The Discovery of France (51 page)

17

Journey to the Centre of France

T
HE LAST GREAT
geographical discovery made in France was a spectacular end to the age of tourist pioneers. When the Verdon Gorges were revealed to the world in 1906, another age of exploration was already under way, thanks in large part to a miraculous machine which opened up the depopulated countryside and brought life back to roads that had been emptied by the railways.

One night in May 1891, just before dawn, a small group of people had gathered at the top of a hill near Thivars, south-west of Chartres. They had turned their lanterns to the south to warn of their presence and were peering down the long, deserted road. Suddenly, a voice cried, ‘Stand back!’

The British amateur, George Pilkington Mills, was on his way to winning the first Bordeaux–Paris bicycle race. The other two shadows were cyclists who took turns ‘pacing’ the competitors (riding close behind another cyclist reduces wind resistance and increases efficiency by up to a third). The organizers had laid on refreshments and beds at towns along the way, but the riders barely stopped to grab the food and flew on towards the capital. They saw the sun go down over the plains of Poitou and rise over the Forest of Rambouillet. When Mills reached the finishing line at the Porte de Saint-Cloud on the edge
of Paris, he had covered the three-hundred-and-fifty-eight-mile course in twenty-six hours thirty-five minutes – an average speed of 13 1/2 mph.

Inspired by the Bordeaux–Paris, the news editor of
Le Petit Journal
organized an even longer race from Paris to Brest and back again. This time, a French victory was virtually certain since only Frenchmen were allowed to compete. On 6 September 1891, thousands of people were on the streets of Paris at 6 a.m. to watch two hundred and six cyclists rolling along the boulevards towards the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois de Boulogne. Out in the Normandy countryside, villagers had set up tables by the side of the road to have the pleasure of seeing their milk, apples, cider and cakes devoured by hungry cyclists. (This still happens in the modern version of the Paris–Brest–Paris, which is open to all well-prepared amateurs.) Some riders stoked themselves with snuff and champagne; others made do with bread and meat broth.

The favourite was the thirty-four-year-old professional cyclist Charles Terront, riding on state-of-the-art, detachable Michelin tyres. He reached Brest on 7 September at 5 p.m. (Paris time), an hour behind the leader, swallowed a pear and some soup and left five minutes later. At Guingamp, he overtook the leader, who was sleeping at the inn, and recrossed the Breton border at noon the next day. At Mortagne, people from all over the
pays
had come to see the riders pass. When Terront hurtled into town after dark he was greeted with thunderous applause and a firework display, and set off again bedecked with flowers. A few miles down the road, he crashed into a fallen branch. Sobbing with exhaustion, he walked to the nearest blacksmith, who repaired his pedal crank and sent him on his way. At five thirty the following morning, ten thousand people saw Terront in the middle of a flotilla of local cyclists cross the line on the Boulevard Maillot with his arm raised in triumph. He had been riding his Humber bicycle for seventy-one hours thirty-seven minutes, averaging 10 1/2 mph for seven hundred and forty-eight miles. He ate four meals, slept for twenty-six hours and then proved his resilience once again by attending eighteen consecutive banquets held in his honour.

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T
HESE LONG-DISTANCE
exploits were described in Homeric tones by newspaper reporters and are still an inspiration to competitive amateurs, but they give a slightly warped view of common experience. The man who saw George Pilkington Mills flash past on the hill near Thivars was a teacher from Chartres who spent a happy two-week holiday riding sixty-five hilly miles a day (‘a distance one should not exceed if one wishes to see and retain something of the journey’) from his home to the Pyrenees and back through the Auvergne. He cycled over the mighty Col du Tourmalet (6,939 feet) fifteen years before the self-mythologizing Tour de France made such a meal of it in 1910. Hundreds of other men and women had already pedalled happily over the Pyrenees, but the Tour de France has promoted its own epic history so effectively that it is now generally believed that the first person to cross the Tourmalet on a bicycle was the leader in the 1910 Tour de France who reached the summit covered in sweat and dust, and shouted at the organizers, ‘
Assassins!
’

The effect of the bicycle on daily life is now drastically underestimated by many historians, who tend to see it as an instrument of self-inflicted torture. Simple truths have been forgotten. As almost everyone knew a hundred years ago, the secret of riding a bicycle as an adult is to pedal just hard enough to keep the machine upright, then to increase the speed very gradually, but without becoming too breathless to hold a conversation or to hum a tune. In this way, with a regular intake of water and food, an uncompetitive, moderately fit person can cycle up an Alp, with luggage, on a stern but steady gradient engineered for an eighteenth-century mule. Descending is more difficult but statistically much safer, to all concerned, than in a car.

