War Battlefields, tourism and imagination - Site de la revue

War Battlefields, tourism and imagination 

Anne Hertzog 

The model of Lutyen’s Memorial as displayed in a 

showcase at the Thiépval Interpretive Centre which 

opened in 2004 is representative of the mutations 

at work in the promotion of sites of memory of the 

Great War in Picardy: the Memorial, which for 

decades had been a destination for visits and 

pilgrimage, has become the object of displayed and 

explained history through museographical 

mediation. The Thiépval Visitor Centre embodies 

the tourism implementation of a site which draws 

close to 200,000 visitors per year and which, 

according to its initiators, requires some reception 

and interpretation. As a Franco‐British creation set 

on a “British land of memory”, namely the space of 

the Battle of the Somme, it forms part of a process 

of the symbolic reappropriation of a painful 

“shared” past. This “Visitor Centre” is the place of 

expression for a new representation of the tourist 

imaginary linked to spaces of memory of the Great 

War. We shall not tackle this place of expression 

from the point of view of tourist motives and 

experiences (Stone, Sharpley, 2009; Winter, 2011), 

but rather from that of local public actors who 

initiated the tourism implementation. 

War is experienced as a trauma which deeply 

influences the local imaginary; it is therefore 

perceived as a founding milestone of local identity, 

with its imprints converted into tourist spaces. Ever 

since the 1990s, it has thus produced and fuelled a 

regional touristic imaginary based on the war, 

which signifies a turning point in the 

representations of “places of death turned into 

commemorative spaces” (Audoin‐Rouzeau, Becker, 

2009, p. 219) and of “touristic destinations” 

(MacCannell). The creation of the Thiépval 

Interpretive Centre testifies to the invention of a 

“tourism of memory” ‐ see Hobsbawm (Hobsbawm, 

Ranger, 2005) ‐ by the local public actors. Discussing 

the idea of invention may seem surprising while 

places like the “Somme” battlefields have drawn 

thousands of British visitors each year since the 

war. However, the rather recent investment in this 

British “living legend” (Winter J., 1995, p. 129) by 

local public actors on the one hand, and, on the 

other hand, the varying interests aroused by the 

promotion of a warlike past within the “destination‐ 

Picardy” on a local scale show to which extent the 

Via@ ‐ international interdisciplinary review of tourism 

1 

“tourism of memory” is indeed akin to the 

construction of a new tourism category which is 

“imagined” within a specific context. This concept 

thus resorts to various approaches, produces places 

and images and offers a new relationship with the 

past and with territories. 

The present contribution will firstly develop the 

extent to which the war and its imprints gradually 

pervade the local touristic imaginary 

representations, while it is also perceived as a 

collective trauma which has durably marked the 

region and its population. Secondly it will focus on 

the various conceptions of the “tourism of 

memory” as developed by the public actors in 

Picardy: we shall try to show the way in which its 

social meaning, values and functions make it a 

“tourism of the present in search of synchrony with 

the contemporary world” (Urbain, 2003), but also 

somehow a “taboo‐tourism” as intrinsically linked 

to the imaginary of the pilgrimage. This contribution 

will eventually question the way in which spaces of 

conflicts are remodelled both in their symbolic 

meaning but also in their geography by the 

contemporary conceptions of “tourism 

implementation” (MIT, 2005) envisaged as a social 

construction of “desirability” and of an imperative 

of seduction on the part of these places associated 

to violence, death, mourning and sacrifice. 

How has Picardy become a touristic destination ‘of 

memory’ 

The present contribution will firstly develop the 

extent to which the war and its imprints gradually 

pervade the local touristic imaginary 

representations, while it is also perceived as a 

collective trauma which has durably marked the 

region and its population. 

Initiated in the 1990s by local public actors, the 

tourist developments aiming at promoting the 

battlefields have multiplied in Picardy : the 

signposting of tourist trails in the Somme and the 

Aisne, the funding of museums like the Péronne’s 

Historial (1992) or Interpretive Centres such as the 

Caverne du Dragon on the Chemin des Dames 

(1995), the staging of ruins of destroyed villages and 

the installation of works of public art all represent 

the “marks” (MacCannell) of a tourism 

implementation which is integrated into 

n°1 – 2012 ‐ Tourist imaginaries

development and land settlement policies. Hence 

the local public actors – first from Local Councils (at 

department level), then from town councils or from 

“communautés de communes” (several towns 

gathering into a metropolitan council) and more 

recently actors from the Regional Council 1 ‐ invest 

this past, the legacy of which is construed as a 

tourism “potential”, a resource (Pecqueur, 2007) 

perhaps even as a “priority product” 2 . 

However, this touristic imaginary strongly manifests 

itself according to various temporalities and 

spatialities at region level. Whereas the first 

initiatives in the Somme date back to the late 

1970s, only in the 1990s does a “programme for the 

cultural and tourist promotion of the Chemin des 

Dames” start to develop 3 in the department of 

Aisne; as for the department of Oise it remained in 

the background until very recently. Ever since the 

beginning of the 2000s the Regional Council has in 

turn been remarkably active in this regard 4 . It is 

therefore presented in the year 2000 Diagram of 

Tourism as follows: “History, culture and heritage 

are a fundamental resource for the development of 

the tourist industry in Picardy. Its Gothic heritage 

and the fact that it is branded by two world wars as 

well as its industrial tradition may contribute to the 

attractiveness of the region and help Picardy stand 

out from other regions”. 

The process of integrating the war into the regional 

touristic imaginary is based on the geography of 

war traces, itself determined by the extension of 

the battlefront but also by the geography of war 

traces in the process of constructing a heritage. The 

uneven patrimonial and memorial appropriation of 

the tracks is therefore an important factor in the 

contrasting inclusion of the Great War into the 

touristic imaginary at region level. In the 1970s, this 

appropriation was much more visible in the British 

sectors of the front where a “genuine complex of 

British mourning in the interwar period which 

contributed to turning the Somme into a sacred 

myth for the British, while at the same time the 

French imaginary of the war would focus on 

Verdun” (Gueissaz, 2001, p. 96) 5 . Thus, the first 

initiatives from the Somme Tourist Board in the 

1970s relied on old commemorative and tourist 

practices connected to the military sectors of the 

Commonwealth nations (Somme Battelfields) which 

have become memorial spaces and pilgrimage 

destinations extensively developed by the various 

nations as early as the interwar period. The 

integration of the Chemin des Dames (located in the 

Aisne) into the regional tourist imaginary took 

longer, as a sign of its more marginal status in 


2 

national memory and in the imaginary of the Great 

War. Several reasons may account for this: the 

Chemin des Dames is firstly a “geographically non 

identifiable battle” as coined by Philippe Olivera (in 

Offenstadt, 2004, p. 36), whose geographical 

identification remains blurred, which impedes the 

spatial rooting of memory. It is also inseparable 

from one of the most important French military 

“failures” (the 1917 Nivelle Offensive) and from 

“the 1917 French Mutinies” (Offenstadt, 2004). 

