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La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire
any) regime’s claim to legitimacy, and tourist organizers no doubt realized as much
in their insistence that developing tourism was one of the highest forms of national
service and public-spiritedness. The version of France that they coordinated and
presented back to France, and to the world, certainly adduced to this end.
Notes
1. The TCF was modelled on the English Cyclists’ Touring Club, its membership
growing rapidly from 1279 in 1892 to 90,000 in 1900 and 130,000 by 1912, and including
many prominent political, business and professional figures of the Third Republic. Forming
in the 1890s, touring clubs were active in all of the major countries of Europe. Léon
Auscher, Dix ans de Touring Club (Paris, 1900) p. 199; 53/AS/163, letter of M Trappes to
M Ballif, President of TCF.
2. The syndicates d’initiative were local and regional groupings of private individuals
wishing to develop the appeal of their town or region, and its capacity to receive tourists.
Members usually included notable local political-administrative and business figures,
members of prominent local committees and societies and academics, united behind a sort
of civic boosterism.
3. On thermal tourism, see Douglas Mackaman, Leisure Spaces: Bourgeois Culture,
Medicine and the Spa in Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
Armand Wallon, La Vie quotidienne dans les villes d’eaux, 1850–1914 (Paris: Hachette,
1981). On beach tourism, see Gabriel Desert, La Vie quotidienne sur les plages normandes
du Second Empire aux années folles (Paris: Hachette, 1983): Alain Corbin, The Lure of the
Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750–1840, trans Jocelyn Phelps
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).
4. The exception to this was the club’s work surrounding the Great Exhibition, its
development of the environs of Paris for weekend excursions, including those of Parisian
petites bourgeois and workers.
5. Dean MacCannell was the first to suggest modern tourism’s function of providing
access to “the authentic”; Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class
(New York: Schocken, 1989). Perhaps the most striking index of the new prominence of
the region in tourism is the degree to which even the more established spas and beaches
had resort to these representational strategies drawing upon the regional identities of the
areas within which they were situated, in their advertising. Whereas the better known
beaches and spas had previously, in effect, sold themselves, on the basis of their mondanité,
or their existing reputation, they too were now finding it wise to submit to an urban
framework of representation, and to trade in local stereotypes, as a way of selling tourism
as a broader experience of connection.
6. La publicité des Syndicats d’Initiative de France. Conférence faite à Nancy par M.
Vergné (Paris, 1908).
7. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
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