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Maillot jaune
accounted with ASO's other sports events for 40 per cent of the group's budget, included paying a television channel to take the race in the USA in the 1990s. Domestic television covers the most important stages of the Tour, such as those in the mountains, from midmorning until early evening. Coverage typically starts with a survey of the day's route, interviews along the road, discussions of the difficulties and tactics ahead, and a 30-minute archive feature. The biggest stages are shown live from start to end, followed by interviews with riders and others and features such an edited version of the stage seen from beside a team manager following and advising riders from his car. Radio covers the race in updates throughout the day, particularly on the national news channel, France-Info, and some stations provide continuous commentary on long wave. The Tour is important for fans in Europe. Millions line the route, some having camped a week to get the best view. The journalist Pierre Chany wrote: The Tour de France appealed from the start not just for the distance and its demands but because it played to a wish for national unity, a call to what Maurice Barrès called the France "of earth and deaths" or what Georges Vigarello called "the image of a France united by its earth." The image had been started by the 1877 travel/school book Le Tour de la
Culture
France par deux enfants. It told of two boys, André and Julien, who "in a thick September fog left the town of Phalsbourg in Lorraine to see France at a time when few people had gone far beyond their nearest town." The book sold six million copies by the time of the first Tour de France, the biggest selling book of 19th century France (other than the Bible). It stimulated a national interest in France, making it "visible and alive", as its preface said. There had already been a car race called the Tour de France but it was the publicity behind the cycling race, and Desgrange's drive to educate and improve the population, that inspired the French to know more of their country. The academic historians Jean-Luc Boeuf and Yves Léonard say most people in France had little idea of the shape of