Rosabicyclette
Clubs cyclistes en France
The touring Club de France.
The advent of the Touring Club de France in the early 1890s strengthened the position of members (men and women) of cycling clubs more interested in leisure riding of all kinds, and gradually helped to make female cycling more acceptable. Cycling clubs were a key driver of the rise of sports in late nineteenth-century France: as cycling developed initially as a leisure and sporting activity that interested the leisured and moneyed classes, aristocratic and bourgeois clubs were set up, which helped to anchor the pastime socially, as well as contributing to the development of rules and regulations. The developing passion for cycling – frequently referred to at the time as “vélomanie” – and the requirement for sports clubs to be legally set up and approved by the authorities meant that cycling clubs led the way in developing models of organizing such associations. Progressively, the direct regulatory function of clubs over their members and sporting activities was taken over by regional and national federations, and as cycling democratized, clubs became progressively less socially restrictive and more numerous.
"L'entree de Georde de Berdon"
Le Véloce Club
The years from 1867 until the end of the 1880s essentially represent a period during which cycling as a social sporting activity undertaken in company with others was invented. The first French cycling clubs were set up in 1868, when a total of five clubs vélocipédiques were created. The oldest club is deemed to be the Véloce-club de Valence, which sought official approval for its activities in March 1868, closely followed by the Véloce-club de Paris, the Société des vélocipèdes du Tarn, the Parisian Société pratique du vélocipède and the Cercle des vélocipédistes de Carpentras. These five pioneer clubs were followed in 1869 by another 13 whose founding can be dated with reasonable certainty, such as the Véloce-club rouennais and the Véloce-club rennais, but in the early months of 1870, before the disruption to society caused by the Franco-Prussian war, only three clubs seem to have been set up. The war and defeat, the Commune and the change of regime dealt a severe blow to the development of cycling clubs during the 1870s, so much so that although 1868–70 had seen the creation of about 40 clubs in the period 1871–79 only six clubs were founded. Furthermore, the most favorable location, theoretically, for the early founding of a véloce-club would be a major urban centre possessing cycle shops, not distant from other towns or cities interested in cycling, open to new ideas by virtue of history or trade, and possessing a British expatriate community.
Le Veloce Club Montalbanais in 1883
L’Union Vélocipédique de France
New clubs began to flourish again during the early 1880s when some 52 clubs appear to have been in operational existence, and enthusiasm for club cycling continued to grow in the later part of the decade, allowing the first Union Vélocipédique de France (UVF) register of clubs to record 70 adherents. Including with the UVF statistics all the other clubs that must have existed, by the late 1880s France could boast at least a hundred cycling clubs.
‘Une sociabilité sportive une, fraternelle et égalitaire’
Véloce-club bordelaise, 1878
An interesting example of the creation and running of an early cycling club is the Véloce-club bordelais (VCB), founded in Bordeaux in 1878. Although the lifetime of the club was short (1878–92), in its 1880s hey-day it contributed much to the definition of French cycling overall. The club was officially authorized by arrêté préfectoral on 13 December 1878, and – among other achievements – its crowning glory was the creation of the Bordeaux–Paris race, first organized in 1891 and widely recognized today as marking the invention of modern cycle competition. Bordeaux in the latter part of the nineteenth century was a typically ‘open’ port city in terms of cultural influences and the national and social make-up of its population. It was just such cities, with their ‘élite de la bourgeoisie commerçante, le négoce des grands ports’, that were the home of new practices and trends in la vie mondaine. Particularly in this early period, however, it is perhaps fair to say that those who chose to ride bicycles were by definition passionate about the new sport and technology and were therefore more likely than not to be members of a véloce-club. Some categories of cyclist were also, of course, generally excluded from joining clubs, such as those below the age of 18 or women.
The club in nineteenth-century France was an interesting intermediary body between the state and the individual citizen. By bringing together individuals of like passions – political, cultural, or indeed sporting – in associations regulated both by the municipal authorities, the Interior Ministry and their own statutes and regulations, circles and clubs were deemed by the Republican state to exercise a role of democratic education through the creation of social networks based on shared communities of interest and shared rights and responsibilities. Clubs and associations were seen by government as useful in the civic and communal education of citizens: the young Third Republic was keen to encourage interactions between individuals that created bonds and that, moreover, through the working through of club meetings, rules, procedures, elections, admissions and exclusions, provided a school for understanding Republican democracy. Approval of sporting clubs was thus always considered a positive decision, as they combined the civic and democratic education of citizens with another pressing concern of government in the years following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war: the need for healthy, athletic citoyens-soldats capable of helping French armies eventually reconquer the lost territories of Alsace and Lorraine.
Women and ‘sociabilité au masculin’
As is clear from the history of cycling clubs themselves during this period, the place of women within the club system of sociability and citizenship through sport and leisure was far from strong. Not only were women excluded from full citizenship until female suffrage in 1944, but membership of cycling clubs was often denied to them. During 1867–87 women were almost totally absent – at least as ‘full’ members – from cycling clubs, with the exception of the rather aristocratic Véloce-club béarnais in Pau, which accepted women on condition that they avoid involvement in the running of the club and any other non-sporting activities. After the late 1880s evolving social and cultural thinking on the place of women in society, accompanied by technical developments in bicycle design that led experts such as Tissié to revise their objections to female cycling, meant that clubs and their sociability through cycling became slightly more open to women. However, female memberships generally remained inferior in rights and obligations compared with the standard involvement of men or even junior sociétaires (in order to preserve ‘respectability’, women were usually required to be introduced to clubs by husbands, brothers or fathers, and were debarred from taking on administrative roles); and, very few cycling clubs created competitions for female members. However, despite the sociability of cycling during this period being fundamentally male, cycling functioned for women (and for men) as a new practice ostentatiously adopted and allowing new forms of mixing between men and women in a social context facilitated by sport/leisure.
Le Châlet du Véloce Club Béarnais à Pau : Inauguration, juillet 1902