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La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire
and visit a greater variety of sites within a given zone, the better to discern the full
“physiognomy” of a region, now commonly cited as the aim of tourism. 19 Even if
still limited by lacunae in the network of transport and reception, this aim of offering
up a more or less complete experience of region marked a significant departure
from the narrower, villégiature of longer stay in a single station or resort. 20
A similar shift is palpable in tourist literature and publicity, as guidebook series
such as the Guides Joanne, Simons, and Baedeker, and the Manuel du Voyageur
began to devote volumes to individual regions in France, beginning in the 1870s
and 1880s. The Touring Club’s “Sites and Monuments” collection, a comprehensive
thirty-volume set profiling the natural, historic, and cultural attractions of
the country, divided into regional volumes aiming at capturing what was most
distinctive about each of France’s traditional regions. The TCF also led the way in
generating and diffusing maps both regional and national, tailored specifically to
the needs of the tourist, including major routes, train lines and national and
departmental roads, identified, as well as smaller paved roads, bike paths and often
major attractions. Tourist maps were a significant means by which the regions were
rendered more concrete, and the national territory imagined, at a time when public
cartographic knowledge was still very limited. 21 One map of “La France touriste”
offered for purchase from the Touring Club from 1905 onward portrayed the
regional cities, or “capitals,” more prominently than Paris, which is almost lost in
the very decentered representation of the country. The great profusion of such
maps in this period presented the regions as discrete and accessible geographic
entities, and made of tourism a more conscious experience of regional and national
territoriality. 22
Within the regions themselves, the Touring Club and the syndicats labored to
bring into relief the distinctive qualities of each region, the better to present, in
the words of future TCF president Léon Auscher, “an image of being as geographically
and ethnographically homogeneous as possible” and that “picturesque
particularism” which defined each region. 23 To this end, the TCF worked with local
cultural and tourist organizations to preserve and promote regional cultural
manifestations. It agitated, for example, on behalf of regional museums of
conservation, with each to be “a pious asylum for historic memories of the
province . . . to safeguard what remains of its primitive originality, and to
resuscitate what tends to disappear.” 24 Having these museums, it was suggested,
would force each region to make a more thorough inventory of its regional
treasures, which might then serve as the basis for an expanded tourism. Similarly,
the TCF supported efforts to preserve traditional costume and regional cuisine, as
prime identifiers of regional specificity, holding contests for traditional dress, and
encouraging provincial restaurants and hotels to serve traditional local dishes, and
local wines, as against the increasingly standardized haute cuisine of the grands
hôtels. 25 In its campaign to build and renovate provincial hotels, the TCF combined
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