The sociogenesis of professional cycling in France

This chapter explains why professionalism rather than amateurism became the more dominant organisational frame in France. It looks at the wider social class structure that facilitated the development and wider acceptance of professional structures at a time when similar structures were successfully resisted in Britain. Crucially, the pattern of class relations differed with that of Britain. By the late nineteenth century in France, bourgeois groups had risen to the apex of French society, though upper-class groups associated with the nobility still retained considerable social status and power chances - a context not dissimilar to that which occurred in Britain. However, it was the professional, rather than economic, bourgeois which came to form the elite of French society. It was this structure, involving a weakened nobility and a relatively secure professional bourgeois, professionalism never generated the same insecurities as it did in Britain.