L'Équipe: История французской спортивной газеты и создание Тур де Франс

French sports newspaper

L'Équipe (lekip, French for "the team") is a French nationwide daily newspaper devoted to sport, owned by Éditions Philippe Amaury. The paper is noted for coverage of association football, rugby, motorsport, and cycling. Its predecessor, L'Auto, was a general sports paper that also covered auto racing which was gaining popularity at the turn of the twentieth century. L'Auto originated the Tour de France road cycling stage race in 1903 as a circulation booster. The race leader's yellow jersey was instituted in 1919, reflecting the distinctive yellow newsprint on which L'Auto was published. The European Champion Clubs' Cup, the competition that would later be rebranded as the UEFA Champions League, was also the brainchild of a L'Équipe journalist, Gabriel Hanot.

L'Auto traces its origins to Le Vélo, a sports newspaper which began publishing in 1892. In addition to covering cycling, the paper also organized cycling races. Le Vélo took advantage of the Dreyfus affair which boosted the paper's sales. As the scandal evolved, French society and media became increasingly polarized. Divisions within Le Vélo on whether Dreyfus was guilty lead to its dissolution. Le Vélo began to adopt a pro Dreyfus stance and allied with Dreyfusards. Its editor, Pierre Giffard, believed Dreyfus innocent and said so, leading to acrid disagreement with his main advertisers. Among them were the automobile maker the Comte de Dion and the industrialists Adolphe Clément and Édouard Michelin. Frustrated at Giffard's politics, they planned a rival paper, L'Auto Vélo which began publishing in 1900. The editor was a prominent racing cyclist, Henri Desgrange, who had published a book of cycling tactics and training and was working as a publicity writer for Clément. Desgrange was a strong character but lacked confidence, so much doubting the Tour de France founded in his name that he stayed away from the pioneering race in 1903 until it looked like being a success.

Three years after the foundation of L'Auto Vélo in 1900, a court in Paris decided that the title was too close to its main competitor, Giffard's Le Vélo. Thus reference to 'Vélo' was dropped and the new paper became simply L'Auto. It was printed on yellow paper because Giffard used green. Circulation was sluggish, however, and only a crisis meeting called "to nail Giffard's beak shut", as Desgrange phrased it, came to its rescue. Then, on the first floor of the paper's offices in the rue du Faubourg Montmartre in Paris, a 26 year old cycling and rugby writer called Géo Lefèvre suggested a race round France, bigger than any other paper could rival and akin to six day races on the track. The Tour de France proved a success for the newspaper; circulation leapt from 25,000 before the 1903 Tour to 65,000 after it; in 1908 the race boosted circulation past a quarter of a million, and during the 1923 Tour it was selling 500,000 copies a day. The record circulation claimed by Desgrange was 854,000, achieved during the 1933 Tour. Desgrange died in 1940 and ownership passed to a consortium of Germans. The paper began printing comments favourable to the occupying Nazis. When the Germans were finally defeated in 1945, the provisional French government forcibly dissolved the paper alongside other publications that printed pro Nazi propaganda during the occupation.