participated in two Tours in the 1930s. Fontenay came to Bobet’s hometown
to compete in the Grand Prix de Saint- Méen, one of the hundreds of local
races in Brittany. After the fi nish, the fourteen- year- old Bobet talked with Fontenay, who promised to buy the teenager a new seat for his bike. Later
in the summer, Bobet ran into his idol while training on Brittany’s country
lanes, and Fontenay lived up to his promise.10 Antonin Magne, who won the
Tour twice in the 1930s, grew up in a dairy farming community outside Paris.
His father worked on a farm down the road from one owned by the parents
of the Pélissier brothers, made famous by Henri Pélissier’s Tour win in 1923
and the Tour’s “galley slaves of the road” scandal of 1924.11 Since nearly 2,200
men competed in the Tour between 1909 and 1929, many communities could
boast that a former Tour rider lived in their midst.
Clubs and corporate sponsors also created the structured organization of
apprenticeship and promotion during the interwar years that allowed large
numbers of aspiring young cyclists to sharpen their skills and to test their
mettle. The Union Vélocipédique de France, the major umbrella organiza-
tion for competitive French cycling clubs, grew enormously. Between 1909
and 1939, the Union Vélocipédique expanded from 80,000 to approximately
200,000 members.12 The culture of cycling clubs changed signifi cantly dur-
ing the interwar years, as the clubs evolved from being social enclaves for the bourgeoisie into training centers for aspiring cyclists of all classes. For example, the Véloce- Club de la Belle Epoque was founded in 1888 in Cholet as an
“association of progress” meant to promote patriotism and popularize new
technologies like the bicycle, automobile, and airplane. It changed its char-
ter in 1921 to focus the club on competitive cycling and created two types of
membership to separate the social and athletic functions of the club.13 Many
clubs dropped overtly exclusionist, classist language from their charters and
became “popular” in character. This trend among cycling clubs mirrored the
broader transformation of associative sports in the interwar years, as more
and more French men of various social classes and profi les began to partici-
pate in sports clubs.14
During the interwar years, industrial concerns and professional racing
teams became more directly involved in the cycling clubs and sponsoring
amateur racing. The biographies of professional cyclists who grew up at this
time make it clear that cycling clubs had become training centers for aspir-
ing cyclists. The trainers and administrators of the clubs were often former
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c h a p t e r f o u r
professional cyclists and acted as intermediaries between young racers and
professional teams. A formal, national network of amateur and semiprofes-
sional races throughout the country supplied the proving grounds for young
cyclists. The most important of these was the Premier Pas Dunlop, the ju-
nior championship of France, which was sponsored by the tire manufacturer
Dunlop. The competition consisted of scores of races, fi rst on the town level, with the winners moving on to regional and national championships. A victory in the Premier Pas or similar competitions often led to lucrative profes-
sional contracts. The clubs and racing circuits fed the ranks of the professionals with an ever- growing number of competitors.
Marcel Bidot, son of a café owner, grew up in Troyes and realized the
dream of many aspiring cyclists. In 1920, the eighteen- year- old Bidot, with
the help of his father, found a clerical position at Crédit Lyonnais Bank. He
soon quit the job, however, and became a bailiff ’s assistant to have more free time to train and race. In 1922, he joined the Véloce- Club de Levallois. While with the club, Bidot won the Paris – Rouen race after a long solo escape from
the peloton. Club offi cers introduced Bidot to Ludovic Feuillet, manager of
the Alcyon racing team. Bidot signed a contract with the team and was paid
a monthly salary of 500 francs. Bidot’s fi rst year as a professional was a great success: “In 1923, cycling won me 23,000 francs. I would have had to work at
Crédit Lyonnais, where I was paid 200 francs per month, for ten years to accu-
mulate such a sum.”15 Following the 1928 Tour, in which he won 5,500 francs,
Bidot had saved enough money from his cycling winnings to buy a house in
the countryside near Troyes. Although he never won the Tour, Bidot’s strong
showings brought him lucrative racing and sponsorship contracts.
André Leducq, eventual winner of the 1930 and 1932 Tours, worked his
way up through the hierarchy of prestigious clubs and was also discovered by
Ludovic Feuillet. Leducq began his amateur career with Montmartre- Sportif,
a Paris club on the rue Poissonnière. The club’s founder, Charles Ravaud, was
a journalist at L’Auto and helped Leducq gain membership in the Véloce-
Club de Levallois after the twenty- two- year- old rider won the French amateur championship. Feuillet employed the widespread practice of “sham amateurism” ( amateurisme marron) and secretly offered money and equipment to the club’s top amateurs to ensure that they signed contracts with his Alcyon team.
Leducq recalled that in mid- 1925 Feuillet invited him and the two other top
riders of the club to his offi ce on the avenue de la Grande- Armée and signed
each to contracts of 1,300 francs per month.16 The riders remained amateurs
for the rest of the year and offi cially turned professional on January 1, 1926.