Lastly, as a “place of national amnesia” (F. 

Rousseau, dans Offenstadt, 2004, p 36) the Chemin 

des Dames is much visited by officials which gives it 

a limited symbolic political impact, at least until 

1998, when on the occasion of the 90th anniversary 

of the end of the war, Lionel Jospin's (then Prime 

Minister) visit integrated it back into the national 

memorial space 6 . 

The process of integrating the war into the regional 

touristic imaginary is regulated by the 

commemorative anniversaries which temporarily 

remodel the regional tourist and memorial 

geography. However, the promotion of this warlike 

past in the context of ‘destination‐Picardy’ is more 

ambivalent than it seems. This promotion resorts to 

identity‐linked conceptions and actors' strategies in 

the construction of the territory image. The case of 

the Oise thus shows that the longstanding and total 

concealment of this segment of the past in the local 

touristic imaginary ‐ despite local initiatives for 

inventory purposes 7 followed by the patrimonial 

promotion of the traces in the North‐East of the 

department from the 1980s onward ‐ is to an 

important extent linked to the readiness of local 

actors to root the department in other imaginaries 

(Hertzog, 2011) which associate it with the capital‐ 

region. Thus, the territorial discourses and 

representations identify the department of Oise 

with a holiday space integrated into the Parisian 

metropolis, as a vision of the inherited territory 

which has long structured the regional imaginary 

space, as shown by the development projects for a 

Great Paris including the South of the department 

as early as the beginning of the twentieth century 

(Bonnard, 2008). The promotion of castles, of the 

“royal”, “imperial” or “princely” past of towns such 

as Senlis, Compiègne and Chantilly, of the artistic 

heritage (important princely or bourgeois 

collections), of forests (hunting) and of an unspoilt 

nature on the edge of Paris, are the expression of 

an imaginary holiday space and of the “Echappées 

belles” (Great Escapes, slogan of the Local Tourist 

Board (CDT) in the early 2000s), which does not 

leave much room for the promotion of the memory 

of the Great War. Until recently, even in 


“devastated” towns (Noyon), the war has competed 

with more glorious episodes of urban history which 

nurture religion or archaeology‐linked local 

historiographical traditions. 

In the Somme, land planning is at stake in the 

invention of a tourism and cultural policy in 

connection with the war. Initiated by the Local 

Tourist Board in the late 1970s, the ‘souvenir tour’ 

relates the whole memory of the site and 

necropolis located in the East of the department in 

order to structure an already much invested in 

territory, mostly by Commonwealth actors. The 

importance of the tourism of memory in the 

Somme also accounts for the momentum initiated 

by Max Lejeune, President of the Local Council, 

former Secretary of Veterans Affairs and whose 

family history was marked by the conflict. As of the 

late 1970s Max Lejeune suggests the idea of a 

museum dedicated to the Battle of the Somme, 

which became the Great War Historial, launched in 

1986 and inaugurated in 1992. The construction of 

the Historial in Peronne reveals the importance of 

local territorial stakes in the promotion of the 

battlefields: its diversified cultural functions 

(museum, research centre, temporary exhibitions 

and concert halls...) have turned it into a 

development tool whose mission is to help balance 

the tourism offer in a marginal territory considered 

as a “tourism and cultural desert” 8 . Building 

territorial identity and using local “patrimonial 

resources” in the perspective of cultural and 

economic development are at stake in this project 

which seeks to attract the British public. The project 

for the tourism development of the Chemin des 

Dames launched in 1994 by the Expansion 

Committee of Aisne on a declining rural territory 

entails similar issues: 

“At the time when the Chemin des Dames was first 

invested in the 1990s […] people became aware of 

the fact that sites of memory could have some 

tourism value. This concept and its economic issues 

were very popular at that time in the department of 

the Aisne and in other places which were deeply 

marked by the war, and a widespread topic of 

discussion as regards land planning and 

development. The Chemin des Dames developments 

are certainly essential in terms of heritage 

preservation and promotion, though they also 

clearly answer this ambition to reconcile tourism 

and memory. This remains relevant today”. Damien 

Becquart, the Aisne Local Council representative 9 

In the 1980s/1990s, facing the de‐industrialisation 

and vulnerability of some economic activities, the 


3 

“construction” of new territorial resources based on 

memory and tourism appears locally as a possible 

answer. The “tourism of memory” category is 

called forth more and more often by local public 

actors as a territories development and 

requalification leverage. The expression thus 

coined is now commonly used and has been 

formalized by the State policy which put it forth as a 

new “field” from the late 1990s on. The “tourism of 

memory” therefore meets political and diplomatic 

objectives, the latter through the notion of “shared 

memory” jointly promoted by UNESCO and the 

Ministry of Defence 10 . This new “field” also meets 

economic objectives as shown by a convention 

signed between the Ministry of Tourism and the 

State Ministry of Veterans Affairs in February 2004 

which ratifies its “economic role in the 

development of territories” 11 . However, the 

organisation of the “tourism of memory” is to a 

large extent achieved by the local bodies in a 

context of political decentralisation and State 

withdrawal. 

As a consequence, the invention of a tourism policy 

linked to the Great War heritage occurs in a 

national, European and world context in the course 

of a reshaping process. It is thus important to note 

the emergence of the Great War in the French 

historiographical scope as of the 1970/80s (Winter, 

Prost, 2004) which plays an essential role in the 

construction of imaginary representations linked to 

the war. These works which revolve around the 

Péronne School of thought and the Crid more 

particularly 12 , produce new historiographical 

approaches to the conflict and are involved in the 

“return” of the Great War which, far from being 

confined to the university sphere, have manifested 

themselves through the multiplication of 

documentaries, films (Lafon, 2009), novels and even 

songs since the 1990s. Historian Nicolas Offenstadt 

describes it as a large‐scale cultural movement 

(Offenstadt, 2010). With hardly any “Poilus” [WWI 

veterans] left, this cultural production could offer 

new conditions for the dissemination of knowledge 

and for the transmission of imaginaries linked to the 

Great War among extended social categories. 

