It was a general sports paper that also covered the auto racing which was gaining popularity at the turn of the twentieth century.

L'Auto launched the Tour de France road cycling stage race in 1903 as a circulation booster.

[3] Its editor, Pierre Giffard, believed Dreyfus innocent and said so, leading to acrid disagreement with his conservative main advertisers.

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.

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.

Circulation was sluggish, however, and only a crisis meeting called "to nail Giffard's beak shut", as Desgrange phrased it, came to its rescue.

When the Germans were finally defeated in 1945, the provisional French government forcibly dissolved the paper alongside other publications that printed pro-Nazi propaganda during the occupation.

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.

[citation needed] The death of Émilien Amaury in 1977 led to a six-year legal battle over inheritance between his son and daughter.