Sport in Paris at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century as Shown through Photographs by Jules Beau

Before the First World War, sport was a multi-facetted social phenomenon. On the one hand, the first sports federations were created and started organizing regulated competitions. On the other, sport was at the crossroads of public performance, technological development and bourgeois sociability typical of the end of the nineteenth century. Our aim is to understand the place and forms of sport in society concentrating on the city of Paris. This work focuses on the analysis of several photo reports done by Jules Beau, one of the first sport reporters in France. Following the steps of this man, a Parisian, member of the Touring Club de France and a cycling enthusiast, provides an original perspective - obviously limited by the constraints of a monographic work - on the sports phenomenon between 1894 and 1913, the period during which he carried out this specific activity. The corpus of this study comprises 36 volumes of nearly 6,000 photographs. Even though portraits of cyclists represent a large part of the corpus, this analysis concentrates on the photographic reports made by Jules Beau when covering the sports events offered to the Parisians of the time.