However, one could question the fact that it may 

create as structuring imaginaries as those described 

by Mireille Gueissaz regarding the British: “The 

British, Australian and Canadian visitor paces 

around the Somme and its renowned sites as one 

would visit Ypres, Paschendaele or Gallipoli : one 

does it with reference to a patriotic, warlike and at 

times mystical mythology. One travels through a 

land made sacred by the blood of its heroes. It is 

not in History class but rather in Literature class 


that the memory of the Great War and its 850,000 

victims was imparted to us. […] The British 

mourning complex cannot be reduced to 

cemeteries and memorials maintained by British 

Commonwealth countries. A symbolic closely knit 

relationship contributes to making the “Somme” 

extensively familiar to Commonwealth visitors: the 

fact that a powerful imaginary has influenced 

visitors from an early age, the road signposting 

network which marks the Commonwealth War 

Graves Commission and the importance of war 

and/or tourism literature linked to “the Somme” 

and its battlefields”. (Gueissaz, 2001, p 103). 

The fact that the war and its marks belong to the 

regional tourist imaginary is also to be linked to the 

context of globalization: the one of touristic 

migrations and, on another level, the one of the 

“currents of memory” (Maurice Halbwachs). 

According to historian Patrick Garcia, these 

“currents” mark most of our contemporary 

societies and henceforth organise themselves on an 

international scale, according to the hypothesis that 

the Shoah as a “inverted founding event” (Ricoeur) 

makes up “the matrix of the contemporary link to 

the past which entails an introspection movement 

and compels societies to revisit to the most tragic 

and least glorious of their historical periods” 

(Garcia, 2008, p. 373). 

This leads us to question the role of the war in the 

regional imaginary: it is perceived as a collective 

trauma which has durably marked the territory and 

its inhabitants. 

The “weight” of war in the regional imaginary 

The devastating consequences of both world 

conflicts are often called upon by local actors to 

explain economic backwardness or obstacles to 

development to which Picardy is structurally 

confronted : in a 1998 paper focusing on the effects 

of the front crossing the Somme, the Amiens‐based 

historian Philippe Nivet questions “the long term 

handicap” : “Can the WWI's echoes and the indirect 

consequences of the impact of the destructions and 

demographical substance loss for the region 

contribute to account for some forms of 

backwardness which preclude local development?” 

(Nivet, 1994, p. 185). In 2001 historian Stéphane 

Audoin‐Rouzeau, Great War specialist and 

researcher at the Péronne Historial Centre, 

develops similar conceptions: “After the hell of 

WWI […] resilience is broken down. Much of today's 

structural backwardness is thus accounted for: 


4 

educational backwardness in particular” 13 . (Le 

Monde, 17th May 2001). 

Besides, a representation of the “sacrificed” land 

which is inseparable from the war and a regional 

imaginary associated to the idea of trauma 

provoked by the conflict appear to have built up 

locally. Thus in 2001 the extent of the Somme flood 

and the project of a third Parisian airport may have 

reactivated representations of Picardy as a territory 

“devastated by History”, “forgotten” (by the State) 

and “sacrificed” (by the nation). Stéphane Audoin‐ 

Rouzeau presents a similar interpretation in the 

newspaper Le Monde 14 : citing “old wounds” 

reopened by the devastating floods: 

“There is a return of the memory, he contends. 

Water replaces the fire of the war. Water destroys 

homes, lands and facilities... which is experienced in 

a traumatic way like in the two world conflicts. […] I 

think that Picardy has never totally recovered from 

the destructions of the first and second world wars. 

It is impossible to understand this region while 

disregarding the battlefield”. 

The floods would therefore have revived a feeling of 

latent vulnerability which also manifested itself at 

the time of the collective mobilisation against the 

project of a third Parisian airport. Facing this 

development project which includes the destruction 

of the Picard plateau, all the whole imaginary of the 

“martyred land” re‐emerges as evidenced by the 

slogans displayed at the entrances to some of the 

threatened villages : “a region sacrificed by the 

madness of man”; “torn down in 1918, rebuilt and 

destroyed again in 2015” 15 . Historian Annette 

Becker comments in the newspaper Le Monde: 

“Everything had to be rebuilt after the war. In this 

region the villages are symbols of that 

reconstruction, of resistance facing adversity. This is 

why inhabitants of the region are attached to them 

and would find it unbearable to see them destroyed 

again. With a few exceptions, all of the Somme 

politicians share this highly cultural and patrimonial 

approach to their region” 16 . Such an 

interpretation 17 is widely publicized by the local and 

regional press: the headline in La Voix du Nord 

reads “Floods, war, airport: Eastern Somme 

cultivates the wounds of centuries” 18 , which 

portrays a territory whose inhabitants “suffered 

during the war and go on suffering now”. The Great 

War is therefore perceived as a “founding event” 

which structures regional identity and even its 

inhabitants’ traits. The “Picard” is therefore seen as 

having developed a “culture of imprisonment 

associated with these events” as well as a strong 


w 

d 

round” 21 feeling of difference intermingled with the 

frustration linked to the lack of recognition by the 

nation and the State of the “sacrifices” made during 

the war. According to Philippe Nivet, the trauma of 

war would have led to “the development of a siege 

mentality, a firm ill to remain among Picards” 

. 

19 . 

This portrayal is completed by landscapes marked 

by necropolis and grounds filled with shells 20 both 

as allegorical representation an physical imprints 

of the “ubiquity of war at the heart of Picardy 

where death prowls in the landscape and in the 

g 

Stéphane Audoin‐Rouzeau points out that the idea 

of an identity “peculiar to regions rebuilt after the 

first world war, where acknowledgement from the 

nation has never been expressed to its fair extent, 

as if a stain had developed through contact with the 

enemy […] is something obscure that remains to be 

explained, but still, traces remain...”. Yet the 

memory of trauma is probably not the only factor in 

the mobilisation of local actors against the airport. 

The commitment to preserve the “green lung” of 

Picardy, to avoid a nuisance‐causing facility, or 

more simply the fear of environmental destruction 

also account for this. Similarly, the 2001 anti‐ 

Parisian reactions linked to the floods fit in the local 

and national political game (The political party 

“Chasse Pêche Nature et Tradition” opposed the 

then Minister of Ecology on hunting issues...). At 

any rate, they reveal a complex relationship with 

this traumatic past and the reconstruction of a 

memory of the trauma 

with respect to present 

stakes 

(Hartog, 2003). 

