The Tour de France was born in 1903 from a newspaper split over the Dreyfus Affair

historyThe Public Domain Review1903 · France

The Tour de France was born in 1903 from a newspaper split over the Dreyfus Affair

the gist

The first Tour de France in 1903 grew out of one of France's great political scandals, the Dreyfus Affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, had been convicted of treason in 1894 and was later shown to be innocent, and the dispute divided the nation. It split the cycling magazine L'Vélo, when an anti-Dreyfus faction broke away and founded L'Auto-Vélo, which had to drop its name after a court case and became L'Auto. To rebuild its circulation, L'Auto organised a long cycling race in 1903 that ran over six very long stages, averaging more than 400 km each. Sixty riders started, and the race was a success that boosted the paper's sales and eventually drove L'Vélo into bankruptcy. The winner, Maurice Garin, later was disqualified for cheating in the following year's race.

so what

The Tour's origin shows how a circulation war between newspapers, shaped by a national scandal, produced one of the world's best-known sporting events. It explains why the race was built as a publicity stunt.

fun fact

The first Tour de France had only six stages, far longer than the stages of today's race.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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