Selling the Yellow Jersey
Page 23
and profi t from its interactions with the broader world in the multimedia age.
Brest’s Tour hosts held more realistic expectations for the publicity and
tourism impact of the 2008 race than they had for the race’s previous vis-
its. First, the Brestois left the job of touristic promotion to the Tour orga-
nizers. The Tour had developed a formidable presence on the Internet, and
the event’s Paris organization took the lead in disseminating for host towns
tourist- brochure images and other promotional materials tailored to the In-
ternet age.72 The Tour’s offi cial YouTube site contained promotional videos
for every host town, produced by each city’s chamber of commerce. Brest’s
two- minute piece was set to music and featured aerial shots of the city center and waterfront, videos of healthful tourist activities like biking, sailing, and surfi ng, and short stat- fact graphics trumpeting Brest’s qualities as a business hub, including twelve daily round- trip fl ights to Paris.73 The Tour’s main website also contained English- , German- , Spanish- , and French- language
editions of the Tour de France Tourist Guide ( Guide Touristique du Tour de France), which had been compiled in printed book form and distributed in small numbers between 1947 and 1993, when Elie Wermelinger wrote it. Anyone visiting the Tour’s website could download the 2008 tourist guide, which
contained several thousand words about the cultural, commercial, political,
and sporting history of the city, and lengthy descriptions of major tourist at-
tractions like Océanopolis, one of France’s largest aquariums, and the Vauban
fortifi cations, designed by Louis XIV’s military engineer. The guide also listed traditional Brestois fare like kig ha farz (meat and dumplings), artichokes, and chouchen (honey mead), schedules for annual city festivals like Astropo-lis, a European electronic music festival, and a short bibliography for further reading about Brest’s history. The guide included eight pages of text about
major tourist and cultural destinations to be visited by the Tour on stage one
and located them at kilometer markers along the daily itinerary.74
Television and newspaper coverage of the Tour seemed less important
in 2008 than in the past. Local newspapers gazed past the Tour’s visit to a
more signifi cant tourist event on the horizon, the week- long Brest Mari-
time Festival 2008 ( Les fêtes maritimes de Brest 2008), scheduled to begin the week after the Tour’s departure from Brest. City boosters created the Brest
Maritime Festival, a quadrennial, week- long celebration of all things oce-
anic, in 1992. The 2008 Maritime Festival featured regattas, fi reworks, music, gastronomy, parades of specialty boats from twenty- fi ve countries includ-
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ing faraway Vietnam and Madagascar, fl otillas of military ships, fl yovers by
France’s Super- Étendard carrier strike aircraft, and more than two thousand
watercrafts open for public inspection and tours.75 Brest invested heavily
in the Maritime Festival’s success with the hope that it would become the
port town’s signature summer event and “dispel its caricature as a grey and
rainy city.”76 The city budget included €900,000 per year for preparations
after 2004, in anticipation of welcoming a million visitors during the week-
long celebration. In an article on the upcoming 2008 festivities, the city and
its business owners characterized the Tour de France as a warm- up for the
Maritime Festival, since the race’s passage would generate only an estimated
30,000 – 50,000 visitors.77
Regional television station France 3 Ouest /Iroise broadcast from the fi n-
ish line in Plumelec — 200 kilometers away — during the Grand Départ from
Brest. Second- team camera crews recorded footage in Brest and along the
race route. France 3 Ouest /Iroise’s telecast included no plugs for local touristic amenities. The report featured footage of the peloton crossing the starting line and panning helicopter shots of riders pedaling across the windswept
Pont Albert- Louppe, an eighty- year- old bridge connecting Brest to the Bre-
ton interior. Local Tour hosts seem to have put little effort into fashioning
a unique, Breton- fl avored welcome for the event. In a brief interview, Tour
Director Christian Prudhomme indicated that the Tour’s logistics transpired
just as they had during the event’s last visit in 1974. France 3 Ouest /Iroise’s evening report mentioned that Breton cyclists led the peloton for a brief stint.