The approach of Picardy as a “sacrificed and 

wounded land” linked to the image of the Picardy 

inhabitant for whom living would mean “suffering” 

represents the invention of an “imaginary of 

territoriality” which involves the notion of the 

“imaginary figure” suggested by Bernard 

Debarbieux with regards to mountain dwellers 

(Debardieux, 2008). This imaginary of territoriality 

founded on the war happens to be widely circulated 

by tourism discourses. The Regional Council for Tourism website thus explicitly refers to a 

specifically Picard disposition 

born out of adversity 

(consulted 

in 2011): 

“All of these ordeals have given birth to very 

specific traits of character in the Picardy inhabitant. 

Thus, suspicion, withdrawal from others but also a 

great nobility in action, intelligence of the heart, 

loyalty and a remarkable capacity to internalise: “a 

character of underground cathedral...” as Sophie de 

Paillette sums up so well in her book “Picardie 


5 

e Picards”, historian Philippe Nivet 

ontends” 22 

Corps et âme”. “If we ignore the wars and the 

sufferings they had to endure, it is impossible to 

understand th 

c 

The war heritag e occupie s an ambivalent place in 

the regional tourist imaginary: sometimes 

presented as a tourism asset in terms of visibility 

and development, sometimes also presented as a 

constraint. The year 2000 Diagram of Tourism 

for 

the 

Somme expresses the following point: 

“The name of the department is associated with the 

grim image of the Great War, with flat and 

monotonous landscapes and with cold and rainy 

weather. Population lacks self‐pride and knowledge 

of history an d heritage. A First World War topic 

which only reaches a limited audience and 

reinforces the grim image associated with the 

department. A culture and a history of withdrawal 

in inhabitants that is not always 

conducive to 

human 

contact and exchange”. 

Ten years later, the regional diagram of tourism still 

evokes the image of a Picardy “failing to stir one’s 

imagination”, an image which is very little related to 

tourism and scarcely perceived as a “rewarding 

destination”. The war is not as explicitly mentioned 

but the document puts forward a “real seduction‐ 

related issue” and makes an inventory of the 

“obstacles to dream and emotion”: “located to the 

North of France, the harsh weather perceived as 

cold and damp, the dreary plains and the 

destruction of the landscape, 

some urban and 

industrial 

wastelands”. 

d i t 

um an 

ent of 

ontemporary Picard regional identity 23 Hence the heritage of the Great War became part 

of the regional tourist imaginary through specific 

context an stakes s nce the 1980/1990s, while he 

collective tra a defines “imaginary of 

territoriality”, namely a compon 

c 

. 

Tourism of history, tourism of memory, pilgrimage: 

the wide and uncertain scope of a tourism "in 

search 

of synchrony with the contemporary world" 

We may now consider the way in which the 

meaning, values and social functions assigned to the 

“tourism of memory” make it “a tourism of the 

present in search of 

synchrony with the 

contemporary world” (Urbain, 2003) but also 

somehow a taboo‐tourism insofar as it remains 

intrinsically linked to the imaginary of pilgrimage 

and 

trauma. 


For most of the actors in charge of coordinating the 

“tourism of memory”, its contemporary 

representations revolve around the idea of a 

paradigmatic change related to the shift from a 

tourism of “pilgrimage” to a tourism of “history”. 

This representation prevails as of the 1980/90s 

when the heritage of the war precisely forms part of 

the regional touristic imaginary in Picardy. This 

turning‐point for tourism, generally accepted to 

have taken place in the 1960/70s, is explained by 

the gradual disappearance of veterans, which 

entails a profound alteration in the nature of 

tourism, habits and motives. Antoine Prost is 

undoubtedly one of the first to emphasise these 

mutations on the basis of his works on Verdun. “The 

pilgrimages are progressively changing in nature”, 

he writes about places of memory in the article 

“Verdun” (Prost, 1986), “history is taking over from 

fervour” (Prost, 1986, p. 1771). Other historians 

concur, like Serge Barcellini 24 , author of a report 

published in 2009 entitled “The Time of History” on 

the tourist promotion of the Meuse battlefields, in 

which the contemporary tourism of history focusing 

on education and the quest for knowledge, breaks 

with the tourism of pilgrimage and the “time of 

memory” 25 . These conceptions are widespread 

throughout the public space as shown in the 

Gazette des Communes 1995 publication which 

observes: 

“the era of the pilgrimages is over, there are only a 

few veterans left. The sites have lost their 

'reliquary' symbolism and entered a new historical 

and cultural phase”. 

The tourism of memory is mainly perceived as an 

“educational” tourism supposedly responding to 

the need to understand and interpret the battle 

spaces and places of memory, the meaning of which 

couldn't otherwise be grasped by contemporary 

generations. The political representative in charge 

of tourism in the Somme advocates the idea of a 

“shift from a tourism of pilgrimage to a tourism of 

historical understanding” 26 . The Somme “souvenir 

trail” is now known as “the historical space of the 

Battle of the Somme”. This tourism of history has 

established the expert‐historian as the central 

figure of the contemporary process of tourism 

implementation. The “educational purpose” of the 

battlefields is rooted in the 1960s in the context of a 

“battle” history centred on the understanding of 

military events and on veteran remembrance. 

However, from the 1980/1990s onwards, this 

“educational purpose” takes advantage of 

historiographical renewals (cultural history, social 

history, comparative approaches as for Péronne and 


6 

integrates several debates; some of which are not 

devoid of ideology as evidenced by the importance 

the “shot for cowardice” topic has been taking in 

the communication and mediation strategies 

implemented for the Chemin des Dames in the last 

few years (Estelmann, Müller, 2009). 

Anglo‐Saxon researches 27 applied to the tourism of 

battlefields or to the tourism of memory, shade the 

opposition between “tourism” and “pilgrimage” by 

insisting on converging elements and on the 

complexity of practices and motivations (Winter, 

2011). Consequently, most of the contemporary 

Anglo‐Saxon work sets itself apart from approaches 

based on the succession of “regimes of touristicity” 

(as a reference to Hartog's regimes of historicity). 

To move in this direction, we may also point out 

that very early, battlefields appear to have 

generated a tourism of history, that is a tourism 

driven by the desire to understand the historical 

facts which happened there and then. In 1919 the 

Guide Michelin dedicated to the Ourcq is both “a 

practical guide and a history”: 

“We do not conceive such a visit as a mere race 

through the devastated areas, but rather as a real 

pilgrimage. Seeing is not enough, one must also 

understand 28 ” 

As early as the war, a form of tourism linked to the 

discovery of “devastated” landscapes (Panni, 

Jagelski, 2000; Bonnard, 2008) developed and which 

local actors try to handle. Various tourist 

imaginaries have therefore coexisted throughout 

the 20th century; this is equally pointed out by 

Antoine Prost about Verdun. 

