The Tour de France was not held because of World War II because the organisers refused German requests.
After that, some attempts were made by the Germans during the war to have a Tour de France to maintain the sense of normality, but l'Auto, the organising newspaper, refused.
Henri Desgrange, the original race organizer, and Jacques Goddet, his deputy and replacement,[Notes 1] announced plans for a Tour de France in August 1940.
[3] Teams would have been drawn from military units in France, including the British, who would have been organised by a journalist, Bill Mills.
[5][6] Desgrange died in August 1940, and his successor, Jacques Goddet, initially wanted to organise the Tour during the war, arguing that sport should remain neutral.
[7] The German Propaganda Staffel wanted the Tour to be run and offered facilities otherwise denied, in the hope of maintaining a sense of normality.
[6] La France Socialiste, run by Jean Leulliot, Goddet's former colleague at L'Auto, did not have the same reluctance, and organized the race on its own.
Leulliot, who had been manager of the French team that won the Tour in 1937, had become head of sport at La France Socialiste which, despite its name, was a right-wing paper that sympathized with the Germans.
Leulliot assembled sixty-nine riders for the race, the Circuit de France, which ran from 28 September to 4 October 1942.
The Course du Tour de France, L'Équipe's race, was better organised and appealed more to the public because it featured national teams which had been so successful before the war, when French cycling was at a high.
[26] Émile Besson, communist sports writer and a member of the Resistance from 1943 when he was 17, called L'Équipe's victory political.
He pointed to the way he had allowed Resistance workers to print anti-German tracts at his newspaper and called Émilien Amaury in his defence.
[9] It was with Amaury and his paper, Le Parisien Libéré, that Goddet ran La Course du Tour de France.
Albert Bourlon, who won the 14th stage of the 1947 Tour de France, told Jean Bobet that he was convinced that his membership of the Communist Party denied him access to the race afterwards.
Jean Leulliot was tried for his role in organising races under German patronage but he was cleared after fellow journalists, including Goddet, spoke in his favour.