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La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire
contemporary national being. This oeuvre, one leader in French publicity argued
at the Fifth Congress of the syndicat d’initiative, was an “eminently French and
patriotic one”; it was in
bringing together, through more frequent voyages, the natives of our various petit pays
[local areas] that one would teach them better to know and love one another, as well as
better to appreciate the beauty of this so fecund and picturesque soil, and would realize
the moral unity of this prodigiously active, intelligent and enlightened race to which we
have the great fortune to belong. 6
Of course, tourist organizers were hardly alone in their “turn” to the provinces
in these years. “Régionalisme” as such was a neologism of the prewar Third
Republic, encompassing a great variety of new efforts to know, promote, and
defend the regions. Herman Lebovics has explained such efforts as part of the
broader impulse in French politics and culture to locate a “True France.” 7 As
Lebovics demonstrates, the more extreme and expressly political regional advocacy
– for example that of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès – tended to promote
narrow and exclusionary visions of French nationhood, and rejection of the claims
of the universal republic. 8 Yet, regionalism lent itself to a range of inflections,
many informed by the desire consciously to avoid the charged polarities of French
politics. The main organization of regional advocacy in these years, the Fédération
Régionaliste Français (FRF), claimed like the Touring Club to be “above parties
and doctrines” in its advocacy of regional development as a service of ultimately
national ends. 9 The great growth of interest in things regional was broad and
unmistakable in this period, be it in the amateur societies and emerging academic
disciplines of geography, ethnography, and folklore, 10 in new schoolbooks and
popular texts such as Le Tour de la France par deux enfants and Bécassine, 11 or
in the universal and specialized exhibitions which commonly featured regional
artefacts in their spectacular displays. 12
The shared assumption of these efforts of regional advocacy and representation
was that heightened awareness and appreciation of the regions ultimately supported
preeminently national objectives, and tourist outfitting was no different on this
score. Tourism was offered, by its advocates, as a means of preserving local
landscapes, monuments, cultures, even populations, through making them part of
a more clearly defined national patrimoine (patrimony). While many might lament
the disappearing region, leaders of the Touring Club argued, a genuine regional
preservation and even revival of the regions would depend upon the drumming
up of public interest, and the spending of tourist money. 13 In opening up those
regions to both French and international travelers, they believed, tourism provided
the foundations for the potential economic revitalization of the provinces,
guaranteeing them a continued place within a revived French nationhood. Regions
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