What We're Reading
Christopher S. Thompson,
The Tour de France: A Cultural History
 Reviewed
by
Dr. Aaron Prevots
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
With spring here and summer on the horizon, how can former
Lance fans fill the void until cycling's Grand Tours? Christopher
S. Thompson's The
Tour de France: A Cultural History ties
a century of heroic challenges in the world's most famous
bicycle race to themes in the saga of France itself.
Thompson examines the public image of both the riders and
the race, with special emphasis on the socio-political challenges
that informed the Tour's evolution as it twisted and turned
through the twentieth century. His focus is relatively unusual
for a Tour history, in that it combines the indispensable
array of factual basics, mythical exploits and disturbing
scandals with a scholarly perspective on modernity,  national
identity, work ethics, class struggle and gender stereotypes.
Thompson considers how the French project themselves as a
nation – their hopes and fears, their dreams, determination
and stubborn pride – into this monumental annual event,
and in turn how the Tour takes different shapes from year
to year – physically, psychologically, emotionally –
based on national trends and the spirit of each new age.
Thompson's well researched portrait of France's highs and
lows relative to the three-week epic that is the Tour uncovers
particularly well the dramas that have served as its cultural
backdrop. In the years leading up to World War I, for example,
which saw the working classes expanding, new notions of leisure
appearing and the French still living to a great extent in
isolated rural villages, cycling highlighted "competition,
physical exercise, and the adoption of modern technology"
as invigorating paths toward national revival (23). As the
race took hold in the public consciousness and traced its
way along new routes, the choice of sites and the media's
coverage of them made the Tour not only a "preeminent
symbol of France," but also an actual agent of change
to the collective self-image (52). In more recent times, socialist
newspapers still proud of traditions of solidarity have decried
the rise even in cycling of a capitalistic hunger for profits
and a desire to win and gain personal glory at any cost (249).
Through the Tour, Thompson explains, we inevitably see a longstanding
historical narrative evolve and adapt.
Other significant aspects of this Cultural History
include chapters on "Gender and Heroism" and "Work,
Sport, and Drugs in Postwar France." Much as warlike
scenes in American and English sports can surprise the uninitiated,
the Tour's love of impossible suffering very much stands out.
We learn how being driven to the point of exhaustion and beyond
in the Tour reflected a need to celebrate survival against
all odds and to be reassured, on a symbolic level, of true
French dignity and strength. Similarly, Thompson discusses
why only men were permitted to become "convict laborers
of the road" (191), until the creation of a Tour féminin
in 1984 (98). According to Thompson, the Tour's "heroic
ethos" served the specific purpose of "asserting
the timeless nature of conventional gender roles" as
"a conservative counterpoint to fears that increasingly
emancipated and empowered women" were "undermining
social stability as they gained new rights and opportunities"
(97-98). We see how cycling reinforced a French dichotomy
of men being encouraged to suffer in public while
women had to do so in private.
The
Tour de France: A Cultural History is selective
in its scope and not meant for the enthusiast seeking an exhaustive
chronology of race triumphs. Nonetheless, it has received
much praise here in the United States for its convincing originality,
engaging style and rich detail. For those keen on expanding
their sports history bookshelves with the latest must-haves,
it is now available in a second, 2008 edition, updated with
a preface on recent scandals. The classic photo above, which
adorns both covers, is of 1947 Tour winner Jean Robic, in
a kind of pictorial embrace by a French couple that reveals
much about how the Tour's riders are at once popular icons
and to the French "one of their own," to be fêted
warmly like old friends as they boldly, gracefully ride on.
Here's hoping a few Southwestern readers will pick up this
book and, like Thompson discovering cycling during a stay
in Belgium in his youth, have the chance to explore with wide-eyed
interest what makes international pastimes central to country
and self.
What We're Reading
features reviews by members of the Southwestern University
community. Some reviews were previously published in the Library's
annual Summer Reading List.
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