Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History
Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s
Author(s): Ellen Furlough
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), pp. 247-286
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Making Mass Vacations: Tourism
and Consumer Culture in France,
1930s to 1970s
ELLEN FURLOUGH
Kenyon College
Do not talk about your work. Tell me how you spent your vacation
who you are.
Michael Chadefaud (1987)1
In the 1950s, French political geographer and social critic Andre Siegfried denounced modem mass tourism as "tourism de serie ... organized, almost mechanized, collective, and above all democratic." Echoing derisory discussions of
mass culture and mass consumption, Siegfried criticized modem tourism as a
degraded aspect of cultural and social democratization, best exemplified by banal American hotel chains. Siegfried complained that modern tourism had essentially destroyed older regimes of pleasure and substituted only amusements.
Someone who yearned for the older "aristocratic" era wherein wealthy leisured
elites sojourned in grand hotels, he believed that the only hope for the future
was with "people of refined taste, knowing how to distinguish... between filth
and beauty."2
Siegfried's lament portrays the historical emergence and consolidation of
mass tourism as the decline of travel by leisured elites and its replacement by
rationalized "moder" tourism for the masses. His comments also suggest a
new cultural and economic understanding of the mass tourism that did emerge
from the middle of the twentieth century. For Siegfried, tourism had become a
I Michael Chadefaud, Aux Origines du Tourisme dans les Pays de l'Adour (Pau, 1987), 976. I
am especially grateful to Victoria de Grazia, Joan Wallach Scott, Melissa Dabakis, and Clifton Crais
for their careful readings of various versions of this essay and for their help in clarifying my ideas.
Research for this article was supported by the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, where I was
a Senior Fellow in 1992-93, and by Kenyon College. I also appreciate the help of audiences who
shared insights on early versions of this essay: The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis seminar
(1992-93); the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modem France at the University of
Chicago; the French Cultural Studies Workshop at the National Humanities Center; and the Kenyon Seminar. Individuals whose comments have been helpful include Leora Auslander, Regina Bendix, Joan Cadden, Gary Cross, Karen Dubinsky, Patrick Fridenson, John Gillis, Nicole Samuel, Ir-
win Wall, Rosemary Wakeman, and Susan Whitney. This article is dedicated to Dorothy Glass
Gentry Johnson (1908-96).
2 Andre Siegfried, Aspects du XXe Siecle (Paris, 1955), 107, 123-25 and 148.
0010-4175/98/2454-0310 $9.50 ? 1998 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
247
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248 ELLEN FURLOUGH
product, a standardized commodity inextricably bound up with the emergence
of post-war European mass culture and mass consumption. This narrative of decline has proven especially durable for describing the mass tourism that became
predominant in Europe and the United States after World War II. It provides the
framework for contemporary stereotypes of mass tourists as herd-like, lacking
internal social distinctions, doggedly seeking amusement, and guided by massproduced tour books. As consumers, tourists are said to exemplify qualities
thought to adhere to mass culture and mass consumption: tasteless, serialized,
socially uniform, and culturally passive.3 Siegfried thus becomes one of a long
line of commentators who have based their own cultural superiority, in part,
upon their distance from, and disdain for, vulgar tourists. This narrative can also
be seen as part of a larger discourse concerning the decline of high culture by
post-war elites.
This essay offers a revisionist reply to the "linear decline" model posited by
Siegfried and developed subsequently by writers such as Daniel Boorstin and
Paul Fussell.4 Recent histories of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
tourism and travel writing have challenged this narrative of travel becoming su-
perseded by tourism. They have demonstrated that both notions existed simultaneously, serving to represent travelers as socially and culturally superior to
"mere tourists" by claiming that travelers' originality and authenticity was based
on a knowledge of places "off the beaten track."5 I believe that older views of
mass tourism also missed a central dynamic in the history of mass tourism and
vacations in particular and of mass consumption in general. Mass tourism's success and appeal from the middle of the twentieth century was due to its ability
both to be popularly accessible and to express social distinction and cultural difference. This paradox of seeming both obtainable and exclusive was a central
engine in the making of the mass consumer culture and society of which vacations were a part. The growth of mass tourism and vacations was also intimately bound up with a particularly French, but also European, understanding of the
3 As Jonathan Culler observed: "Tourists are continually subject to sneers and have no antidefamation league. Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot: they are said to move in herds,
droves, flocks and swarms; they are as docile as sheep." In "Semiotics of Tourism," American Jour-
nal of Semiotics, 1:1-2 (1981), 138. In David Lodge's novel, Paradise News (New York, 1991),
depictions of tacky, herd-like tourists abound.
4 Boorstin wrote that tourism was "diluted, contrived, prefabricated," a "pseudo-event" instead
of "sophisticated pleasures" enjoyed by "well-prepared" men. Fussell asserted that the "final age
of travel" was the inter-war period, after which there was only tourism. He celebrates "what it felt
like to be young and clever, and literate" before the deluge of mass tourism, and adds that "the resemblance between the tourist and the client of a massage parlor is closer than it would be polite
to emphasize." Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York,
1987) and Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York, 1980).
5 The best examples of this kind of analysis are James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European
Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (New York, 1993) and Jean-Didier Urbain, L'Idiot du Voyage: Histories de Touristes (Paris, 1991). The classic text on tourism, recently
re-issued, is Dean MacCannell's The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976). A recent
article by ethnographer Orvar L6fgren, "Learning to Be a Tourist," Ethnologia Scandinavia, 24
(1994), 102-25 argues that the history of tourism is a "history of emancipation."
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 249
relationship between leisure, vacations, and politics. From the 1930s a
celerating in the post-war period, paid vacations came to be understood as
of citizenship bound up within a European standard of living, part of a
cial contract. Unlike in the United States, for example, where modem v
developed as a "privilege" accorded salaried and waged workers as part o
employment "package," access to vacation time in France and in most Eu
states has been politically secured. The vast majority of Europeans are
teed as much as five weeks of paid vacation by virtue of their status as
rather than as a result of employee "benefits."6
This essay describes and analyzes the making of mass vacations in F
from the 1930s, a moment captured in images of French workers wavin
trains as they set out for their first paid vacations, through the early 1970
tourism and vacations were firmly ensconced as significant elements o
sumer expenditure, a leading sector within commercialized leisure and
element of mass culture.7 I argue that vacations in France became at on
jects of mass consumption, subjects of mass culture, and politically secu
cial entitlements, a constellation of meanings that were historically spec
which often differed from those developed elsewhere. I am particularl
cerned with the changing meanings of the vacation in France-how va
came to be defined in certain ways, which definitions counted, and ho
definitions were instituted and reproduced. I contend that the history
vacations must be understood not as the logical result of seemingly natu
creases in leisure time due to advanced industrialization but rather as
"made" from a complex skein of political choices and concerns, social
lems" defined and debated, economic transformations, and culturally pe
anxieties and pleasures.
The 1930s were a time of extraordinary political tensions in Europe in
leisure became a site for competing cultural politics. In 1936, the Frenc
ular Front government legislated paid vacations (conges payes), unleas
wide-ranging debate around the cultural politics of leisure and of socia
6 As Lydia Elhadad and Olivier Querouel put it: "There has long been a very particular
al sensibility in France ... of being the country which enunciates universal rights: right
right to liberty and equality, right to education, right of sanctuary. Even today, France is
the only country in the world in which leisure has this character," "L'Apparition des Cong
Temps Libre 1 (1980), 83. See also Victoria de Grazia, "Beyond Time and Money," Inte
Labor and Working Class History, 43 (Spring 1993), 29.
7 A note about terminology. I will focus primarily upon vacations rather than tourism p
cause they had become by this time the more far-reaching phenomenon. While the histori
ings of these terms was complex and unstable, by the early decades of the twentieth cen
France the notion of vacation had synthesized that of conge, which implied time liberat
one's occupation and from schooling, and of tourisme, which assumed a journey and a re
everyday life. The vacation enjoined these understandings of time and space, reconstitut
notions of time in terms of vacation time and of space as vacation sites in both the indiv
collective imagination; thus anyone on vacation could be considered a tourist. On these ma
Jean-Didier Urbain, L'Idiot du Voyage: Histoires de Touristes (Paris, 1991), especially c
Touriste et les Mots" and Alain Laurent, Liberer les Vacances? (Paris, 1973), 20-21.
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250 ELLEN FURLOUGH
The conges payes forged a new understanding of vacations. Popular
challenged the prevailing notions of vacations as an elite and generally
practice and enacted a democratic model for vacations forged in cons
position to those organized by the Nazi and Italian fascist regimes. P
tions in France were henceforth a right of citizenship grounded in th
cal traditions associated with the socialist Popular Front government
eve of World War II, however, they were not yet a mass social practi
sense of large numbers of people from diverse social groups going on
nor were they highly visible as a subject of commercialized mass cul
The late 1940s through the early 1970s were the period in France
many other European countries, when tourism and vacations becam
"mass" phenomenon-both literally in terms of who went on vacatio
the extraordinary proliferation of mass-mediated cultural representatio
cations. Whereas only a tiny proportion of French people, perhaps 5 t
cent, went on vacation in the mid-1930s, by the 1980s over 60 percen
for the beaches, countryside, or their second homes during the sum
tion season.8 Shopkeepers and workers vacationing in newly bu
grounds, popular beaches, and low-cost vacation villages joined pred
ly bourgeois vacationers at luxurious spas, expensive hotels, and posh
resorts. This new era in the practices and organization of vacations an
took place in the context of post-war economic growth, rising prospe
the elaboration of government policies designed to mitigate social ant
and put in place a social welfare state. Yet, the cultural and social mea
sociated with the vacation were neither stable nor fully worked out in t
and 1960s. It is within the proliferation of different cultural models
tutions that we can begin to trace convergent and divergent understa
mass vacations in this era.
While at first glance post-war social and commercial tourism seem to literalize accessibility and social distinction, tensions were at work within these two
genres. Social tourism tended to rely on government subsidies to realize "vacations for all" through vacation villages and group travel. The Left promoted
organized vacations as a form of democratic leisure, social consumption (rather
than as a commercialized consumer product), and group solidarity.9 Social
8 John Tuppen, "France: The Changing Character of a Key Industry," in Allen M. Williams and
Gareth Shaw, Tourism and Economic Development: Western European Experiences (London,
1991), 192.
