The Dreyfus Affair and the Origins of the Tour de France

This year’s Tour de France cycling race will be 3,492 kilometers traversed over 21 grueling stages, across a mix of flat, hilly, and mountainous terrain. It is the leading event on the men’s professional cycling calendar, with riders from around the world training their entire careers to win the event—or even just to finish it.

How does the Tour make money today? How have working-class politics polarized the event? What sort of technological improvements has the bicycle seen over time?

Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: The Tour de France has its origins in a business competition between two rival sports newspapers. It was also a competition that was tied to early 20th-century far-right politics. Could you unpack what exactly was going on?

Adam Tooze: Yeah, it’s an amazing story that I wasn’t familiar with until we embarked on this. At the turn of the century, the Third Republic in France was a notoriously divided polity. And in the 1890s, it split bitterly over the so-called Dreyfus affair, which was a situation when, in 1894, a Jewish officer in the French Army was scapegoated as a German spy by reactionary antisemitic groups. And the left wing and the liberal press sided with Dreyfus and eventually secured a retrial and his acquittal. And so it became like a key rallying point of the French center and left. It’s the precursor to the Popular Front of the 1930s, which is now being reprised again in the effort to try to keep [National Rally leader Marine] Le Pen and her party away from power in France. But there’s always been a right-wing, aristocratic, pro-business, and profoundly antisemitic politics in France, and they struck back in the early 1900s.

And the leading sports newspaper of the day, Velo, was a pro-Dreyfus paper. And the anti-Dreyfus folks, including notable industrialists like Michelin, the tire company, and de Dion, who’d made cars and bicycles, were infuriated that the dominant sports newspaper of the day was pro-Dreyfus. They found themselves imbibing, if you like, radical pro-Dreyfus news while just trying to get the scores and decided to set up their own newspaper, their own sports newspaper called Auto-Vélo, which, when they set up in 1903, was kind of floundering against incumbents. And so they were looking for a big coup, some sort of publicity affair. And being nationalists and modernist because, you know, de Dion, Michelin, they’re in the business of modernizing France. France was a huge producer of bicycles and motor cars in the early 20th century. And so they thought, how about having a self-consciously modernist exploration of France by the relatively new-fangled device of a bicycle?

And so it became this tour of France. By the ’30s it was hugely successful. The right-wing sports newspaper was garnering 800,000 circulation during the Tour of 1933. Predictably, given their politics, they ended up then collaborating during the Nazi period. They were shut down in the aftermath of the war, but L’Équipe, which is, to this day, France’s main sports newspaper associated with the Tour, emerges from the wreckage and is still associated with the Tour all the way down to the present day. And one of the things about all professional bike racing is that you can’t successfully compete as an individual. You have to compete as part of a team, because it’s crucial to maintaining the momentum of a very fast, very long ride. Long riding is having a team around you for psychological support, but also aerodynamic. You can sit behind your other riders and spare your legs. And what’s really striking about the Tour is that very, very many of the teams are corporate teams. They ride for Telecom, for, you know, the Emirates. They ride for brands, though the individual riders, as you say, are heroes of particular stages or the race overall.

CA: Today, the Tour is now run by a private company that’s called the Amaury Sport Organization. How does the Tour make money these days?

AT: It’s always been a problem, to be honest. The idea was that it would drive circulation for the newspaper. In the ’30s, they came up with, you know, one of the striking things of the kind of carnival of the Tour as you watch it go around France is you see the beautiful French scenery, but you also see this extraordinary cavalcade of accompanying vehicles that go with the riders. They can change a wheel while the bicycle is still riding on the front wheel. But they come up with this idea of the caravan, which was essentially like a giant billboard that tracked around France as they went along. This is before television, of course, so you don’t have television coverage. And that was really the big breakthrough. The Tour was struggling for money in the ’60s, and what they did was to essentially hand it over to Amaury, the sport organization, which came up with the idea essentially of doing TV broadcasting from the Tour. And it’s from that moment onward that it begins to attract a global audience and becomes a, you know, for many people, it really is a kind of seasonal preoccupation.

It’s worth saying it’s not huge money. The estimate I found of the amount of revenue it generates is in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not like a giant soccer tournament or basketball or baseball or American football. They’re relatively modest amounts of money. The profit is maybe in the $10 million to $20 million range. So this is not a huge business. And the riders on the Tour itself don’t get rich, either. So coming in with the yellow jersey, which is the overall winner, the prize money is, you know, as recently as 2018, 2019, relatively modest. I think it was only about half a million dollars for a race that can kill people from the sheer scale of physical exertion. A stage win is 11,000 euros. So, as you were saying, for many riders winning a single stage of the Tour, that’s one day of racing, is a lifetime’s achievement. Many of them are specialists; they’re sprinters or they’re mountain specialists. They can’t hope to win the whole Tour, but to win one stage, one of the famous stages. But the actual prize money is peanuts. So these people are sustained by what they earn as part of teams, sponsorships of various types. But bike riding is not, you know, it’s not mega-sports. These people are not sort of superstar earners in the way that the big stars of soccer or basketball or American football are.

CA: The purpose of the event, in some sense, is to foster a sense of national cohesion, but it’s also been a site of polarization, protests, and striking. How does that fit in with the national purpose of the event?

