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Christopher S. Thompson
elaborated a discourse of social distinction that contrasted the elegant ideal of the
bicycling gentleman with his uncouth, working-class opposite. By the turn of the
century, how one cycled, that is, one’s behavior, posture, position, and attire on
the bicycle, had become an important social marker.
Meanwhile, the republican regime, anxious to mend its relations with the
increasingly visible, self-confident, and organized lower classes, sought to channel
the latter’s growing interest in cycling into activities and institutions – specifically,
cycling clubs – that would instill in them republican civic values and bourgeois
respectability. Battles over the social meaning and potential of the bicycle in finde-siècle
France were thus intimately linked to class identities, class relationships,
the rise of mass leisure, and a new consumer culture of plentiful and relatively
inexpensive goods symbolized by the bicycle.
There is, of course, considerable scholarship on the social question, class
formation, and class relations in nineteenth-century France. The focus of this
scholarship has been essentially – and for good reason – on illuminating class
identities, experiences, and relations through the dual prism of politics and work.
Leisure – sport, in particular – has, however, until recently been relatively
neglected. Yet for male workers broadly defined and for the young men filling the
growing number of petty white-collar positions in commercial and government
bureaucracies, the development of new leisure opportunities, especially new
sporting activities such as bicycling, represented a significant improvement in their
lives. The fact that these were leisure activities instead of work or politics did not
of course render them politically or socially neutral; on the contrary, such activities
and the organizations they spawned provided a new terrain, at the intersection of
politics, civil society, and consumer culture, for the conceptualizing and playing
out of class identities and relationships during the Belle Epoque. I have addressed
elsewhere the case of female cycling in the Belle Epoque, specifically debates
about the emancipation of bourgeois women by the bicycle; 3 here I shall focus on
the ways in which contemporary perceptions of class and of political and economic
interests both informed and were shaped by the realities and representations of
male bicycling.
The Bourgeois Cavalier Cycliste versus the Working-Class Vélocipédard
Prior to the 1890s the bicycle’s cost made it the virtually exclusive toy of the wellto-do;
even so, bicycling faced elitists who dismissed the new sport because it was
neither noble like fencing and riding, which, they noted, went back to the
Crusades, nor well established like boating, gymnastics, foot races, and hunting. 4
As late as 1894, one defender of the bicycle noted the “disdain and pity,” the “easy
sarcasm” with which “fanatics of the horse of flesh” had until recently viewed the
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