9 According to one study, social consumption "includes state production and subsidization of
such things as education, public daycare (and nurseries) for children, health insurance, housing,
transportation, pensions, entertainment, and cultural activities ... In the socialist economies, social consumption ranges from 20 to 30 percent of the total-significantly higher than the 5 to 15
percent level commonly characteristic of the capitalist economies" (Philip J. Bryson, The Consumer
Under Socialist Planning: The East German Case [New York, 1984], 24). Bogdan Mieczkowski
defines it as "consumption provided for by the society and not purchased individually in the market" (in Personal and Social Consumption in Eastern Europe [New York, 1975], 19). See also D.
R. Hall, "Stalinism and Tourism: A Study of Albania and North Korea," Annals of Tourism Research, 1781 (1990), 36-54.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 251
tourism was not necessarily embedded within a market-based logic an
often part of lingering working class subcultures during the 1950s and
While social tourism provided access to modestly priced vacations, i
nomic and cultural strength was overshadowed by the growth of comm
(for profit) tourism. Commercial tourist organizations promoted vacati
commodities laden with particular cultural expectations. I argue that tho
resentations actively modeled emergent values of consumer culture and
central to that culture's economy of desire. This period also saw the r
growth of tourist professionals who encouraged mass access to vacation
seeking market-oriented demarcations to preserve exclusivity. Marke
seen by the 1960s not so much in class terms but as segments that var
age, occupation, and so forth, a logic fully in line with post-war business s
gies as well as the loosening of tightly defined class divisions.10 Vacatio
thus becoming both a mass-consumer product and, to use economi
Hirsch's formulation, a positional good."1 The making of mass vacatio
commercial and commodified products, was not fully realized by the
and indeed a distinctive feature of French tourism today is the relative
stantial role played by non-profit groups in organizing vacations.
It is my contention that the 1930s through the early 1970s was the p
moment for creating mass vacations and that it was crucial to that pro
create and market vacations as consumer goods that could both preserve
social privileges and secure social entitlements within an emergent consumeroriented society and economy. This history, I will argue, demonstrates the ways
in which the constitutive elements of mass consumer culture were neither stan-
dardized, as Siegfried suggests, nor, as others have suggested, the result of a
manipulative "culture industry" that vanquished "authentic" or popular leisure
formerly outside the processes of commodification.12 Instead, mass vacations
offer insights into the appeal of commercialized leisure to a wide variety of social groups, the nature of people's investment in those forms of leisure (here,
10 For examples: Francoise Grosse and Regis Tasle, "Le Temps des loisirs du troisieme age,"Espaces, 2 (January 1974), 22-34, and Fran9oise Cribier, "Retirement to Tourist Resorts on the French
Coast," Leisure and Social Change (Edinburgh University, Tourism and Recreation Research,
1983); Jacques Heytens, "Le tourisme des jeunes," Apres Demain, 137 (October 1971), 31-32;
Fran9oise Monge, "Les vacances familiales," Apres Demain, 137 (October 1971), 35-36; V. Patin
and M. Pegnat, "Vacances des Handicapes," Espaces, 46 (July 1980), 9-16. On social changes,
Henri Mendras with Alistair Cole, Social Change in Modern France: Towards a Cultural Anthropology of the Fifth Republic (Cambridge, 1991).
I I Hirsch defines positional goods as those characterized by scarcity and high prices. Positional goods also function to secure social distinctions (Social Limits to Growth [Cambridge, MA,
1976), 27-32 and 37-38.
12 The classic Frankfurt School critique of mass culture of and the effects of the "culture industry" is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1972). Note also Raymond Williams, Communications (New York, 1967); Richard Butsch, "Leisure and Hegemony in America," in For Fun
and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, Richard Butsch, ed. (Philadelphia,
1990) and Michael Denning, "The End of Mass Culture," International Labor and Working-Class
History, 37 (Spring 1990), 4-19.
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252 ELLEN FURLOUGH
as a part of a standard of living forged within the post-war social welfa
and the complex play of cultural representation that mass vacations
This is not to dismiss or minimize the ways, as anthropologist Arjun
rai puts it, touristic imaginaries have become transnational and "empo
imagined vistas of mass-mediated master narratives,"13 but to argue ins
we need to map the proliferation of convergent and divergent meanings
questions about how those formulations were produced, embraced,
ered, or rejected within particular historical contexts.
TOURISM AND VACATIONS IN THE 1930s
In the 1930s, French tourism was legally transformed from a regime
lege to a regime of access. The law of June 20, 1936, on conges payes
cations) made vacations a political right rather than a class privilege. Th
atory legislation provided a 15-day-paid vacation (12 working days)
salaried employees or wage earners (with no exceptions for sex, age,
tionality) who had worked for one continuous year in an establishment
stipulated that the vacation would coincide with the summer vacatio
schools and factory and business closures. People were not allowed to w
pay during their vacation.
A product of the first days of the Popular Front government of social
Blum, the law was part of the government's goals for rassemblemen
gration, participation, and democratization-designed to build social d
cy within the parliamentary republic. 4 Democratic access to a variety of
and cultural activities, ranging from art, music, theater, and cinema t
cation, was at the heart of the cultural politics of the Popular Front. As
an Pascal Ory notes, all its cultural initiatives had the same goal, "to brea
obstacles to participation ... which have a name, under many masks, o
ey and class prejudice."15 Along with initiatives such as a forty-hour w
pay increases, the paid vacation was to set the stage for purposeful an
cratic leisure activities.
The organization of leisure was a particularly politicized issue in Europe during the 1930s, and the choice of paid vacations as a focus for cultural politics
was not unique to France. The Blum government offered its version to contrast
with, and respond to, the success of fascist and authoritarian leisure policies
meant to secure political consensus through state intervention. Whereas gov13 Arjun Appadurai, "Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,"
201, in Richard G. Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM, 1991).
14 On these matters, see Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy,
1934-38 (Cambridge, 1988); Gary Cross, "Vacations for All: The Leisure Question in the Era of
the Popular Front," Journal of Contemporary History, 24 (1989); Francis Hordern, "Genese et Vote
de la Loi du 20 Juin 1936 sur les Conges Payes", 19-33; and Jean-Claude Richez and Leon Strauss,
"G6enologie des Vacances Ouvrieres," both in Le Mouvement Social, 150 (January-March 1990)
3-17.
15 Pascal Ory, La Belle Illusion: Culture et Politique sous le signe du Front Populaire,
1935-1938 (Paris, 1994), 846.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 253
ernments in Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Greece had created sta
leisure institutions designed to dismantle the institutions of the Left
a national audience for political messages, and compensate for lo
consumption,16 the Popular Front's leisure and vacation initiativ
signed to express social democratic ideals. Opportunities for pop
and tourism emphasized the freedom of choice and organization an
realized by a network of voluntary associations, trade unions, loca
ket-based initiatives. The state encouraged access to leisure pursu
formation, some coordination, and financial assistance.17
Paid vacations were also a direct product of the politics of labor.
er a dominant theme, paid vacations had been a demand of Europe
ganizations since the early twentieth century. With the onset of th
day after World War I, elites feared that workers would dissipate
time in drink or other morally irresponsible behaviors, in comme
tainment such as the cinema, or even worse, on political or labor
and thus sought to organize the workers' leisure time. Labor mo
France and elsewhere responded by seeking either to provide a dis
cialist and populaire interpretation of leisure activities through wo
el associations, sports groups, theater, film and music societies or
efforts of the state, modern industrialists, and reform-minded lab
favor of the benefits of vacations for workers' health, hygiene, an
ly, productivity.'8 By 1935, there were fourteen countries (prim
rope, but also in Brazil, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba) and two S
tons where legislation provided an annual paid vacation for workers and
salaried employees.'9 Paid vacations for American workers and employees, in
contrast, continued to be linked to employment contracts rather than to national legislation.20
16 Victoria de Grazia, "La Politique Sociale du Loisir: 1900-1940," Les Cahiers de la Recherche
Architecturale, 15-17 (ler trimestre,1985), 24-35. On Fascist leisure policies, Francois-Xavier
Babaur, L'Organisation des Loisirs Ouvriers en Allemagne: Kraft Durch Freude (Paris, 1939); W.
Buchholz; De Nationalsocialistische Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude (Thesis, Munich 1976); and
Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981). Shelly Baranowski, of the University of Akron, is currently working on a history of
Kraft durch Freude. See her "Strength through Joy: Tourism and Lebensraum in the Third Reich"
(unpublished paper). For broader perspectives on leisure politics, see Nicole Samuel and Madeleine
Romer, Le Temps Libre: Un Temps Social (1984); and Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making
of Consumer Culture; (London and New York, 1993).
17 Ory, La Belle Illusion, 720; and Cross, "Vacations for All."
18 De Grazia, "La Politique Sociale du Loisir," and Cross, Time and Money, ch. 5. On England,
see Stephen Jones, Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure, 1918-1939 (London, 1986), 143.
19 The ILO estimated that the total number of persons entitled to paid vacations in Europe had
increased from 19 million in 1926 to between 70 and 80 million in 1939. International Labour Of-
fice, Studies and Reports, Series G (Housing and Welfare), no. 5, Facilities for the Use of Workers'Leisure During Holidays (Geneva, 1939), 9-11.
20 For a discussion of the American case, see Gary Cross, Time and Money, especially pages
96-97; and Marguerite Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1905-1940
(Smithsonian Institution Press, forthcoming).
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254 ELLEN FURLOUGH
The momentum for paid vacations by the labor movement had languis
France during the Depression but took on a new urgency during the first
of the Popular Front government. Leon Blum took office in the midst o
labor agitation, and demands for paid vacations emerged during the str
May and early June 1936.21 In this politically charged climate, some con
tives raised objections about the financial effects of paid vacations, while
reluctantly accepted them. Employers pointed to paid vacations as a "m
diffusing revolutionary sentiments" and a route toward "moral progre
then moved quickly to establish groups for organizing their workers' vacat
In one bold stroke, this legislation changed the meaning of vacation.
ographer Francoise Cribier put it, "Vacations, or leisure, no longer follow
fluctuations of production, forced inactivity, disguised unemployment; t
now an organized cessation of activity, claimed, imposed, the object of
tract. Work stops this time in security."23 No longer the privilege of eli
cations had been "conquered for the working class" and were seen as t
mocratic fruit of political victory.24 This legislation did not, of course,
what people would do during their paid vacations but did set the stage
panding the meanings and possibilities of tourism for French people.
