Pedaling, braking, or falling: Images of cycling in school reading materials (1880–1960)

Since the end of the nineteenth century, reading textbooks have played an essential role in French schools. Over the course of the twentieth century, the number of «sports» vignettes in these increasingly illustrated books grew steadily. As a result, certain physical activities, such as cycling, are particularly well represented. Analysis of a corpus of over three hundred textbooks, published between 1880 and 1960, shows that the existence of images depicting this bodily practice is not accidental. Indeed, in these educational booklets, texts and illustrations are far from insignificant. Despite their sometimes entertaining nature, they convey to pupils, explicitly or otherwise, knowledge, values, models, standards, morals, and so on. In order to legitimately take their place in these pedagogical works, representations of cycling must conform to certain criteria: they must never interfere with learning, they must constantly show bodily forms that are considered acceptable in the school context, and so on. The aim of this article is therefore to understand the conditions under which cycling practices appear in school reading materials. To do so, we will analyze the constraints on the visualization of the characters’ bicycle movements, and examine the permanence of certain motifs, such as the fall.