The period of the Occupation and of government by the Etat 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 an invading army, torn between resistance and collaboration of all kinds, divided into two geographical regions by a demarcation line, France was indeed during these Vichy years in torment, and ‘torment’ is the word chosen by the historians of sport and public policy Marianne Amar and Jean-Louis Lescot to describe the situation of sport under the Occupation and at the Liberation (Amar and Lescot, 2007). During the war years there was significant disruption to the normal workings of the system of sporting activity in France, caused either simply by the absence of able-bodied men (serving in the Free French forces, or in POW camps, or undertaking compulsory labour service in Germany) or by difficulties of logistics (transport, fuel, electricity or other requirements for hosting sporting events), but the German and Vichy authorities were at pains to encourage sport as a means of suggesting a certain ‘normality’ in everyday life (Arnaud, 2002). Major sports such as football, rugby and cycling thus continued to function as best they could during the troubled period of the Occupation and during the generally joyous but sometimes trau-matic months of the Liberation, which were perhaps even more disruptive of events than the war years themselves (Dine, 2001: 99–114; Hare, 2003: 22–25). Some iconic sporting competitions either occurred in trun-cated form or, in the case of the Tour de France, simply ceased altogether, their reappearance in the years following Liberation, the end of the war
129
and the foundation of France’s new regime of the Fourth Republic being noted by all as proof of France’s return to its own traditions and to a true normality.
But the influence of the Vichy regime on sport was not an entirely negative disruption of the practicalities of competition and a distortion of the ideals and philosophy of sport itself in the service of an ideology that emphasized order, responsibility and discipline in society and poli-tics, and that saw sport as a means of exemplifying such ‘positive’ values in support of France’s new national motto, Travail, Famille, Patrie.
Precisely because the Vichy regime was interventionist in society and economics, in furtherance of its ‘conservative revolution’ and goal of French ‘national renaissance’, it developed the trend set in the 1930s by the Popular Front of setting up public policies and public institutions to foster sport and leisure. The French state’s interest in and involvement in sport and leisure was to reach its fullest intensity during the Fifth Republic (1958– ), as we shall discuss in the following chapter, but during the Fourth Republic (1946–58) which replaced the Vichy regime, even relatively un-interventionist governments became increasingly aware of the need for the encouragement of sport and healthy living.
In terms of practical, everyday cycling the years of the war and of the Fourth Republic were – although in many ways the hey-day of utility cycling – a period of challenge for la petite Reine: during the austerity of the Occupation and of the late 1940s, the bicycle flourished as a mode of personal transport, but as the French economy gradually regained pre-war levels of production and unheard-of rates of growth in the 1950s, rising prosperity allowed households to experiment with other forms of mobility. Rising ownership of motorcyles, cars and the motorized bicycle know as the Vélo-Solex, for example, increasingly distracted French citi-zens from cycling as a practice of everyday life, even if the Tour de France and other professional racing remained as significant – if not more so – than ever.
In this chapter we shall, inescapably, discuss the history of the rela-tions between the Tour de France and its owner, L’Autonewspaper, and the authorities of Vichy and subsequently of the new Fourth Republic, considering why the Tour did not run during the war and reappeared only in 1947. Secondly, we shall consider how Vichy and the Fourth Republic attempted to manage sport and cycling in general through ideologies, institutions and policies. Thirdly, the huge popularity of the Tour as it redefined France’s identity in the late 1940s and 1950s, and the attachment of millions of French citizens to the French heroes of the Tour during the Fourth Republic, merits some discussion of quite what
champions such as Jean Robic and Louison Bobet represented culturally and socially in a country questioning its own worth and modernity.
Fourthly, we shall discuss how popular culture – in film, in the form of the Vélo-Solex and in the form of invented cycle leisure/sport practices involving (sub-)urban space – was beginning to reflect the difficulties now being experienced by cycling, threatened by the car and prosperity, by its old-fashioned image, and sometimes symbolic more of France’s past than of its future.
