Origins

The Tour de France

Course 1 · Chapter 2 · Origins: Desgrange, L'Auto and 1903

The Tour de France was not founded by a sporting body or a government. It was invented by a newspaper that was losing readers, in a quarrel that began over a political scandal. This chapter follows the story from the rival cycling papers of the 1890s to the first race in July 1903 and the crisis of 1904 that almost ended it. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

Two Newspapers and the Dreyfus Affair

Le Vélo

Founded in Paris in 1892, Le Vélo became the leading daily cycling newspaper, edited by Pierre Giffard, who had organised some of the first long road races (check). Cycling was a craze in the 1890s: the "safety bicycle" with equal-sized wheels and pneumatic tyres had made the machine cheap, safe and fast.

The split

The Dreyfus affair divided France in the late 1890s, over the army officer Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongly convicted of treason. Giffard supported Dreyfus. Several of the paper's advertisers, including the car-maker Comte de Dion and the tyre makers Michelin, took the other side and withdrew their money (check). They helped to found a rival paper in 1900.

L'Auto

The new paper, first called L'Auto-Vélo and printed on yellow paper, was edited by Henri Desgrange, himself a former track cyclist who had set the first official hour record in 1893 (check). After Le Vélo went to court over the name, it was shortened to L'Auto in 1903 (check).

Business, not sport The motive was circulation. Desgrange's paper was struggling against an established rival, and the owners needed something to bring in readers. The long-distance race, reported in daily instalments, was an old way of selling papers (races such as Paris to Brest and back and Bordeaux to Paris had been run in the 1890s, check). The yellow paper that distinguished L'Auto from its rivals is the reason for the yellow jersey (Chapter 1).

The Idea

Géo Lefèvre. A young journalist on the paper, Géo Lefèvre, is credited with suggesting a race that would cover the whole country in stages over several days, in the autumn of 1902 (check the details of the story, which is often retold with a lunch at a Paris café).
"Tour de France." The name draws on an older idea: the tour de France of the journeyman craftsmen who travelled the country to learn their trade, and the popular schoolbook Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877), in which two orphans cross the country (check). A tour of the whole country was already a familiar image.
The pitch. Desgrange was reluctant at first, then announced the race in January 1903, with a cash prize and a daily report in his paper (check).

The First Tour, July 1903

Feature (check each)	1903	Today
Stages	Six stages, with rest days between them	About 21 stages in 23 days
Distance	About 2,400 km, in stages of 400 km or more	About 3,300 km, with stages seldom over 250 km
Route	Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Paris; flat, with no high mountains	Changes each year; always includes the Alps and Pyrenees
Riders	Around 60 starters, many riding as individuals, some paying their own way; about 21 finished	Professional teams of eight
Winner	Maurice Garin, a chimney sweep turned professional, born in Italy and naturalised French	Decided by overall time over three weeks
Conditions	Unpaved roads, riding through the night, no support cars, fans handing out food	Race radios, team cars, a mechanical and medical service

The first race took place from 1 to 19 July 1903 (check). L'Auto reported it in daily instalments and its circulation rose sharply, reportedly from around 25,000 copies to about 65,000 during the race (check), and later far higher. The race had done what it was invented to do.

Crisis in 1904

The cheating

In the second Tour, riders were accused of taking the train or riding in cars, and of other tricks, and supporters of rival riders attacked competitors, scattered nails on the road and blocked the way with obstacles (check). The race ended in disorder.

The disqualifications

After an inquiry the governing body disqualified a number of riders, including the first four finishers, and the title went to Henri Cornet, aged 19 or 20, still the youngest winner on record (check). Desgrange wrote that the Tour was finished, killed by its own success (check).

The survival

The race continued in 1905 with changed rules, a points system for the order of finishers and stages that included the first real climbs (check). Le Vélo, meanwhile, closed in 1904 (check). The Tour had won the newspaper war.

A British comparison The bicycle itself has Scottish connections: Kirkpatrick Macmillan of Dumfriesshire is credited by some with building the first pedal-driven bicycle in the 1830s, though the claim is disputed, and the pneumatic tyre was developed in 1888 by John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish-born vet working in Belfast (check). Both helped create the machine that the Tour needed. As for the idea of a newspaper stunt to sell copies, British papers of the time did the same with air races and other contests, such as the Daily Mail's aviation prizes of the 1900s and 1910s (check).

Check the details The founding story has been told many times, with some details polished. The numbers for circulation, starters and finishers vary by source, and the 1904 events are known mainly through newspaper reports and later retellings. Check the dates, and where you can, compare the newspaper accounts with a modern history.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain how the Dreyfus affair led indirectly to the Tour de France, and why the race made business sense for a newspaper.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

Compare the 1903 Tour with a modern one in three respects and explain what the differences say about how sport has changed.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Most of what we know about 1903 and 1904 comes from newspapers, some of them involved in the race. Say what problems this raises and how a historian would deal with them.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Papers: Le Vélo (1892, Giffard) against L'Auto (1900, Desgrange), split by the Dreyfus affair
Idea: Géo Lefèvre, a round-France race, announced January 1903
First Tour: July 1903, six stages, winner Maurice Garin
1904: cheating and violence, disqualifications, Cornet declared winner
Result: circulation soared; Le Vélo closed in 1904