How then would a new model of democratic leisure, of "social solida
through leisure beyond the market," be realized?25 The policies of Le
grange, under-secretary of state for the organization of sports and leisure
central to the elaboration of a new vision for volunteerist, democratic, a
ticipatory "loisirs sportifs, loisirs touristiques, loisirs culturels." Lagran
phasized the important role of youth within a new moral unity, sought to
together different sectors of the population within clubs and associatio
voted to leisure and recreation, and encouraged widened access to plac
practices formerly reserved for elites.26
Putting democratic leisure into practice proved complicated. Despite
rhetorical support for "popular tourism," government initiatives were
meager, due to the new Ministry's limited resources and to its emphasis
tra-governmental groups, clubs, and associations. Nonetheless, the gover
disseminated brochures on hotel and vacation opportunities for the "be
21 Richez and Strauss, "G6enologie des Vacances"; and Jacques Danos and Marcel Gibelin
1936: Class Struggle and the Popular Front in France, 20 (London, 1986).
22 On French business: Suzanne Trist, "Le patronat face a la question des loisirs ouvrier
1936 et apres," Le Mouvement Social, 150 (January-March 1990), 45-57.
23 Cribier, La Grande Migration, 42. Those with less than six months employment recei
week only.
24 E. Lefranc, "Vacances 1936," Vendredi (September 28, 1936). This is the thesis of Roger-H.
Guerrand, La Conquete des Vacances (Paris, 1963).
25 Gary Cross, "Time, Money, and Labor History's Encounter with Consumer Culture," International Labor and Working-Class History, 43 (Spring 1993), 9.
26 Julian Jackson, "Le Temps des Loisirs: Popular Tourism and Mass Leisure in the Vision of
the Front Populaire," in Martin Alexander and Helen Graham, ed., The French and Spanish Popular Fronts, 226-53 (Cambridge, 1989) and Ory, La Belle Illusion, 720.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 255
aires de conge," facilitated access to low-cost accommodations for vis
the 1937 International Exposition, placed representatives of working
tourism organizations on the national Tourism Commission, and enco
the growth of youth hostels (auberges de jeunesse.)27 The creation o
grange tickets" was the most visible effort and perhaps had the most dir
immediate impact. Realizing that train travel was too expensive for mo
ers, Lagrange arranged for a 40 percent reduction on ticket costs. The
also special trains, at a reduction of 60 percent for workers at certain f
The railroad companies put sales offices in the Parisian suburbs and in
ries for easier access by workers.28
Groups that responded to the challenge of popular tourism soon reali
the democratization of vacations entailed more than breaking through
formidable barriers posed by wealth and class. Popular tourism's asso
ist model was meant to be different from both the state-dominated (
model and the market -driven (liberal) model exemplified by the Unite
Would leisure and vacations become vehicles for the democratization of cul-
ture and public space, or might the emphasis on individual liberty result in a re-
treat into private life or commercialized amusements? If paid vacations were
not to become "tourism at a discount,"29 a cut-rate version of existing tourism,
what would a more democratic tourism look like? What would prevent these
"new tourists" from embracing the values of pre-existing tourism and simply
becoming another market for a commercial tourist industry?
Various groups, including employers organizations, the Catholic Church, and
working-class organizations, elaborated their own understandings of popular
tourism.30 Groups sympathetic to the Popular Front, especially those of the
working class, moved quickly to provide low-cost vacation opportunities distinct from the existing tourism and vacation industry. Their efforts were not, as
one contemporary put it, meant to "stimulate commercial profits,"3' but rather
27 Ory, La Belle Illusion, 752, 758-59, 778-87. See Lucette Heller, Histoire des Auberges de
Jeunesse en France des Origines a la Liberation (1929-1945) (These d'Etat, Histoire, Universit6
de Nice, 1985).
28 Benigno Caceres, Allons au-devant de la Vie: La naissance du temps des loisirs en 1936
(Paris, 1981), 34-36; and Cribier, La Grande Migration, 47. The national railroad company, the
SNCF, was not created until August 31, 1937.
29 Andre Ulmann, "Qu'est-ce donc le tourisme populaire?," Vendredi (August 13, 1937), 6.
30 The employers organization, the CGPF, created a new committee in early 1937, the Comite
de Prevoyance et d'Action Sociale (CPAS). The CPAS helped found, in March 1937, L'Association Francaise de Tourisme, which was to help employers organize the vacations of their workers
(Trist, "Le Patronat," 54-55). The Catholic church founded a National Leisure Committee in early 1937, with a section on tourism. Jean-Victor Parant, Le Probleme du Tourisme Populaire: Em-
ploi des Conges Payes et Institutions de Vacances Ouvrieres en France et a 1'Etranger (Paris,
1939), 100-3. Other initiatives came from within the cooperative movement, where there had been
a National Leisure Committee since 1930. By the mid-1930s, there were 400 regional branches.
Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption, 1834-1930 (Ithaca, 1991).
31 E. Lefranc, "Vacances 1936," Vendredi (September 28, 1936) 6.
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256 ELLEN FURLOUGH
to share information, open up access to vacation sites, and foster relaxation and
sociability (often with a socialist or trade unionist purpose).
Most initiatives involved organizing modestly priced group travel, providing
information about accommodations, and offering local assistance to visiting
vacationers. The labor movement press, for example, organized collective travel from the summer of 1936. L'Humanite, the Communist daily, advertised a
special trip to Nice (including transportation, lodging, meals, tips, and taxes)
for 480 francs per week. Le Populaire, the Socialist daily, sponsored low-cost
vacations and listed the few hotels available for the new vacationers. Vendredi,
the quintessential Popular Front press, even offered international travel. Their
tours involved bus travel and camping and were geared toward "discovery and
the birth of friendships."32 Some of these initiatives were local, as when a group
of members of Nice's Popular Tourism Association met one of the early trains
filled with 900 vacationers holding "Lagrange tickets." They had arranged for
lodging in small hotels and pensions or in the homes of local members and
greeted vacationers at the train station with a brass band. A photograph from
this event captures the prevailing spirit with its caption: "The Popular Front has
abolished this privilege: the Cote d'Azur reserved for the Rich."33
Some of the most active efforts came from within French trade unionism. The
Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) founded a Tourism Bureau in April
1937 dedicated to the notion of ensuring that "workers tourism should be class-
oriented tourism." Its membership was open only to union members and their
families. Led by three "tourism delegates," its vacations were meant to procure
rest, relaxation, well-being, and culture for workers. The CGT Bureau sought
lower prices in vacation areas; organized a kind of savings bank, the "Credit Vacance", and provided group travel opportunities.34 Another group from within
trade unionism was Vacances Pour Tous, founded by teachers in the Jura department. In December 1937 the CGT bureau and Vacances Pour Tous merged
to form Tourisme-Vacances Pour Tous (T-VPT). This group also offered information on low-cost hotels, as well as on farms willing to take in vacationers.
While acknowledging that popular tourism was not immune from the beauties
of nature or the importance of cultural monuments such as chateaux, the CGT's
32 "Les Voyages de Vacances de Vendredi," Vendredi (June 5, 1936, 5). By June 12, group travel was available to Switzerland, Spain, Czechoslovakia, England, and the Soviet Union. The latter
cost 2,225 francs for a 20-day tour.
33 Le Petit NiCois (August 4, 1936). There were widely reported sneers about "trains rouges,"
or train loads of socialist and communist workers on the way to the beaches. The wife of a metal
worker recalled that hotel staff on the C6te d'Azur was "amazed to see that we knew how to use a
fork." Robert Steven Rudney, "From Luxury to Popular Tourism: The Transformation of the Resort City of Nice" (Ph.D. thesis, Department of History, University of Michigan, 1979), 236, 53.
The photograph is from Virgile Barel's memoirs, Cinquante Annees de Luttes (Paris, 1966), 113.
34 "Les Vacances," L'Humanite (August 25, 1936), 5. In this era of ressemblant, there was a special emphasis on the reconciliation of diverse groups within French society. L'Humanite, for example, hailed the paid vacation as a way for workers to go to the sea or countryside, where they
would join their "maritime and peasant comrades" and form lines of solidarity for the "happy future of the working class" ("A la Mer! A la Campagne!" (August 8, 1937).
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 257
organization insisted that working class tourists should see a different
one that focused on labor along with leisure. As such, their tours involved
with local workers and to local workplaces. By 1939, T-VPT was an ac
ganization that promoted a wide range of vacation options-camping,
group travel, tourist information, and railway ticket discounts.35
The Popular Front's emphasis on volunteerism, local initiatives, and
vidual liberty was indeed different from the heavy-handed direction (and
in Germany) of fascist cultural policies. Yet, expectations for vacatio
were strikingly similar across a wide range of interested groups duri
1930s: Socialists, communists, trade unions, Catholics, and employers
vacations as a privileged time for "education," for the mobilization of
stituencies around various agendas.36 Catholics encouraged pilgrimage
the development of spirituality. Reform-minded capitalists hoped that
nized leisure and vacations would help integrate workers into the nat
"restore" their energy for production. Some writers expressed conce
without "rational" organization, workers would "spend their vacation t
cabarets, cinemas, or other unhealthy distractions with disastrous effects"
ers saw paid vacations as an antidote to class struggle. Historians Jean-
Richez and Leon Strauss have also emphasized convergences between F
aspirations for popular tourism and the Nazi Kraft durch Freude-acce
ty to leisure practices connoting social prestige, the role of vacations in
ial and national unity, the return to and reconciliation with nature, and
generation of the body.37
Other vexing issues arose in the elaboration of a democratic perspect
tourism and vacations. How was popular tourism to be different from
elite models? Paternalist discussions of tourism, for example, had often
issues of "hygiene" in connection with working-class leisure, arguing
should be healthy, relaxing, and restorative, resulting in higher produ
once back on the job. Hygienic themes of rest and recuperation, along wit
utility for productivity, were also themes within popular tourism. Leis
said to offer workers the "possibility to feel alive and to taste la divine pa
This kind of logic had not only popular appeal but also positive histori
onance (such as recalling Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafarge's The Right t
35 Gaulthier, "Notre Pittoresque," C.G.T. Tourisme: Revue Mensuel (November 9, 19
March 1939 and July-August 1939).
36 Francois de Dainville, Tourisme et Pastorale (Tournai, 1965); J.V. Parent, Le Prob
Tourisme Populaire, 100-1; Trist, "Le patronat," 45-57. Yvonne Bequet, L'Organisa
Loisirs des Travailleurs (Paris, 1939) praises organized vacations for worker's health an
tism and applauds the cessation of class struggle that she attributes to Kraft durch Freude
Cross, Time and Money, 121 and Bachelier, Les Conges payes, 13. Victoria de Grazia has n
point as well.
