L'Équipe

L'Auto-Vélo

De Dion on one of his company's early products.

L'Auto and therefore L'Équipe owed its life to a 19th-century French scandal involving soldier Alfred Dreyfus – the Dreyfus affair. With overtones of antisemitism and post-war paranoia, Dreyfus was accused of selling secrets to France's old enemy, the Germans.

As different sides of society insisted he was guilty or innocent – he was eventually cleared but only after rigged trials had banished him to an island prison camp – the split came close to civil war and still has its echoes in modern French society.

France's largest sports paper, Le Vélo, mixed sports coverage with political comment. 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. 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.

L'Auto

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.^[1] The paper began printing comments favourable to the occupying Nazis and so its doors were nailed shut with the return of peace,^[2] like all other papers that had printed under the Germans.

L'Équipe

Maurice Garin (1871–1957), winner of the first Tour de France

In 1940 Jacques Goddet (1905–2000) succeeded Desgrange as editor and nominal organiser of the Tour de France (although he refused German requests to run it during the war, see Tour de France during the Second World War). Jacques Goddet was the son of L'Auto's first financial director, Victor Goddet. Goddet defended his paper's role in a court case brought by the French government but was never wholly cleared in the public mind of being close to the Germans or to the Head of the French State, Philippe Pétain (1856–1951).^[2]

Goddet could point, however, to clandestine printing of Resistance newspapers and pamphlets in the L'Auto print room^[1] and so was allowed to publish a successor paper called L'Équipe. It occupied premises across the road from where L'Auto had been, in a building that had actually been owned by L'Auto, although the original paper's assets had been sequestrated by the state. One condition of publication imposed by the state was that L'Équipe was to use white paper rather than yellow, which was too closely attached to L'Auto.^[1]

The new paper published three times a week from 28 February 1946.^[3] Since 1948 it has been published daily. The paper benefited from the demise of its competitors, L'Élan, and Le Sport. Its coverage of car racing hints at the paper's ancestry by printing the words L'Auto at the head of the page in the gothic print used in the main title of the prewar paper.

L'Équipe is published in tabloid format.^[4]

Émilien Amaury

In 1968 L'Équipe was bought by Émilien Amaury (1909–1977), founder of the Amaury publishing empire. Among L'Équipe's most respected writers have been Pierre Chany (1922–1996), Antoine Blondin (1922–1991) and Gabriel Hanot (1899–1968).

Philippe Amaury – Éditions Philippe Amaury

The death of Émilien Amaury in 1977 led to a six-year legal battle over inheritance between his son and daughter. This was eventually settled amicably with Philippe Amaury owning the dailies while his sister owned magazines such as Marie-France and Point de Vue. Philippe then founded Éditions Philippe Amaury (EPA), which included L'Équipe, Le Parisien and Aujourd'hui. At Philippe's death in 2006, the group passed to his widow, Marie-Odile, and their children.

Evolutionary milestones

• In 1980 L'Équipe began publishing a magazine with its Saturday edition.
• On 31 August 1998, L'Équipe TV was formed.
• In 2005 a Sports et Style supplement was added to the Saturday edition.
• In 2006 L'Équipe Féminine was first published.
• In 2006 L'Équipe bought the monthly, Le Journal du Golf.
• In early 2007 L'Équipe supplemented its main website with L'équipe junior, dedicated to youth.

Discover more about History related topics

Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus

Alfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish ancestry whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most polarizing political dramas in modern French history. The incident has gone down in history as the Dreyfus affair, the reverberations from which were felt throughout Europe. It ultimately ended with Dreyfus's complete exoneration.

Dreyfus affair

Dreyfus affair

The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. L'Affaire Dreyfus has come to symbolise modern injustice in the Francophone world, and it remains one of the most notable examples of a complex miscarriage of justice and antisemitism. The role played by the press and public opinion proved influential in the conflict.

Antisemitism

Antisemitism

Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism.

German Empire

German Empire

The German Empire, also referred to as Imperial Germany, the Second Reich, or simply Germany, was the period of the German Reich from the unification of Germany in 1871 until the November Revolution in 1918, when the German Reich changed its form of government from a monarchy to a republic.

Le Vélo

Le Vélo

Le Vélo was the leading French sports newspaper from its inception on 1 December 1892 until it ceased publication in 1904. Mixing sports reporting with news and political comment, it achieved a circulation of 80,000 copies a day. Its use of sporting events as promotional tools led to the creation of the Paris–Roubaix cycle race in 1896, and the popularisation of the Bordeaux–Paris cycle race during the 1890s.

Henri Desgrange

Henri Desgrange

Henri Desgrange was a French bicycle racer and sports journalist. He set twelve world track cycling records, including the hour record of 35.325 kilometres (21.950 mi) on 11 May 1893. He was the first organiser of the Tour de France.

Géo Lefèvre

Géo Lefèvre

Géo Lefèvre (1877–1961) was a French sports journalist and the originator of the idea for the Tour de France.

Maurice Garin

Maurice Garin

Maurice-François Garin was an Italian then French road bicycle racer best known for winning the inaugural Tour de France in 1903, and for being stripped of his title in the second Tour in 1904 along with eight others, for cheating. He was of Italian origin but adopted French nationality on 21 December 1901.

Jacques Goddet

Jacques Goddet

Jacques Goddet was a French sports journalist and director of the Tour de France road cycling race from 1936 to 1986.

Philippe Pétain

Philippe Pétain

Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Pétain, commonly known as Philippe Pétain or Marshal Pétain, was a French general who attained the position of Marshal of France at the end of World War I, during which he became known as The Lion of Verdun. From 1940 to 1944, during World War II, he served as head of the collaborationist regime of Vichy France. Pétain, who was 84 years old when he became Prime Minister, remains the oldest person to become the head of state of France.

Pierre Chany

Pierre Chany

Pierre Chany was a French cycling journalist. He covered the Tour de France 49 times and was for a long time the main cycling writer for the daily newspaper, L'Équipe.

Antoine Blondin

Antoine Blondin

Antoine Blondin was a French writer.

The biggest-selling issue was that of 13 July 1998, the day after the France national football team won the World Cup. It sold 1,645,907 copies. The second best was published on 3 July 2000, after France won the European Football Championship and the paper sold 1,255,633 copies.

In 2020, the circulation of L'Equipe was 219,032 copies.^[5]

• 1946–1984: Jacques Goddet
• 1984–1993: Jean-Pierre Courcol
• 1993–2002: Paul Roussel
• 2003–2008: Christophe Chenut
• 2008–present: François Morinière

• 1946–1954: Marcel Oger
• 1954–1970: Gaston Meyer
• 1970–1980: Édouard Seidler
• 1980–1987: Robert Parienté
• 1987–1989: Henri Garcia
• 1989–1990: Noel Couëdel
• 1990–1992: Gérard Ernault
• 1993–2003: Jérôme Bureau
• 2003–: Claude Droussent and Michel Dalloni