In 1903, L'Auto was losing. The French sports newspaper had roughly 20,000 daily readers against a dominant rival, Le Vélo, which had launched earlier and owned the cycling audience. The two papers had split over the Dreyfus Affair — Le Vélo had taken the Dreyfusard position; L'Auto's backers had not — and advertisers had followed Le Vélo out the door. A young L'Auto journalist named Géo Lefèvre, riding home from another race with his editor Henri Desgrange, suggested something no rival could replicate: a race around the entire country. Desgrange took the idea to the paper's financial controller, who approved it, and on January 19, 1903, L'Auto announced what Desgrange called "the greatest cycling trial in the entire world."
It worked. After the first Tour, L'Auto's circulation had tripled. After the second, it reached 130,000. Le Vélo, unable to report on a story it hadn't invented, folded in 1904.
The yellow jersey arrived in 1919 without ceremony. Desgrange needed spectators to identify the race leader from the roadside. He chose the color of his paper. The jersey went to Eugène Christophe, who was leading the race at the time. Christophe didn't want it. Spectators lined the road and called out to him — "Ah, the yellow jersey! Isn't he beautiful, the canary? What are you doing, Madame Cri-Cri" — and, as he later recalled, "that lasted the whole course."
"Ah, the yellow jersey! Isn't he beautiful, the canary?"
— Roadside spectators, Tour de France, 1919, as recalled by Eugène Christophe
He wore it anyway, because Desgrange required it. Then, while leading the race, his front fork broke. He walked his bicycle to a blacksmith's shop in a nearby village and repaired it himself — the rules required no outside assistance — while the field rode past. He lost the yellow jersey. He finished third. He never won the Tour de France. The jersey he didn't want, repaired in a blacksmith's shop, has been worn by Merckx, Hinault, Induráin, and Armstrong, who held it for seven consecutive Tours before each title was stripped. It is now the thing every rider in the peloton is working toward.
Desgrange died in August 1940, a month into the German occupation. Four years later, at the liberation, the French government banned every publication that had kept printing under the occupation. L'Auto was among them. Its assets went to a new paper created to replace it: L'Équipe. L'Équipe still runs the Tour today.