The Tour de France, 1903--1998: A chapter of French cultural history

Using tools drawn from history, rhetorical analysis, media studies, and symbolic anthropology, this dissertation analyzes the cultural history of the Tour de France in five chapters, corresponding to five distinct periods, which I call: (1) The Period of Invention (1903--29); (2) The Period of Rejuvenation (1930--39); (3) The Golden Age of the Tour (1947--61); (4) Television and "Stagflation" (1962--82); and (5) France in the European Union and the Global Village (1983--98). For each period, one representative edition of the Tour is examined as a case study (1910, 1930, 1954, 1978, and 1992). Placing these case studies in a larger context and treating chapters as elements of a series sheds new light on some of the major transformations of twentieth-century French culture, as well as certain mechanisms by which these transformations have occurred.;In light of Marc Bloch's celebrated statement that "history is the science of change," a science whose goal is to not only trace change but to shed light on the processes by which change occurs, the Tour de France provides an exceptional object for the study of contemporary French cultural history. The Tour is deeply paradoxical: it both reflects and promotes cultural change while simultaneously helping to reconcile the French to such change. The collective memory that is constructed, cultivated, invested, and celebrated in representations of and discourses about the Tour provides a comforting framework of tradition and continuity within which important shifts such as the advent of new media, technological modernization, the rise of mass advertising, or supranational integration inscribe themselves. In this way, over the course of the twentieth century, the Tour has helped the French come to terms with cultural transformations by reconciling past and present, continuity and change, tradition and modernity, heroism and consumerism, as well as France and the European Union.