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La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). Such arguments were especially
convincing when applied to the mountain areas of the country – the Alps, the Pyrénées,
and the Massif Central – whose ample picturesque and athletic attractions seemed to offer
a solution to depopulation and declining economic prospects.
15. TCF Procès-Verbaux, General Assembly (1902), p. 27.
16. La Route (February 21, 1909), p. 82.
17. This plan directly mirrored the outlines of the FRF’s proposed administrative
division of France into discrete regions, each with an urban regional center, serving as an
administrative, economic and cultural pole of attraction for the surrounding area, and as a
seat for vital local institutions, such as regional assemblies, and universities. The idea was
hardly a farfetched one in this period: Auguste Comte, Frédéric Le Play and Georges Vidal
de la Blache were only among the more prominent of those who advocated the scheme,
seeing in it a better reflection of the “natural” divisions of the country. Peer, France on
Display, p. 61.
18. While a more common refrain in the 1890s, this was an attitude still expressed in
the later part of this period as well; Revue Mensuelle du Touring Club de France (March
1907), p. 116.
19. The term is used commonly in this period, but see, for example, Le Pays de France
(1913), p. 15.
20. That Jules Arren would offer his discussion of railway advertising in his 1914 Sa
Majesté la publicité under the chapter heading of “How One Launches a Region,” suggests
the change in the company’s orientation. Jules Arren, Sa Majesté la publicité (Paris, 1914),
p. 115.
21. Eugen Weber makes this point in his chapter “The Hexagon,” in Weber, My France:
Politics, Culture, Myth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1991).
22. Consistent upon this more “territorial” disposition, the Touring Club and many other
tourist and sporting advocates asserted the virtues of tourism on bicycle or on foot (as
opposed to the train), as more engaging of the terrain, connecting hygienic renewal with
the experience of more consciously traversing national territory. This point is made in
greater detail in ch. 7 of my dissertation, “The Body Rested, A Class Revived: Tourism,
Hygiene and Bourgeois Embodiment, 1890–1914”; The Consumer as National Subject:
Bourgeois Tourism in the French Third Republic, 1890–1914 (dissertation, Colombia
University, 1999).
23. Léon Auscher, Urbanisme et Tourisme (Paris, 1919), p. 87.
24. Revue Mensuelle du Touring Club de France (October 1909), p. 455.
25. The Touring Club would begin referring to “tourisme gastronomique” in this period,
though it would develop more fully in the interwar period, as part of the continuing interest
in regional cuisine, and regional cultures more generally. See Revue Mensuelle du Touring
Club de France (April 1910), p. 145, (June 1910), p. 255. Stephen Harp’s forthcoming book
on Michelin, Marketing Michelin: A Cultural History of Twentieth Century France, deals
more extensively with interwar regional tourism and gastronomy. Priscilla Ferguson is also
currently working on regional gastronomy, as part of a larger project on food, taste and
class in modern France.
26. While the small, local auberge was often the target of withering critiques by tourist
organizers – who lamented their failure to adhere to basic standards of hygiene and comfort,
or to be run in line with efficient business practices – neither they nor hotel industry leaders
ever wished fully to replace them. The auberge remained a potent symbol of regional
traditionalism and distinctiveness, and for that reason was a staple of postcard representation
in the fin-de-siècle. The tiny local inn was more grounded in local history, and the local
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