He also shows that the veteran pilgrimages raise 

peace as a “supreme value” as early as the interwar 

period (Prost, 1986). On the Chemin des Dames 

some clearly pacifist monuments are subject to 

visiting practices and regular commemorations (see 

Jagielski in Offenstadt, 2004, p. 270). The theme of 

peace has become increasingly important since the 

1980s (as evidenced by the construction of the 

Peace Memorial in Verdun). Likewise, if some places 

of memory have been established as symbols of 

Franco‐German reconciliation as early as the 1960s 

in the context of the European construction 

(Chemin des Dames), the theme of “shared 

memory” is summoned more and more often in the 

process of contemporary tourism implementation. 

The pacifying function of the tourism of memory 

therefore fuels the touristic imaginary and informs 

discourses both at State and at local level. In 2005, 

the State Secretary to Veterans Affairs declared: “in 


a time troubled by major international events, the 

tourism of memory thus appears as a vector of 

peace, a vector of exchange and mutual respect 

between peoples” 29 . In 2008, the elected 

representative in charge of tourism at the Somme 

Local Council considered the tourism of memory as 

“a way to celebrate peace between nations” 30 . His 

lecture at a conference held in Picardy in 2008 was 

particularly revealing of the understanding of this 

form of tourism: 

“The tourism of memory takes part in the 

construction ‐ or should we say reconstruction ‐ of a 

new territorial identity. A new identity develops and 

is henceforth based on hospitality, openness to 

others, exchange and mutual enrichment. The 

tourism of memory accompanies the inhabitants of 

these territories marked by tragedies and by the 

weight of history through a necessary process of 

evolution and a salutary redevelopment, which 

turns a land of invasions into a welcoming one.” 31 

Here, we move beyond the pacifying function of 

tourism in favour of an imaginary of resilience: 

tourism is summoned as the “reconstruction” and 

“redevelopment” of a territory and a shattered local 

society. In this sense, tourism is perceived as a 

component of the identity of territories which 

allows them to overcome trauma. The same 

political representative calls for a “form of tourism 

in which ethics and morality are even more present 

and through which the visiting of these places of 

memory will be a means to give meaning to our 

future”. Consequently, the tourism of memory is 

more and more often associated with an “ethical”, 

“durable tourism” inasmuch as it is perceived as a 

means to reconcile the protection of heritage, 

economic development and social and ethical 

values, therefore harnessing the rationales peculiar 

to some contemporary conceptions of sustainable 

development. 

These comments clearly show that however much 

developed on the basis of traces of the past, the 

tourism of memory is certainly conceived as a 

“tourism of the present in search of synchrony with 

the contemporary world” (Urbain, 2003). The 

significance given to tourism not only forms part of 

a relationship with the past and a memorial 

construction related to the war, it is also anchored 

in some ‐ idealised ‐ conceptions of tourism as a 

factor in the development of closer ties between 

peoples. The meanings and purposes assigned to 

this form of tourism also refer to the new normative 

frames of territory development (‘sustainable 

tourism’), to values (ethics, peace, human rights) 


7 

and to contemporary political stakes (European 

construction, creation of European remembrance). 

Yet the imaginary of the pilgrimage has not been 

erased. “To visit Verdun means going on a 

pilgrimage to the heart of a wounded land”, the 

headline of the publication Voyage et Histoire 

reports in 2006 32 . The imaginary of the pilgrimage 

which characterises the tourism of the battlefields 

in the immediate after war period (Prost, 1986, 

Lloyd, 1998, Winter J., 2001, Winter C., 2009, 2011) 

continues to influence contemporary conceptions 

of the tourism “of memory”. The values of 

sacredness and respect, mourning and 

commemoration of sacrifice are still present in the 

discursive registers. Regarding the touristic 

promotion of the Somme, the political 

representative in charge of tourism for the Local 

Council of the Somme offers significant comments 

at the 2008 conference: 

“To establish the tourism development and the 

promotion of a territory on the basis of such painful 

memories is a difficult task. For the public and 

private actors of our department, the tourism 

implementation of such a sensitive topic had to be 

handled with caution. It will seem obvious to 

everyone that to consider developing the tourism of 

memory in the same way as seaside tourism, golf or 

hiking is not tenable. The local authorities as well as 

the Department Tourist Board have always seen to 

the fact that the tourism implementation of these 

places of memory be in line with the spirit and 

values of respect and reverence which characterise 

these places”. 

This is true for several reasons: the desire to reach 

foreign tourists, from the Commonwealth in 

particular, who are often first perceived as pilgrims 

who behave very differently compared to French 

tourists 33 on the one hand, on the other hand the 

desire, despite the disappearance of veterans, to 

perpetuate the transmission of the values linked to 

this “community of memory” in dealing with some 

memorial sites in the present day. 

This “actuality” of the pilgrimage remains 

particularly perceptible in the nations of the 

Commonwealth. Even today, “The Vimy Pilgrimage” 

still designates the visit of the Vimy (department of 

Nord) monuments and cemeteries 34 ; some rituals 

have been reactivated (the “pilgrimage medal” 

awarded to Canadian students visiting the 

battlefield). Some tour operators still refer to this 

imaginary. In 2006, Bruce Bilson, the Australian 

Minister of Veterans Affairs pointed out with regard 

to the development of tourism on the battlefields: 


“we must remember that our final objective is to 

commemorate the services (to the nation) and the 

sacrifices, it is not to create a tourist attraction” 

(Bilson, 2007), a statement faithfully developed in 

the project for the commemoration of the Great 

War Centenary 35 . Thus, we observe that even today 

the imaginary of pilgrimage and commemoration 

still marks the tourist imaginary of the 

Commonwealth “places of memory” ‐ as symbols of 

veteran sacrifice but also of national identity 

(Winter, 2001, Audoin‐Rouzeau, 2002) ‐ and 

qualifies the idea of the emergence of a historical 

tourism exclusively focused on education. 

Significance of tourism, significance of places : 

places of memory reinvented in order to arouse 

desirability 

It is now time to analyse the way in which spaces of 

conflict are remodelled in their symbolic 

significance, but also in their geography by the 

contemporary conceptions of “tourism 

implementation” (MIT, 2005) envisaged as a social 

construction of “desirability” and as an imperative 

of seduction of these places related to violence, 

death, destruction, mourning and sacrifice. These 

extracts ‐ that we underline ‐ were taken from the 

Regional Diagram of Tourism in Lorraine for the 

2007/2012 period concerning the “tourism of 

memory associated with military regional heritage” 

appear as indicators of this issue of tourism 

implementation: 

“Ambitious action could aim at a positioning which 

would act as a reference on this theme in France, 

and even in Europe, while making it positive 

through a ‘peaceful’ positive angle: the battles 

which built Europe and brought peoples together. 