37 Jean-Claude Richez and Leon Strauss, "Un temps nouveau pour les ouvriers: les
pay6s, 1930-1960," 386-93, in Alain Corbin, ed., L'Avenement des Loisirs, 1850-1960
1995).
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258 ELLEN FURLOUGH
Lazy of 1884). The popular press cast vacations as being distinct from everyday life and labor, a total change of location and activities. By the late 1930s,
the rhetoric of some popular tourism organizations sounded like a travel agency
for low-cost tourism. Partir, for example, urged workers to vacation at the posh
resorts of Deauville and Trouville for "the pleasures of relaxation and amusements" and for the modern swimming pools and tennis courts. Another article
urged workers to travel to Tunisia, for its "multiple attractions, privileged climate, cities with their cachet oriental, and numerous archeological ruins."
L'Humanite counseled escapism (evasion), an older theme that would later become a staple advertising motif of commercial tourism.38 The prior weights of
older elite values and touristic expectations were hard to dislodge; as Jean Viard
has noted, the first conges payes wanted for the most part to go to "the sacrosanct places of the tourism of the Belle Epoque."39 French society's class rigidity and powerful bourgeois culture allowed for the development of popular
tourism by and for those excluded from the culture and practices of vacationing, but this also made it difficult to imagine new cultures and practices distinct
from older models.
The elitism and rigidity of French tourism was an important reason why the
1936 legislation did not immediately result in the development of mass tourism
or of an expanded commercial tourist industry. Indeed, relatively few of the new
tourists were able to go on vacation. For working people, the most obvious con-
straint was money. As Cribier observed: "The working class in 1936 was an im-
poverished group; people had no savings, they had suffered from unemployment for several years, and the important salary raises of the summer of 1936
were quickly absorbed by necessary purchases, and then very quickly, inflation."40 Another barrier was psychological. Benigno Caceres, a master carpenter, recalled that the reactions to the news on the paid vacations "was not as simple as one might have imagined." People awakened at their regular time, as if
they were going to work, and "it took lots of effort to persuade them that for 12
days they could wake up when they wanted." Many were concerned whether
they would be paid; they "could not imagine that these new laws, still fragile,
would actually be applied." For waged workers, paid vacations signified first
and foremost the opportunity to be away from work (here I refer to waged labor, not domestic labor, which was ongoing for most women) and did not nec-
essarily involve the physical displacement involved in going away on vacation.
People often stayed home, rested, caught up on all of the domestic tasks that
38 Partir was founded in 1936 by the Association Touristique Populaire de la Region Parisienne. By 1938 it contained over 30,000 members and 26 popular tourism associations. See G. Chabanon, "Ce qu'est la Federation 'Partir': Son But, Son Activit6, Ses Possibilites," Partir (Decem-
ber 1938); Julien Lefranc, "Pour vos vacances: Trouville, Deauville," Partir (July 1938); "La
Tunisie: Contree Touristique," Partir (December 1938); and "Vivent les Vacances!," L'Humanite
(August 1, 1936).
39 Jean Viard, Penser les Vacances (Vendome, 1984), 91.
40 Cribier, La Grande Migration, 45; and Hordern, "Genese et Vote," 21.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 259
were always being put off, picnicked along the river, and danced
Thus, vacationing generally meant engaging in older patterns of wo
leisure.
Even if the potential new tourists could find the money and psyc
embrace paid vacations, accommodations remained a major barrier.
fact that the economic depression of the 1930s forced a serious self
tion within the French tourist industry, it was unable to break out of
tons that tourists were and should be people of wealth and privilege. W
had been, since the mid-nineteenth century, some broadening of the s
of vacationers, going on vacation continued to signify the adaptation
geois style of life.42 Hotels continued to serve elites and provide a way
tain and communicate social distinctions as well as prestige.43 Ther
cided emphasis on affluent foreign tourists, especially since incom
tourism largely made up for the deficit in the French balance of trad
Given the constraints of finances, psychological barriers, and tou
tures that rendered them invisible, working-class people who did g
their vacations stayed with relatives in the countryside, camped, or p
advantage of the new popular tourism associations. As such, tourism
of the war remained largely a practice of privilege and continued t
to draw boundaries framed in class terms. Nonetheless, the 1936 leg
alter the status quo. While there continued to be concern about wo
propriate" use of vacation time, the new notion of tourisme popula
41 Caceres, Allons au devant de la vie, 28; and Rolande Tremp6 and Alain Boscu
miers Conges Pay6s a Decazeville et a Mazamet," Le Mouvement Social, 150 (Jan
1990), 65-71.
42 From 1853, government functionaries acquired the right to an annual 15-day vacation, followed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by employees of the rail-
road companies, banks, insurance companies, and department stores; school teachers had vacations
by virtue of the rhythm of their profession. There were also a small number of workers that had the
right to annual vacations (mostly in north-eastern France), although not generally with pay. For dis-
cussions of the bourgeois signification of vacationing, see Cribier, La Grande Migration, 48 and
Douglas Mackaman, Leisure Settings: Medicine and the Culture of the Bourgeois Spa in Modern
France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). From the 1920s, new vacation rituals
emerged (most notably during the new summer season along the C6te d'Azur) within a privileged
cultural avant-garde, rituals that included sunbathing and tanned, relatively unveiled bodies (JeanDidier Urbain, Sur la Plage: Histoires et Coutumes Balneaires [Paris, 1994]).
43 On French hotels: Marcel Gautier, L'Industrie Hoteliere (Paris, 1971); Pierre Andrieu, Histoire Anecdotique des Hotels de France (Paris, 1956); and D. Perrin, L'Hotellerie (Paris, 1983).
44 League of Nations, Economic Committee, Tourist Traffic Considered as an International
Economic Factor (Geneva, 1934), AN CE 162. One account estimated that tourism brought in 10
billion francs in 1929, 8 billion for 1930, and 6 billion for 1934-35. Journal Officiel, Ddbats
(Chambre), July 28, 1936, 2165. Alarmed by reports citing the decline of foreign tourists to France
in the 1930s (from 1,911,000 in 1929 to 93,000 in 1933), the National Economic Council's Tourism
Commission redoubled their efforts to represent and sell France to a market composed of wealthy
foreign tourists. Conseil National Economique, Commission du Tourisme (1934-35), CompteRendu Analytique de la Sdance du 31 octobre 1934, AN CE 162. See also W. W. Stowe, Going
Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, 1994).
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260 ELLEN FURLOUGH
up possibilities for change in terms of who might take vacations and be a tour
and in the cultural dilation of social space. As historian Julian Jackson put
fundamental feature of the Popular Front was "the assertion of a working-c
presence in a highly compartmentalized society-a presence on the cin
screen, in the street and, now, on the beaches."45 The Popular Front was it
too short-lived to fully implement its vision of "vacations for all" or to w
through how popular tourism might be realized differently from older patter
It would take significant social, cultural, and economic transformations to
alize the mass tourism inaugurated during the Popular Front era.
MASS VACATIONS IN POST-WAR FRANCE
The development of mass tourism in France took place duri
rious years" of economic growth and the related rise of a
economy and society. The "New France" was one of enhance
panding mass domestic markets, an increasing velocity of t
utive policies that substituted active governmental econom
austerity. Social policies included annual paid vacations, alon
locations and insurance benefits, as part of a panoply of ben
supporting the rights of all social groups to share in the g
prosperity of society.46 The post-war period was thus when t
titlement and access to vacations narrowed in France. Draw
economic and social base and capitalizing on expanded inco
of government-sanctioned paid vacations, as well as the g
related infrastructures, tourism and vacations grew dram
during the first three decades following the war. This expans
cationing was also influenced by better and more reasonabl
dations and resorts, along with the greater personal mobilit
mobiles and cheaper air travel.47
The state encouraged the development of mass tourism
access (domestic and foreign) through a mixed economy o
initiatives. These included investments in tourism as a way
derdeveloped" regions such as the Languedoc-Roussillon, A
sica; in the case of the Languedoc development, governmen
those of the joint Rumanian-Bulgarian project on the Black
45 Jackson, "Le Temps des loisirs," 234.
46 On the general European context, see the excellent essay by Leonardo
of Mass Consumption in Europe After World War II," delivered at the Ru
torical Analysis conference on "The Coming of Mass Consumption in E
post-war French social policy, Henry Gallant, Histoire politique de la se
1945-1952 (Paris, 1955), Wallace C. Peterson, The Welfare State in Fran
John S. Ambler, ed., The French Welfare State: Surviving Social and Id
York, 1991).
47 A good discussion of general trends is Joffre Dumazedier and Mau
Loisir dans la Societe Francaise d'Hier et de Demain (Paris, 1967).
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 26I
ican initiative in the Yucatan. It also underwrote the costs to consumers and to
developers involved in transforming French mountains, seacoasts, and rural ar-
eas into "tourist products."48 The state also helped develop low-cost vacation
options, supported the increasingly important commercial tourism industry's
efforts to attract wider segments of the domestic population and to entice
foreign tourists to France (and thus continue the positive balance of payments
associated with foreign tourism), and facilitated transportation with railroad re-
ductions and charter flights on government-controlled railroads and airlines.
The extension of paid vacation time as a legal right continued the synergy in
France between politics and vacations as they tended to follow from labor union
demands, and the onset of left-wing governments. While the long-term trend in
the postwar era has been for hours of work to drop for waged and salaried work-
ers, French trade unions accepted an increase in worktime (averaging forty-five
to forty-seven hours per week) for the task of post-war reconstruction. By the
early 1950s, as the economy grew, organized labor began to agitate for a decrease in worktime; unlike developments in the United States, however, the labor movement's efforts focused primarily on lengthening paid vacations rather
than on shortening the work week. Workers at Renault took the lead and signed
collective accords in September 1955 for three weeks of paid vacation time.
