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Patrick Young
8. On Maurras, this classic account is Eugen Weber, Action Français: Royalism and
Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962),
though it gives only passing attention to the regional question. See also Michael Sutton,
Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French
Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); on Barrès, see
Maurice Barrès, Les Déracinés: le roman de l’energie nationale (Paris: Gallimard, 1988);
Ze’ev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le Nationalisme Française (Paris: Editions Comlexes,
1985), pp. 322–36; see also Robert Soucy, Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972); an older account, though one which
nevertheless offers interesting points of comparison between Maurras, Barrès and Sorel, is
in Michael Curtis, Three Against the Republic: Sorel, Barrès and Maurras (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1959). Curtis discusses the protest against centralization on
pp. 155–65.
9. Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials and Folklore in the 1937
World’s Fair (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), p. 62. The FRF directly supported the
tourist organization of these years as “essentially provincialist,” its leader, Jean Charles-
Brun, explicitly lauding the work of the Touring Club and syndicates d’initiative in the
TCF’s Revue Mensuelle (September 1910) as well as in his 1911 Le Régionalisme (Paris:
Bloud, 1911).
10. In all three cases, what had been a rather limited pursuit became, in the Third
Republic, a much more serious and professional endeavor, taking the form of university
chairs, and a wealth of new organizations and societies dedicated to exploring the local
differences against which (or, more accurately, perhaps, upon which) an emerging
republican national identity was being forged. A Société des traditions populaires was
founded in France in 1886, and was followed by other organizations, such as the Société
d’ethnographie nationale et d’art populaire in 1895, and the Renaissance provinciale in
1906, these too mounting exhibitions of popular folkloric artefacts for both specialized and
general audiences. See Peer, France on Display; on the growth of geographic societies in
France, see Dominique Lejeune, Les sociétiés de géographie et l’expansion coloniale au
XIX siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993).
11. See Mona and Jacques Ozuf, “Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: The Little
Red Book of the Republic,” in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), vol. 2, ch. 4.
12. The Musée d’Ethnographie was created in Paris immediately following the Exposition
of 1878, permanently to house the Exposition’s ethnographic displays, and a Salle
de France was added in 1884, specializing in the regional cultures of France, particularly
Brittany. Provincial cultural artefacts, particularly costumes, were an even more significant
presence at the Exhibitions of 1889 and 1900 in Paris, often presented alongside advertisements
for regional products and tourist attractions. Peer, France on Display, pp. 136–7, 139.
On the development of a consumer gaze at the exhibitions, see Thomas Richard, The
Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. ch. 2. On Brittany, which was the focus of a
large share of the effort at folkloric and historic preservations in these years, see Olier
Mordrel, L’Essence de la Bretagne (Guipanas: Kelenn, 1977), and Caroline Ford, Creating
the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
13. Revue Mensuelle du Touring Club de France (September 1910), p. 386.
14. For discussion of the economic bases of regionalism, see Charles-Brun, Le Regionalisme;
William Brustein, The Social Origins of Political Regionalism, France 1849–1981
186