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Christopher S. Thompson
racing careers into their own café or cycle shop. Nicknamed “workers of the pedal”
(ouvriers de la pédale), cycle racers were the first unskilled laborers to turn their
physical capital (strength and endurance) into socioeconomic success (fame and
fortune), thereby challenging the bourgeois social hierarchy which was founded
on intellectual and social capital (education and relations).
Not all middle-class observers took such a dim view of the social implications
of the democratizing bicycle. Rejecting its portrayal as a symptom and agent of
social chaos and racial degeneration, 30 they claimed that the new machine offered
at least a partial solution to the ongoing challenge of improving the lot of French
working-class families and thereby reducing class tensions. This inexpensive,
rapid mode of locomotion would decrease expenditures in the family budget,
reinforce family unity, and improve personal hygiene by encouraging showers
after a ride. The bicycle would also allow working-class families to move from
their squalid, inner-city lodgings to less polluted suburbs, far from cabarets
and cafés where the male head of household too often forgot his familial obligations
and succumbed to alcoholism, tuberculosis, gambling, tobacco, and loose
women. 31 The new sport led to “very moral distractions,” 32 allowing French youth
to sublimate their passions and avoid precocious sexual activity while enhancing
their health in the pure air of the outdoors: “is it not better to get intoxicated by
the bicycle, than by tobacco, wine and love?” 33 Cycling fostered courage, prompt
judgment, sobriety, initiative, self-confidence, and persistence; 34 it was “the great
school of our character . . . hygienic not only for our flesh, but also for our
minds.” 35 Such hyperbolic claims suggest that for bourgeois commentators the
stakes were high indeed.
The Citizen-Cyclist: Cycling Clubs and Social Integration
The challenge for middle-class bicycle enthusiasts, social and economic elites, and
government officials was to monitor male, lower-class cyclists and reorient their
energies, too often expended in morally and physically harmful – and therefore
socially dangerous – environments and activities. Their search for a socially safe
framework for lower-class cycling led them to promote and seek to control local
cycling clubs. Their hope that these clubs would play a stabilizing social role raises
a number of questions. Who were the members of these clubs? How did these clubs
operate? What activities did they provide? And were efforts to control the
expanding leisure opportunities of lower-class males successful in this instance?
The first French cycling clubs were founded in the final years of the Second
Empire, but their creation stalled until around 1880. During the next three decades,
however, the increase was spectacular: in 1910, there were 800 cycling clubs with
a total of some 150,000 members. Areas of high concentration of bicycles included
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