The biographies of Brittany’s cycling stars attest that the system of promo-
tion worked in roughly the same manner in the provinces, although it must
t h e f r e n c h s c h o o l o f c y c l i n g
87
be said that this region produced an unusually large number of competi-
tive professional cyclists. The Circuit de l’Ouest, raced in Brittany and spon-
sored by the Rennes newspaper L’Ouest- Éclair, offered young Breton cyclists a highly visible proving ground and was a pipeline to selection for the Tour
de France and to more lucrative professional contracts. Pierre Cloarec, Jean-
Marie Goasmat, Jean Fontenay, Lucien Le Guével, and Eloi Tassin translated
high fi nishes in the Circuit de l’Ouest into invitations to compete in the Tour de France.17 The Premier Pas Dunlop competitions also helped Breton cyclists
gain recognition. In 1938, future Tour winner Louison Bobet’s father bought
him his fi rst bicycle. Thirteen- year- old Louison lied about his age, claimed he was eighteen to enter the local Premier Pas Dunlop challenge in Saint-Méen, placed seventeenth in the race, and gained a taste for competition that
inspired him to become a professional cyclist.18 Bobet joined the Cyclo- Club
Rennais in 1941 and was provided with a racing machine and a small contract
with a regional professional team sponsored by Stella, a Nantes bicycle man-
ufacturer. The Premier Pas Dunlop also launched the professional career of
Jean Robic, the 1947 Tour champion. Robic won the regional competition in
1939, which allowed him to move to Paris to compete in lucrative velodrome
races in the capital.19
The Tour de France stood at the pinnacle of the French School’s system
of competitions. Young men became professional cyclists and dreamed of
parti
cipating in the Tour de France for glory, profi t, and social promotion.
The Tour was cycling’s richest event. The lure of the Tour’s prize money en-
ticed many riders, and a good showing at the Tour led to lucrative contracts
to compete in other races. For example, André Leducq won a 30,000- franc
prize for winning the yellow jersey in 1932, but after his victory he signed
dozens of racing contracts, including a contract for 17,500 francs to compete
in a velodrome race in Algiers and 25,000 francs to enter the Six Jours de Paris endurance track race.20
The number of individuals who earned their living as professional cy-
clists was minuscule, despite France’s expansive system of clubs and races.
At most, several score were employed full- time per year. Those who were
not the top riders on their teams struggled fi nancially: cyclists who signed
contracts with Peugeot, one of the top teams, in the early 1920s rarely made
more than 200 or 300 francs per month.21 Even successful professional rid-
ers such as Antonin Magne endured periods of under- or unemployment.
The son of a farmer from the Aurillac region, Magne entered races secretly
during the mid- 1920s to hide his cycling from his disapproving father. He
raced well and, after a strong showing in the Circuit de Champagne race in
1928, won a contract for the 1929 season from bicycle manufacturer Alleluia.
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c h a p t e r f o u r
In the off- season, he performed odd jobs around his father’s farm to make
ends meet. Desgrange named Magne to the Tour’s French national team in
1930. Although he fi nished third in that Tour, Magne could not fi nd adequate
sponsorship for the 1931 season because no professional team would hire him
as its featured rider. Magne instead raced for Marcel Massoon, who owned
a single bicycle shop near the train station in Gargan, a Paris suburb, and
promised to provide Magne with racing machines and material, if not a sal-
ary, for the season.22 Despite his handicap vis- à- vis the better- compensated professionals, Magne was named to the 1931 Tour’s French national team and
won the fi rst of his two yellow jerseys.
2. Tour Heroes as Celebrities and Commodities between the Wars
Fame itself had become a commodity with immense commercial value. Ce-
lebrity made star cyclists wealthy. In the hands of the newspapers, who li-
onized Tour champions and transformed them into popular heroes, and of
the industrial sponsors, who used cycling champions to sell their products,
sports celebrity itself was an object of consumption for the French public.
Stories of the exploits of French Tour champions spurred sales of L’Auto and other newspapers, and the endorsements of these stars helped to sell entire
lines of products, from bicycles that bore their names to other products com-
pletely unrelated to cycling.
The commercial value of cyclists’ fame opened new paths to enrichment
for Tour stars like the Pélissiers, Antonin Magne, Georges Speicher, and An-
dré Leducq. Two developments undoubtedly increased the star appeal and
marketing power of the riders. First, French cyclists once again dominated
the Tour in the 1930s after a long period of relative weakness vis- à- vis riders of other nationalities. Between 1911 and 1930, only one Frenchman, Henri Pélissier, won the Tour (1923). Following Desgrange’s creation of the national team
formula in 1930, French riders won in 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, and 1937, and the national team won four times between 1930 and 1937. Second, more and
more businesses recognized what the newspapers had come to understand. In
terms of marketing, the names, faces, and words of celebrities — athletic and
otherwise — possessed considerable power; French men and women coveted
and purchased the images of their favorite stars in the same way that they
bought tangible products. Businesses sought to link the images of famous
cyclists to their products to increase sales, even if the goods and services they offered had little relation at all to cycling or to sport.
