by Max Leonard
Chapter 7
HOW THE ALPS WERE WON
Or, routes stratégiques to routes touristiques, warrior scientists, and what did two Napoleons and the Blue Devils ever do for us?
The twenty-fourth of July 1950. The Tour is in one of its favourite places, Pau, a rather beautiful hilltop town with grand promenades and gardens looking out towards the distant Pyrenees. It is a rest day and it is hot. Very hot. Each year, this part of south-west France becomes a cauldron as the summer heat, trapped by the mountains, rises and rises until it becomes uncontainable and explodes into violent storms. It is the day before this edition’s first mountain stage, and Tour director Jacques Goddet has been playing with the race format to try to reduce the overall importance of the mountains. Time bonuses awarded to the first rider to pass over the big cols have been reduced from a minute for each one to only 40 seconds (which is still enormous by modern standards – no seconds have been awarded for classified cols for years). In a bigger break with tradition, the Tour is only spending one day in the Pyrenees – a single étape from Pau to Saint Gaudens over the classic cols of Aubisque, Tourmalet and Aspin – before it heads east across the Mediterranean towards the Alps.
Events will conspire against Goddet, however, and the mountains will reassert their importance.
Jean Robic was a curious and rather unloved French rider. He had won the 1947 Tour, the first Tour after the Second World War, yet unspectacularly, never once wearing the yellow jersey on the way to Paris. Physically, he was unprepossessing: he was 5' 3" and 60 kilos, was going prematurely bald and had sticky-out ears. He was a rather obstreperous character and would, it was said, wait in the doorway when he went to restaurants until the whole room was looking at him; and then say, ‘Yes, yes, it’s Robic,’ before parading through to take his seat. ‘He had a face that was speckled like a bitter apple,’ Tour historian Pierre Chany wrote. In 1944 Robic had fallen badly in Paris–Roubaix, after which he habitually wore a helmet, which in those days was virtually unknown among pros. Thanks to this, one of his nicknames was ‘Leather Head’, since contemporary helmets were made out of leather and resembled a bunch of bananas, or several saveloys, draped across the cranium; another, less unkindly one, was Biquet (which means kid, as in kid goat), because he was so good in the mountains. Not only could he climb well, he was famous for taking on heavy, lead-filled bottles before descending, to give him more speed on the downhills.
In 1950 the Tour was contested by riders in national colours, but despite his previous Tour win Robic was not given a spot on the main French team, where the ascendant Louison Bobet, with his matinée idol looks, was the preferred rider. Instead, Robic had to make do with the West regional squad. Grand Tours were much more national in flavour in those days, and there were five French regional teams bulking out the start list, not to mention the first ever official African presence at the Tour, in the shape of Nord-Afrique, which was composed of riders from the French colonies in the Maghreb. It was expected far more than today that the hosts would dominate their national race, but the French were up against it. Both Tours since Robic’s win had been taken by the Italians: first by the pugnacious Gino Bartali in 1948; then in 1949 the peerless Fausto Coppi had overcome intra-team politics to beat Bartali – and everyone else – in the Alps. Both years the best the French could manage was third.
In 1950 Coppi wasn’t riding, but the Italians were again dominating. There were two Italian teams: one comprised of younger or up-and-coming riders, and one of the stars and their water carriers. The latter included Giovanni Corrieri, who had won Stage 5, taking his total Tour de France stage tally to three; Serafino Biagioni, who would win stages and wear yellow the following year; and Fiorenzo Magni, who was in the prime period of a career that would include winning the Giro d’Italia, the Italian National Championships and the Tour of Flanders three times each. And there was Bartali himself. Like Robic, Bartali was never going to win a beauty contest, but physically he was more prepossessing. The son of poor, hardworking Tuscan peasants, he was stocky, with thinning hair and a pugilist’s nose – God’s boxer – and in the Italian public’s mind he was the opposite of the debonair, adulterous Fausto Coppi. In 1950 Bartali was 36 and his best days were behind him (he had won the Tour twice, the Giro overall three times and its mountains jersey seven) but under his captaincy the Italians were imperious. So much so, they had been criticised by other teams and the press for riding unsportingly in a kind of rolling road block – similar, I imagine, to the kind of disciplined high-tempo collective efforts that Team Sky is sometimes criticised for today. Between the two Italian teams they had won five of the 10 stages before the rest day.