The trend continued in other key industrial sectors and was then generalized by
a law enacted by socialist Guy Mollet's government in the spring of 1956.49
Significantly, during the Parliamentary debates that accompanied this law, the
Minister of Social Affairs declared that paid vacations, along with other social
policies (including family allocations and insurance measures), were "all part
of a whole" meant to ensure a particular standard of living.50 The momentum
continued; in 1956 workers at the aeronautics firm Marcel-Dassault obtained
four weeks of paid vacations, followed by trade union agitation resulting in
around 150 other collective conventions, most notably at Renault in 1962. In
1969, the government legislated four weeks of paid vacations, regularizing collective conventions already in place and extending four weeks of paid vacation
48 On the Languedoc-Roussillon project, see Ellen Furlough and Rosemary Wakeman, "La
Grande Motte: Regional Development, Tourism, and the State." Paper presented at the Third International Conference on Urban History, Budapest, Hungary, August 1996. The Black Sea development is discussed by Jean-Pierre Lozato-Giotart, Mediterran&e et Tourisme (Paris, 1990), 141-4,
and Jean Poncet, "Le D6veloppement du Tourisme en Bulgarie," Annales de Geographie, 85
(1976), 155-77. For Mexico, Mary Lee Nolan and Sidney Nolan, "The Evolution of Tourism in
Twentieth-Century Mexico," Journal of the West, 27:4 ((1988), 14-25 and Georges Cazes, "Mex-
ique: La Fonction Economique du Tourisme International," Problemes d'Amerique Latine, 27:4
(1980), 122-50. On tourist "products," Francesco Frangialli, La France dans le Tourisme Mondial (Paris, 1991), 127, and especially chapter 7, "Des espaces et des produits."
49 Jean-Luc Bodiguel, La Reduction du Temps de Travail: Enjeu de la Lutte Sociale (Paris,
1969), 91-106. The French government extended the amount of paid vacation time to four weeks
in 1969 and five weeks in 1981.
50 France, Journal Officiel, M. Albert Gazier, Ministre des Affaires sociales, Conseil de la
R6publique, seance du 8 mars 1958, p. 317.
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262 ELLEN FURLOUGH
time to the approximately 15 percent of workers still outside collective a
ments.51
Transformations in the social composition of vacationers and in the proliferation of vacation options (or "supply" in the language of economics) led sociologist Joffre Dumazedier to hail vacations as "the most important leisure activity" of the post-1945 period, a "social fact of the first magnitude," and a
cornerstone of what he and others saw as an emergent "leisure society" in the
1960s.52 Vacations were becoming an object of mass consumption. While consumer durables were the leading sectors of consumer spending in post-war
France, personal expenditure on leisure activities, possessions, and equipment
rose by 250 percent, more quickly than household revenues, during the two
decades after 1950.53 Vacations were an ever-increasing focus of consumer
spending on goods and services clustered within the category of leisure, and
there was a striking equivalence to the proportion of income spent on vacations
in all income categories-around 6 to 8 percent of the family budget.54
Modem mass tourism was increasingly a new social norm. By the late 1960s,
not leaving one's home to go on vacation had become a "sign of social maladjustment almost as strong as the refusal to work ... the norm of vacationing
quickly became an obligation."55 This can be seen in the unprecedented increase in the proportion and social range of French people taking vacations:
From approximately 15 percent in 1950, the rate of departure surpassed 50 percent by 1974. This rate of departure was, and remains today, strongly influenced
by geographical and socioeconomic variables-those going on vacation were
predominantly urban, most likely to fall within the broad middle class that was
emerging in this era, and relatively young. Those least likely to go on vacation
were generally rural dwellers, economically disadvantaged, and older.56 The
51 Employees preferred extending vacation time to the reduction of the work (which remained
around 46-47 hours per week). See Bodiguel, La Reduction du Temps, 154-91, and France, Journal Officiel, Documents de I 'Assemblee National, Annexe no. 518, Seance du 22 (novembre 1967),
pp. 785-79.
52 Joffre Dumazedier, Toward a Society of Leisure (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 123-4
(first published in French in 1962).
53 Dumazedier and Imbert, Espace et Loisir, 3 and John Ardagh, The New French Revolution:
A Social and Economic Study of France, 1945-1968 (New York, 1968), 269.
54 Calculated from data for 1961 in Francoise Cribier, La Grande Migration, 65 and Tuppen,
"France: The Changing Character of a Key Industry," 191.
55 Viard, Penser les Vacances, 75.
56 People living in large urban areas, especially Parisians, were more likely to go on vacation
than people in rural areas or small towns. In 1964, only a little over 16 percent of people in rural
areas were able to take vacations, rising to over 73 percent of Parisians. The two closely related
variables of occupation and income were also important. Farmers were the least likely to take a vacation (5.9 percent in 1964), people in upper management and the liberal professions the most likely (82.5 percent in 1964). Income was considered to be the most significant variable; when asked
why they did not go on vacation, the highest proportion of respondents (41 percent in 1957) cited
the high cost. Pierre Py, Le Tourisme: Un Phenomene Economique (Paris, 1986), 19-20; Claude
Goguel, "Les Vacances des Francais," Communications, 10 (1967), 8; Dumazedier and Imbert, Espace et Loisir, 64-65 and 67; Cribier, La Grande Migration, 60-61 and 71; Pierre Defert, Pour une
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 263
social practice of going on vacation was also linked to changing patterns of mobility, in particular the increasing dissemination of another consumer goodperhaps the most culturally and economically significant one of the post-war
period-the automobile. By 1964, 65 percent of French vacationers traveled by
car to their vacation destination.57 Kristin Ross has noted that "post-1950s
France-at-the-wheel enacted a revolution in attitudes toward mobility and dis-
placement."58 Going on vacation in one's car also enacted a cultural convergence: Both vacations and cars could signify mythic escape, personal autonomy, and displacement in time and space. Already by the 1950s we can see the
contemporary pattern of north-to-south summer migration emerging. Not only
did this entail a significant transfer of spending power, but it also involved ma-
jor strains on the transportation network that were exacerbated by the cluster-
ing of vacations-three-quarters of French people set out on their annual vacations during July and August, called in France les grandes vacances. Despite
governmental efforts, and a flood of studies demonstrating higher prices, a loss
of comfort and space, and productivity declines in certain economic sectors,
French people continued (and continue today) to take their vacations during this
same period.59 The ensuing strains and tensions were those that Jean-Luc Godard so fiercely and tellingly satirized in his 1967 film, Le Weekend. The chang-
ing geography of vacationing also had an extensive impact at the local and re-
gional level.60 The greatest holiday growth area of the post-war era was
undoubtedly that of the seacoasts. By the early 1970s, the highest proportion of
vacationers (almost half) headed for the beaches, a trend representing a significant democratization of space formerly reserved for elites, as well as the cul-
tural power of mass media imagery linking a successful vacation to the sensual pleasures of the beach.61
Politique du Tourisme en France (Paris, 1960), 44-54; and Anne Guillou, "Les Vacances des
Agriculteurs," in Brigitte Ouvry-Vial et al, Les Vacances: Un Reve, Un Produit, Un Miroir
(Autrement, January 1990).
57 Of the remainder, 25 percent traveled by train and 10 percent by bus, air, or other means. Marc
Boyer, Le Tourisme (Paris, 1982), 69 and 45-51.
58 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 72. The increasing mobility of vacationers is significant for analyzing tourism and consumerism since going on vacation reversed the older logic of the circulation
and distribution of consumer goods. As J6zsef Borocz notes, in tourism and vacations the consumers traveled to the commodity, rather than the commodity being circulated and distributed to
the consumers ("Travel Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32:4 [1992], 709).
59 Cribier, La Grande Migration, 104 and Tuppen, "France," 197.
60 There is an extensive literature on the regional impacts of tourism and vacationing in France.
Examples include Georges Cazes et al, L'Amenagement Touristique (Paris, 1980), R. Knafou, Les
Stations integres de sport d'hiver des Alpesfrancaises (Paris, 1978), P. Pr6au, "Le changement social dans une commune touristique de montagne" Revue de Gdographie Alpine, 74 (1984), 411-37.
61 This destination was followed in popularity by vacations in the countryside and the mountains. Families of modest means most often took rural vacations, whereas wealthier people more
often went to the mountains, notably ski resorts. The former decreased over the period, the latter
increased. A significant proportion of people maintained second homes (7 to 18 percent in 1967)
generally concentrated in tourist areas along the seacoast, in the mountains, or in the area around
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264 ELLEN FURLOUGH
Reflecting on this new norm, Claude Goguel, who was often in charge of national statistical surveys, claimed that the year had become divided into two
very distinct periods: "waiting for vacations and vacations."62 The vacation was
thus becoming a new order of social time away from work and daily routines
that was fixed within the annual cycle. It became an individual and collective
period of reference, the object of planning and imaginative speculation. Vacations, as sociologist Edgar Morin observed in the early 1960s, blended older
themes of health and naturism with newer values and expectations; they were
first and foremost times of "pleasure and play"63 involving not only an escape,
a true displacement from work, but also from one's home, neighborhood, and
daily annoyances. Only physical displacement would refresh those living in
crowded, noisy, and enervating urban settings (read Paris). As French sociologist Jean-Didier Urbain sees it, this was where notions of "tourism" diverged
from those of the "vacation." The point was to travel, to leave home physically, but to be only sedentary once at one's vacation destination; vacations came
to mean being "re-centered" in a place deemed different from daily life and devoted to pleasure, nature, and the cult of the body.64
These understandings were being forged as vacations became a highly visible subject within mass culture, notably the popular media (radio, film, mass
circulation magazines, comic strips) and in advertising. It is precisely in the proliferation of cultural representations of the vacation-its purposes and imagined pleasures-that we can see its seductive power within the social imagination. Notwithstanding emphases on displacement, images of vacations were
incessantly woven within the quotidian. Images of vacations abated briefly at
the end of the summer season, then accelerated in late fall with publicity concerning the Salon du Tourisme, a trade show held annually in Paris. Advertise-
ments for vacations filled the mass market press, magazines (especially
women's magazines such as Elle and Marie-Claire) ran regular columns on vacationing, posters on the streets and in the metro depicted idyllic vacation spots,
and vacation-related attire and consumer goods crowded the window displays.
Numerous films scripted cultural expectations, from the endearing social awk-
wardness, inevitable vacation disasters, and delight of escape from regimentation portrayed in Jacques Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) to the
sun-drenched, sexually-charged "natural" eroticism associated with the Cote
Paris. Visits to spas attracted only 1.8 percent of the vacations in the mid-1960s. The French were
not likely to travel in tour groups (only around 7 percent did so in the 1960s), and French vacationers also tended to remain in France (only around 15 percent traveled outside France by the late
1960s). See Boyer, Le Tourisme, 123-9 and Tuppen, "France," 196; U.S. Department of Commerce,
A Study of French Travel Habits and Patterns (Washington, DC, 1974), 1:8; Cribier, La Grande
Migration, 354; Goguel, "Vacances," 12. For the historical evolution of attitudes and practices related to the seacoast, see Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the
Western World, 1750-1840 (Berkeley, 1994) and Urbain, Sur la Plage.
