French Revolutions

the
night-before’s rain, filling bridges to the tops of their arches and brimming
château moats. I was always awestruck by the procession of imposing castles
glowering out over the fields from almost every hillside — the surprise wasn’t
that there’d been a revolution, but that they’d waited until 1789 to have it.
Nowadays, of course, there’s nothing the French like better than a bit of
high-profile direct action, and over the years the Tour has seen it all. The
second Tour in 1904 was almost the last: as well as the endemic dishonesty of
the competitors, crowd trouble got utterly out of hand. Mobs hid in lonely forests,
assisting their own local favourites by leaping out to batter rival racers with
clubs. Unruly spectators had to be dispersed by firing revolvers in the air,
and that was when they were in a good mood. After a rider from Nîmes was
disqualified for slipstreaming a car as the race approached his home town,
2,000 of his supporters fought a pitched battle with police and Tour officials.
Later stages had to be rerouted after farmers expressed more obscure grievances
by the time-honoured French tradition of blocking the road with machinery and
produce. ‘The Tour is finished,’ proclaimed its founder, Henri Desgrange,
dramatically, ‘driven out of control by blind passion, by violence and filthy
suspicion.’ But however noble this speech, Desgrange was ultimately a
businessman. He had conceived the Tour purely to sell more copies of his sports
daily, L’Auto Vélo , and with circulation up by 300 per cent he quickly
changed his mind.
    Crowds are better behaved these days
— a slightly mad old man punched Eddy Merckx in the stomach as he rode up the
Puy-de-Dôme in 1975, and every year some ass with a compact zoom knocks a rider
off his bike in the quest for a close-up — but for everyone else connected with
the Tour it’s a case of plus ça change. In 1966 riders protested against the
introduction of dope tests by getting off their bikes just after the start of a
stage and chanting ‘Merde!’ in unison for five minutes — not the most
spellbinding exhibit in France’s extensive museum of mob rhetoric, perhaps, but
effective nonetheless: the positive sample that had incited the shit-shouting
was mysteriously mislaid. (One wonders how the triumphant protestors felt after
Simpson’s death in the following Tour.) In 1998 they were at it again, sitting
down in the road to protest about police searching their rooms for drugs. Three
teams abandoned the Tour; the remaining riders tore their race numbers off and
idled at strolling pace to the stage finish.
    In 1968 it was the journalists’ turn,
blocking the road to illustrate their displeasure after the Tour’s boss accused
them of trying to discredit the event, and if you think that’s the sort of
tactical decision you might expect during an argument over whose Pokémon cards
are the shiniest, then what about the photographers, who refused to take any
pictures for a day in 1987 because the corporate guests got their own
hospitality tent and they didn’t.
    Then, of course, there are the
protests from those with no connection to the race at all but who realise the
publicity potential of making a big fuss at the world’s largest sporting event.
Rare is the stage that escapes: tubby Basque separatists in replica kits
pedalling out of the crowd to accompany the leader over a mountain col; student
pranksters lining cones in front of the speeding peloton. In 1985, a group of
protesting shipyard workers made the mistake of standing across the road when
Bernard Hinault was in the lead. Because it was only the Paris-Nice race, he
let them off with a few right hooks. If it had been the Tour, somebody would have
been eaten.
    The most notable example of what I
suppose could be called secondary picketing occurred during the 1982 Tour.
After a four-year campaign to get on the route, the village of Fontaine-au-Piré had been rewarded with a stage finish: the smallest French community ever to
be given this honour. The streets were re-tarmacked, houses painted, changing
rooms built — all paid for by villagers working through the night producing
souvenir banners and T-shirts to be sold across northern France. Over 50,000 brochures were handed out, and on the day a huge crowd thronged the
tiny square in front of a town hall bedecked with the flags of every competing
nation.
    Regrettably, Fontaine-au-Piré had the
misfortune to be 40 kilometres down