Bicycle manufacturers recognized this trend in public tastes and trans-
lated the fame of interwar Tour stars directly into marketing power. The tone
t h e f r e n c h s c h o o l o f c y c l i n g
89
and approach of bicycle marketing changed markedly since the fi rst days of
the Tour. Early in the event’s history, manufacturers like Peugeot and Al-
cyon hired talented professional cyclists in the hope that they would win
to “prove” the superiority of their products to consumers. Advertising fre-
quently centered on the machines themselves, rather than the athletes. This
earlier style of publicity continued in the interwar years. For example, in a
its bicycles had won that year’s Paris – Roubaix race but did not mention the
name of the racer who rode the machine to victory.23 L’Auto and other dailies often proclaimed victory by “a Peugeot” or “an Alcyon,” and journalists
frequently substituted the name of a bicycle for that of the rider that rode it.
For example, in a Petit Parisien reporter’s summary of the 1927 Tour standings, the leading racer seemed to be of secondary importance to the bicycle he
rode: “The grand brand [Alcyon] . . . still holds, with Frantz, fi rst place in the overall standings, as well as fi rst in the team standings, and continues to reap the laurels of this race that is so diffi cult for the bicycles.”24
A new style of promotion emerged in the interwar years that relied solely
on the personal star appeal of the famous French Tour riders. In the 1930s, the Mercier brand led the way among the bicycle manufacturers. Company director Emile Mercier marketed entire lines of bicycles in the late 1930s named after the stars of the Tour — Francis Pélissier, Georges Speicher, Roger Lapébie, An-dré Leducq, and Antonin Magne. He paid enormous sums to the riders for the
right to use their names and images: in 1937, Francis Pélissier received 300,000
francs and André Leducq was paid 150,000 francs. Riders received a percent-
age of the sale of each bicycle frame as a royalty.25 The fi rst- place prize of the 1937 Tour de France was 200,000 francs. Interestingly, many of these stars were retired or past their competitive primes by the time that Mercier bought the
right to use their names for the bicycles. Francis Pélissier, for example, had
not competed in the Tour since 1927, and Emile Mercier did not contact Anto-
nin Magne about creating a line of machines until 1939, the year of the rider’s retirement.26 Clearly, Mercier did not expect to promote the brand by hiring
these over- the- hill heroes to win races. The mere association of their famous names with the machines publicized and promoted the bicycles.
After 1930, Desgrange created the publicity caravan and opened the door
to widespread corporate sponsorship of the Tour. New and different types of
businesses involved themselves in sponsoring the “national bicycle race” and
other sporting events during the 1930s. They used the star power of Tour he-
roes to sell products that were often completely unrelated to cycling. L’Auto, in which Desgrange had promoted the Tour riders as moral role models and
the event itself as a campaign against physical degeneration, began to change
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c h a p t e r f o u r
its approach. In the 1930s, rider
s touted cigarettes and alcohol in the pages
of L’Auto. In a 1930 advertisement, for example, Charles Pélissier, “the most popular of the French riders,” claimed that Lucky Strike cigarettes have “always been the brand that I prefer” because “It’s Toasted.”* Later, Antonin
Magne also promoted Lucky Strikes: “Of course, I don’t smoke when I’m rac-
ing, that would be extravagant . . . but once I cross the fi nish line, what a great feeling to be like everyone else, to be able to smoke Lucky Strikes.”27 Alcohol and wine producers also hired Tour racers to promote their spirits. In Le Petit Parisien, Magne promoted Frileuse Wine as a “sports fortifi er” in an advertisement during the 1935 Tour: “I drink Frileuse Wine every day. Nothing’s
better for loosening up the legs.”28 René Le Grèves, the French professional
champion in 1936, touted the aperitif La Quintonine as an “excellent sports
tonic” in the company’s campaign during the 1936 Tour.29 Thirty riders, in-
cluding almost the entire French national team, endorsed Le Bonal wine dur-
ing the 1933 Tour: “In the opinion of the Giants of the Road, Le Bonal is a
great and soothing wine.”30 In other advertisements in the 1930s, Tour riders
promoted such products as spring water, paint, and cheese.
3. The Star System and French Cycling after the Second World War
The marketing power of cyclists’ celebrity increased and the commercial uses
for athletic fame diversifi ed after the Second World War. More and more
businesses sponsored professional cycling teams in the hope of engaging the
vast audiences that watched bicycle races. A team was incomplete, however,
without a star cyclist to lead it. The reason for this overriding imperative
was simple: the media photographed, interviewed, and lionized winners and
stars, not also- rans. As fi ve- time Tour champion Jacques Anquetil asserted,
“Second- place fi nishers are forgotten.”31 A star played the role of front man and marketing agent for his sponsors, as well as the athletic role of champion
and team leader. It was primarily through the team’s lead rider that sponsors
gained access to the media, especially television, the postwar’s most domi-
nant medium. A cyclist’s victories made him famous and often translated