[…] With regard to the tourism of memory more 

specifically, the message is worked in coherence 

with the image policy of the region. The themes 

tackled are dealt with within the scope of the 

future (exchange between peoples rather than 

war...) […] The issue here is to have products which 

allow the projection of a forward‐looking image, 

one of an exchange between peoples rather than 

war” 36 

The construction of the space of conflict as a 

tourism destination, namely an “attractive” one, 

leads us to question more acutely the 

representations related to violence and to traces of 

conflict as well as the registers used to make them 

“desirable”. We must consider the way in which this 

social construction of desirability is spatially built, 

which makes the memory of conflict more positive, 

therefore re‐inventing the meaning of places of 


8 

memory, and even imagining new places which 

would be real, fictional or hyper real spaces (Crozat, 

2007). Indeed, with the reconstruction and the 

progressive fading of the scars of war, the 

construction of the battlefield as a tourist 

destination is first of all an “invitation for the eye”. 

Thus, as of the 1980s, the process of unprecedented 

unearthing of the traces of war; the intense 

“signposting” of places must give visibility to 

elements that are not immediately perceptible as 

they belong to the past. The reenactment, which 

often requires significant technical and human 

measures (pageants, reconstitution of trenches, 

ruins...) represents a particular modality of the 

latter by establishing a “semblance” of truthfulness 

through pseudo‐realistic and more or less 

spectacular staging. The “Schéma régional du 

tourisme de Lorraine” [Regional Diagram of Tourism 

in Lorraine] therefore presents a culture “without 

pedagogy”, a culture proposing “more spectacular 

museums, more animated patrimonial sites, 

possibly with live performance” 37 . 

Tourism implementation involves innovating socio‐ 

spatial practices which model places structured 

around contemporary and inherited practices. 

Some researchers consider these “touristically 

implemented” battlefields above all as spaces “in a 

state of tension” where an initial practice formerly 

related to the pilgrimage and a current inclination 

to develop an “a la carte” service which segments 

the offers (Trouche, 2010) intermingle. The 

installation of works of art, the multiple landscape 

developments on some battle sites 

(commemorative parks, cornflower beds...) 

establish new terms of place appropriation and 

create renewed imaginaries. They contribute to the 

creation of hybrid places halfway between reality 

and virtuality, erudition and entertainment, the 

sacred and the profane. 

The social construction of desirability through a 

positive rendering of a painful past relies on a few 

modalities which renew the practical, landscape 

and symbolic planning of these spaces of conflict. 

We have identified five of these modalities: 

estheticizing, pacification, naturalisation, 

involvement of local inhabitants and urbanisation. 

Estheticizing. An “artialisation” which draws from 

universalising references succeeds to the 

commemorative monumentalization. Artists’ 

residencies, art exhibitions or public art 

implantation policies on battlefields characterise 

the contemporary modalities of tourism 

implementation. Thus in 1998, the installation of 

Ernest Pignon‐Ernest's work in Soyécourt wood 


(Somme), and Haim Kern's on the Craonne plateau 

to name but two, led to the emergence of new uses 

and representations of sites. The Chemin des 

Dames has become the place par excellence for a 

hybridisation of space practices and 

representations. To name but one example, the 

California plateau battlefield has been subject, for a 

few years, to a promotion which aims at producing 

at once: a place of history (undergrowth clearing in 

the forest in order to exhume the trenches, 

installation of explanatory signposts), a place of 

memory (excavation of the ruins of the destroyed 

village of Vieux Craonne and restoration of war 

memorials), a place for hiking and environmental 

tourism (opening of new trails, ONF signposting and 

marking of "remarkable" trees), and a place of in 

situ art exhibition since the installation of Haim 

Kern's sculpture entitled "Ils n’ont pas choisi leur 

sépulture" [They did not choose their place of 

burial] commissioned by the State in 1998. 

The implantation of works of contemporary art on 

battlefields allows us to highlight another aspect of 

this positive rendering which at times impregnates 

tourism implementation: the idea that a universalist 

“message” must be superimposed onto the 

historical meaning of places. This is exemplified by 

the use of the peace register, one which is as old as 

war itself, as the theme of peace marks the 

memorialisation of the battlefields as early as the 

end of the fighting (war memorials, pacifist 

pilgrimages of veterans). Ever since the 1980s, as 

the public touristic promotion of sites developed, 

the distance to the memory of conflict not to 

mention the concealment of some modalities of 

war violence seem to have increased in favour of 

other registers like those of peace, reconciliation or 

more recently “shared memory”. Thus the refusal 

“of the enjoyment of the spectacle of war” and the 

will to “preserve the visitor from the emotional 

outcome related to the staging of the unbearable” 

(Wahnich, 2001) are clearly within some of the 

modalities of tourism implementation such as the 

museographical exhibition. The specificity of the 

Péronne Historial is that, according to Jay Winter, 

its scheme focuses on staging a “peaceful and 

soothing dimension” on the one hand, and “the 

discourse of this museum is one of shared calamity” 

(Winter, 2004) on the other hand. Historian Sophie 

Wahnich, pointing out the absence of heroisation, 

analyses the laying of soldiers’ uniforms and 

belongings at the foot of the graves as a desire to 

conceal warlike action in favour of death and 

mourning. The field of museography, she contends, 

obscures a part of war violence and precludes the 

appraisal of fighting on the side of those who take 


9 

lives: “Sobriety, distancing, intentionally sensible 

aesthetics rather than emotional, induce the denial 

of war violence and a humanist ecumenism. It 

suppresses the memory of warlike conflict which 

could still be perceived as a political conflict” 

(Wahnich, 2001). The European dimension is also 

clearly expressed here (a trilingual museum 

including a triple viewpoint on the events) in the 

perspective of the construction of a common 

history. This type of planning which pertains to 

creation of heritage and tourism implementation 

fits into territorial and political issues. 

