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NOTE: The edge of this card is slightly trimmed.
A wooden grandstand trimmed with small bunting flags rises above a crowd dressed for an occasion, women in wide plumed hats and high-necked gowns, men in dark suits and boaters, gathered on a staircase and viewing platform built specifically for watching the horses run. The architecture and the fashion together place this firmly in the years just before the First World War, when a day at the races was as much about being seen as about the racing itself.
This scene is consistent with Hippodrome de la Prairie in Caen, a trotting racecourse with roots going back to 1837, when the city's agricultural society first organized racing on the open ground known as the Prairie. The grandstands seen in cards like this one were inaugurated in 1880 and earned a real reputation in their own right. In 1868 the writer Henri Rochefort judged Caen to possess the most beautiful racecourse he knew, a claim that this kind of elegant, carefully dressed crowd seems determined to live up to.
A French racecourse on an ordinary race day rarely made it into the history books, but cards like this one are often the only record left of what that day actually looked like, the hats, the staircase, the crowd pressing in for a better view.
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