At the conclusion of this rapid and necessarily selective overview of cycling and the bicycle in France, it seems sensible to attempt to draw together some tentative general remarks about how this technology of transport and its varied uses can be interpreted to tell us something about French culture and society. Following the framework set out in the Introduction, where we suggested a conceptualization of cycling and the bicycle in France that necessarily had to find appropriate space for the Tour de France while at the same time addressing the wider and deeper complexity of the issues at stake through the themes of leisure, sport, industry, utility, and identity, we shall here briefly revisit these topics. We shall also consider how the chronology of analysis provided in the previous eight chapters fits with the developing story of cycling and the bicycle in French culture and society.

Cycling as leisure, sport, industry, utility

Leisure, in various forms, has been a key theme of the discussions of cycling in the previous chapters. Those who dislike the prominence of the Tour in the mental imagery of French cycling would stress that cycling for most people in France is – albeit against the background of a memorial awareness of the Tour de France – about leisure, recreation and associated forms of sociability. As we have seen in the discussion of cycling during the 1920s and 1930s, the capacity of cycling to afford personal mobility and the opportunity of leisure activities has been a key element of people's relationship with the bicycle. Writing about the Popular Front, Benigno Cacérès suggests rightly that ‘le tandem est resté l'image de 1936. Il a valeur de symbole. Il incarne le passage à la civilisation de loisirs’ (Cacérès, 1981: 33). Although in a future study it might be interesting to unpack a little more the iconicity of the tandem for the Popular Front's ‘invention’ of loisirs, cycling has enduringly been associated with leisure and freedom from constraints imposed by established patterns and modes of transport or by social mores.