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Patrick Young
tourist traffic in France. 2 The work of this emerging “tourist industry,” as it came
to be called in this period, was essential in widening the appeal of tourism in
France for both French and foreign tourists, and in developing France’s capacity
for receiving ever-larger numbers of those tourists. Equally important, though, and
highly characteristic of this period, was its insistence upon the broader social and
national potential of tourism to function as a progressive, recuperative activity, of
deep value not only economically, but also morally, physically and even, in the
final instance, politically. Consistent with its nationalist and solidarist convictions,
the Touring Club in particular would strive to recast French tourism as a redemptive
experience of the national available to middle-class consumers. The sense of
“place” more commonly registered in the new tourism adduced both to the immediate
agenda of republican nation-building, as well as to the broad need within the
French and international bourgeoisie for always-updated markers of interior
distinction.
Tourism as Regional Preservation
One of the defining ambitions of the new, professedly more modern tourism was
to generate a new breadth of attractions, as opposed to the tried and true resort
areas – the spas and beaches – which had come to define French tourism before
1890. 3 Doing so was consistent with the desire to have tourism represent more
faithfully, and market more successfully, France and “Frenchness,” a desire
harboured most resolutely by the TCF. These aims led the club and its allies deep
into the traditional regions of la France profonde, the lesser known areas of the
country which, while possessing worthy historic, cultural or natural landmarks,
were not yet fully “open” to tourist traffic. It was this “France inconnue” (unknown
France), as they called it, which galvanized the imagination of tourist organizers,
and gave tourist organizing its nationalist élan in these years. Indeed, the Touring
Club rarely even mentioned Paris – perhaps the most important tourist attraction
in the country – let alone devote itself to developing its attractions or capacity for
tourist reception. 4 Nor did it promote the spas or beaches, referring to them only
as attractions within the larger regions it was attempting to constitute. For the TCF
as in tourist representation taken as a whole, the region would come to weigh more
heavily in this period, as a privileged signifier of the authenticity tourism now
offered. 5
Like many in this period, tourist activists fretted over the growing distance they
perceived to be separating an increasingly urban and factious society from the
deepest sources of its national being. Tourism in the newly outfitted French regions
might, they believed, connect individuals to their regions of origin, but stood also
to connect the French more generally to the deeper rural, regional bases of their
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