The Tour and L’Autoduring the Second World War
Although the running of the Tour de France was suspended from 1940 until 1947, the newspaper that had conceived the event and that organ-ized it each year continued to function during the Occupation, and at the Liberation was transformed into L’Equipe. In the difficult times of both the Occupation and of the return to government by the French them-selves during the Liberation and the purges that accompanied it, the behaviour and activities of L’Autoand then L’Equipe, as ‘guardians’ of France’s national sport and emblematic annual cycle race, were under close scrutiny.
L’Auto becomes L’Auto-Soldat
On 16 September 1939, some two weeks after the declaration of war, L’Autochanged its name to L’Auto-Soldat, promising to place the news-paper’s priority on ‘the struggle for human independence’ and the
‘crusade of free men’ that had recently been joined against Nazi Germany (Lagrue, 2004: 85). The rhetoric ofL’Auto-Soldatechoed that of L’Auto in 1914, when Desgrange had famously exhorted Frenchmen to throw themselves into the fight against the ‘bastard Prussians’ (Desgrange, 1914), but neither the newspaper nor France were in the same situation of national unity and enthusiasm for revenge on Germany as had reigned at the start of the First World War. The management of L’Autowas now under the care of Jacques Goddet, the son of Desgrange’s initial business partner Victor Goddet, and Desgrange himself was seriously ill. France’s armed and political resistance to Germany was short-lived, with capitu-lation coming on 16 June 1940, accompanied by the creation of the Vichy state, which replaced the Third Republic and was led by the octogenarian Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun in the First World War, but now inclined towards cooperation with the victorious Germans. Desgrange died on 16 August 1940, being spared the difficulty of seeing his news-From Defeat to the New France 131
paper become increasingly mired in the compromises and collabora-tionist arrangements required of the press during the Occupation, but not before L’Autohad published an ‘Appel aux sportifs’ in which it called for realistic and disciplined acceptance of France’s predicament. This was the first overt example of what was to become L’Auto’s much-debated and much-criticized ‘collaborationist’ stance during the années noiresof the Occupation, discussed accessibly by Lagrue (2004: 85–92) and Bœuf and Léonard (2003: 117–32). Even after more than sixty years of discus-sion and research, and a useful recent volume by the sports journalism historian Jacques Seray (2011), it is hard to judge just how collabora-tionist L’Auto was during the period 1940–44. The ambiguity of the newspaper’s actions and declarations is all of a piece with the ambiva-lence, confusion and changeability of French politics, society and culture as a whole under the much-denigrated Etat français, and the journalists themselves, masters of rhetorical ambiguity, often couched their texts in a style that offers varying readings.
The ‘Appel aux sportifs’ of 17 June 1940 is a case in point: it is not signed and in many ways does little more than echo a predominant theme – le maréchalisme– in French political and popular opinion of the day, which was support for the sacrifice of Marshal Pétain in offering his serv-ices to protect France from further conflict. The ‘Appel aux sportifs’
suggests, for example, that sportsmen and women understand better than others the need to bow to ‘unjust adversity’ because: ‘La rude école du sport leur a appris à apprécier à sa juste valeur la force qu’il faut pour regarder la vérité en face, quelle qu’elle soit et pour se soumettre à ses conséquences.’1 Such phraseology admits of both collaborationist and more positive readings, as France’s situation is presented as unjust at the same time as readers are apparently enjoined to accept its defeat. Goddet was serving in the army when the ‘Appel’ was published, and Desgrange was too ill to contribute to L’Auto, so it is generally assumed that the piece was written by the Germanophile Charles Faroux. L’Autohad been founded by Desgrange as a – purportedly – apolitical newspaper, but during the Occupation its path veered uncomfortably towards political engagement, as Goddet’s maréchalismebecame obvious in its columns, and as, perhaps more damningly, it published announcements imposed by the Germans.2 Goddet himself vigorously defended himself against accusations of collaborationism, presenting a version of events – notably in his autobiography L’Equipée belle– that acknowledged his support for Pétain but stressed his responsibility to maintain the business of L’Auto in order to keep his workers in employment during a difficult time (Goddet, 1991). Goddet was also able to justify his actions by
emphasizing the difficulties he faced after the sale of a controlling share of L’Auto’s capital to German financial interests: not only was he under pressure from the German authorities in Paris, but his business was owned by the Germans!
