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Patrick Young
the objectives of hygiene and comfort with the need accurately to manifest locality
in their design and operation. 26
Regional Difference, National Unity, Class Distinction
Closer analysis of tourist representation of the regions suggests the degree to which
tourism’s commodifying and nationalizing tendencies were often inseparable in
this period. This is evident, for starters, in tourist texts’ insistence that it was the
great range of landscapes, cultures, and possible experiences one encountered in
the French countryside which made France French, and distinguished it as a
potential destination for tourists. Tourist leaders’ promotion of France as an
attraction always proceeded from the assertion of its great variety – of landscapes,
of cultures, of people – united in a “harmonious ensemble.” 27 “One cannot say it
often enough,” a typical Touring Club article began, “no other country in the world
offers, compressed into so small a space, as many architectural and natural
beauties, as much variety and charm.” 28 France, if more fully outfitted for tourism,
stood to offer anything within its borders that tourists had previously sought
elsewhere. Foreign tourists had traditionally followed established itineraries within
the country, including Paris, the main thermal and beach resorts, and, for some,
the Alps; now they were being invited more to experience “France.” 29
The assertion of a difference which testified ultimately to national unity was a
common trope in representations of French locality and nationhood, stretching
back at least as far as Michelet’s Tableau de la France which emphasized difference
in the genesis (and ultimate transcendence) of French nationhood. 30 The great
profusion of geographic works appearing in the prewar Third Republic commonly
proceeded from this assumption as well, most notably Paul Vidal de la Blache’s
Tableau de la géographie de France, which exhaustively dissected local physiognomies
in its exploration of the (ultimately highly compatible) relationship between
pays and nation. 31 One sees it at work in the regional advocacy of the FRF as well,
in its encouragement of regional representation and identification as a means of
“founding patriotism on tangible realities.” 32 Thus the insistence of one tourist
organizer that it was the “maintenance of local traditions which gives to our regions
their character of originality” and could be replaced by no publicity text, as an
argument for the distinctiveness of the country as a whole; depicting a more varied
France was both good business and good politics. 33
The Regional Picturesque
While tourist organizers would insist upon the seemingly limitless variety of
France’s regions as a defining feature of French national distinctiveness, individual
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