Film recommendations before Paris-Roubaix
The origin of the well-known nickname of the monumental one-day cycling race Paris-Roubaix – “Hell of the North” – is of cultural theoretical significance.
For those who are familiar with the world of road cycling beyond the Tour de France, it may seem obvious that the nickname of a race like Paris-Roubaix is related to the experience of going through hell. Rain, mud, cold, slippery cobblestones, big falls, or in dry weather, choking on dust; how else could this be referred to than some hellish set of experiences that happen to cyclists in the north of France.
But that is not why the term was coined;
this connotation only became dominant when the original began to fade from public consciousness.
The Paris-Roubaix route runs mostly through areas of France that were subject to the bloodiest and most destructive battles of the First World War. Roubaix, once a separate city, now a suburb of Lille, lies in the area where the Germans invaded France. Lille was the first major industrial city to be occupied by the invaders and held for almost the entire duration of the war.
When organizers, cyclists, and journalists set out from Paris after the war to see what the situation was like there, they encountered all the stages of destruction caused by modern mechanized, industrial warfare on their way. The newspapers later reported that someone had put the general shock into words when they said:
This is like hell. This is the hell of the North.
Naturally, as the experience of war became more distant from everyday life, the connection became less and less significant, and what spectators of bicycle races could experience for themselves, that Paris-Roubaix is a hell of a tough race, came to the fore.
But let’s return to the scale of the destruction of World War I, and how we can imagine it with the help of some films.
Recently two highly publicized European films have been made about the historical event, and both, albeit in different ways, are able to visually capture what this region must have looked like during the war and immediately after.
Sam Mendes’ film 1917 follows the almost impossible mission of two (by the end, only one) soldiers as they must carry a message from one British unit to another through no-man’s land (including abandoned German trenches) in order to avoid running into a German trap.
The attack that must be stopped is fictional, but the story is otherwise authentic.
Although the main character, played by George Mackay, travels somewhat further west geographically,
it helps us to imagine the extent of the destruction of the war that had already lasted three years.
There is a long segment when the main character spends the night in a bombed-out town. The sight of the ruins flashing in the light of flares is aesthetically beautiful and uplifting, while the viewer is naturally aware that what he sees is the result of inhumane industrial destruction.
Edward Berger’s film, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s classic with the same title, approaches inhumanity in a different way. Partially because the characters are Germans, and we can follow what happened from their perspective.
This story is set mostly in the last phase of the war, when the Germans are constantly being pushed back. Although there are no specific battles here, the horrors seen are made up of real historical situations.
While we can see the consequences of the destruction in 1917, All Quiet on the Western Front shows the brutal realism of the first battles, involving the first tanks, must have looked like from the inside, from the perspective of the weaker side in terms of military technology.
With the help of these visually very strong film, we can understand how the northern French countryside near the Belgian border could have come to the state that the visiting sportsmen could only describe as hell on Earth.
There is also a very specific connection between the history of the two world wars and Paris-Roubaix.
The armistice that ended the first war was signed in a railway carriage in the Compeigne forest. The same railway carriage served as the place of the French capitulation in 1940.
Compeigne served as start of Paris-Roubaix in 1968 for the first time, but it has only been starting continuously from the historic location since 1977.