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Bicycling, Bicycling, Class, Class, and and the the Politics Politics of
of
Leisure Leisure in in Belle Belle Epoque Epoque France
France
Christopher S. Thompson
“[The bicycle] is going to revolutionize social relations, that is easy to predict,
although the extent to which it will do so is still impossible to calculate.” 1 This
claim, made in 1894 by Dr Lucas-Championnière, one of cycling’s most fervent
enthusiasts, was an explosive one for French people of all social classes at the turn
of the century, many of whom saw their nation as riven by political, social, and
religious divisions. Under the impact of industrialization and urbanization, and
with the reintroduction of universal male suffrage in the 1870s, the fledgling Third
Republic faced the challenge of peacefully integrating the working classes into a
society shaped by bourgeois norms and values. This “social question” was a
particularly sensitive issue for the new regime, which owed its birth in part to the
massacre of working-class Communards in 1871, itself a discomforting echo of
the Second Republic’s brutal repression of its working-class constituency in June
1848. In addition, republicans faced enemies to the right – Bonapartists, monarchists,
and nationalists – as well as a divisive confrontation with Catholics over the
institutional place of the Church in the Republic.
Many of his compatriots, seeking consensus and social peace, no doubt hoped
that Dr Lucas-Championnière was correct when he claimed that cycling was a
democratic sport that would “bring the nation’s children together in common
aspirations, by making them accomplish common efforts”; 2 others, however,
feared that the democratizing bicycle, far from being an instrument of national
unity and social cohesion, raised the frightening specter of social disruption. These
critics watched in dismay as the falling price of the bicycle in the 1890s made the
new machine accessible to lower-class budgets, effectively challenging the virtual
monopoly that middle- and upper-class practitioners of the new sport had enjoyed
to that point. As lower-class cyclists discovered a world of speed and leisure that
had traditionally belonged to their social betters, their appearance and conduct
often flouted the cycling etiquette formulated by bourgeois experts of the bicycle,
suggesting that new, unregulated forms of popular leisure posed a threat to the
social order. Faced with this appropriation from below of their toy, the bourgeoisie
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