There is certain ambivalence in the approach to the 

battlefields landscapes or places marked by 

destruction: alternately landscapes convey signs of 

trauma (hollow teeth, ruins, emptiness left by 

destruction in urban landscapes...), and they 

embody serenity and restored peace. This 

description found on the website of the Regional 

Council of Picardy in 2006 shows the capacity of the 

tourism discourse to produce allegorical landscapes: 

“Go hiking on the battlefields, walk through 

formerly mutilated villages, make a halt in a 

cemetery or enter the Péronne Historial. Feel the 

emotion well up in places now filled with calm and 

serenity. The Picards have rebuilt their towns 

through courage and strength of willpower, the 

verdure of the Haute Somme Valley is restored, the 

poppies blossom in the fields, the big trees watch 

over the Chemin des Dames again, the landscapes 

are astonishingly beautiful. Now that nature has 

regained its rights, a peaceful Picardy pays tribute 

to the men who gave their life for its freedom" 

(website of the Local Council of the Somme in 2006) 

The idea of resilience strongly rooted in some 

discourses about landscape also implies the idea of 

shared memory. The social construction of tourism 

attractivity and desirability implies the involvement 

of the inhabitants; the regional diagram of tourism 

reveals one of the backbones of the regeneration of 

the regional tourism policy. The CRT (Regional 

Tourist Board) website has recently issued 

inhabitants’ “testimonials” who act both as 

ambassadors and guides. This also implies a re‐ 

appropriation of “inhabiting” and not only 

“fighting” memories. Mireille Gueissaz evokes the 

challenge the inhabitants face in trying to position 

themselves on their own territory and questions the 

imaginary of a shared memory: “ignored by the 

pilgrims who travelled to celebrate their war and 

pay tribute to their dead […] they were doubly 

excluded from the French imaginary of the First 

World War, first as civilians from the occupied 

regions and second as the victims of a four‐year 


long battle bearing hardly no status in the national 

imaginary”. According to Annette Becker, “the 

memory centred on an exclusive experience ‐ the 

one of the veterans of the trenches ‐ tended to cast 

aside and forget the exceptional (yet minor 

geographically) pains suffered by the inhabitants of 

occupied France. [...] First, because during the 

conflict, the French people in occupied zones were 

somehow geographically and symbolically cast aside 

from the national territory. The war indeed 

consisted in defending the national sacralised land, 

which the trenches symbolise as a ground 

permeated with blood and death. How would those 

who were away from this land during the war not 

be condemned to be excluded from this very 

memory? How can victims who are not heroes be 

commemorated?" (Becker, Audoin‐Rouzeau, 2000, 

p. 250). And yet one of the contemporary mutations 

of the tourism implementation of spaces of conflict 

is the attempt to take an off‐centre look: the 

inhabitants of Picardy are now solicited to “get 

involved” through their stories and testimonials in 

the shift of image and in a more personalised 

discourse about the places (see the website of the 

regional council which stages inhabitants as 

ambassadors of the territory) by mobilising their 

experience of the places. Finally, the integration of 

spaces located “outside” the battlefield, therefore 

different from major traditional memorial places 

(trenches, destroyed villages, memorials), into a 

“tourism of memory” forms part of a commitment 

to include other types of memories (civil, rearguard) 

and also new traditional territories of the tourism of 

memory. Thus the integration of the heritage of 

reconstruction in the promotion of the Somme or 

the Meuse project, “The Time of History” written by 

Serge Barcellini in the perspective of the centenary, 

puts the touristic and memorial territory of the 

memory of the war far beyond the scope of the 

Verdun battlefield. 

In addition, while the space of memory and 

pilgrimage crystallises on the battlefield as the very 

place of “sacrifice”, of burial of the dead and of the 

cult (materialised by memorials, necropolis and 

cemeteries), the towns became new centres in the 

tourism implementation of spaces of conflict as of 

the 1980s with the urban establishment of a new 

generation of museums. These history museums 

which constitute a specific modality of the creation 

of heritage and of the tourism implementation of 

the spaces of conflict aiming at the intelligibility of 

the past, distinguish themselves from the first 

“reliquary” museums implanted on the battlefields. 

The implantation of the Historial in the Château de 

Péronne situated in the town centre shows the 


10 

dissociation of the museum from the battlefield as a 

form of ‘deterritorialisation’ of memory in order to 

better materialise a renewed historiographical 

concept based on the comparative approach of the 

war and a universal project: illustrate a community 

of suffering on the European scale, in other words 

move away from the territory to better anchor in a 

broader spatial imaginary. However, these new 

localisation rationales reveal more complexes 

issues. These urban museums also constitute the 

fulcrum of the local cultural development and often 

take part in urban requalification projects. 

Conclusion 

Tourism on the battlefields and in destroyed towns 

is an old phenomenon which was initiated with the 

Great War (guides Michelin...). But in the interwar 

period, some distrust arose not to mention 

rejection. The phenomenon weakened as the 

inhabitants removed traces of the war in the 

landscape, except for spaces visited by nations of 

the Commonwealth. Nevertheless, after decades of 

concealment, the war and its traces are gradually 

being included in the regional tourist imaginary 

linked to the front, and more particularly in Picardy 

since the 1980s, according to various temporalities 

and spatialities. This turning point which turns 

traces of the war into a tourism resource forms part 

of a global context as an answer to local issues of 

identity construction and territorial development. 

It is activated by outside actors and approaches 

(politicians, historians...), imported practices, 

references and models from elsewhere, and 

operates in the global context of territorial 

reordering. 

The values and the meaning assigned by local actors 

to the tourism of memory have turned it into a 

present‐focused one. The tourist imaginary of the 

pilgrimage does not appear to fade in favour of a 

tourism of history, the latter undergoing a profound 

mutation under the influence of historiographical 

renewal. The historical sites, both places of 

commemoration and exhibition, reverence and 

entertainment, which are subject to promotion 

policies, refer to hybrid representations and usages. 

In Thiépval, the 1930s memorial and its 

museographical replica, the place of memory and 

the object of history, the commemoration and 

pilgrimage space and the pedagogy and tourism of 

historical space stand side by side. On this site, 

artists, historians but also more recently, stage 

designers and technicians confront their 

representations in favour of the construction of 

desirability. 


The construction of the attractivity of the tourist 

destination sometimes rests on the memory of a 

painful past rendered positive, which testifies to the 

NOTES 


11 

ambiguity of combining touristic registers 

(enjoyment, entertainment, fascination...) and 

those of violence and mourning. 

1 The significant role of the local actors as of the 1970s/1980s in the promotion of historical sites on the French 

side and in supportive collaboration with the numerous local associations in the territories of the front is 

indeed worth noticing. The State which mainly invested in the national commemoration policies eventually 

played a minor role in the sites promotion, even though they have started funding some museographic 

development as early as the mid‐1980s. 

