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La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire
appeal of traveling to these areas. One account of a voyage to the Eastern Pyrénées
described the tramontane as the traveler’s “constant companion,” forcing early
departure from certain areas because of its severity. While certainly presented as
an inconvenience, the winds are also made a sort of décor for the courage and
initiative of the Touring Club member, a testimony to the exploratory quality of
his tourism. 48 Equipped with persistence, ingenuity, and often explicit patriotic and
cultural conviction, the traveler comes slowly to penetrate the unknown, to, in
effect, “discover” and report upon these regions of tourism.
The portraying of tourism as an experience of novelty, trial and discovery
certainly suited the ethos of the Touring Club, bonding together its delegates in a
shared identity and sense of nationalist mission. In this the Touring Club member
served as a sort of model for other travelers; most, of course, did not, or could not
travel in the same way, and with the same force of conviction. Nevertheless, this
ethos of the traveler-discoverer did make its way into tourism as a whole,
reconditioning tourist expectations and experiences of the regions. The thrill of
discovering attractions “off the beaten track” was one which, with improvements
in transport, was coming to be available to all tourists. Even if the routes around
the Aude were well traveled, one TCF account suggested, the visitor to the area
still had the chance to join “the avant-garde of tourists who will soon, in response
to the appeal of the local syndicates d’initiative, hasten to the area to see marvels,
which have not yet been rigged, prepared and transformed by the invasion of the
crowd.” 49 While the sites would always shift, and the population of tourists
expand, tourism needed to preserve a sense of discovery at its core, and make it
available to all tourists.
Travel in the countryside was simply impossible without the explorer’s fortitude,
the patriot’s commitment, and the amateur’s taste and judgment. The author of one
account of the Pyrénées in Le Tour de France complained that many people
wanted too simple and immediate an access to tourist attractions, desiring, for
example, a beauty which was “nice, welcoming, mise au point [arranged]”:
We are “feelers,” not volunteers, promeneurs rather than mountaineers, artists and not
conquerors. We seek to feel quickly, at first glance; the sublime is disconcerting to us;
we need it tailor-made for us, adapted to our vision, reduced to pretty and gracious dimensions.
What we want is what is ready at hand, immediate pleasure to satisfy our
indolence, to calm the fleeting appetites of gourmets too quickly satisfied . . . For we have
a great capacity to illusion, an unfathomable, incurable tendency to be dupes. 50
These tendencies were opposed, by the author, to the taste for action and spirit of
initiative which defined the new tourist, or at least the new tourist ideal propagated
most insistently by the Touring Club. It was these qualities, he argued, which one
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