To generations unspoiled by automation, hundred-mile bike rides were quite routine. When the teacher from Chartres set off on his thousand-mile holiday in 1895, boneshakers were already a distant memory. His machine was identical in most respects to the modern bicycle. It had ball-bearings and pneumatic tyres. Many velocipedes were lighter and more reliable than the energy-sapping machines that can be seen on city streets today. There were bicycles that folded up into a suitcase and bicycles that pumped up their own tyres. The derailleur, which made it possible to change gear without removing
the back wheel, was introduced in 1912. Brakes, however, were still in their infancy. Many cyclists recommended tying a heavy branch to the seat-post before beginning a descent, but only ‘in the absence of dust, mud, sudden turns and especially forest guards who may refuse to believe that one has brought one’s own branch from Paris’ (Jean Bertot,
La France en bicyclette: étapes d’un touriste
, 1894).

As soon as second-hand bicycles and cheap imitations of the well-known models became available, millions of people were liberated from their close horizons by a mechanical horse that could be given fresh limbs and reincarnated by the local blacksmith. A boy with a bicycle could leave his
pays
in search of a job or a bride and be back in time for dinner, which is why the bicycle has been credited with increasing the average height of the French population by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations. It was used by farm workers, urban commuters, postmen, village priests, gendarmes and the French army, which, like many other European armies, had several battalions of cycling cavalry.

Before the First World War, at least four million bicycles were owned in France, which represents one bicycle for every ten people: 3,552,000 were declared for tax, but many more ‘feedless horses’ must have been hidden in stables. It was now possible to travel long distances at an invigorating speed, with the sort of panoramic view over the hedgerows previously enjoyed only by travellers perched on the roof of the diligence. Bicycles could be hired in most towns and taken on trains for less than a franc. The railway companies accepted responsibility for any damage. The Touring Club de France, founded in 1890 on the model of the British Cyclists’ Touring Club, had a hundred and ten thousand members by 1911. There were special maps for cyclists, showing steep hills, danger spots, paved and tar-macked sections and separate bicycle paths in towns. In her
European Travel for Women
(1900), Mary Cadwalader Jones recommended the bicycle as a means of discovering France. Her only word of caution concerned the law on keeping to the right: ‘You cannot always be sure: there are right- and left-handed cities and districts, so you must always keep your eyes open if you are bicycling’.

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T
HIS OPENING-UP
of the domestic frontier was beautifully embodied by the greatest bicycle race of all. The Tour de France was devised as a publicity stunt by a journalist, Géo Lefèvre, and his boss, Henri Desgrange, champion cyclist and editor of the sports newspaper
L’Auto
. The first Tour (1903) covered 1,518 miles and was divided into six stages, each lasting more than twenty-four hours: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes, Paris. This was the low-altitude route typically followed by apprentices on their Tour de France: it was perfect for the early Tours, when the stewards’ cars were unable to cope with the mountains. Sixty riders started and twenty-one shattered survivors were welcomed back to Paris by a hundred thousand people.

From the very beginning, the Tour de France was a national celebration, the joyful beating of the bounds that millions of people with no interest in sport still enjoy every summer. For those who followed the Tour in newspapers and saw the murky photographs of mud-spattered heroes on the roads of France, from the black grime of the north to the white dust of the south, the ‘sacred soil’ of France became the setting of an annual adventure story told in the cartoon-epic prose of Henri Desgrange.