AT: The bicycle is itself significant in this respect, right? Because listening to you just now, I was thinking Eric Hobsbawm, the great British Marxist historian, described the bicycle as perhaps the single greatest source of human emancipation in modern history because it’s so affordable. Even a nation as poor as China in the ’50s and ’60s can equip people with bicycles in the millions, hundreds of millions. The so-called flying pigeon became the emblem of Maoist China. And with a bicycle, if you’re reasonably fit, you can do 100 kilometers a day without really killing yourself. And that means you can travel, you can get around. So once the design of the bicycle had stabilized in its basic modern form, it becomes the main form of mobility for working-class people in most of the world.

So originally it was a class sport. I mean, a lot of sport in the late 19th, early 20th century has this gentleman-players distinction. There are gentleman athletes who do it for fun, and the players are the actual guys who put in blood, sweat, and tears for the money. And certainly the Tour de France had that kind of attitude at first. I mean, the very disagreeable people that came up with the idea, Henri Desgrange, described the aim of the race as not that one person would win, but that only one man would finish. In other words, it was like a Darwinian test of grit. It was more like gladiatorial, last-man-standing and everyone else is dead. The riders were overwhelmingly tough working-class men for whom it was worth taking the pain. And in 1924, there was, in fact, an uprising of the so-called chain gang of laborers of the road, led by the reigning champion, Henri Pélissier, at the time, who essentially engaged in a strike against the organizers. France in the ’20s and ’30s was a hotbed of radical politics. The Communist Party, L’Humanité, you know, protested against the excessive fatigue, suffering, and pain of the riders on the Tour. Riders wanted to be treated as men, not dogs, was the slogan at the time.

Since then, the riders who, you know, were known as pedal workers for a while have settled into a more cooperative mood. It’s more corporate. But the Tour has been regularly used for various types of protest on the Tour. And so you’ll see blockades, efforts to attract global political attention. Exiled Spanish anarcho-syndicalist groups at various points interrupted the tour in the ’70s. So it is a national stage for the French in their national tradition to express various types of protest. Increasingly, though, the sport has come to dominate, and it has taken on a more professional aspect. Even if, as we were saying, the returns are much lower than they would be in something like soccer.

CA: What if we were to look at the event through a technological lens? I imagine over time there have been various technological improvements on the bicycle itself.

AT: The history of the bike is about 200 years old. So the very first ones were produced by German inventor Karl von Drais, which is a sort of like a hobby horse. The 1870s saw the famous high-wheel bikes that most people will have seen photos of, these kind of ludicrous things with giant front wheels and tiny ones at the back. It’s the 1880s that really sees the modern, so-called then safety bike invented, which has two wheels of equal size, pedals, chain driving the back. That’s essentially the structure. And then the diamond shape of the frame, which emerges as the dominant mode in the late 19th century. If you add in [John Boyd] Dunlop’s invention of pneumatic bicycle tires in the late 1880s, 1888, you basically got the frame of a modern bicycle. And those were the kind of bikes which are still ridden all over the world, are still ridden on the race, essentially. So it freezes in shape and then it becomes a mass-produced article very quickly. Along with the sewing machine, the bicycle is one of the first things to be mass-produced, and it’s crucial because it’s light and strong. And so you can do other things like add an internal combustion engine, make a car, which you can’t do if you start with a horse and cart because it’s too heavy, because it’s not built to be light and strong. But a bicycle has to be light and strong, because a human’s got to pedal it. So you add an internal combustion engine, you have a car. And one step further than that is you add wings on an internal combustion engine to a bicycle design, and you have an airplane.

So the bicycle, with this combination of the emphasis on extreme light weight, because a human, not a horse, is driving it and you’re not going to use it for pulling, you know, carts initially becomes a key testbed for early 20th-century mobility. It starts with the bike. What you then see is the development of gears. So the derailleur gear, the classic arrangement, that nice little flow of little cogs that you see at the back, and then the three or four big cogs that the chain can move over, that is the derailleur design. It’s introduced between 1900 and 1910. But the cruelty of the Tour is that in bike racing through to the interwar period, you weren’t allowed to use more than generally only two gears. So when you do mountain stages essentially with only two gears, it’s torture. Anyone who’s ever tried to ride a bike uphill knows that it’s just agony unless you can shift down. And the more gears you have, the more you’re able to actually deal. Mountain bikes would be unthinkable without 10, 15 gears that people have taken for granted today. So that gearing was introduced in general bicycles in the early 20th century and postponed deliberately into the later century to raise the challenge.

And the same is true for bicycles today. There have been huge innovations above all in frame weight recently. They could make them featherlight, less than a kilo, if you use the titanium carbon fiber. But the Tour de France actually sets a minimum frame weight, and they add weights to the bicycles to bring them up to that weight nowadays. So if technology was allowed, they could be even lighter. The final stage of intervention now has been the derailleur gears, which are electronically operated rather than being operated by wire. So most of us will be familiar with a wire gear, which runs from a lever around the handlebars or on the frame to the back. On the extreme racing bikes, it’s electronically operated to save weight. It’s just like fly-by-wire with modern airplanes, where there used to be a series of pulleys that go back to the flaps on the airplane. And nowadays, it’s all fly-by-wire, so it’s electronic. So bicycles adopt that kind of technology as well. The latest thing is brakes. And the question is at what point will they move to disc brakes. Because when you’re doing really extreme downhill biking with no holds barred, the brakes overheat. Then they lose their ability to stop the bike. And it’s very dangerous. And so disc braking would be, you know, a further step, but they’re relatively heavy. So the question is how do you combine them. So there has been evolution. But the striking thing about it is that early design got set. And we’ve run with it ever since.