Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 French Cycling: Issues and Themes
- 2 The Early Years: Cycling in Search of an Identity, 1869–1891
- 3 Towards Sporting Modernity: Sport as the Driver of Cycling, 1891–1902
- 4 The Belle Epoque and the First World War: Industry, Sport, Utility and Leisure, 1903–1918
- 5 Cycling between the Wars: Sport, Recreation, Ideology, 1919–1939
- 6 From Defeat to the New France: Sport and Society, Cycling and Everyday Life, 1940–1959
- 7 Cycling's Glory Years and their Mediatization, 1960–1980
- 8 Cycling in Transformation: Industry, Recreation, Sport, 1980–2000
- 9 French Cycling in Quest of a New Identity, 2000–2011
- 10 A Sense of Cycling in France
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The Early Years: Cycling in Search of an Identity, 1869–1891
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 French Cycling: Issues and Themes
- 2 The Early Years: Cycling in Search of an Identity, 1869–1891
- 3 Towards Sporting Modernity: Sport as the Driver of Cycling, 1891–1902
- 4 The Belle Epoque and the First World War: Industry, Sport, Utility and Leisure, 1903–1918
- 5 Cycling between the Wars: Sport, Recreation, Ideology, 1919–1939
- 6 From Defeat to the New France: Sport and Society, Cycling and Everyday Life, 1940–1959
- 7 Cycling's Glory Years and their Mediatization, 1960–1980
- 8 Cycling in Transformation: Industry, Recreation, Sport, 1980–2000
- 9 French Cycling in Quest of a New Identity, 2000–2011
- 10 A Sense of Cycling in France
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
France during the 1870s and 1880s was a country undergoing social, political and economic transformation. The end of the Second Empire (1848–70) in ignominious defeat at the hands of Germany in the Franco-Prussian war led to a change of political regime with the institution of the Third Republic in 1871, after the bloody and divisive interlude of the Paris Commune (1870–71). After what Roger Magraw has described as the ‘modernizing dictatorship’ of the Second Empire (1983: 149), the Third Republic continued France's measured move towards modernity, as the economy industrialized and society became increasingly stratified into an industrial working class as well as the traditional rural peasantry, dominated by an increasingly well-educated and prosperous bourgeoisie (Charle, 1991). Between the workers and the upper classes lay a swelling social grouping of clerical and administrative workers, essential for the changing nature of the economy, whose support was courted by the Republic as it gradually established its legitimacy during the 1870s and then flourished in the later decades of the century, and whose growing affluence and cultural assertiveness partly found expression in leisure and sport (Zeldin, 1980: 331–48).
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- Information
- French CyclingA Social and Cultural History, pp. 15 - 43Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012