62 Goguel, "Vacances," 3.
63 Edgar Morin, L'Esprit du Temps (1962; reprinted, Paris, 1975), 97.
64 Urbain, Sur la Plage, 15.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 265
d'Azur (and Brigitte Bardot) in Et Dieu Crea la Femme (1956).65 This social
script was represented as liberatory, a narrative of non-regimented time in plea-
surable social space. As the voice-over in Monsieur Hulot urged: "Don't look
for a plot, for a holiday is meant purely for fun."
By the late 1960s, then, paid vacations had become an object of mass consumption, a subject of mass culture, and a right of citizenship linked to notions
of entitlement and a just standard of living within an emergent social welfare
state. Unlike the earlier accent on vacations as a means for the recuperation of
the labor force or as a solution to the "problem" of working class leisure, vacations represented the achievement of an acceptable standard of living, an opportunity for distraction and play, and a time for the (re)creation of the self. And
yet, the proliferation of consumer-oriented values associated with vacations
does not mean that those values were universally embraced. Nor did more democratic access to vacations result in their becoming banal, serialized, or standardized. Rather, mass vacations continued to express a variety of values and
to articulate diverse and complicated social and cultural differences. It is to the
variety of meanings and practices of vacations that we now turn.
SOCIAL TOURISM AND POPULAR TOURISM
Social tourism, which continued and revamped the
one of the most significant developments during th
tended to provide access to vacations for people of m
to commercial tourism's emphasis on individualist
ment, social tourism's vacations were represente
poseful, and often politically engaged. Economicall
tourism was positioned as a "third sector" within t
wholly in the public nor in the commercial sector.6
of social tourism also differed in many ways from t
Vacations figured prominently in the cultural poli
movement, due in part to the heritage of the Popula
of entitlement associated with the emergence of a s
bor movement continued to express the frustrations
cess to new consumer goods remained restricted, h
housing inadequate, all in the midst of claims from
65 The first Salon du Tourisme opened in 1950 and showcased i
government representatives to the public. "Le Premier Salon du To
s'adressera au grand public aussi bien qu'aux professionnels,
L'Express, for example ran a regular column entitled "Vacances"
was generally placed within the "Madame Express" section of the
include "Vive les Vacances" (1957) and "Les Bronzes" (1978). An im
inine adolescent rebellion in the context of the vacation is Fr
(1954). Note also Alain Laurent, "Le theme du soleil dans la public
Communications, 10 (1967), 35-50.
66 Robert Lanquar and Yves Raynouard, Le Tourisme Social et
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266 ELLEN FURLOUGH
in the 1960s that France had achieved a consumer soci
prosperity. In this context, the left and the labor movem
moted low-cost vacations in such forms as vacation vill
accommodations, or camping.
Social tourism understood vacations as an aspect of so
side the commercial market and devoted to different
tourism meant low-cost vacations away from home. Sec
profit enterprises that did not initially position themse
the market. These enterprises legally could not adverti
form people of their activities and programs. (Camping
exception in this regard.) Third, programs often featured
as dormitory-like accommodations, collective eating and
ganized child-care, and leisure activities. Finally, "anim
played a central role in organizing leisure, an aspect der
education movements of the 1930s.67
One strand of social tourism, referred to at the time
stressed the politics of working-class access to vacations
phrase social tourism, a less politically charged term, as
section will explore these different manifestations th
Tourism and Labor (Tourisme et Travail), the paradigm
lar tourism, and Family Vacation Villages (Villages Vac
after VVF), a major social tourism organization. Since in
differing patterns within the same larger phenomenon of
will use the term social tourism to simplify the discussi
Tourism and Labor was one of the most important non
zations in France during this period. It is also the parad
limitations of politicized social tourism, limits which c
and Labor's dissolution in 1985. Officially created in Feb
auspices of the Vichy government, it was also linked to
eral institutions and movements, notably members of t
been active in pre-war popular education and youth m
the liberation of Paris in August 1944, Tourism and Lab
association of Charles de Gaulle's government. Its adviso
en members of the provisional government, itself predo
67 Lanquar and Raynouard, Tourisme Social, 1-10. For popular ed
cially the important group, Peuple et Culture, see Brian Rigby, Popula
A Study of Cultural Discourse (London, 1991), 39-67. Billy Butlin's
ticularly the "Redcoats" who aided vacationers, were a likely transcul
and Denis Hardy, Good Night Campers! The History of the British H
68 Alain Malherbe has traced Tourism and Labor's genealogy to mem
General au Tourism under Vichy (notably Henri de Segogne and H
Francais de Liberation Nationale (CFLN) in Algeria, the Vichy remnan
nesse, and members of Resistance groups. "Tourisme et Travail, 19
de l'Institute de Recherches Marxistes, 41 (1990), 46-47.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 267
left and center political groups, as well as representatives of the labor movement. The statutes underscored the politically open character of the new orga-
nization, and its early policies focused on welcoming returning deportees and
prisoners of war and on aiding a "new clientele" of "manual and intellectual
workers" seeking vacations.69 This attitude, which fitted smoothly within the
post-war political ethos of tripartisme and the consolidation of a network of labor entitlements, ensured governmental support; in 1948, for example, Tourism
and Labor received a subvention of around 12 million francs. Membership
could be individual or collective, and by 1948 Tourism and Labor had around
1,000,000 individual members and around 2,000,000 people whose membership was through collective organizations. By the late 1960s, Tourism and Labor was the largest organization of social tourism in France.70
Tourism and Labor's goal was "to offer healthy and enriching vacations to
the greatest number of workers, and to organize tourist activities enabling them
to better know their town, region, France and foreign countries." It offered a
range of options for members, organizing day trips, arranging group and indi-
vidual travel within France or to foreign countries, and running campgrounds
and family vacation villages.71 Their sites increasingly gravitated toward the
seacoast. The one at Carnon near Montpellier was typical, with accommodations in bungalows and tents and a child care service. In 1960, the catalogue
had reached 139 pages, a little over half of which (76 pages) described vacations within France.
During the Cold War, and following the dismissal of Communist ministers
from the French government in May 1947, there were schisms within Tourism
and Labor similar to those dividing other organizations of the French left. Both
socialists and representatives of the Catholic trade union had left Tourism and
Labor in 1948. By the mid-1950s, Tourism and Labor would be connected to
the CGT and the Communist Party, although other trade unions occasionally
used its services. The particular strength of Tourism and Labor came to be with-
in workplaces with CGT unions; the union would gain influence within the local comite d'entreprise (work council), which in turn would become a member
of Tourism and Labor and use its services to organize the vacations of that en69 Py, Le Tourisme, 61 and Tourisme et Travail, Statuts, Declare le 11 janvier 1944. In Tourisme
et Travail, Documents Administratifs et d'Information, BN 4 WZ 6070, and Malherbe, "Tourisme
et Travail," 48.
70 M. Paoletti, "Rapport sur le Tourisme Populaire," in Comite National des Activit6s des Sta-
tions Thermales, Climatiques, Balneaires, et Touristiques, lie Congres National du Tourisme
(Vichy, May 1949), 36; Tourisme et Travail, Vacances 1950 (Paris, 1950) in Documents Touristiques, BN 4 WZ 5474; and "L'Equipement actuel du tourisme social," Confronter (June 1969). In
1969 Tourism and Labor had around a million members, of which there were 200,000 individuals,
with the rest acquiring membership through affiliated groups. It directed 30 vacation sites, with
costs to vacationers of 16 to 22 francs per day (pension complet).
71 As early as October 1945, the Lyon delegation published a small four-page list of activities
that included day trips to Strasbourg, lectures, and a fifteen-day bus trip to the Black Forest in Ger-
many. (Tourisme et Travail (Lyon), Programe pour octobre 1945), also in Documents Touristiques.
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268 ELLEN FURLOUGH
terprise's unionized workers. The government ended its financial supp
Tourism and Labor in 1952.
Thereafter, Tourism and Labor's niche within social tourism was overtly
politicized, drawing upon time-honored themes that stressed the integrity of
working-class culture and political strategies. As a "democratic organization
born within the working class movement," its role was to defend working clas
tourism as part of the class struggle: "It is impossible for us to not also have a
class-based attitude at the service of the workers .... We do not have at our dis-
posal the enormous means of the bourgeoisie to appropriate the domains of
leisure, vacations, and culture ... our sole strength at the present time is mili-
tancy ... we ought to consider this battle [for popular tourism] as part of the
class struggle."72 The Communist press used vacations to represent the degree
to which workers were left out of the economic growth of the 1960s; for workers stuck in poorly paid and relentless labor and living in miserable housing,
there was no money to take vacations.73 Leisure, and vacations, it was argued,
must "never be separated from the ensemble of workers' demands" because the
politics of leisure were inextricably intertwined with the politics of labor-of
work time, wages, and a critique of capitalist exploitation.74
Much of Tourism and Labor's activities focused on providing low-cost vacations for trade unions and comites d'entreprise. In many cases, Tourism and
Labor served as an intermediary between comites in different establishments,
helped them become tourism associations independent from the company,
loaned money for constructing vacation sites, and used its national network to
ensure that the new vacation sites would be filled with vacationers.75 For example, in the early 1960s, Tourism and Labor helped several comites d'entreprise to purchase the elite "Grand-Hotel" of Markstein (Alsace) despite efforts
by employers to block the sale. Vacationers were greeted by "Bonjour Camarade," and the entertainment included Russian films in the evening.76 Tourism
and Labor also operated its own vacation villages, such as Cigales in the Var
departement.77 Tourism and Labor's vacations were in great demand. Indeed,
72 Tourisme et Travail, Union Departementale du Val-de-Mame, 23eme Congres, 1974, Rapport Ecrit (Ivry, 1974) and in Documents Touristiques.
73 See for example, "Les Vacances des Francais: Les Esclaves de Roubaix sont Prives de Soleil,"
L'Humanite, June 3, 1965.
74 Jean Hansi, "Tourisme et Travail: Une Ouverture sur le Monde," L'Humanite, 10 (January
1964), p. 4.
75 Tourisme et Travail-Au Service des Collectivites (Paris, 1953) and in Documents Administratifs. On comitds d'entreprise: Jo Vareille, "Comment les Comites d'Entreprises r6ussir a assurer le depart de nombreux travailleurs," L'Humanite, (4 June 1965), p. 2 and E. Poussin, L'Intervention des Comites d'Entreprise dans le Tourisme Social, (M6moire, Centre d'Etudes Superieures
du Tourisme, Paris I, Sorbonne [Paris, 1976]).
