Henri Desgrange - L'Auto

L'Auto

France at the end of the 19th century was split over the guilt or innocence of a soldier, Alfred Dreyfus, who had been convicted of selling secrets to the Germans. The leading sports paper, Le Vélo - it sold 80,000 copies a day - mixed sports reporting with news and political comment and stood for Dreyfus's acquittal. Some of the paper's largest advertisers, notably Jules-Albert de Dion and Adolphe Clément the owners of the De Dion-Bouton car factory and the Clément tyre and bicycle works, believed Dreyfus to be guilty. A row between them and the editor, Pierre Giffard, led to the advertisers withdrawing their custom and planning a paper of their own. An alternative version has it that Giffard banished the advertisers.

Albert de Dion and Adolphe Clément found other supporters in those who found Le Vélo's advertising rates too high or those, like Desgrange, who had had his advertising rejected and little interest taken in his track editorially. The same went for the man who became Desgrange's business partner, Victor Goddet, another velodrome director. Desgrange's enthusiasm, his sporting ability, his writing and the press work he had done for Clément persuaded the group to appoint him as editor.

The writer Geoffrey Nicholson said of Desgrange:

"He was outwardly flamboyant, privately cautious and well-connected in the cycle industry. But he was clearly no political die-hard, for as a writer he modelled himself on Émile Zola, who had been the most reviled of all defenders of Dreyfus."

Beyond that, and bringing in Goddet to look after the books and perhaps extend the potential for running cycle races, the industrialists knew nothing about newspapers and asked nothing except that they drive Giffard out of business. Desgrange gave the impression - correctly - that he wasn't a man to welcome consultation, let alone questioning. What Desgrange wanted, went. Only years later did he confess that he and Goddet had sat on a bench outside De Dion's luxurious house in the avénue de la Grande Armée and got themselves into such a state over whether to join his venture that they had to put the decision off to the next day.

The first issue of L'Auto-Vélo appeared on 16 October 1900. It was printed on yellow paper to distinguish itself from the green of Le Vélo but a court case brought by the original paper agreed in January 1902 that the name was too similar and the consortium was ordered to drop "vélo" from the title.

The title was chosen to reflect the enthusiasm at the time for car racing as the sport of the future.