the fi nish line became a “veritable human river.” Some of the more daring
men escaped the crowds and perched themselves on the roofs of the four-
story buildings around the fi nish line. As the hundreds of cars and trucks
that preceded the riders began to arrive in Pau, the place de Verdun, next to
the fi nish line, was “transformed into a gigantic car park.” After the race, the rue de Liège, near the fi nish line, “was transformed into a vast fairground. A hundred street peddlers advertised and pushed their wares, while crowds surrounded the riders, who struggled toward their hotels. . . . Innumerable Béar-
nais had come from the most remote villages of the département, dropping
their tools in the fi elds for a few hours, to see the Tour pass.”102 The arrival of the Tour in Pau was a great popular success.
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Editorialists, however, cringed at the Tour’s sheer promotionalism and
feared the day when such an unfettered “system of political and commercial
propaganda will become completely engrained in our morals.”103 Opinion
pieces complained that the Tour took on more and more the character of a
giant promotional circus that featured cars and vans packed with publicity
fl iers broadcasting the loudspeaker- enhanced jingles of pitchmen: “One can
see the day when the bicycle Tour de France will be nothing but a mobile
foire- exposition in which athletic competition will be nothing more than one attraction among many others, and not even the most interesting one.”104
Such reactions to the Tour exemplifi ed the negative attitudes toward public-
ity and commercialism that continued to prevail in Pau.
Despite such criticisms, Pau’s business community and municipal leaders
believed sporting events could be used to boost commerce and rejuvenate
the town’s image. In 1933, the city and the local Automobile Club Basco-
Béarnais created the Grand Prix de Pau, a Formula One automobile race that
became part of the international Grand Prix circuit. The fi rst competition
took place in February, at the end of the high- society wintering season, on a
picturesque course that wove through Pau’s rebuilt downtown tourist spaces.
The automobile club and the town together organized and paid for all aspects
of the race, which cost 120,000 francs by 1935.105
The organizers approved of the volume and the style of publicity that
the Grand Prix furnished Pau. One automobile club offi cial pointed out that
more than 1,000 newspapers from France, Spain, Italy, England, and Belgium
carried pieces about the 1935 event, which took place on Easter Sunday.106 The
race bolstered the image of Pau as a fair- weathered spa resort. While cold
temperatures and torrential rainstorms blanketed most of France on the day
of the Grand Prix, radio stations transmitted three and a half hours of cover-
age to France and Italy in which it was reported that the sun was so hot in Pau that “women reached for their umbrellas.”107 The city council agreed that the
publicity offered by the event was invaluable, in particular because the aristocratic prestige generated by staging a Grand Prix Formula One event placed
Pau once again among the ranks of elite resort towns like Monaco, which
also hosted a major Grand Prix race. Despite the cost of the race, most city
council members agreed with city councilor Bijon, who affi rmed that “the
organization of this type of competition helps rebuild the [traditional] fame
of the town . . . at the moment when our town is looking to maintain her
prestigious image as the great touristic and sporting town of the Southwest.”
Several members of the city council commented, “The publicity generated by
the last Grand Prix was astonishing. . . . [Staging the Grand Prix] is justifi ed and worth continuing.”108
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Pau’s leaders also came to value the Tour de France as an important im-
age builder, despite the continuing criticisms of the event’s commercialism.
Pau’s subvention to the Tour doubled after the race’s fi rst visit, and Henri Desgrange chose the town to host a stage every year during the 1930s. The
stage between Pau and Luchon was an exciting and decisive one. It included
of the Tour itinerary. In a letter to the editor in 1935, a Patriote des Pyrénées reader complained that the 10,200- franc subvention offered to the Tour was a
“huge waste,” especially since only the town’s restaurateurs and car mechan-
ics would benefi t from the Tour’s passage.109 Paul Casassus, the president of
the Syndicat d’Initiative, responded the following day in a letter to the paper.
Casassus claimed that the selection of Pau, Evian, and Nice as 1935 Tour rest
towns accorded Pau “honor” by placing the city once again in the ranks of
France’s premier resort destinations. He also hailed the “splendid publicity”
for Pau generated by international radio broadcasts during the race:
The Tour stops at Pau because of our many comfortable hotels, because the
stay here is pleasant, and the population welcoming. Some cities spend mil-
lions of francs on publicity to convey that, and the Tour offers it to us for free.
Free, because the 10,000 francs are mostly repaid [by what visitors spend here
while they watch the Tour].110
Casassus also pointed out that if Pau failed to welcome the Tour lavishly, then the organizers might abandon the city in favor of one of its rival tourist towns like Biarritz.111
Sport, and cycling in particular, began to take on a new meaning in the
interwar years. To many provincial towns, sport was no longer merely the
bourgeois- gentleman pursuit of the belle epoque, but instead meant public-
ity, increased commerce, and greater participation in the national economy.