The Circuit de France of La France socialiste
One of the principal non-collaborationist achievements of L’Autoduring the Occupation was – perversely, given the race’s importance to the finances of the group – not to run the Tour de France. Goddet had been organizing the Tour since he replaced Desgrange as ‘patron’ of the event in 1936, and as late as August 1939 had outlined plans for the race of 1940, but from the summer of the phoney war until 1947 the Tour was put into hibernation, despite considerable pressure from the Germans and from the Vichy state. The popular success of the Tour during the 1930s had transformed it into a symbol of national identity and normality, and thus it was in the interests of the occupying forces in northern France and of the collaborationist government of the south that the Tour should be organized to give the appearance of a country accepting its new condition. When the Tour was finally run in the austerity of 1947, it was hailed as proof of France’s return to being herself, marking, if need there was, how the race’s absence in the inter-vening years had demonstrated the nation’s estrangement from its traditional values. In the spirit of the times, Goddet was initially in two minds over the running of the Tour under the Occupation, tempted to believe that the race might be able to stimulate the French cycle industry and thus improve the difficult living conditions of many workers, at the same time as providing its traditional examples of effort, discipline and courage (Marchand, 2002: 49–51). He was also aware of the propaganda that could be made by the Germans if the Tour were to be held and was mindful of the further tarnishing of the reputation ofL’Autothat would ensue.
Serge Laget has briefly summarized the ‘ersatz’ Tours that were run during the Occupation (Laget, 2003), and it is clear how they combined complex conflicting motivations of differing interpretations of duty, patriotism, honour and self- and national interest, played out in cycling, France’s national sport. Piecing together the treatments of Lagrue (2004:
90–92), Thompson (2006: 78–81) and Bœuf and Léonard (2003:
126–32) allows us to provide a summary of the events. In 1941 Goddet resisted pressures from the occupier-run Paris-Soir newspaper to stage the Tour jointly, and then in 1942 similarly rejected a proposal from the collaborationist newspaper La France socialiste. The principal sports From Defeat to the New France 133
correspondent of La France socialiste, Jean Leulliot, then undertook alone the organization of a six-stage race christened le Circuit de France, which ran from 28 September until 4 October 1942, visiting Paris, Poitiers, Le Mans, Limoges, Clermont-Ferrand, Saint-Etienne, Lyon and Dijon. Sixty-nine riders started the 1,650 km race, which was run over both the occupied and unoccupied zones of France, and which earned the approval of the collaborationist prime minister, Pierre Laval, who was keen to stress the ‘national’ dimensions of the competition. The jour-nalists of La France socialiste were at great pains to emphasize the differences – as well as the flattering similarities – between their race and the Tour, as the Circuit was designed to reflect the sporting and social agendas of the Vichy government. The Circuit’s major obstacles were thus presented not as the distances and mountains of the route, but more as the challenges of a simple non-commercialized race run under spartan conditions of rationing (riders were accommodated in dormitories rather than hotels, food was not to be wasted, fancy componentry such as light-weight inner tubes was not to be used). The Circuit involved multi-national teams, whose varied members were to work together to achieve glory in their common profession. Ironically, the Circuit was organized at a time when the Etat français was increasingly losing the support of ordinary French citizens, who had been shocked by the recent introduction of compulsory labour periods in Germany for French workers (the STO system). The Circuit’s stress on effort and austerity, and on Vichy values such as ‘national revival’ and ‘corporatist pride’, served more to remind the French of their difficulties than to inspire them to greater loyalty to the Etat français. The Circuit was essentially a failure, as it struggled to overcome the material difficulties it publicized as the challenges the riders were supposed to master in their racing.
Despite political attempts to present it as a success and to encourage the organization of a second competition in 1943, the changing tide of the war and of politics and society within France meant that the Circuitof La France socialiste was the only ‘national’ race run during the period of the Occupation.
