“The Tour de France is also the return to France”we can hear it almost every year on the airwaves since the race was televised, since 1948. But it’s been a long time since cyclists drew a perimeter around France. In 2025, the Tour will depart from Lille (North) on July 5. The first three stages will take place in the departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais, organizer ASO revealed on Tuesday, October 29.
Otherwise, competitors will cross the Alps, the Pyrenees and the increasingly frequent Massif Central. We have taken all the routes of the Tour since its creation to understand this evolution. Until the 1950s and 1960s, the peloton voluntarily allowed itself to bypass the roads of France, but, from the 1970s onwards, we witnessed the arrival of half stages divided throughout the day and exotic routes that shortened France or passed through (finally) through Corsica. The two departments of the Island of Beauty are the big losers of the tour: they only crossed paths once, in 2013, one hundred and ten years after the first edition. The least traveled department on the continent is Indre (36), which saw the Tour pass for the first time in 1992, and only eleven times in 112 editions, including the eleventh in 2025.
And then there are those who almost always win. Firstly there is Paris – except in 2024, due to the Olympic Games – which has even been a departure city for a long time. It is followed by the departments of the Pyrenees: Hautes-Pyrénées (65), crossed 108 times in 112 editions; the Pyrenees-Atlantiques (64), 106 times; Upper Garonne (31), 104 times. All three are still on the program for the 2025 edition.
The Alpine departments are obviously in the breakaway, but obtain less good results: Savoy (73) has been crossed “only” 99 times; its neighbor Haute-Savoie (74), 89 times; and 86 times for Isère, a department that is home to Alpe d’Huez, as well as the Madeleine and Porte passes.
From the return to France to the return to the Alps and the Pyrenees
These studies show the changes in the Tour route, which goes from a circular race along coasts and borders in a dozen stages to an international Tour de France that starts from our Belgian, Dutch or German neighbors, and not through the Channel the stain.
From 1903 to 1939, the Tour took a grand tour of France. It thus crosses Haute Garonne, Gironde, Charente-Inférieure (which will become Charente-Maritime in 1941) or Bouches-du-Rhône thirty-three times… in thirty-three editions.
Then, after the recovery after the Second World War and until the mid-1950s, the Tour resumed its circular habits through France.
Starting in the 1960s, the field became more “exotic.” This is also the moment when transfers between stages begin to exceed 200 kilometers, and when central France begins to see the peloton pass by with greater regularity.
And then, starting in the 1980s, and even more so starting in 2000, the Tour progressively moved away from the northwest of the country, despite repeated passages through Brittany or Vendée, fertile lands of French cycling. From now on, it is the mountain ranges that are preferred by the organizers: during the 26 editions ranging from 2000 to 2025, the Pyrénées-Atlantiques are crossed 23 times (in 26 editions); Savoy, 25 times; and the Hautes Pyrenees… 26 times.