The report featured esoteric tidbits of historic- sounding yet inconsequential
information, such as a thirty- second spotlight on the col du Concolohue, a
minor hill on the day’s itinerary, which a knowledgeable spectator described
as a favorite ambush site for seventeenth- century highway brigands.78
Global television coverage of the Grand Départ from Brest exhibited the
same defi ciencies as French television coverage, in terms of its usefulness for promotion. International broadcasters relied on French television’s video
feeds and the Tour’s standardized information packets for their images of
and information about the host towns. In the United States, the Versus net-
work transmitted the same helicopter shots of the peloton crossing the Pont
Albert- Louppe as the French networks. Versus announcers Phil Liggett and
Paul Sherwin read excerpts of the same Tour- prepared, English- language text
about the history of Brest and Brittany’s famous cyclists as appeared in the
tourist guide on the race’s offi cial website.79
After the Second World War, the Brestois forged new economic identi-
ties for themselves that were refl ected in how and why they hosted the Tour
de France. In response to the new economic contexts of the 1950s and of the
t h e t o u r i n t h e p r o v i n c e s
127
1970s, Brittany’s local hosts put aside their insular attitudes to pursue aggressively new commercial opportunities. In 1952 and 1974, one can conclude that
Brest’s organizers failed to achieve their stated goals of developing the tourism industry and transforming Brest into a “locus of economic development” in
the European Community. In 2008, Brest’s hosts had largely abandoned the
view that the Tour represented a crucial publicity tool. Instead, they pinned
their hopes for touristic and business promotion on a proprietary cultural
event, the Brest Maritime Festival. Nevertheless, the lesson drawn from these
stories is that Brest’s view of its relationship to the broader world evolved
signifi cantly. The Brestois zealously pursued the new opportunities that the
Tour offered to participate in the cultural and commercial life of the French
nation and of Europe.
3. Pau and the Tour before the Second World War
Pau was part of the new cohort of Tour host towns courted by race organiz-
ers after the 1929 race. The event visited the city more than 60 times after its fi rst arrival in 1930. The arrival of the Tour in the city coincided with a sea change in the community’s history. The evolution of the leisure and tourism
industry, especially the decline of aristocratic tourism in France during the
interwar years, undermined Pau’s economic structure and threatened its sta-
tus as an elite resort town. As Pau tried to adapt to the age of mass travel and leisure after the Great War, town leaders welcomed the Tour in the hopes that
the event would revive tourism and c
ommerce.
Pau is situated in the foothills of the Pyrenees along the banks of the Gave
River and is a gateway to the mountains and to the Spanish border. In the
modern era, tourism fi gured highly in Pau’s economy and helped defi ne the
town’s identity. By the early twentieth century, Pau enjoyed an international
reputation as a preeminent winter resort and gateway to the numerous spa
towns in the Pyrenees. The town was world famous for its English colony,
a group of several thousand British aristocrats who wintered in Pau every
year. Well- to- do Americans and Spaniards also fl ocked to the city because
of its mild climate; the region around Pau enjoys warm temperatures, dry
air and gentle breezes even during the coldest winter months. After railways
reached the town in 1863, Pau’s economic health depended on the infl ux of
money from foreigners and spa seekers from October to April, when cold,
wet weather dominated most of continental Europe.80 The number of spa
seekers who passed through Pau in the late nineteenth century is diffi cult
to establish, but spa tourism on the national level became big business dur-
ing this period. Offi cial statistics indicated that more than one million for-
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c h a p t e r f i v e
eign tourists visited French spas in 1900, including 100,000 British, 200,000
Americans and 534,000 Spaniards.81
The aristocratic tastes and sensibilities of the English residents shaped
Pau’s social life, culture, and physical appearance. Foreign tourism liter-
ally transformed the architecture of Pau — the number of private, primarily
English- owned villas in downtown Pau grew from ninety in 1866 to 325 in
1893.82 Imported British sports dominated the social calendar. The showcase
event of each winter season was an enormous fox hunt, which the town sub-
sidized and which was staged in the fi elds to the south of Pau. The English
colony established the fi rst golf course in France in Pau in 1856, the fi rst of many around the city, and helped to create and man the nationally renowned
Section Palois rugby club in 1899.83 Foreign tourists even convinced Wilbur
Wright to visit Pau and to establish a fl ying school there in the winter of
1908 – 9, and the city invested more than 70,000 francs to build the school’s
fl iers a special aviation park.84 The press in Great Britain, North America, and New Zealand chronicled Wright’s aeronautical exploits above the Béarnais
capital.
So prominent was the English presence in Pau that one of the French
winter residents wrote, “Pau is not at all a French town, Pau clearly and de-
fi nitively belongs to England.”85 The British winter visitors considered Pau
to be theirs, as well. They appreciated the stark differences between Paris —
“peevish,” “condescending,” “nose in the air”— and Pau, a “visitor’s town,
spread out over its hill in the full blaze of the sun . . . gay and glittering,” with its “silvery light . . . delicate, fl uid, almost incorporeal” and “surprising tropi-cal gardens” featuring “enormous magnolias with leaves shining as though
newly varnished.”86 The Times (London) dubbed Pau “The Restorer, An
Englishman’s Haven,” and declared the town “essentially an English resort”
made famous by the fox hunts imported by England’s winter residents.87
American visitors frequented Pau in increasing numbers after 1900, and
the town became a well- known wintering locale for American high society.
