French Cycling: A Social and Cultural Historyaims to provide a balanced and detailed analytical survey of the complex leisure activity, sport and industry that is cycling in France. Identifying key events, practices, stake-holders and institutions in the history of French cycling, the volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how cycling has been significant in French society and culture since the late nineteenth century.

Structuring and writing this book has been rather challenging, principally because of the potentially vast scope of material and debate, given the multi-faceted nature of ‘cycling’, and indeed, the chronological range of the period during which...

France during the 1870s and 1880s was a country undergoing social, political and economic transformation. The end of the Second Empire (1848–70) in ignominious defeat at the hands of Germany in the Franco-Prussian war led to a change of political regime with the institution of the Third Republic in 1871, after the bloody and divisive interlude of the Paris Commune (1870–71). After what Roger Magraw has described as the ‘modernizing dictatorship’ of the Second Empire (1983: 149), the Third Republic continued France’s measured move towards modernity, as the economy industrialized and society became increasingly stratified into an industrial...

France in the 1890s was politically relatively stable, even though the new Third Republic – in the form of the ‘conservative Republic’ defined by Thiers as the form of regime least likely to divide the French people – was still challenged by threats from the extreme right, and was shaken to the core by the national drama of the Dreyfus Affair (1894–99). But the threat of acoup d’étatfrom General Boulanger had been avoided in the late 1880s; parliamentary democracy seemed established, if occasionally questioned. Economically and socially, although France was still concerned at its weakness and slowness of development...

Before France was torn apart by the First World War it experienced the golden age of theBelle Epoque. Following the political and social upheavals of the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s, which had for a time seemed almost to threaten the safety of the Republican regime, destabilized by attacks from the extreme right and doubting the validity of its own political, moral and social principles, France entered a period of relative calm and prosperity. As well as the success of the movement of ‘Republican defence’ in favour of the Republic that strengthened the regime around the turn of the...

The destruction and disruption of the First World War naturally impeded the development of cycling overall – in terms of competition, industry, media and everyday use – in France, although the links between light arms manufacture and the cycle industry that were discussed in the previous chapter meant that newly expanded factories, for example, were in a position to produce more bicycles than before, if the demand was there. In fact, in 1920 there were 4.3 million bicycles in France recorded by the authorities. By 1923 this figure had risen to 5.8 million, and by 1926 there were 7.1 million bicycles declared....

The period of the Occupation and of government by theEtat français, based in the town of Vichy, from 1940 to 1944 still provokes strong emotions among French people. The political and social divisions between French citizens that were exposed so cruelly by the choices they were confronted with after the rapid defeat of France in 1939–40 often reflected ideological stances that had developed during the politically charged 1930s, and once France had been liberated, politics and society negotiated a difficult pathway through what the cultural historian Henry Rousso has described as a ‘Vichy syndrome’ (Rousso, 1987). Occupied by...

The 1960s and 1970s were a period of great change in French politics, society and culture. Demographically, the boom in the birth rate in the late 1940s was, by the early 1960s, beginning to feed into the adult population and workforce; France was a younger country than it had been for decades, and the younger citizens had new social, political and cultural aspirations and terms of reference, some of which led to the explosion of discontent at the Gaullist state and its ordering of society that occurred in May–June 1968. Politically, the return to power of General Charles de...

France in the 1980s was marked by the political change of having a socialist president and socialist government for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic. Coming to office in May 1981, François Mitterrand and his governments were faced with economic challenges they inherited from the mid-and late 1970s, when inflation, unemployment and a generally uncompetitive economy threatened to definitively end the economic success story that France had enjoyed since 1945. As theTrente glorieuseswere replaced by what commonly became known as theVingt rugueuses(‘twenty years of rough times’), socioeconomically France was under pressure from...

Cycling of all kinds in France during the 2000s has been the subject of increased interest from citizens and the state. The cycle industry has benefited from a growing uptake of cycling as recreational sport, transport/personal mobility and recreational leisure. And professional cycle sport, in the form of the Tour de France, has maintained its hold on the popular imagination, despite frequent suspicions that the endemic drug-taking of the 1990s that culminated in the ‘Tour of Shame’ in 1998 could sound the death-knell of the event. In 2003 no less official an institution than the augustBibliothèque nationale de France...

At the conclusion of this rapid and necessarily selective overview of cycling and the bicycle in France, it seems sensible to attempt to draw together some tentative general remarks about how this technology of transport and its varied uses can be interpreted to tell us something about French culture and society. Following the framework set out in the Introduction, where we suggested a conceptualization of cycling and the bicycle in France that necessarily had to find appropriate space for the Tour de France while at the same time addressing the wider and deeper complexity of the issues at stake through...