Stage 21: Mantes-la-Ville – Paris (132.3k)
We’ve made it! This is the most exciting thing ASO have done in Paris since the 1989 final time trial (it’s honestly insane that they never again repeated that format). Now it isn’t fair to ask whether this stage can be just as memorable, but assuming no neutralisations this should be a fun way to end the race.
Map and profile
Start
ASO’s seemingly never-ending contract with the Yvelines department means that we are once again starting to the west of Paris, this time in Mantes-la-Ville. For a long time, this was a small wine-growing village in the shadow of its larger neighbour Mantes-la-Jolie, until the decline and disappearance of the viticulture in the 19th century. This actually caused a population decline at a time when France was developing rapidly. The main railway line from Paris to Rouen arrived here in 1843, but Mantes-la-Ville remained a village until the establishment of chemical industries in the 1920s. During the Second World War, it was bombed by both the Germans and the Allies. The decades after the war saw its transformation into a banlieue. It has not hosted the Tour before, but was the start and finish of the infamous opening stage of the 2022 stage of Paris-Nice, where Visma went full Gewiss mode on an innocent-looking hill.
(picture by GFreihalter at Wikimedia Commons)
The route
After the champagne has been drunk (or not – I really don’t know if that tradition will survive the route change), it’s time for the stage. I’m also not sure whether we’ll have the habitual slow start or if people actually want to get into the break now. In case of the latter, the first KOM, Côte de Bazemont, is actually relevant.
After heading through the Chevreuse hills and passing by the Versailles Palace, we have the second and final KOM of the run-in, the short and steep Côte du Pavé des Gardes.
Then, it’s on to the traditional final circuit, where the first sign of change is that the finish is no longer as close to Place de la Concorde. On the third and final ‘normal’ lap, we have the intermediate sprint at the top of the Champs-Élysées, as always.
And then, the change that for decades seemed like a pipe dream. We are doing the same side of Montmartre that was introduced by the Olympics last year. The KOM is at the Sacré-Coeur, 200 metres of false flat after the profile below ends, but you get the idea. The approach is different than at the Olympics, which results in four sharp turns in the span of 500 metres right before and in the first metres of the climb, something that should help anyone looking to attack. On the other hand, this is still a 17.7-kilometre circuit with no other difficulties and a lot of wide roads.
Finish
Down the back of Montmartre, looping around the base of the hill, and then a fast trip back to the finish. 6.1 kilometres is really not a lot of time for the sprint teams to organise themselves.
Now I previously said that I wanted to look like I was socially adjusted, but that kind of goes out of the window when you stay up well past midnight to write about the history of Paris on a cycling forum. But so be it. Before I get completely delirious, let’s start this thing.
It was long assumed a settlement had been established on the Île de la Cité in the centuries before Roman conquest, but archaeological findings have cast some doubt on this. In either case, Paris has existed since at least the 1st century BC, when the Romans founded Lutetia on the southern bank of the Seine. Although an important trading centre at the time, it was not yet the most important city in what is now France, as the centre of gravity was located to the south. During the 3rd century, the arrival of invading tribes caused a dramatic decline in Lutetia’s size, with most of what remained of the population fleeing to the Île de la Cité. After this upheaval, the name Lutetia slowly disappeared and gave way to Paris. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire caused renewed chaos, but Paris was spared of the worst of the sackings. Finally, the Franks came to dominate in the late 5th century, and so Gaul became known as Francia and then France. Their ruling Merovingian dynasty chose Paris as their capital in 508 and, in the 7th century, established the tradition of royal burials in Saint-Denis.
In the same century, the Merovingians grew weak, and after a period with declining central authority they were usurped by the Carolingians in 751. They moved the capital to Aachen, and even when the Carolingian Empire was divided into thirds,
West Francia (the direct predecessor of France) was ruled from Laon, not Paris. This caused a period of decline that was exacerbated by Viking raids in the 9th century. After this division, the Carolingians gradually lost all authority, and by the time that the West Francia branch died out in 987, the vast majority of France consisted of de facto independent duchies and counties. They were succeeded by the Capetian dynasty. Paris was one of few places where they initially had authority, and so it became a capital once more. Although the main branch died out in 1328, leading to the Hundred Years’ War, they would continue to rule France through their cadet branches until the monarchy was abolished.
The next centuries were characterised by the slow and difficult reassertion of royal authority over increasingly large parts of France, as well as the development of Paris into the leading city in Europe. Sitting at 20000 inhabitants when the Capets ascended, it reached an estimated 228000 people by 1300, having surpassed Constantinople when the latter was sacked and occupied by the Crusaders just under a century prior. As much as a tenth of the population attended the University of Paris (now known as the Sorbonne), which was founded in the mid-12th century. The Nôtre-Dame also dates back to this period, as well as the reconstructed basilica at Saint-Denis, which was the world’s first fully Gothic church. The city’s good fortunes were interrupted in the mid-14th century, with the near simultaneous arrival of the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War. The darkest days were the initial plague outbreak in 1348-1349 that killed a quarter of the population, although the repeated sieges giving way to English occupation between 1420 and 1436 don’t exactly rank highly on the list of Paris’ best years either.
The city’s recovery was unquestionable, but gradual until the now much more centralised monarchy moved back from the Loire Valley to Paris in 1528 and instigated a dramatic expansion, including the construction of the Louvre. This era also saw Paris definitively established as the cultural capital of Europe, a status which it has retained at least a solid claim on until this day. The city’s hardline Catholicism factored significantly into how the Wars of Religion played out in France, most notably when between 10000 and 30000 Parisian Protestants were slaughtered in a single day in 1572 (the infamous Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre). The next two centuries were somewhat contradictory: France reached what was then the apex of its power in the 17th century, but in Paris, the mortality rate outstripped the birth rate and the city was also replaced by Versailles as the capital. The 18th century, on the other hand, saw mismanagement and overextension bring the monarchy to its knees, while Paris experienced a period of rapid growth. The downside was that urban expansion could not keep up, and the city had been overpopulated even before this latest population surge.