The Palois viewed the Tour and the Grand Prix as new tools to be used to
revive the city’s declining tourism trade. Nevertheless, Pau’s well- established identity as an aristocratic winter resort did not mesh well with the town’s
early forays into promoting commercial spectator sport. The resistance that
arose from these experiments underscored the uneasiness of Pau’s transition
into the era of mass culture.
4. Pau and the Tour after the Second World War
Despite such anxieties, Pau developed an even warmer relationship with the
Tour and its organizers after the Second World War. The city became a favor-
ite Tour stop, and the race visited Pau nearly every year. The uses of the event
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for the Palois evolved signifi cantly in the postwar era as the local economic
situation changed. By the 1970s, the race served primarily a cultural rather
than a commercial function in Pau. The Palois incorporated the Tour into
their local sporting identity and embraced the event as a cherished ritual in
their summer festival calendar.
During the 1950s, publicity benefi ts of hosting the Grand Prix dissipated
while the Tour de France remained a signifi cant part of Pau’s nationwide pub-
licity strategies. Pau refocused its promotional efforts from wealthy travelers to the mass tourism market. Popular tourism expanded tremendously after
Liberation. Between 1950 and 1961,
the portion of the French populace that
took annual vacations rose from 20 to 37 percent.112 Sporting events like the
Tour de France generated a style of promotion that resonated more closely
with popular tastes than traditionally elite sports like Formula racing.
The Tour’s enormous media coverage helped the event maintain a com-
petitive advantage over other sporting events. Before the television age, vast
audiences read about the race and its host towns in the press. In 1949, one
local reporter estimated that the 400 Tour caravan journalists wrote for an
audience of at least twenty million readers.113 Pau’s municipal council coveted that exposure and agreed to fund the Tour’s visits each year, despite the fact
that the local welcoming committee consistently ran sizable defi cits.114
Television coverage of the Tour de France cast a favorable light on Pau’s
historic sites and its connections to natural Pyrenean wonders. RTF’s news-
reel highlights fi lms of the Tour’s visits to Pau, usually broadcast during jour-naux télévises (evening newscasts), followed what had become by the early 1950s a standard format for French television’s coverage of most host towns.
The 1953 silent newsreel for the Pau – Cauterets stage on Bastille Day began
with shots of the Gave riverfront, with its picturesque bridges and clay- roofed residences on the banks. It continued with several panoramic and close- up
detail shots of the famous Château de Pau, the castle of King Henri IV.115
Coverage of the 1960 Pau – Luchon stage featured nearly identical shots of
the castle. The narrator, Jean Quittard, employed the same self- referential,
historic style of commentary as newspaper reporters. Quittard’s voiceover ex-
plained the signifi cance of the Château de Pau footage, pointed out the royal
symbols of “Good King Henry” on the castle walls, and referred to the Pau –
Luchon stage as the “greatest Pyrenean stage” of the Tour, thereby neatly ty-
ing together the sporting and national heritage of the Béarnais host town.116
Thanks to their editing, both newsreels created the impression of an imme-
diate connection between Pau and the wild Pyrenees, even though the heart
of the mountains lies some thirty miles to the south. An uninformed viewer
might assume that the high Pyrenees are located just outside Pau, since the
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fi lmed stage coverage transitioned quickly from shots of the Tour caravan
rolling through Pau’s streets to cyclists laboring up steep mountain roads.
Meanwhile, the Grand Prix de Pau generated less and less media coverage.
