The 1911 Tour de France was the 9th Tour de France, taking place from 2 to 30 July 1911. It was composed of 15 stages over 5,344 kilometres (3,321 mi), ridden at an average speed of 27.322 km/h. The results were computed by giving each rider points according to his finishing position on each stage, and the rider with the least points at the end of the race won the overall competition. It was a gruelling tour, with the longest stage, 470 km long, taking almost 18 hours for the fastest riders to complete. Out of the 84 riders who started the tour, only 28 completed the race. After the introduction of the Pyrénées in the previous edition, in 1911 the Alps were first visited; for this addition, the 1911 edition has been named the first modern Tour.

Newcomer Paul Duboc won four stages and was close to winning the Tour, but he fell sick mid-way through the race while he was in second place in the general classification. The winner was Gustave Garrigou, who also won two stages.

In 1910, the Tour de France included the Pyrenees mountains for the first time. That was a success, so in 1911 the Tour organisers also included the Alps. The favourite mountain of the Tour organiser Henri Desgrange was the Col de Galibier, about which he wrote "O, col Bayard, O, Tourmalet... next to Galibier you are worthless."

The Tour de France (French pronunciation: [tuʁ də fʁɑ̃s]) is an annual bicycle race held in France and nearby countries. First staged in 1903, the race covers more than 3,600 kilometres (2,200 mi) and lasts three weeks. As the best known and most prestigious of cycling's three "Grand Tours", the Tour de France attracts riders and teams from around the world. The race is broken into day-long segments, called stages. Individual times to finish each stage are aggregated to determine the overall winner at the end of the race. The rider with the lowest aggregate time at the end of each day wears the leader's yellow jersey on the next day of racing. The course changes every year, but the race has always finished in Paris. Since 1975, the climax of the final stage has been along the Champs-Élysées.

The tour typically has 21 days of racing and covers 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi). The shortest Tour was in 1904 at 2,420 kilometres (1,500 mi), the longest in 1926 at 5,745 kilometres (3,570 mi). The three weeks usually include two rest days, sometimes used to transport riders from a finish in one town to the start in another. The race alternates between clockwise and anticlockwise circuits of France. The first anticlockwise circuit was in 1913. The New York Times said the "Tour de France is arguably the most physiologically demanding of athletic events." The effort was compared to "running a marathon several days a week for nearly three weeks", while the total elevation of the climbs was compared to "climbing three Everests."

France (English ⁱ/ˈfræns/ FRANSS or /ˈfrɑːns/ FRAHNSS; French: [fʁɑ̃s] ( listen)), officially the French Republic (French: République française [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone ("The Hexagon") because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km² (4,260,000 sq mi), just behind that of the United States (11,351,000 km² / 4,383,000 sq mi).

Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands.

Félix-Alexandre Guilmant (12 March 1837 – 29 March 1911) was a French organist and composer.

Guilmant was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer. A student of his father, then of the Belgian master Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, he became an organist and teacher in his place of birth.

In 1871 he was appointed to play the organ regularly at la Trinité church in Paris, and this position he held for 30 years. From then on Guilmant followed a career as a virtuoso; he gave concerts in the United States (the first major French organist to tour that country), and in Canada, as well as in Europe, making especially frequent visits to England. His American achievements included a 1904 series of no fewer than 40 recitals on the largest organ in the world, the St. Louis Exposition Organ, now preserved as the nucleus of Philadelphia's Wanamaker Organ.

With his younger colleague André Pirro, Guilmant published a collection of scores, Archives des Maîtres de l'Orgue (archives of the masters of the organ), a compilation of the compositions of numerous pre-1750 French composers. The collection was printed in ten volumes, the first in 1898 and the last (which Guilmant did not live to finalize) in 1914. Guilmant provided a rather similar survey of organ pieces by foreign composers, publishing l'École classique de l'Orgue (classical school of the organ). These anthologies, despite all the musicological developments which have taken place since Guilmant's own time, remain very valuable sources of early music that is often hard to track down elsewhere.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (sometimes spelled Strawinsky or Stravinskii; Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский, transliterated: Igorʹ Fëdorovič Stravinskij; Russian pronunciation: [ˌiɡərʲ ˌfʲjodɐrɐvʲɪtɕ strɐˈvʲinskʲɪj]; 17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian, and later French and American composer, pianist and conductor. He is acknowledged by many as one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.

Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite of Spring, which provoked a riot during its premiere, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His so-called Russian phase was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony). They frequently concealed a vein of intense emotion beneath a surface appearance of detachment or austerity and often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, for example J.S. Bach and Tchaikovsky. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, of instrumentation and of utterance.