76 Malherbe, "Tourisme et Travail," 58-59.
77 One study of this village in the mid-1970s suggested that the vacationers, overwhelmingly
workers and employees, enjoyed their vacations there; they were pleased with their accommodations and appreciated the welcoming ambiance of the village. Their complaints were mostly about
the food (Hector Caballero, "Tourisme Social et Developpement Culturel," in Memoire de Maitrise,
Centre d'Etudes Superieures du Tourisme) (Paris I, Sorbonne, [1977], 84 and 91).
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 269
it was consistently unable to fulfill requests for vacations. At one factory in
1964, for example, the comite d'entreprise, in association with Tourism and Labor, organized vacations for 351 people and had to turn away 120 others.78
Tourism and Labor insisted that it was "not a travel agency, but a democratic organization ... the fruit of the unity of the workers" and that it was "fundamentally opposed to the commercial sector centered on profits ... for us, vacations are not a consumer good, a source of profits."79 And yet, while it saw
its members as activists rather than "markets," Tourism and Labor was drawn
into the representational universe of commercial tourism. The covers of their
vacation catalogues, for example, show the evolution of images similar to com-
mercial tourism. The 1953 and 1954 covers depict happy heterosexual couples,
smiling as they depart on a fun-filled vacation. By the late 1950s, the figures
have become cartoonish, invoking images of playful tourists with their cameras
and sunglasses. The 1957 catalogue displayed women in bikinis to "advertise"
vacation sites, and the 1960 catalogue advertised Coca-Cola on the inside cover. By the 1960s the catalogues are indistinguishable from those of commercial
tourism-glossy photographs, description of destinations, and the implicit
promise of sun-filled, pleasurable vacations. Tourism and Labor's president,
Andre Faucher, acknowledged the power-and appeal-of the commercial
mobilization of pleasure and desire when he stated that "popular vacations
ought not only to be less expensive and less 'passive' than those of the clubs,
they must also be seductive."80
An ongoing and crucial difference between Tourism and Labor and commercial tourism was the fact that the history and fortunes of Tourism and Labor were intertwined with those of French Communism and that history, in gen-
eral, was one of declining influence and increasing social and cultural
insularity. But, the issue was also more complicated. A 1967 article in Le
Monde, one of a two-part series by Charles Vanhecke comparing Club Mediter-
ranee with the labor movement's vacation organizations, explicates some of
that complexity. The article first noted the "poverty" of Tourism and Labor
(seen in the article as the prime example of a unionist vacation organization)
and placed part of the blame on the difficulties of keeping a non-profit organization afloat. Vanhecke then pointed to unresolved tensions surrounding the no-
tion of vacations. Many militant trade unionists, long suspicious of the "industrialization of leisure and the marketing of vacations," felt that vacations could
lead to embourgeoisement. The result was Tourism and Labor's village at
Carnon, "where nothing is further from the dreamed life at the seacoast than
this encampment with its provisional appearance." This ambivalence regarding
leisure was conditioned by the labor movement's understanding of its primary
78 L'Humanite, June 4, 1965, 2.
79 Tourisme et Travail: Association des Loisirs Populaires (Grenoble, 1967) and Tourisme et
Travail (Rh6ne), Votre Soleil pour Vos Vacances (1979). Both are in Documents Touristiques.
80 Charles Vanhecke, "Les Syndicats et les Vacances: Du Temps des Militants a celui des Clubs,"
Le Monde, July 18, 1967, 8.
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270 ELLEN FURLOUGH
mission-"the man at work" (the use of 1'homme is not accidental her
many in the labor movement continued to recognize, rather than mute,
namic interplay between work and leisure, the appropriate emphasis
subject to debate. As Albert Detraz, Secretary of the (socialist) CFD
union asserted, leisure was the site for "the withering away of a life of
cy." Others noted that it seemed indecent to be thinking about vacati
so many people lived in poverty. And yet, many trade unionists recog
notions of "needs" had expanded in an era of emergent mass consump
indeed, that the right to leisure and vacations was one that the labor m
had fought for. Detraz even noted that there was a "certain liberation
geois comfort."8'
Another example of social tourism, Family Vacation Villages (VVF
lowed a different trajectory. In large part because it adopted consumeris
of expanding markets and "comfort," it was (and is today) an econom
story. Its immediate origins were within the Semaines Sociales de F
yearly meeting of progressive Catholics focusing on social issues.82 T
ject of the 1956 meeting was regional planning and development. And
gnand, the secretary-general of the French Federation of Popular To
organ of the CFTC, the Christian trade union), argued that three need
served by combining popular tourism and regional planning: lower-p
cations, facilities for families, and the economic expansion of rural
Guignand secured assistance from the regional tourism association an
Pflimlin (who as Minister of Finances, helped acquire funding from
Deposit and Consignment Bank) to construct two vacation villages. Th
like Tourism and Labor, which lost its government funds for politica
support for VVF came from multiple sources, among them the Nation
for Social Security and for Allocations to Families, the Ministry of Agri
the Christian trade union movement, and a variety of regional and de
tal sources.
VVF villages first opened in the summer of 1959 in scenic rural areas of Alsace. Both villages consisted of a vast central pavilion with two restaurants (one
for adults and the other for children), a child care center, recreation and meet-
ing rooms, a bar, and bungalows with two to three bedrooms. The relatively
large number of bedrooms addressed the target market of families of modest
means, rather than groups within the labor movement (as with Tourism and La-
bor) or individuals. From its beginnings, VVF attracted people primarily from
the middling and working sectors of French society, although there were some
people from the liberal professions. One account of a VVF village recalls the
81 Vanhecke, "Syndicats et les Vacances." These dilemmas are similar to those discussed by
Gary Cross, in Time and Money, for the 1930s (pp. 123-7).
82 This narrative of the founding of the VVF comes from two major sources: Andr6 Guignand
and Yves Singer, Villages Vacances Families (Paris, 1989), 10-17 and Maurice Lemoine, "Villages-
Vacances-Familles" 138-54 in Ouvry-Vial, Les Vacances.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 271
perceived social limits of the clientele when the directors of a villa
formed that someone coming to the village would be arriving on A
(Air travel remained the prerogative of the wealthy.) Thinking that
bit much ... perhaps he has made a mistake," the director went to t
to retrieve the visiting "nabob," only to find that it was a "brave mec
Air France who along with his three children had received a reduce
Social aspects of VVF vacations included an emphasis on "animatio
lective cultural and social events and excursions) and, in its early y
ciability that included creating a pool of private automobiles for use
one who was a resident vacationer.84
VVF expanded rapidly and always received more requests for spac
could fill. By early 1960s, VVF diversified its offerings to include r
ments (gitesfamiliaux,) residences, and camping facilities. Over the
sites routinely began to provide swimming pools, golf courses, ten
and apartments with televisions and telephones. The success of th
been attributed to good management, which indeed has been the ca
can also argue that the organization developed a formula that fit we
indeed expressed, changing needs-by offering moderately priced
cations, restful vacations in scenic areas, and for more comfort and
Because it was not connected to a specific political group, the VVF
tential for a broader appeal, and VVF administrators recognized t
expanding markets. As a secretary-general of VVF put it:
The fundamental project was liberty. No mercantile gain. We were neither a
of consumption, nor of a political ideology, a religion, or a trade union. Our
both very simple and very ambitious, to create the means to transform a
right-vacations for the greatest number-into an accepted practice. We
women to take their vacations. People could come as a family and have the
taken care of.85
The focus on families was indeed at the forefront of market segmen
the emphasis on non-elite families addressed a target market of a very
egory of people who had continued to be virtually ignored within
tourism prior to the early 1970s. The VVF also implicitly acknow
vacations were not always times of pure leisure. Someone had to p
tions, pack and unpack suitcases, purchase vacation-oriented items
ing, take care of children, cook and cleanup after meals, and so f
tasks, part of women's work in everyday life, generally preceded th
83 Lemoine, "Villages," 141. Although they state that the socio-economic categorie
consistent, Guignand and Singer provide figures only from 1989. Those are rural peop
industrialists, shopkeepers, artisans, 3.3 percent; middling cadres, 22 percent; employ
cent; workers 24.6 percent; retired persons 12.3 percent; others 4.8 percent (pp. 28-
"Un Enquete de Villages-Vacances-Familles," Le Monde, February 21, 1967, 14.
84 Marcel Roy, "Une experience d'animation culturelle dans un village de vacances,
ment, 13 (October 1960), 32-36.
85 Quoted in Lemoine, "Vacances," 141.
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272 ELLEN FURLOUGH
cation and continued during the vacation. The efforts of VVF, and of a
er groups such as the Touring Club de France and Club Mediterr
tempted to allay some of that labor by offering child care and prepared
The VVF's emphasis on families allowed for a broader range of
sources, including state funds concerned with family welfare. It was als
1950s and 1960s, fully in line with a family-oriented cultural surg
companied the baby boom of that era, with its array of images of the h
erosexual nuclear family on vacation.
VVF embodied the shift in emphasis from tourisme populaire to to
social. Whereas popular tourism held within it at least two meanings
litically secured right to vacations for the working class and the real
that right through the combined efforts of the state and the labor move
is, as an element of social consumption)-social tourism emphasized a
mitment to low-cost vacations with some state aid. The latter definiti
ground during that period, especially with the onset of more conserv
ernments from the middle of the late 1950s onward. The Fifth Plan (
for example, defined social tourism as "the ensemble of the means of
modating at a reduced price ... certain categories of tourists or perso
cation."87 The focus was changing from a class-based vision to one of
ing markets comprising populations of consumers (such as families,
retired people). Low-cost vacations thus became one more optio
"democracy of goods," ostensibly available to all, and in the case of t
especially appealing to families.
Social tourism was, and continues to be, a vital part of French tour
an important means for fulfilling promises of entitlement and mass acc
many of its advocates have criticized the relatively meager contrib
public funds, noting the continuing dearth of affordable vacations for p
modest means, especially for those with large families.88 An especi
critic was sociologist Marc Boyer. Boyer chided the mass media
which was at this time controlled by the state) for its seemingly endles
of universally available vacations, which he insisted served to mask t
86 These efforts did not undermine the gender system that continued to define that labo
inine (and render it invisible), nor did it seriously question the ways in which notions
were gendered. One article that discusses the ways vacations entailed work (rather than
women is Fanny Deschamps, "Des Vacances et Des Hommes," La Nef 18 (April-J
75-82. Recent research on women and the gendering of leisure includes Erica Wimbus
garet Talbot, Relative Freedoms: Women and Leisure (1988); Nicole Samuel, "L'Asp
Femmes a 1'Autonomie: Loisir Familial et Loisir Personnel," Loisir et Societe/Society a
15:1 (Spring 1992), 343-54; Beth Anne Shelton, Women, Men, and Time: Gender Dif
Paid Work, Housework, and Leisure (1992); and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Work
and Leisure in New York City, 1880-1920 (1985).