The social pages of the New York Times between 1900 and 1940 are fi lled with hundreds of notices about fashionable New Yorkers spending the winter in
Pau. One social notice indicated that it was impossible for well- heeled Ameri-
cans to remain in Paris for the winter because “Paris is not very gay” come
autumn, since “the watering places have all closed their season, and many
of the leading members of fashionable society are in the country” to attend,
among other events, the fi rst run of Pau hounds.88 The fame of the Pau fox
hunt resonated even as far away as California, where the Los Angeles Times
carried a story on the event’s centenary in 1938. The story lauded Pau’s “sunny and windless climate [and] unparalleled hunting” as well as the town’s dis-
t h e t o u r i n t h e p r o v i n c e s
129
tinction of having the oldest golf course on the Continent.89 The New York
Times also covered the centenary and noted that although British who settled in France after Waterloo had started the fox hunting club and that the Duke
of Wellington was an early member, American Frederic H. Prince of Boston
had served as the master of hounds for a quarter century.90
After the First World War, Pau’s tourist industry entered a recession that
was later exacerbated by the Depression of the 1930s, and talk began of a
municipal “crisis.”91 Between 1927 and 1936, the number of foreign tourists
to France dropped from 2,125,000 to less than 700,000 and the amount of
money spent by foreigners in France dropped from between twelve and fi f-
teen billion francs to less than one billion.92 The recession in Pau’s tourism industry was attributable to the large number of English aristocrats killed dur-
ing the Great War, the dramatic plunge in the wealth of the British aristocracy during and after the confl ict, and the subsequent decline in British “aristo-tourism” to France.93 The Times (London) noted the decline and lamented that Pau’s “hotels seemed deserted” because “people cannot afford the prices
of the fashionable ‘season’ places anymore.”94 Pau’s weakening hotel tax ( taxe de séjour) revenues vis- à- vis those of rival town Biarritz after 1925 highlighted the town’s relative decline as a major travel destination. Biarritz’s hotel tax revenues surpassed Pau’s for the fi rst time in 1930. By 1938, Biarritz took in the sixth- highest amount of hotel tax revenues of any French city, while Pau
ranked sixty- fi rst.95 Even Pau’s world- renowned hunting grounds seemed to
be slumping. One New York Times article lamented that the French stags had become so tame and lazy after the Great War that “hunting was impossible.”
To rejuvenate the sport, the British Colony imported a dozen wild, untamed
deer from northern Britain.96
Amid these struggles, Pau searched for a strategy that would resurrect its
tourism trade. Local leaders had mixed feelings about trying to attract more
tourists from the expanding nonelite clientele, since appealing to middle-
class travelers seemed to confl ict with the aristocratic, cosmopolitan, Anglo-
phile self- image that Pau had embraced before the Great War. One editorial in
the Patriote des Pyrénées, Pau’s largest daily newspaper, lamented the passing of the era when Pau’s visitors were “not mere tourists, but travelers of taste, above all the British, for whom our area was like a second homeland. . . . Unfortunately, those people are part of a disappearing generation.”97 All agreed
that some action was necessary since to do nothing, as one councilor pointed
out, would be to “declare that the Town of Pau freely abandons her status as
a resort and spa town ( station climatique) and that she places herself squarely in the ranks of the mere county seats. . . . We must not forget that Pau is considered to be the capital of the Southwest.”98
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c h a p t e r f i v e
Beginning in the mid- 1920s, Pau’s municipal council consid
ered several ini-
tiatives. The most dramatic measure put into motion was the “Jaussley Plan,”
an urban renewal project that involved the radical redesign and city- funded
reconstruction of downtown Pau. Between the mid- 1920s and 1938, Pau de-
molished an Ursuline convent, scores of private villas, and a bustling farmers’
market. On this blank urban canvas, the city built a “touristic space” in the
center of town that included wide boulevards and promenades, a new, mod-
ern 400- room hotel, a casino, retail shops, and updated, reconfi gured green
spaces.99 Despite the successful completion of the Jaussley Plan, the project did not succeed in bringing back the wealthy clientele of the pre – World War I era.
The town also attempted to attract nonaristocratic visitors and promote
the town in new ways. Pau modernized the business apparatus of the town
by creating a Syndicat d’Initiative (Chamber of Commerce and Tourism) and
a foire- exposition, a commercial carnival meant to draw visitors to the town and publicize local businesses, that would be modeled after those staged by
France’s larger cities.100 Sport played an important role in Pau’s new promo-
tion strategy. The Tour visited Pau for the fi rst time in 1930 and received a
lukewarm reception from the city council because of the high subsidy de-
manded by the race organizers. To convince the municipal council to de-
vote the rather small sum (by Tour standards of the time) of 5,500 francs to
the organization of the event, the head of Pau’s Tour committee reminded
the councilors that the spectacle would attract many foreign journalists, not
just large crowds of locals.101
The intense, carnival- like atmosphere that engulfed Pau on the day of
the Tour’s arrival and the crowd’s incredible excitement astounded reporters
from the Patriote des Pyrénées, the local paper. One journalist marveled that
“the work of the reporter is easy. The spectacle of a Tour fi nish is something so vibrant, so bizarre.” The crowd began gathering along the last kilometer
of the course at seven in the morning, and very quickly the home stretch to