Much has been written about that Pyrenean stage from Pau and, like all the best Tour stories, there have doubtless been a few juicy details added and lost along the way. We know that Bartali was riding with Robic and Bobet, and the trio were chasing Kléber Piot, a Frenchman from the Île-de-France–Nord-Est team. Robic had led over the Aubisque but had crashed on the descent, scraping his side and damaging his derailleur, leaving Piot first over the top of the Tourmalet. They were all on the Col d’Aspin, which was mellower than the two preceding climbs and was the final obstacle of the day. Perhaps if there hadn’t been a storm Robic might not have fallen – more than 50 riders did on the slick surfaces – and he wouldn’t have been in a group with Bartali. Perhaps if there had been more than one Pyrenees stage the crowd wouldn’t have been so large. Somewhere on the Aspin the crowd encroaches too far and impedes the riders. Bartali and Robic go down. The atmosphere is highly charged. The spectators believe it is Bartali’s fault that Robic hits the deck. There is a mêlée, in which Bartali is insulted and hit. A knife is flashed. Both riders are quickly up and on their way again, but Robic’s derailleur is now useless. He rides on single speed, losing time, until he finds a teammate to swap bikes with. Bartali is enraged and speeds on to the finish, overhauling Kléber Piot and winning the stage. Firenzo Magni, his young compatriot, takes the yellow jersey. The Italians have won, resoundingly. And Bartali tells his team manager, the old champion Alfredo Binda, that he is not sure he will start in the morning. He is leaving the race in protest.
It’s possible that, in the hysteria, the threat of the knife was overstated. The famous Tour journalist and historian Pierre Chany has been quoted as saying: ‘I saw this spectator, he had a knife in his right hand … and a saucisson in his left.’ But Chany has been known to favour a good story over the truth, and L’Auto, the organising newspaper, which had the best coverage of the race (and, admittedly, a reason to play the incident down), reported in the immediate aftermath that the supposed knife-wielding maniac was a woman. Whatever the truth, it is undeniable the prevailing sentiments were hostile and probably xenophobic. Magni, too, received blows, and that evening displayed a bruised shoulder where he had been hit with a stick. And Bartali had even more serious accusations. Not only did ‘fanatics’, as he called them, threaten to take his bike, ‘on the descent, a non-official car pulled out in front of me and waved me past, the better to, 100 metres further down, squeeze me against a low wall, behind which was a large drop,’ he said. ‘I am a professional racer, a racer who wants to earn his living with his bike, not lose his life because some people think they don’t like our way of racing.
‘I don’t want to continue.’
Binda, too, is eloquent: ‘A man’s life clings to so little when it is threatened. But I will exhort them this evening to start tomorrow. If Gino accepts my prayer, we might dare to hope.’
Overnight, a diplomatic mission from Jacques Goddet does everything it can to convince the Italians to continue. He even offers them a set of grey jerseys to race in, so they are not as conspicuous to angry fans. Magni is understandably reluctant to quit, as that would mean relinquishing his lead of the race, and there are noises among the Cadetti, the junior team, to support him and keep riding, but Binda cannot sanction a split. They will stand and fall together. The Italians withdraw at Saint Gaudens
and the race, which two days later is scheduled to finish at Sanremo on the Ligurian coast in Italy, will be truncated: that stage will stop short of the border, in Menton.
Stopping before the border was a neat solution to a sporting crisis, but zoom out from that afternoon in 1950 and the national rivalries only become more complicated. Menton may then have seemed to Jacques Goddet a safe haven, but seven years earlier it had been under Italian occupation. And a century before that it had been an Italian town through and through; as had Nice, Saint Étienne de Tinée, Bousiéyas – almost all the places I’ve been writing about in this book. Until 1860 they belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled by the House of Savoy, which had its seat in Turin. None of the countryside around Nice was French until Vittorio Emanuele II of the Savoy, during the birth traumas of the Italian nation, gave it to Napoleon III of France.
