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La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire
representations of the regional in tourism tended to conform to certain dictates of
the picturesque. What united the different regions in their representations was a
shared invocation of “the old France,” of a sort of local and traditional picturesque
which could be readily embodied in specific cultural signifiers. In this formulaic
image, the regional was defined by a “local color, its picturesque quality resulting
from constructions unique to each region, varied costumes, fetes and games of the
past, naively artistic furniture and utensils decorating the houses of the peasants
of la vieille France” (the old France). 34 It was this easily identifiable quality that
tourism had to deliver in its manifestations of the regional. Léon Auscher spoke,
for example, of the need to “create” a local charm through efforts of tourist
outfitting, a charm which could be easily conveyed to tourists. 35 Such charm lay
nascent in every corner of the country: almost any village could be transformed
into an attraction, one tourist writer argued, with the smallest effort of embellissement;
the arranging of flowers throughout the town, for example, could change a
banal village into something outsiders would have an interest in viewing. 36
Thus, tourist organizers proceeded with a more or less clear sense of what
regional life should look like, a sort of “regional picturesque,” as they represented
France for tourism. It was through the medium of this obligatory and familiar
picturesque style that bourgeois consumers from without could gain ready access
to the otherness of the provinces. A writer in the TCF’s Revue Mensuelle invoked,
for example, the essential features of the picturesque rural conglomeration:
pretty villages huddled together at the bottom of a small valley or at the bend of a river,
signalled only by the lovely point of their old steeple; or still more of these graceful little
towns fanning out on a hillside with their old-fashioned houses, their monuments, built
by the different centuries, the work of an entire history, of an entire civilization. We have
vaunted them and stated repeatedly that one searches for charming places and marvels
of art and nature which one can find here, right around oneself. 37
This formula would be reproduced in postcard representations of rural villages,
which usually depicted a set of houses surrounding a church, with trees, mountains,
or cultivated fields providing the framing. 38 One sees it repeatedly in tourist
posters, in the Sites and Monuments collection, and in guidebooks, a more or less
standardized representation of French locality which could easily be called into
service again and again. What is perhaps remarkable is that the Touring Club itself
could so readily admit, in this passage, the formulaic quality of the scene; that it
should do so suggests the degree to which representations of locality were often
not very “local” after all. The clear assumption is that there was something identifiably
French in such a scene, which had to, and did, come through, regardless of
the locality represented.
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