By the early 1950s, the size of and speeds attained by cutting- edge racing cars made staging Formula One races on Pau’s downtown streets impossible. Between 1952 and 1960, Pau’s Grand Prix race was downgraded to Formula Two
and then to Formula 3000, competition circuits whose automobiles were
equipped with smaller engines and raced at slower speeds. The city council
lowered its expectations for the publicity impact of the automobile race. In
1947, for example, local offi cials expected the Grand Prix de Pau to “attract
an immense crowd from the farthest horizons” and for coverage of the event
to appear in newspapers around the world.117 By the mid- 1960s, organizers
blamed the race’s inability to draw paying spectators for the event’s growing
defi cit, and a Chamber of Commerce report lamented that the Grand Prix
was a “distinctly insuffi cient” spur to local tourism.118
International newspaper coverage of the Grand Prix conveyed distinctly
negative images to readers. As the Pau organizers yearned for reinstatement
into Formula One, Canadian driver Ludwig Heimrath, in Pau to compete in
the 1962 Formula Two race, commented, “It is hard to imagine a formula one
car racing on a circuit with such narrow corners.”119 Worse still, international newspaper coverage lingered on the mortal dangers of the now- infamous
Grand Prix. Time magazine and the New York Times, in their articles on the 1955 and 1961 Grand Prix races, devoted more words to the numerous crashes
and the tragic death of Italian driver Mario Alborghetti, who fl ipped his ve-
hicle in a hairpin turn and was killed instantly in the 1955 race, than to race results.120 In 1964, New York Times sports reporter Robert Daley characterized the increasing insignifi cance of the Grand Prix de Pau as symbolic of France’s decline as a Grand Prix racing powerhouse and of the French nation’s fl agging
“virility” in auto racing.121
At the same time, the Tour presented Pau with several other distinct ad-
vantages over the Grand Prix. First, the annual bicycle race was relatively easy and convenient to stage. By the 1950s, the Tour took over many of the onerous organizational tasks from the hands of local offi cials in Pau and other
host towns. At a time when city administrations assumed more and more
(sometimes unwanted) responsibilities, the Tour organizers’ ability to stage
their competition with relatively little municipal assistance was very attrac-
tive to local authorities. By contrast, the city and the local automobile club
were responsible for handling every aspect of the Grand Prix de Pau’s annual
organization. In addition, local hotel and restaurant owners liked the per-
sonal accountability of the Tour organizers and appreciated that they paid in
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135
advance for food and lodging, while occasionally the Grand Prix racing teams
left town without paying their bills.122
Second, subsidizing the Tour was relatively inexpensive and carried little
fi nancial risk for the rewards reaped. The town council granted an annual
subsidy but paid for little else. Although the Tour’s Parisian organizers con-
sistently ran defi cits in the 1940s and 1950s, host towns were not responsible for covering them. In contrast, city offi cials promised to pay the Grand Prix’s growing debts. By 1958, Pau was paying nearly 4.5 million francs per year in
interest alone on the Automobile Club’s incurred debt. 123
The evolution of the Tour favored Pau. The Tour’s caravan grew to sev-
eral thousand people, and few towns in the region had adequate hotel and
restaurant infrastructures to accommodate it. Pau’s hosts also provided the
caravan with unparalleled logistical support and established warm, personal
relationships with the Tour’s personnel and management. Georges Briquet,
the Tour’s veteran radio announcer, described in 1954 the excellent reception
he received at Pau’s Hôtel Continental each year:
Monsieur Touyarot [the owner] has rendered us distinguished service. In the
twenty- two years I’ve worked the Tour . . . this is the twentieth time I’ve stayed with him. He’s the only hotel owner in France to provide me with my own
broadcasting room. It’s a thoughtful luxury that is worth highlighting.124
The following year, Elie Wermelinger, the Tour’s chief of logistics, raved that Pau’s reception for the race was “impeccable” and that Pau was a “model stage
town.”125 Some Pau businessmen appear to have developed personal friend-
ships with high- ranking Tour offi cials. In 1999, Jean Touyarot, the second-
generation owner and manager of Pau’s Hôtel Continental, even referred to
Tour Director Jacques Goddet as “my friend, Jacques.”126
Finally, French geography af
forded Pau signifi cant advantages as a Tour
host town. Few sizable French towns are situated within bicycle- riding dis-
tance of the Pyrenees, so the race had little choice but to pass through Pau.
Because of its fortuitous location in the Pyrenean foothills, Pau welcomed
one of the Tour’s exciting, decisive mountain stages almost every year.
Throughout the 1950s, at a time when the Tour incurred debts consistently,
Pau’s administrators insisted on paying lower subsidies than many other host
towns and convinced race organizers to accept a special revenue- sharing ar-
rangement that further reduced the city’s fi nancial burden.127
The Tour visited Pau more frequently in the postwar era than almost any
other provincial town. In 1962, Jacques Goddet presented Pau with the “Tour
de France Medallion” to recognize the city as one of the race’s most frequent
and hospitable hosts.128 Yet despite the town’s promotional strategies and
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the publicity power of the Tour’s annual visits, Pau did not succeed in rein-
vigorating the local tourism industry. By the mid- 1960s, an average of only
85,000 travelers per year spent a night in one of the city’s hotels.129
By the late 1960s, Pau had largely abandoned its effort to reestablish it-
self as a major tourist destination. In 1951, Pétroles d’Aquitaine — later Elf-Aquitaine — punctured a vast natural gas reserve under the village of Lacq,
twenty kilometers west of Pau. The enormity of the Lacq discovery surprised
drillers. The fi rst well released a natural gas plume so dense and voluminous
that the residents of surrounding towns were forbidden to light matches or
turn on stoves for four days.130 By the late 1950s, yearly production of natural gas at Lacq equaled one and a half times the French annual consumption. Gas
extraction and refi ning became two of the most important commercial ac-
tivities in southwestern France. Between 1954 and 1959, new businesses estab-
lished themselves in the Pyrénées- Atlantiques département, of which Pau is the capital, at a pace that was two times the national average.131 According to Martine Lignières- Cassou, a National Assembly representative who was later
elected mayor of Pau, the Lacq discovery was a “godsend” that transformed