As a liberal republican, Desgrange was delighted with the first winner of the Tour de France. Maurice Garin was an Italian by birth. He came from the other side of Mont Blanc in the Aosta Valley. Like thousands of his compatriots, he had left home as a boy and walked all the way to Belgium, where he earned his living as a chimney sweep. Garin had since become a French citizen and settled in Lens in the Pas-de-Calais. ‘The Little Chimney Sweep’ was as much a symbol of national unity as the French-born Algerian Kabyle, Zinédine Zidane, who captained the World Cup-winning national football team in 1998. Attacks on Italian immigrant workers had been increasing. Poor Italians were employed to do the filthy jobs that no one else wanted and were blamed for driving wages down. But the violence had as much to do with xenophobia as with industrial relations. In 1893, fifty Italians were shot and bludgeoned to death by a mob at the salt works in Aigues-Mortes. The murderous man-hunt went on for three days. The perpetrators were arrested, tried and acquitted. In a country that was still divided by the Dreyfus
Affair, national unity seemed a distant dream. Desgrange imagined that his Tour de France would help to heal the wounds and restore national morale. The brawny editorial that he published in
L’Auto
on the first day of the race was almost a peaceful call to arms:

Unfortunately, the Tour was more catalyst than balm. As a Parisian, Desgrange himself was amazed by what he saw in darkest France: wild faces drawn like moths to the checkpoint’s acetylene flares; ‘raucous housewives’ in a suburb of Moulins, ‘who haven’t even the decorum to wear a bonnet’: ‘Just how much further could we be from Paris?’ On the second stage of the 1904 Tour, at three o’clock in the morning, ‘the Little Chimney Sweep’, ‘the Butcher of Sens’ (Lucien Pothier), ‘the Red Devil’ (Giovanni Gerbi) and a rider known only by his real name (Antoine Faure) reached the summit of the Col de la République near the industrial town of Saint-Étienne. A mob was waiting in the forest. Faure, the local boy, was cheered on his way while the others were beaten up. The Italian Gerbi later retired from the race with broken fingers. On the next stage, at Nîmes, a riot broke out because the local favourite, Ferdinand Payan, had been disqualified for riding in the slipstream of a car. All along the route, nails and broken bottles were strewn on the road, drinks were spiked, frames were sawn through and hubs quietly unscrewed at night.

The Tour de France gave millions of people their first true sense of the shape and size of France, but it also proved beyond doubt that the land of a thousand little
pays
was still alive.

*

T
HE
T
OUR
DE
F
RANCE
may have failed to unify the country but it did help to conjure away the feeling that there was nothing left to be discovered. No one could now publish a guide like Charles Delattre’s
Voyages en France
(1842), in which the author wrestled with a bear, fled from Spanish smugglers, was sucked into a bog in the Landes and nearly drowned in the
mascaret
tidal wave on the Dordogne.

None of this was true, but at least, in those days, he could expect to be believed. British tourists were already searching for ‘undiscovered’ places where no other British people would be found. The
Magasin pittoresque
had once bemoaned the ‘wasteland’ that covered much of the country. Now it bemoaned the cultivation of every little corner. Nature was beginning to look like the Forest of Fontainebleau, with its signposts and log-cabin souvenir shops. The road from Bayonne to Biarritz was filled with traffic and the smell of cheap restaurants. Cliff faces all over the Pyrenees were papered with hotel advertisements.

The mountains described in Desgrange’s Tour reports as malevolent giants seemed to be getting lower by the year. A road across the ridge of the Vosges had been completed in 1860. The magnificent Route des Grandes Alpes was opened to civilian traffic before the First World War and made it possible to drive, in summer, all the way from Lake Geneva to Nice. The Côte d’Azur itself was turning into the vast burglar-alarmed suburb that now stretches from Saint-Tropez to the glass-strewn highways of Monaco and into the once-deserted hills where mudslides and the smell of sewage are constant reminders of over-development. Native vegetation was eradicated by Australian mimosa and English shrubs and lawns. A hundred years before, Nice had been a quiet haven for a few travellers waiting for the wind to change before sailing for Genoa. In 1897, Augustus Hare visited Nice and found ‘a great, ugly, modern town, with Parisian shops and a glaring esplanade along the sea’.