Confused? Don’t worry. The history of the Alps is confusing, political and often counterintuitive. The Alps are shared between eight countries and are at once a natural barrier between languages and nations, a contested margin in which boundaries are constantly slipping, and a region unto themselves where neighbouring peoples either side of a borderline often have more in common with each other than with their distant capital cities. It may seem now, when escaping on a bike, that these mountains are remote from the world’s concerns, that they are the sole preserve of pleasure-seeking tourists, hikers and cyclists. But for much of Europe’s past they were central to the dramas that have shaped the continent.
Some of these dramas were peaceful – take, as an example, the more than 55,000 mules and their muletiers who facilitated the salt trade, working the Via del Sale between the Mediterranean and the Col de Tende, south-east of the Bonette, conveying the precious commodity up to the Savoy stronghold of Turin. In that case, the mountain roads we now cycle were originally mule tracks that navigated a route between directness and danger from the coast to the big towns in the north. Similarly, other road cols started life as time-honoured short cuts – the quickest way to get you, your donkey and your produce from one valley to the next (and beat your neighbour, who took the road down the valley, to market), even if you did have to battle gravity, bad weather and other hazards. The Col de l’Iseran, for example, which is now the highest paved pass in the Alps, started life as a mule track for cheese producers in the Beaufortain region (who make cheeses including Beaufort itself and also the delightful Reblochon) towards Piemonte. They were also important routes for smugglers and contraband.
A lot of the roads through the mountains, however – most of the ones we now know and love – owe their development to a long history of paranoia, distrust and violence.
The first famous military crossing of the Alps is undoubtedly Hannibal’s, but the mystery of which pass the Carthaginian warrior took on his march towards Rome in 218 BC has puzzled people since ancient times, with heavyweights like Napoleon Bonaparte (who was sometimes called the ‘Modern Hannibal’, as well as ‘the Horse Thief of Berlin, ‘the Nightmare of Europe’ and ‘Old Puss in Boots’ among many less flattering things) and Julius Caesar, both well practised in taking armies over mountains, weighing in with opinions. There are enough clues in accounts contemporary or near contemporary to Hannibal’s life to narrow down the selection. Polybius and Livy, the two main sources, talk of encounters with various barbarian tribes and say that the ascent was gentle but the path down into Italy steep, with a significant rockfall to overcome. There was space enough near the top for 25,000 men and animals to camp for a couple of days and it was high enough for there to be snow in October. It had views over the Po Valley and was three days’ march from Turin. The relatively easy Montgenèvre, Mont Cenis and Little Saint Bernard passes have all at some point been front runners, and two high, difficult cols – Clapier and Traversette, rank outsiders – have lagged behind. However, no physical proof of his passage had ever been found.
In the 1950s a Cambridge engineering student called John Hoyte became interested in the debate; so much so, he borrowed an elephant from Turin zoo and got an expedition together to prove that Hannibal’s feat was actually possible. The elephant was a female, weighing 2.6 tons, and the group tried to name her ‘Hannibella’, but she did not respond to the new name so they had to stick with Jumbo.fn1 Jumbo was a former circus animal, which, John Hoyte told a Stanford University lecture audience in 2007, ‘delighted us. She had a great sense of balance. She could walk on a row of pilings about 18 inches diameter like a cat walks along the top of a wall. She was the right elephant for us.’ Her balance was not good enough, however, for the British Alpine Hannibal Expedition to follow their intended route. They had determined that the Col de Clapier was Hannibal’s most likely passage, but a rockfall on the climb towards it forced them to turn back; instead they crossed the Col du Mont Cenis and, upon successfully invading Susa in Italy, Jumbo ate ‘special elephant cake’ and drank a magnum bottle of Chianti wine.
