On its fifth day in 2002 the Tour finished in Rouen, a town often visited by the race since 1949 though oddly not before then, and which was the Départ in 1997, when the Prologue there was won by the honourable and scrupulous Chris Boardman. Rouen is famous for its cathedral and the church of St-Ouen, for its luscious cream-heavy cooking, for the journey round its streets in the horse-drawn cab in which Emma Bovary committed adultery with Léon, and for the death of Joan of Arc. A few hundred yards from the finishing line is a huge monument glorifying her, whose mortal remains were lost for ever in the fire that consumed her but who lives in the hearts of those who love her. Not that everyone loves her equally, not even in France, where her cult and her canonization had a very clear – and a very divisive – political message. For many, she was the embodiment of ‘a certain idea of France’, which is to say of Catholic France fighting its fierce battle against the laical republic. And against other dark forces, too: it wasn’t until 1949 that the Tour first visited Orléans whence the Maid took her name (though she was born in the little village of Domrémy-la-Pucelle in Lorraine, no distance from Nancy). Not many years earlier visitors could have bought a postcard on sale there, comparing Orléans in 1431, exalted by the pure and saintly Joan, with Orléans in 1931, in the hands of the Jews.
We have heard the ominous political echoes of sport, louder in the last decade than ever; sporting or otherwise, France had not been a happy country in the 1930s, and less happy in 1940 than ever before in her history. Five weeks after the 1939 Tour ended, France was at war with Germany. Only weeks before the 1940 Tour should have been run, the German armies swept into France, crossing the Meuse on 10 May and reaching the Channel at Boulogne seventeen days later to cut off the British army and a large part of the French. That beleaguered garrison was evacuated, but the Germans moved through Normandy and south to the Loire, and on 16 June the new leader, Marshal Pétain, sued for peace, signing an armistice on the 22nd. Germany had played one of the most devastating ‘return matches’ in history to avenge the defeat of 1918, and cruelly confute Desgrange’s former boasting that ‘a Frenchman will never succumb to a German’. A new regime under Pétain was installed at Vichy (visited by the Tour surprisingly soon after a war in which it had became the name of ill-fame, whose bottled water Claude Rains eloquently discards at the end of Casablanca). Some Frenchmen, led by Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle, refused to accept the verdict and raised the standard of Free France in London, though their cause wasn’t immediately helped by the British. Dunkirk and Strasbourg lie at different points of the hexagone and both have often been villes-étapes. Shortly after the fall of France the French fleet, including the eponymous battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg, lay across the Mediterranean at Mers-el-Kebir on the Algerian coast. When they refused immediately to surrender to the Royal Navy they were sunk on Churchill’s orders with heavy loss of life, pour encourager les autres, even if it wasn’t quite clear who the others were meant to be in this case.
All of France north of the Loire became an occupied zone, including those two great nurseries of cyclists, Brittany and Normandy, where English riders have often come to base themselves in the hope of making a career. No one visiting Normandy today can miss the undertones of war, from very long before the 1940s, or the long connection with England, very nearly a thousand years old. In Bayeux is the great tapestry stitched to commemorate the conquest of England by William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, in 1066. Less than 400 years later, Henry V of England was back, besieging Harfleur north of the mouth of the Seine before marking his great victory at Agincourt by massacring the French prisoners.
Not so very far from there, on the first Friday of the 2002 race, I stayed literally en route for that day’s stage, at Evreux where the peloton rode past its fine cathedral, one of a dozen great churches between Rheims, where the third stage had ended on Tuesday and Mont St-Michel, in whose shadow the seventh stage ended on Saturday: a route which takes you close to the cathedrals of Beauvais, Lisieux and Bayeux. And the visitor to Normandy can intersperse beautiful buildings with sumptuous meals.
Nothing about Norman cuisine is in any way nouvelle or minceur. This is a landscape of pastures, meadows and chalk streams, offering some of the best trout fishing in Europe. Its farms produce beef, which means the tripes to be cooked à la mode de Caen, pré-salé lamb, pork for andouille de Vire (a very distinctive and distinctly acquired taste), the Rouennais duck stewed in its own juice, the butter and cream that almost every Norman dish, such as sole dieppois, uses in copious quantities, Livarot and Camembert cheeses, chickens, and the eggs for the omelettes Mère Poulard which are something of a culinary cliché of Mont St-Michel. Not by accident the province also gives us the trou normand, a slug of calvados apple brandy taken between courses to settle the stomach and prepare it for more assaults on the digestive juices.
