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Bicycling, Class, and Politics of Leisure
the exception of the early months of the short-lived Second Republic, the political
regimes and social order of nineteenth-century France prior to 1870.
Ultimately, whether successful or not, these turn-of-the century initiatives to
protect the social order and political regime from the laboring masses and their
bicycles enjoyed a relatively brief window of opportunity. The growing militancy
of French workers, their ideological opposition to the bourgeois order many of
them believed the Republic served, the ongoing shift from traditional manufacturing
to large-scale factory production and the resulting social and geographic
dislocation, all contributed to the explicit politicization of sport along class and
ideological lines: 1905 saw the founding of both the SFIO (the unified French
Socialist Party) and the first militantly working-class French sports clubs; in 1908,
the French Socialist Sports Federation, the Fédération Sportive Athlétique
Socialiste, was created, to be renamed the Fédération Sportive du Travail in
1914. 56 After the war and in the wake of the 1920 Tours Congress of the French
Socialist Party, the French working-class sports movement would suffer from the
same divided and divisive fate as its political parties: Socialist and Communist
sports clubs and federations, tied to international organizations and claiming that
they alone embodied the purity of working-class sport, competed against each
other and against established secular and Catholic sports clubs for working-class
members. This explicitly class-based, ideological polarization of the French sports
scene would make the coexistence of several collective identities, such as those
celebrated in the speeches at Ouchamps in 1902, problematic for working-class
cyclists and create new challenges for French governments and elites in the
interwar period.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Janet Horne, Shanny Peer, Charles Rearick, and Robert Hall for
their comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
Notes
1. Dr Just Lucas-Championnière, La Bicyclette (Paris: Léon Chailly, 1894), p. 46.
2. Ibid., pp. 46–7.
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