of benighted monarchical imperialism, the ‘Ukanian’ hegemony of Tom Nairn’s coining. But in France it was republicans who were much keener to centralize authority, and to gallicize Brittany, Alsace or Corsica, than royalty had ever been. In the seventeenth century men from the capital spoke of the darkest south as a remote continent. When Racine had visited Uzès, not far from Arles, he had needed ‘an interpreter as much as a Muscovite would need one in Paris’, and much later Parisian visitors to the outlying provinces were still complaining about the natives’ incomprehensibility and sheer barbarism. Even in the nineteenth century, by when almost all of what is now France was unquestionably ruled from Paris, much remained very remote to Parisian eyes and ears. In 1831 the prefect of Ariège – the Pyrenean department that contains the Plateau-de-Beille étape and the Col de Port climb – said that the population of the place was ‘as brutal as the bears it breeds’, while one of Balzac’s characters says in his 1844 novel Paysans, ‘You don’t need to go to America to see savages,’ since here – in the depths of Burgundy – ‘are the Redskins of Fenimore Cooper’. All of this was akin to the language in which educated Englishmen at the time were wont to describe the primitive backwardness of Scotch Highlanders or Irish peasants, except that the fastidious Parisians don’t even seem to have found any redeeming touch of the lovably quaint or picturesque.
No doubt they were right by their lights: the evidence is that, by urban standards, much of outlying France was indeed very raw until quite recently. Early in the nineteenth century, when Georges Haussmann – he who later rebuilt much of Paris – visited Houeillès in the south-west corner of Lot-et-Garonne, today a matter of minutes from the D932 road where it takes the Tour from Bordeaux to Pau, he found no roads or signposts and had to be guided by a man using a compass. His complaints were still being echoed at the end of the nineteenth century.
There was more to metropolitan disdain than physical backwardness. These ‘savages’ in Gascony or Brittany or remoter Limousin, were savage not least because they simply weren’t French. That is, they didn’t speak the language of Racine, of Voltaire, and of the republic. The revolution had not only promoted Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, it had claimed that France was ‘one and indivisible’, even if it had done so at a time when this simply wasn’t true. Many people who lived in the First Republic, or even the Third, may have lived under French law and administration, but they had no common culture, apart from that catholicism that was precisely what republicanism defined itself against. Plenty of citizens didn’t so much as know which country they lived in. An inspector of education touring the Lozère mountains in 1864 was baffled and angered to find that most children at a village school could not name their country, or answer his irritable question, ‘Are you English or Russian?’
Above all, most ‘Frenchmen’ didn’t speak French until well into the nineteenth century, or many of them into the twentieth. This was something of which the Jacobins had been aware, and which they bitterly resented. One of the harshest accusations made against those who ruled the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from London was to be that they had wilfully neglected or even persecuted the Celtic languages, Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish. But no administrators in London could have been more hostile towards smaller languages than were the French revolutionists of the 1790s, with their rallying cry: ‘Citizens! Join in holy emulation to extirpate from every region of France these jargons which are the surviving tatters of feudalism and slavery.’
The ‘jargons’ in question were the smaller languages or patois or dialects – themselves fighting words – of France. Some were entirely distinct, like Breton, sister-tongue to Welsh, in the far north-west, and Basque in the far south-west. Some others spoken on the fringes of the hexagone were branches of neighbouring larger languages, like Flemish, which is a version of Dutch, or ‘Alsatian’, which is audibly a German dialect, or ‘Corsican’, which is audibly an Italian dialect, or the language of Pyrénées-Orientales, which is simply Catalan. But others, above all in the land of the tongue of Oc – ‘Languedoc’– from Gascony to Provence, were romance tongues comparable with, but different to the point of incomprehensibility from, the French of the Île de France.
Not all those peasants had become Frenchmen by the first decade of the Tour, at least not in quite the way that good republicans wanted. The Catholic Church was still hugely strong, waging what was by no means just a forlorn rearguard action against liberalism and laicism. A great national Kulturkampf was waged in miniature in villages throughout France, until the very end of the Third Republic, with the pious curé and the free-thinking schoolteacher, a Radical, or later often a Communist, fighting their own little skirmishes. Almost the decisive events in this story came after 1914. There was the war itself, which took millions of peasants away from their pays for the first time in their lives and afterwards returned them, those that survived, as Frenchmen for the first time. And then after the war came the new mass media. Cinema had reached France before 1914, but it was in the 1920s that it began to be a part of national culture; appropriately the Tour played its part. In 1925 what may have been the first cycling film was made, Le Roi de la Pédale, starring the popular actor Biscot, and with scenes shot on the Tour. It would be followed by plenty of others as talkies replaced silent film: in 1939, Pour le Maillot jaune was shot during the Tour, starring Albert Préjean and Meg Lemonnier, sister-in-law of Jacques Goddet, who later succeed Desgrange as director general of the Tour.
And there was the ‘TSF’, wireless or radio, the other captivating mass medium that dominated popular culture in the west until another arrived, which would combine the hypnotic visual power of cinema and the immediacy of radio. Sport was given a new dimension, albeit an unlikely one, by radio. Broadcasters became national figures: in the case of one American football commentator Ronald Reagan, the beginning of a career that would end in the White House. Even now there are elderly men who can remember listening to World Series or to soccer matches before the war (one bizarre notion of the BBC commentators’ – dividing the pitch into imaginary squares so as to indicate verbally to listeners, referring to a grid printed in the Radio Times, where the man with the ball was – soon lapsed, leaving behind only the phrase ‘back to square one’), or boxing matches, as when much of England, and all of Wales, sat up till the small hours one August night in 1937 to hear Tommy Farr go the distance with Joe Louis.
In 1929 the Tour was covered on radio for the first time, on a modest scale, but the beginnings of what would one day be transmissions listened to by tens of millions of Frenchmen at home or in cafés and bars. Those listeners became familiar with ‘La Houppa’ singing ‘On tourne autour du Tour’, one of a flurry of popular songs about the Tour, before 1938, when the commentators included Préjean, a still greater movie actor in Jean Gabin, and Georges Carpentier. And although Gabin may have spoken with a strong Parisian accent, French was what he spoke, and so did the others: as with English in the British Isles, radio was a more powerful force for linguistic and cultural centralization than anything governments had done.
It may have been the final blow against the contrary movements for regional distinctiveness and for the revival of those ‘jargons’, from Breton to Provençal, which had sprung up in outlying parts of France in the nineteenth century as in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In Brittany and Provence, as in the Celtic fringe, it was too late. As Weber truly says (in words equally applicable to the British Isles as the French Republic) the revivalists could not deal with the decline of their beloved tongues, because they could not deal with the causes of the decline. By the later twentieth century, such revivals appeared to enjoy some success, but it was illusory. Although famous villes-étapes from Nantes to Nice now have bilingual street signs, just as there are in Swansea or Cork, in the local language (jargon or patois) as well as the language of the state, this is unmistakably a touch of folklorique colour rather than an authentic expression of an everyday tongue. As can be seen by anyone who follows the great race around the republic, for better or worse, all of France within the hexagone is French at last.