Needless to say, Normandy is now swept up in the exhausting enthusiasm for la mode rétro, for invented tradition, and for institutionalizing writers and artists by turning anywhere they lived or worked into tourist shrines. Not that this is purely French, as visitors can find out who go to Wessex – ‘Hardy country’ – or to Mayo – ‘Yeats country’ – or to Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, the whole of which former mining village has been turned into a kitschy monument to D. H. Lawrence. With Marcel Proust this has happened twice over, in the village of Illiers near Chartres where he grew up, which he imagined in literature as ‘Combray’, and which is now ‘Illiers-Combray’ (as it were, ‘Dorchester-Casterbridge’) in case anyone forgets; and at Cabourg on the Normandy coast, not far from Caen, which he imagined as ‘Balbec’. Lest we forget, the Grand Hotel at Cabourg is now called ‘Le Balbec’, it serves a ‘Cocktail Proust’, and breakfasters are obliged to eat a madeleine, with or without tisane.
Not every cyclist who has ridden in the Tour will have read À la Recherche du Temps Perdu or will know the luminous passage on the front at Balbec, where the narrator first sees Albertine, the captivating temptress who will bewitch and torment him for several hundred thousand more words, ‘a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump matt cheeks, a black polo cap crammed on her head, who was pushing a bicycle with such an uninhibited swing of the hips’, whose saucy gamine manner makes him think that she and her girlfriends frequented the racecourse, or ‘must be the very young mistresses of professional cyclists’. Possibly there are professional cyclists who still have mistresses, though they will count themselves unlucky if any of these ladies is as tricky as Albertine.
Other literary shades in Normandy include Flaubert’s, not only in Rouen but in Pont-l’Eveque, where the cheese comes from and where he set Un Coeur simple; Maupassant, who set stories in Fécamp, Tôtes, and Yport; and Gide, with Isabelle at La Roque-Baignard and La Porte étroite at Cuverville. Le Havre may seem, even when the Tour calls, one of the least beguiling ports in France, or anywhere, but it inspired Maupassant’s Pierre et Jean, Sartre’s La Nausée, and Queneau’s Un rude Hiver. And further up the coast to Dieppe and beyond are other memories, of Oscar Wilde’s sad last days in exile, and then of another though voluntary literary exile. P. G. Wodehouse lived at Le Touquet where he was found by the German army in 1940, with such unhappy consequences.
And so, while France licked her wounds, there was no Tour that July, nor for the duration of the war, though that wasn’t for want of trying. No one who has followed this story so far will be under many illusions about Desgrange, with his dictatorial manner, his habit of arbitrarily, and often foolishly, changing the rules before a Tour began or even when it was in progress, his astonishing capacity for abusing riders in print. He had been an anti-Dreyfusard in the 1890s, and was no simpering liberal ever after. But he was a French patriot, and he had lived to see the utter humiliation of his country. Overshadowed by this catastrophe, Desgrange died on 16 August.
Despite all his faults, I have called him one of the great Frenchmen of his century, and he was certainly one of the most influential. To borrow and adapt words from another country and a quite different sphere, what Sir Rudolf Bing said about John Christie, the founder of the Glyndebourne opera festival, may be adapted quite appropriately. Henri Desgrange was difficult as well as eccentric, he was sometimes tactless and overbearing, and at times ‘could be megalomaniac’. But he was also a man of remarkable judgement and energy, while in the end ‘all his boasting came back to the fact’ that he had created the Tour de France, ‘and nobody else could have done it; and on that matter he was entirely right’.
After his death Desgrange was formally succeeded as Directeur de la Course by Jacques Goddet, whose finest hour was his first in this role, when he resisted all blandishments to stage the race under occupation. Sport was disrupted in most countries that were at war, with no first-class cricket played in England, and a diminished football season in most continental countries, although in America sport continued full-blast until Pearl Harbor – 1941 was the season when Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees hit in 56 straight games and Ted Williams of the Red Sox batted .406 – and even in Europe some events were continued as a means to entertain and boost morale. For totalitarian countries sport sometimes posed problems when the wrong side won. After Germany was beaten at ice hockey by a team from the satellite rump Czech state, Himmler complained that inferior races should not be given such opportunities to humiliate their betters, rather as Desgrange had felt about Major Taylor, the black cyclist.
