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La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire
comfort, of conveniences of access,” but not so much as to menace the “charm”
and “variation” which had to be preserved as their defining feature. 64 Whether or
not this could be a realistic strategy for development, in either the short or long
term, its importance lay far more in its insistence upon a certain vision of
Frenchness and French modernity, one which exercised both in this period and
beyond it a considerable appeal.
Conclusion
To flesh out fully the implications of tourism’s constructions of regional and
national identity in these years, it is necessary first to return to Lebovics’s discussion
of the “True France” ideology. For this essay has demonstrated how closely these
constructions conformed to the broad outlines of this vision of a “True France,”
as Lebovics characterizes it, advancing promises of retrieving a lost, compromised
or hidden national authenticity through informed travel in the French terroirs.
Lebovics’s argument obliges that one consider these codings critically, as he
locates in them an implicit conservative and exclusionary political agenda. Though
tourist organization proceeded as a work of political disinterestedness, at least
according to its advocates, there is no severing of efforts of preservation and mise
en valeur (tourist outfitting) from the political and social context of the Third
Republic. Whereas the groups and individuals profiled by Lebovics manifested a
“True France” in discourse mainly as a means of drawing clearer, and more
absolute, lines of national membership, tourism aimed instead after realizing a sort
of solidarity which was far more compatible with the republican project. Tourism
did not place nation and pays in opposition: rather, the visualizing of the one
always implied, and rendered more tangible, the other. Within its framework of
commodified representation, tourism concealed the most glaring contradictions of
modernity behind an ethic of reconciliation which was an article of faith for many
in these years. The enthusiasm of tourist organizers was a genuine one: they
thought they had found a way of making French national solidarity real, and
visible.
But tourism’s promises need further unpacking. What, for example, of the class
dimensions of regional representation and consumption in tourism? For tourism
was, above all, a form of middle-class consumption. As both consumption and
“preservation,” tourism assumed a national context for local cultures, with the
latter consolidated as discrete and identifiable objects, viewable from without,
from the modern, national perspective of the mobile middle-class tourist. The work
on regional preservation and development was but one component of a larger
effort to convert the regions into accessible commodities, available to circulating
tourists. It institutionalized and spread the viewing position of metropolitan
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