Paris-Roubaix is ​​a free state

It is understood at a glance. It can be understood in an instant in the faces, in the expressions, in the gestures, in the words of the people who arrive up there for the right days, the best ones to enjoy the best that the area has to offer at the most suitable moment: when everything revolves around the bicycles, because nothing is more important than a bicycle that rides over stones. On Sunday 2nd April they embellished Flanders, they gave their people one of the most beautiful and exciting editions of the Tour of Flanders. On Sunday 9th April they will ride along that long sanctuary on pedals which is the Paris-Roubaix.

The Free State of Stones is an institution that exists, albeit in the Neverland fashion of Peter Pan, but much more real.

Stones Free State is a sub-region of two regions in two states. They are a handkerchief of small hills, plains that are not completely flat, rivers, streams, hot, cold, cold and mist, in which for centuries they have willingly killed each other for a long time.

Not in Roubaix, at least not on the front lines. Roubaix has always been in the front lines. Wars need big rivers or big swamps to last a long time. The wars have given the worst to the south and east of Roubaix, on the Somme and on the Moselle.

Yet approaching Roubaix in 1919, along the French countryside that once, and then later, smelled, and will smell again, of Flanders, among rubble and burnt trees, among holes the size of a shell explosion, crosses in the fields, tears of those could not forget, Victor Breyer jotted down in his notebook and then reported in the newspaper L’Auto: “This really is the hell of the North”. The Hell of the North was an acknowledgment of the misery of war. It turned into a banner, something to be proud of. Because it’s something to be proud of when a race turns into hell, it means it will be a show.

The war is still there though, it is elsewhere but it hasn’t disappeared. Not even bicycles, those “holy bicycles which have within them the possibility of saving the world from wickedness, because they tire the heart and free the head”, as Erich Maria Remarque told Radio Télévision Suisse in 1955, have managed to put an end to people to fight. The EU first, the stones later, have at least put that piece of Europe back in order, which now goes on with the usual problems, forgotten in the usual way, but which for a few weeks a year becomes the beating heart of a world who sees that the most beautiful and important place in the world is there and nowhere else.

Blessed bicycles.

“A Fleming always remembers that he is a Fleming, and is always convinced that he is special, and not just on a bicycle. At least I’ve always known Flemings who thought they were special”, André Gide amusedly wrote to Georges Simenon, adding: “There is only one place where this doesn’t happen: in Roubaix, indeed in Roubaix”.

That border is gone. The lions of Flanders flood the roadside of Roubaix, French flags adorn the Tour of Flanders, whoever meets, cheers, shouts allez then ends up drinking Kwaremont or Kronenbourg alike, because the pommes are the same and something to fry together it is certainly there.

In the mineral soul of those who desire stones, look for them, crave them, consider that month and a half of pavé classics, the most beautiful month and a half of the year, know that Flanders and Nord-Pas-de-Calais are the same thing, they speak two different languages, but less and less, but they stop for the same thing: for that extraordinary and unstoppable attraction that is the bicycles dancing on the cobblestones.

“More bikes, more bikes, we need more bikes,” Samuel Beckett hoped. Then when he finished along the Paris-Roubaix route, it was 1973, the day of Eddy Merckx’s last Roubaix, he regretted having said it: “Seeing those runners tossed on stones the size of tables, I had a precise idea of ​​how the passion can evolve into torture”.

More than one runner has said similar things.

Even those who come back every year because they can’t do without it.

Even those who take a week a year to be there, between Flanders and Roubaix, in the free state of stones.