In Italy the Giro was held in attenuated form in 1940, when it saw the beginning of a great rivalry between Bartali and Coppi, and competitive cycling continued elsewhere on a reduced scale, with one-day races in various countries. There was indeed an attempt to stage a ‘tour’ race in France in 1942, but without the stamp of authority that only Goddet could have provided this ‘Circuit de France’ was a sham. The following year the Auto announced a ‘Grand Prix du Tour de France’, but this was no more than a totting-up by points of nine of the races that were still being run. At the other end of the earth, in what was still technically a French colony though occupied by the Japanese, a true curiosity was held in the form of a Tour of Indo-China, using whatever bikes could be scraped together, an event worthy of the pen of Graham Greene rather than Proust.
Back at home the Auto covered itself with little glory during those years, although admittedly not many French institutions did much better. It was a subsequent fable convenue that most Frenchmen or women were résistants; what was true was that, as one Englishman concerned with the resistance well said, most of the French were resisters in the sense that they wished the German occupation to be over, and most were collaborators in the sense that they accepted it. Even men of the Left like Sartre and Camus spent the war writing in Paris, where a great film like Les Enfants du Paradis could be made cheek by jowl with the ‘occupying’ Germans, whose forces in truth ruled France with a light hand.
For most people, that is; and the story of French cycling has one indirect but peculiarly sombre pendant. Of all the stadiums that had sprouted in and around Paris at the end of one century and the beginning of the next, one had a special fame within and without the sport. The ‘Vel d’Hiv’ – Vélodrome d’Hiver, winter stadium – on the boulevard de Grenelle had opened in 1909 and had long been used for conventions and political rallies as well as its original purpose. On one famous occasion in 1937, le tout Paris of the Left turned out there to support the Spanish Republic in its war with Franco’s insurgents and to hear the famous fulminating agitatress ‘La Pasionaria’ give one of her harangues.
But then something else happened within five years of that rally with which the name of the stadium would always be associated. In 1942, in a huge sweep by French police, acting under German supervision but with no lack of enthusiasm, the Jews of Paris were rounded up, and many of them held at the Vel d’Hiv, before being sent on a fatal final journey to Auschwitz. There were 4000 children among them. For the great Catholic writer François Mauriac, this was a moral landmark: ‘The dream which Western man conceived in the eighteenth century, whose dawn he thought he saw in 1789, and which, until 2 August 1914, had grown stronger with the process of enlightenment and the discoveries of science – this dream vanished finally for me with those trainloads of little children.’
Two years later, too late to save those victims, the greatest seaborne invasion in the history of warfare sailed to Normandy and hit the huge stretch of beaches running west and east between the Vire and Seine estuaries, and the British on the left flank would fight their way grimly towards Caen, visited many times by the Tour over the years, although between the stage there won by Fournier in 1939 and the stage won by Diot in 1947, there wasn’t much of it left. They then fought their way gruellingly through the bocage which seems comparatively easy going to cyclists, but not to infantry and armour facing stiff opposition. On 25 August Paris was liberated by a French army under de Gaulle, amid scenes of mass rapture and mass copulation, followed by the dubious épuration in which many collaborators or supposed collaborators were savagely punished, often by people who had little to be proud of themselves.
One man who had very much to be proud of never mentioned it in his lifetime. It only transpired months before the centennial Tour that Gino Bartali, hero of the 1938 and 1948 Tours, had shown still greater heroism in 1943–4. Working as courier for a secret network, he smuggled documents to create false identity papers, and thus enable several hundred Italian Jews to escape deportation and death. Bartali did many good and brave things in his life, but nothing better or braver than this.
Slowly French life returned to normal, which required a good deal of conscious forgetting of the past. The degree of enthusiasm or acquiescence with which so many of the French had accepted defeat and collaboration was quietly forgotten, as was, thanks to those troops of de Gaulle’s and General Leclerc’s fighting under the Cross of Lorraine, the awkward fact that, during the course of the war, more Frenchmen had borne arms on the Axis side than on the Allied. Some acts of oblivion applied to the press. Newspapers that had continued publishing under the occupation were suspended by the new government, and then after a decent interval reappeared in new guise. Thus the tainted Temps and Auto re-emerged as the Monde and the Équipe respectively, to this day two great and flourishing papers, with the Équipe still one of the sponsors of the Tour.
In 1946 a Petit Tour was held with no pretence that it was the real thing, but still a proper stage race of 1310 kilometres from Monte Carlo to Paris in five days. It was won by the young Jean Lazaridès, ‘Apo’, from his middle name, or ‘L’Enfant Grec’, a protégé of René Vietto who himself came third, with Jean Robic between them in second. Now France was once again ready for something like former life, including its greatest sporting event.