In 2016, some evidence of where Hannibal did pass finally was found. Digging into a peat bog next to a pond at 2,580 metres, under the 2,947-metre Col de la Traversette, a Canadian research team found clostridia bacteria in ancient animal dung, and a significant amount of churn and disruption to the soil record over the whole site. The dung was carbon-dated to around 200 BC – very close to Hannibal’s time – suggesting that a large number of people and animals walked, rested, ate, drank and, yes, evacuated on that spot around 2,200 years ago. Clostridia microbes are characteristic of the mammalian gut, and horses in particular, and, there is the hope, if that is the right word, that distinctive elephant tapeworm eggs might still survive somewhere in the frosty ground.
It is said that the past is a mirror into which a man may gaze and see only himself. Julius Caesar was a believer in Hannibal crossing the Montgenèvre, but that may be because it was his preferred route when he was going to survey his territories in Gaul. Napoleon Bonaparte thought that Hannibal followed the Isère river valley and therefore crossed the Mont Cenis, and he reportedly carved his name under Hannibal’s when he found it inscribed in the rocks. During his rule, Napoleon would build proper roads over both the Montgenèvre and Mont Cenis. ‘You wish to know Napoleon’s treasures?’ wrote the Comte de Las Cases, his friend and hagiographer. ‘They are immense, it is true, but they are there for all to see: namely, the Simplon and Mont Cenis, the Mont Genevre and Corniche passages that open the Alps to the four points of the compass. These passages surpass in grandeur, art and endeavour all the works of the Romans.’ Bonaparte’s rationale for improving the passes in the early 1800s was to be able to move troops into northern Italy, where France regularly had to oppose the Austrians. The success of the Napoleonic Wars was such that at the height of his empire his influence extended over large parts of Italy, Spain, Germany and into what is now Poland.
Fast-forward 50 years or so and the situation had drastically changed. Napoleon III was the nephew of Napoleon I, and he had started his leadership as an elected president; however, the constitution did not allow for a second term, and it was at that point that he organised a coup d’état and appointed himself emperor. Although the first years of his reign were characterised by censorship and repression, there was also a keen intelligence at work. With Baron Haussmann’s help he reconstructed Paris, making it the city of grand avenues and imposing buildings we know today, but he also undertook civic works in the far-flung regions – in part as a kind of political PR tactic, to foster loyalty to Paris. He began to improve the road networks in the Alps, and built the refuges on the Col d’Izoard and the Col de Vars that are still there to this day, and his relationship with Italy was cordial.
Italy was in a tumultuous transition from diverse city states into the recognisable modern nation. Napoleon III supported Vittorio Emanuele II’s drive towards unification, and in return the territorial settlement the two powers reached seemed generous. In 1860, the County of Nice and what we now know as the Savoie region became French. In return, the French emperor allowed Vittorio Emanuele II
continued possession of some of his favourite hunting grounds in the mountainous Niçois backcountry, and the new border was drawn.fn2 Almost immediately, Napoleon III pledged to make the Col de Restefond route (what we now usually call the Bonette) a route impériale. Nice and the region had been under more or less continuous Savoy control since the 14th century, and the Restefond road would be strategically important, lassoing the remote lands into France and helping guarantee their protection in case of attack.fn3 It too can be filed under canny PR: one of the factors behind the County’s vote to join France was that the Italians had left the peasants of the interior isolated and without much infrastructure. A new road would be a crowd-pleaser.
So far, so consensual. However, as Italy consolidated it became bolder and increasingly irredentist – covetous of lands that were once its own, or that might be considered in some way ‘Italian’. And that left the French with a problem. On top of a problem. In 1870 they suffered a quick and hugely humiliating defeat to the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon III was deposed and the new Third French Republic found itself shorn of its beloved Alsace and Lorraine regions in the north-east and also paying heavy reparations to the Germans. One – but by no means the only – failure that had beset the French in the Franco-Prussian War was that the Germans had comprehensively outmanoeuvred them, efficiently moving men, weapons and supplies behind the front line. That meant that in the mid-1870s almost the entire length of France’s eastern flank was a relatively new, undefended border. The Italian part of this stretched from the Mont Blanc massif to Menton on the coast: 1,200 kilometres through 13 separate valleys separated by some of the Alps’s highest mountains.
