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Bicycling, Class, and Politics of Leisure
In his speech the president of the Véloce-Club de Tours extolled the values
promoted by the sport of cycling and personified by the old artisan Galloux: “We
shall always be happy to have brought, with our respectful friendship, the homage
that was due, first to the family man, to the worker and especially to the persevering
worker, full of endurance and tenacity, whom we saw earlier astride his
respectable wooden horse.” The club president stressed qualities and values that
buttressed the social order: endurance, tenacity, respectability, and family. Père
Galloux, hard-working family man, was clearly a safe example for younger
workers, a counter-model to the disorderly, disrespectful vélocipédard, to the
dissipated, excessively paid working-class cycling champion, and to the militant
working-class activist, all of whom seemed more or less consciously bent on
destroying the political and social status quo. In his conclusion the president
reminded his audience that, beyond their value as a leisure activity, beyond their
educational and moralizing potential, cycling clubs like his had “their noble and
useful side,” a higher, patriotic end, “the preparation of soldiers for the defense of
the fatherland!”
The outing had achieved much. It had offered club members an opportunity for
exercise in the great outdoors among congenial companions, and had reinforced
patriotic sentiment and appreciation for French history (including that of the
bicycle). Perhaps most important, the day-trip had provided its participants with a
sense of belonging to a number of communities: first, their own club; second, the
larger cycling brotherhood which they celebrated in the person of Galloux and
which was officially represented by the UVF delegate; third, a mythical national
community of traditional, unthreatening, and idealized workers, whose tenacity,
perseverance, hard work, and family values were also personified by the old
artisan; fourth, the regional community of neighboring villages and towns that had
cheered the cyclists on during their ride; and fifth, the nation itself, whose army
would soon swell with young, healthy soldiers formed in France’s cycling clubs.
That such excursions might foster and reinforce a number of different but
compatible collective identities was of consequence to French elites seeking to
build social cohesion and national unity.
Conclusion
Such excursions, like the clubs that organized them, were a novel form of leisure
and festivity made possible by the increasing accessibility of the bicycle to pettybourgeois
and working-class pocketbooks. Organized leisure was no longer the
exclusive preserve of the French middle and upper classes: the visible, public
assertion by lower-class male cyclists of their right to leisure was part of a larger
transformation underway in fin-de-siècle France. This transformation, facilitated
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