L’Auto during the Liberation
Jean Leulliot of La France socialiste, organizer of theCircuit de France, was executed for collaboration during the épurationperiod that accom-panied and followed France’s liberation in 1944–45. The épuration (purge) was a confused mixture of official and unofficial justice and reprisals meted out to people of all walks of life who were deemed to have overly sympathized with, or assisted, the German occupiers. Goddet
was unsympathetic, suggesting that Leulliot had committed ‘high trea-son’ and deserved his fate.3Goddet himself escaped the épuration, despite considerable dissatisfaction among some who thought that he had not done enough to distance himself from the Germans and Vichy. The fact that he had refused to run the Tour was Goddet’s major saving grace, as well as his toleration of the use of some of L’Auto’s facilities – the printing presses for example – for resistance activities. In general Goddet was deemed to have done his best in difficult circumstances, particularly the German ownership of L’Autocreated by Raymond Patenôtre’s sale of his shares in the newspaper to a German consortium in early 1941 (Lagrue, 2004: 91–92). In August 1944, however, L’Autofell victim to a purge of newspapers rather than individuals, implemented by the Provisional French government as part of its attempt to punish press groups that had profited from the Occupation and to remove the influ-ence of collaborationist media. L’Autowas initially banned on 17 August 1944 and saw its premises and equipment confiscated, and then on 30 September 1944 a new law was implemented that prohibited newspapers that had continued publication during the Occupation from ever being authorized to reappear. This effectively sealed the fate of L’Auto, but Goddet was eventually able to create a new sports newspaper from the ruins of Desgrange’s pre-war commercial empire in the form of L’Equipe.
Government restrictions on the press and shortages of paper and newsprint prevented the publication of newspapers dealing with sport or other non-essential matters until February 1946, when a number of new titles tried to win the attentions of the sporting public. Sports was a communist-inspired sports paper, closely linked to the communist resist-ance forces of 1940–45, which survived until the early 1950s; Elanswas a short-lived (just 77 numbers) paper with socialist sympathies that quickly became absorbed by the much more successful L’Equipe, whose first number was published on 28 February 1946, and which continues today as France’s only sports newspaper. L’Equipe was staffed by a variety of journalists of most political persuasions, but the general tenor of the newspaper was discreetly right-of-centre.4Initially Goddet had to take something of a back-room role, as legislation prohibited over-direct links between the new press of the Liberation and France’s reconstruc-tion, and that of the Occupation. Just as in the 1890s, the sporting press became an arena of rivalry between Left and Right, a rivalry that expressed itself in the classic form of competing ‘national’ cycle races staged in spring and summer 1946.5The ultimate goal of both Sportsand L’Equipewas, of course, the organization of the first post-war Tour de France, and the more successful Paris–Monaco, sub-titled ‘Le petit Tour From Defeat to the New France 135
de France’, managed by L’Equipein July 1946 outshone the ‘Ronde de France’ (essentially Bordeaux–Grenoble) organized by Sports(Bœuf and Léonard, 2003: 138–40). In June 1947 the government finally awarded the rights to the post-war Tour to the company that managed the velo-drome of the Parc des Princes, which was backed by the newspaper Le Parisien-Libéréand L’Equipe. This was the result of complicated finan-cial and political machinations on the part of Goddet and the owner of the Parisien-Libéré, Emilien Amaury, who was also co-owner with Goddet of the Société du Parc des Princes. Amaury was a highly influ-ential figure in the Liberation period, transforming his past as a member of the Resistance and his participation in governing bodies of the press
de France’, managed by L’Equipein July 1946 outshone the ‘Ronde de France’ (essentially Bordeaux–Grenoble) organized by Sports(Bœuf and Léonard, 2003: 138–40). In June 1947 the government finally awarded the rights to the post-war Tour to the company that managed the velo-drome of the Parc des Princes, which was backed by the newspaper Le Parisien-Libéréand L’Equipe. This was the result of complicated finan-cial and political machinations on the part of Goddet and the owner of the Parisien-Libéré, Emilien Amaury, who was also co-owner with Goddet of the Société du Parc des Princes. Amaury was a highly influ-ential figure in the Liberation period, transforming his past as a member of the Resistance and his participation in governing bodies of the press