And then, as we all know, everything came to a head. France was almost bankrupt by 1786, which forced Louis XVI into convening the Estates General in 1789. The long-simmering tensions in both Paris and the rest of France boiled over immediately. The king and the First and Second Estates tried to trample the wishes of the Third Estate (i.e. everyone but the nobility and the clergy), which immediately backfired because everyone but most of the nobility and parts of the clergy refused to acquiesce. With the backing of mob action by the Parisian working class, the liberal-dominated dissident factions within the Estates forced the creation of a National Assembly and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. However, the working classes were not represented well in this new system, and little was done to improve their often terrible living conditions. The royal family’s attempt to flee Paris and the shooting of an unarmed crowd by government forces, both in 1791, definitively shattered the 1789 liberal-radical alliance.
And then, as we all know, everything came to a head again. After a number of French provocations, Prussia declared war in mid-1792. This prompted another uprising, deposing the king and (with the aid of new elections) forming a new, radical government. It did not end well. Yes, France wound up beating back the Prussians and conquering Belgium and the Netherlands, but the next two years in Paris were characterised by the radicals murdering first the king, then many moderates, and then each other, interspersed with tens of thousands of civilians – the infamous Reign of Terror. After this regime fell in 1794, radical power was broken, and four years of uneasy rule by the Directory were ended by Napoleon’s coup in 1799. Once he had conquered and then lost everything there was to lose and conquer, France found itself with a Bourbon on the throne once more.
However, the Parisian appetite for revolution soon resurfaced. When Charles X made a stab at re-establishing absolute monarchy, Paris rose up in revolt and deposed them once more in 1830. Disenchantment with his successor, Louis-Philippe of another cadet branch (Orléans), soon grew, and his government had to beat back another uprising as early as 1832. This failed uprising is now more notable for forming the backdrop of Victor Hugo’s famous Les Misérables. Following a severe economic downturn, Louis-Philippe, too, was deposed by an uprising in 1848, directly leading to mostly-failed revolutions in large parts of Europe. The monarchy was now abolished, although democracy proved short-lived after Napoleon’s nephew was elected president, instigated a self-coup and became Emperor Napoleon III. His reign saw the complete overhaul of the urban fabric of Paris by Haussmann, the wide boulevards with which the city now became synonymous built in part to hinder the construction of barricades.
This theory was tested in 1870 and 1871, when France went to war with Prussia once more and was crushed, with a captured Napoleon III abdicating. The Third Republic was proclaimed, but the Prussians kept on marching, besieging Paris and declaring the German Empire in the halls of Versailles. The city was eventually forced to capitulate after entering severe famine conditions. Many Parisians felt betrayed by the new government and revolted once more, with an array of left-wing and far-left factions instigating the Paris Commune. However, they failed to adequately deal with the prospect of military intervention, and the government proved that moderates can be just as extreme as radicals by killing between 10000 and 30000 Parisians, most by execution, in the week where they retook the city. In the meantime, elections had been held, and the pro-Bourbon and pro-Orléans factions (who were now united, as the Bourbon branch was close to extinction) had won a majority. The grandson of Charles V, the would-be Henri V, was offered the crown, but his insistence on restoring the Bourbon flag in particular caused talks to collapse. And so, somehow, the Third Republic became the longest-standing form of French government post-French Revolution, lasting all the way until the Second World War.
The other lasting aspects of Napoleon III’s reign in Paris were the development of industry and the banking sector. The period from there to the First World War, the Belle Époque, saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur, the opening of the metro, the birth of both the worldwide cinema and modern consumerism, and of course the first editions of the Tour. Inequality remained very high, a phenomenon that has persisted to the present day, only with the most disadvantaged pushed out of the city proper (which is the second-most expensive to live in in Europe) and into the banlieues. The municipal borders of Paris itself have not been changed since Napoleon III, and thus the Paris proper of the Belle Époque is not as different from present Paris as it might have been. Industry in the entire urban area remains relatively limited for a city of this size courtesy of that late start, with the city relying instead on services and of course tourism. And of course, it remains one of the world’s most culturally influential cities. In sports, it has hosted three Olympics, is the home of reigning Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain, and is of course central to both tennis and cycling courtesy of Roland Garros and the Tour finishes respectively.
There are obviously far too many famous Parisians to go through here, so I’ll limit myself to cycling. In the early days, it produced two Tour winners (Louis Trousselier in 1905 and Henri Pélissier in 1923), as well as Eugène Christophe, the man who famously lost the 1913 Tour by breaking his fork on the descent of Tourmalet. However, all were to be eclipsed by the late, great Laurent Fignon, surely the only man to have won both the Tour (twice) and the Giro, but be best remembered in both races for an edition he lost. In the Giro, the organisers’ meddling cost him the win in 1984, and what happened in the 1989 Tour goes without saying.
The focal point of the stage (picture by Alessandro Traini at Wikimedia Commons)
What to expect?
The 2023 Vuelta showed that the peloton
can go crazy on the final stage if it really want to, and with this field I expect hard racing so long as they don’t neutralise it. A reduced bunch sprint is possible, but a classics rider winning this one is more likely.
Three in the morning and almost 29000 words. I pushed the limit with this one, but I don’t think I was ever going to go about this in any other way…
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