Anyone who has followed the debacle that is this year's Tour de France will probably be wondering if anything else can possibly go wrong. Of course all this might seem remote from politics--but not if you've read Georges Vigarello's wonderful essay on the origins of the Tour in Les Lieux de mémoire (it's in the second volume of the English version, Realms of Memory, which I translated a decade ago). Vigarello points out that the Tour was a direct product of the revanchist nationalism that gripped the French between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. The route was designed to trace the outline of the Hexagon, with its truncated northeastern vertex thus recalled to the national imagination. In an era before television and mass tourism, moreover, the vivid descriptions of the various Tour venues and étapes by sporting journalists with the pens of lyrical nature poets helped to arouse national sentiment and patriotic ardor in a mass readership that on the whole had little knowledge of the country beyond the home quartier or terroir. Thus the association that the title of this post would create between the current disaster and La Débâcle, the title of Zola's novel about the 1871 defeat, is not misplaced. There is a direct connection.
Neither was it fortuitous that Sarkozy, a president who is open about his wish to restore France's national self-consciousness, should have sought to associate himself with the Tour, to the point even of appearing in one of the team cars in the early stages, poking his head through the roof, megaphone in hand, to exhort the riders and appeal over their heads to the viewing nation about the wonders of sport, energy, endurance, and speed, all quintessential Sarkozyan values. He timed his entrance well. The disasters had not yet begun to accumulate. Now the Tour has dropped from the presidential rhetoric, and cleaning up the mess is left to sports minister Roselyne Bachelot.