2 Diagram of Tourism in Picardy, period 2000. 

3 Local Council documentary material ‐ Mission of the Chemin des Dames, 1994‐2011. 

4 At another scale level the touristic development of the "Communautés de Communes", local areas as well as 

some specific towns (e.g. Pays du Coquelicot in the Somme) has strongly relied on Great War and its marks. 

5 The historians have extensively shown the path to the sites of memory for the various nations and explained 

how Verdun attracts the imaginaries linked to the memory of the war on the French side, as opposed to the 

Chemin des Dames for instance. 

6 In this regard, see Offenstadt, 2004 in particular. 

7 A heritage inventory of the Great War in Picardy was launched from 1991 on by the Regional Department for 

Inventory in collaboration with the State departments (DRAC, DIREN). 

8 An approach which is currently shared by the whole of the public actors of development, culture and tourism. 

9 Quoted in: Estelmann F., Müller O., "Schlachtfeldtourismus und dissidente Diskurse: Zu den Geschichtsorten 

des Ersten Weltkriegs am Beispiel des Chemin des Dames in der französischen Region Picardie (Gastbeitrag)” 

dans Lenz R., Salein K., Kulturtourismus Ethnografische Recherchen im Reiseraum Europa, 2009. 

10 See First International Conference on Shared Memory jointly organised by the Secretary to Veterans Affairs 

and UNESCO in 2006. 

11 www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/telechargement//Word/ConventionLille.doc 

12 The Crid is an international research and discussion group which focuses on WW1 and settled in Craonne on 

the Chemin des Dames. This research group (N. Offenstadt, R. Cazals, F. Rousseau…) challenges the Péronne 

School (S. Audoin‐Rouzeau, A. Becker…) more particularly on the importance of mutinies, the brutalization 

theory, the notion of war culture... 

13 Le Monde, « Les Picards entre la mémoire du feu et le désespoir de l’eau » (The inhabitants of Picardy: 

between memory of fire and despair from water), 17th May 2001. 

14 Interview conducted by Régis Guyotat for Le Monde publication: « Les Picards entre la mémoire du feu et le 

désespoir de l’eau » (The inhabitants of Picardy: between memory of fire and despair from water), 17th May 

2001. 

15 Jean‐Pierre Dufour, "La mémoire de la bataille de la Somme contrarie le troisième aéroport parisien", (The 

memory of the Battle of the Somme annoys the third Parisian airport), Le Monde, 1st December 2001. 

16 Le Monde, op.cit., 1st December 2001. 

17 This "cultural and patrimonial" approach of reconstructed spaces must be put into perspective. Admittedly, 

an inventory of the reconstruction heritage was taken in the 1990s followed by a few publications and a series 

of exhibitions set up in 2001 in five local towns by museums curators and local cultural actors. 

18 La Voix du Nord, Christophe Lépine, 2001 

19 The inhabitants of Picardy : between memory of fire and despair from water"(The inhabitants of Picardy: 

between memory of fire and despair from water), Le Monde, 17th May 2001 

20 In the press but also in the whole of the historical and television productions or exhibition catalogues (see as 

an example Bonnard, 2008, p. 221: after mentioning landscapes marked by hollow teeth, ruins and shell holes, 

he concludes his work by pointing out that "nearly a century later this conflict still deeply marks the Oise"). 

21 Le Monde, op.cit., 17th May 2001. 

22 Regional Tourist Board website, consulted in May 2001 

23 See in this regard, Auzas V., Jewsiewicki B., (dir.), "Traumatisme collectif pour patrimoine : regards croisés 

sur un mouvement transnational", Presses de l’Université de Laval, Canada, 2008. 



24 Former controller general of the armed forces in charge of memorial policies for the Ministry of Defence 

(1995) and historian of the memory of the first world war, Serge Barcellini's mission has been to promote the 

war sites within the Meuse Local Council since 2008. 

25Online report, 2009; see also Barcellini Serge, "Introduction", Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 

3/2009 (n° 235), p. 3‐5, or "Du tourisme de pèlerinage au tourisme d’histoire" in Administration (Territorial 

State Administration Review), n°228, December‐January 2010/2011 

26 Dominique Camus's intervention, "The tourism of memory in Picardy: for a regional integration" at the 

conference "The tourism of memories in Picardy dedicated to the economic and cultural development of 

Picardy", ACSE, DRT, ONAC, UPJV, Amiens, January 2008 

27 The analysis of the tourism practices has become an object of research per se, whether in the field of study 

of DarkTourism/ Thanatourism, cultural history (Lloyd, 1998, Winter J., 2001) or Tourism Studies (Winter, C., 

2009, 2011). 

28 Volume dedicated to the Ourcq (Chantilly, Senlis, Meaux), 1919 – see also Brandt, 1994. 

29 Extract of the State Defence Secretary's speech, quoted in Actes des Premières rencontres de la Mémoire 

partagée, La Documentation Française, 2006 

30 Dominique Camus’ lecture, « Le tourisme de mémoire en Picardie : pour une intégration régionale » at the 

conference Le tourisme des mémoires en Picardie au service du développement économique et culturel de la 

Picardie, ACSE, DRT, ONAC, UPJV, Amiens, January 2008 

31 Dominique Camus's lecture quoted, 2008 (acts online). 

32 The Tourism of History Magazine n°1 which dedicates a dossier to Verdun 

33 Bien que des recherches récentes montrent qu’une minorité d’entre eux se perçoivent comme des pèlerins 

aujourd’hui (voir Winter C, 2011) 

34 See Sharon Adams's story of the journey of some Canadian veterans's families to the European battlefields : 

« Pèlerins à l’ombre de la guerre, 1/11/2009, Légion review, 

http://www.legionmagazine.com/fr/index.php/2009/11/pelerins‐a‐lombre‐de‐la‐guerre/ 

35 http://www.anzaccentenary.gov.au/ 

36 Extracts from the Regional Diagram of Tourism in Lorraine, period 2007/2012 

37 Regional Diagram of Tourism in Lorraine, period 2007/2012 (online). 

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TO CITE THIS ARTICLE 

Electronic reference: 

Anne Hertzog, War Battlefields, tourism and imagination, Via@, Tourist imaginaries, n°1, 2012, posted on 

march 16th, 2012. 

URL : http://www.viatourismreview.net/Article6_EN.php 

AUTHOR 

Anne Hertzog 

Maître de conférences en géographie, Université de Cergy‐Pontoise. 

TRANSLATION 

Bureau de Traduction de l'Université 

Université de Bretagne occidentale ‐ Brest 

http://www.univ‐brest.fr/btu/ 

13

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