This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The French Open's everyday name, Roland Garros, honors a French aviator who never played competitive tennis. Roland Garros was the first pilot to fly solo across the Mediterranean Sea, in 1913, and he died in aerial combat in 1918, seventy nine days before the Armistice that ended the First World War. When the French Tennis Federation built a new stadium in the Paris suburb of Auteuil in 1928, to host the Davis Cup after France's team, the Four Musketeers, had won the trophy the previous year, a federation official who had served alongside Garros proposed naming the new grounds after his fallen friend, on the condition that the stadium always bear his name.
The stadium's construction in 1928 also marks the year many histories treat as the true founding of the modern French Open, distinct from the French Championships that had existed since 1891. Before 1925 the Championships were closed to anyone who was not a member of a French tennis club, which in practice meant French nationals; the tournament opened to international entrants only in 1925, three years before the move to the stadium that gave the event its lasting name.
The clay surface that now defines the tournament's identity, the slowest of the four majors, was already the standard playing surface in France by the time of the move, but it became a genuinely international talking point only once the world's best players began arriving in numbers after 1925.