This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Women joined the French Championships in 1897, six years after the men's event began in 1891, a shorter gap than either the Australian Championships or the US Championships allowed. For its first three and a half decades the tournament remained closed to anyone who was not a member of a French club, a restriction that meant the championship, however strong its home grown fields, could not claim to crown a genuine world champion.
That changed in 1925, when the French Championships opened to international entrants for the first time, immediately drawing the era's leading foreign players into a field that had previously been a purely domestic affair. The change came the same decade France's own Four Musketeers, Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet and Rene Lacoste, were becoming the dominant force in men's tennis worldwide, and the newly international French Championships gave Parisian crowds a stage to watch them face the world's other best players rather than only each other.
Like the other three majors, the tournament turned fully professional in 1968 with the start of the Open Era, ending the distinction between amateur and professional entrants that had shaped tennis since the sport's beginnings. The French Open's clay courts, unusually slow and physically demanding compared to grass or hard courts, have since made it the major most associated with long, attritional five set matches, a reputation that predates the Open Era but has only deepened since professional players began entering every year without exception.