87 Commissariat General du Plan d'Equipement et de la Productivit6, Ve Plan (196
port General de la Commission du Tourisme pour le Ve Plan (Paris, n.d.), 57.
88 For example, N. Carlier, "Les Vacances des Travailleurs," Economie et Human
(September-October 1965), 68-75.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 273
ties of exclusion for large numbers of people. He leveled his strong
however, on the financial neglect of social tourism, arguing that "v
all" remained an elusive dream. He cited the paucity of the first fo
ment plans to provide for social tourism and insisted that granting
tion time would not necessarily lead to people being able to take va
argued that strong government intervention was necessary to fulfill
of vacations for all.89
Although the state did contribute to social tourism, and does so e
those efforts have been overshadowed by competing concerns. Gov
efforts in the late 1940s focused primarily on rebuilding and mode
French hotel industry in order to attract foreign tourists and mainta
able balance of trade. The Second Plan (1954-57) also focused on ho
though it recognized the need to construct and modernize two- an
hotels. This plan also defined tourism as a means for internal "deve
to (re)vitalize economically depressed or "underdeveloped" regions
spective was one that could work in favor of social tourism, as w
with the VVF, but tended to favor large-scale projects that combin
ment and private funds for commercial tourism. Finally, the Secon
naled another important theme, that of individual "consumer sove
major directive was "to render the primacy of the consumer, the clien
will be the constant criteria," and urged more tourism-related m
search.90 Success was coming to be seen as linked to commercial to
vacations, money-making enterprises meeting the needs of individ
eign" consumers clustered in specific, well-defined markets.
COMMERCIAL TOURISM
Social tourism created a niche for itself within French
by the tremendous increase in commercial (for-profit
The commercialization was fueled by the growth of t
creased capital concentration; the proliferation of ma
services, and products; and the increasing velocity an
images promoting vacations as vital components of
vacations became a source of larger profits, especially
commercial tourist industry promoted vacations as "m
ensemble of goods and services as well as a culturally
chasable "experiences." Vacations were thus becomin
ly during the consumer-oriented economic expansio
89 Marc Boyer, "Vacances Pour Tous: Mythe ou Realite?," Rev
(September-October 1965), 977-90.
90 "Note de M. Gravier sur le Plan dans l'industrie touristique"
Plan, Commission de modernisation du Tourisme, Proces-Verbal de
AN 80 AJ 67. See also "Quelles rdgions touristiques faut-il develo
November 21, 1953.
91 There is a vast literature documenting the growth and developm
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274 ELLEN FURLOUGH
Older sectors such as hotels expanded and modernized, in some ca
business strategies such as franchising and chains. More dynam
was the development of a vast, interlocking, and reinforcing infr
development not limited to France because it was a part of the enha
of the flow of national and transnational capital and information
this included new commercial tourist organizations (such as the C
du Tourisme, Voir et ConnaUtre, and Club Mediterranee) and the
of travel agencies designed to sell vacations. By 1974 there were
travel agencies, often interconnected with other corporate ente
example the Havas-Voyages group, owned by France's largest
distribution enterprise, Agence Havas, operated Tourope-France w
man agencies (Touristik Union International and Tourope-Scharno
UTA operated under the aegis of Air France. Tourist professionals
ly-growing new category of "experts."93
The expansion of commercial tourism was fueled by its conceptu
in an emergent society and economy of mass consumption. A pro
cultural representations forged the equation that vacations were d
sumer goods, vital aspects of a new, modern standard of living, a
language of consumption was the way to speak about vacations. In
for example, Le Monde noted the trend toward "treating vacation
chandise and tourists like buyers." Another article described a tou
that produced "after market studies and consultation with compu
dardized products adapted to the presumed needs of two or three
gories of consumers." This industry, the author concluded, "crea
like automobiles and considers the 'vacationer' not as a worker who has ceased
to work, but as a consumer who is poised to consume."94 A government minister declared in 1968 that tourism was a product that should be sold like an automobile or a refrigerator. Vacations were also portrayed as a time and space of
dustry. For recent overviews, see Rene Baretje and Pierre Defert, Aspects economiques du tourisme
(Paris, 1972); Tuppen, "France"; and Frangialli, La France dans le Tourisme Mondial, especially
chapter 4, "Forces et faiblesses de l'industrie touristique francaise." Tuppen notes that in the mid1980s, tourism contributed just over 8 percent of the French Gross Domestic Product and that the
weight of the tourist sector was thus greater than other major areas of economic activity, such as
agriculture and the car industry (p. 199). By the late 1980s, tourism in France was a key sector of
the economy, generating over 550 billion francs in 1989. (Frangialli, La France, 223).
92 Contemporary discussions can be found in Robert Christie Mill, Tourism: The International
Business (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990); and Chuck Y. Gee, et al, The Travel Industry (2nd ed., New
York, 1989); Frangialli, La France dans le Tourisme Mondial, especially chapter 1, "L'Explosion
du Tourisme Mondial"; and the United Nations, Transnational Corporations in International
Tourism (New York, 1982).
93 U.S. Department of Commerce, French Travel Habits. An excellent autobiography of an important expert on French tourism is Pierre Defert, Memoires d'un Voyager: On Peut etre myopathe
et expert eln Tourisme (Paris, 1981). See also Pauline Sheldon, "The Tour Operator Industry: An
Analysis," Annals of Tourism Research, 13 (1986), 349-65.
94 "Une industrie de la meme importance que celle de 1' automobile ou de la chimie," Le Monde,
October 20-21, 1968, 13 and "Les vacances vont devenir des marchandises," Le Monde, June 2-3,
1968, 14.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 275
pure consumption. As anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss claimed, pe
vacation "suddenly transform themselves, or believe they are being
formed, into absolute and unilateral consumers." On vacation, one cou
various patterns and taboos on consumption-eat and drink to excess
money more freely, frivolously, and recklessly, and wear outrageous c
Yet, if vacations were to be "consumed," what meanings would de
"product?" Here again, the dominant messages within consumer cult
commercial tourism converged, providing a primer for living a mode
sumer-oriented life valuing comfort, health, pleasure, and self-indu
(preferably at the beach). As a consumer good, vacations did differ fr
commodities. When one paid for a vacation, the "product" being purch
a pastiche of heterogeneous elements amalgamated by advertising and
ing, the emergent tourism industry, the mass media, and government
policies. Those elements included services (accommodations, dining,
portation, recreation), culture (national heritage, monuments, festiva
rich mixture of promised pleasures and experiences.96 By the early 1
cations had become part of a range of images insisting that social, pers
familial well-being was tethered to increased leisure time and its atten
vices and commodities. For example, in a 1962 work on vacations, th
cal aura of commodities and vacations mutually reinforced (and sold
other:
A beautiful young girl goes swimming on a beach without end-vacation! A h
ily with their suitcases in hand appears on the television screen-vacation
peasant girl in folkloric costume, a bicycle rolling through the countryside-
All these images solicit us while touting a brand of beer, milk, cheese, or camera
to seduce us by simultaneously evoking vacations, the period of our lives wh
happy and finally ourselves.97
What is especially striking about the cultural meanings that were a
with vacations, and hence were bought and sold, is that they also scr
periences and expectations directly opposed to the routines and norms of
day life. Vacations were generally depicted as an escape from domestic
into the public space of vacations sites and were thus cast as a break
intensely domestic privatization of the middle class. Vacations were th
parentheses, set apart for escapism, rest and regeneration from the
working and spending, a return to nature and retreat from the stresses
modernity, and for the (re)discovery of people's "true" selves. The vac
marked a privileged time and space for pleasure and bodily sensations
95 "II faut pouvoir vendre le tourisme comme une automobile ou un refrig6rateur,"
October 13-14, 1968, 24. Jean-Francis Held, "Claude Levi-Strauss: Tristes Vacances,"
Observateur, 74 (13-19 April 1966), 29.
96 Marie-Franqoise Lafant and Nelson H. Graburn, "International Tourism Reconsi
Principle of the Alternative," in Tourism Alternatives: Potentials and Problems in the D
of Tourism, Valene L. Smith and William R. Eadington, eds. (Philadelphia, 1992), 9897 Simone Mesnil-Grente, Les Vacances (Paris, 1962), 5.
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276 ELLEN FURLOUGH
sensual or therapeutic; hence the predominance of images in tourist advertisements of the sun (which some have argued served as a metaphor for sex), and
of the contact of the body with nature.98 By the 1960s, several images dominated those used to represent vacations; the family holiday (a couple with two
to three children); the romantic holiday (a heterosexual couple gazing into the
sunset); and the fun holiday (same-sex groups looking for partners of the other sex).99 It was in this period as well that the "sea, sun, sand, and sex" ideal
was in full force, an ideal that emphasized youth, beauty, and what one writer
has termed (for another consumerist context) an "excruciating normative heterosexuality."'00 While some of these themes converged with those of social
tourism, particularly those emphasizing rest, recuperation, and the virtues of
nature, the ensemble of commercially directed images and messages was devoid of any overt political content.
The strength of these cultural representations of vacations was their seemingly universal appeal. As with other consumer products, commercialized vacations were said to be the market's response to consumers' demands and needs,
which were objectively rooted in the conditions of moder urban living: Vacations had become "necessities" rather than luxuries.?'0 As the commercialized
culture of mass vacations took shape, tourism experts increasingly discussed issues of access as an economic project involving the alignment of supply and
demand, rather than as the fulfillment of a right of citizenship. The state was to
intervene only to compensate for inadequate market performance. What was
being forged here was a new democratic ideology for mass consumerism, which
Thomas Richards aptly describes: "This vision was not so much of a classless
society as of a society in which everyone was equal in the sight of things ...
the assumption was that they all wanted exactly the same articles."'02
98 Georges Cazes, "Les Catalogues de Voyages le Revelent: Le Touriste Veut Jouir Mais Encore
Plus Posseder," Espaces, 22 (Printemps 1976), 19-22 and Alain Laurent, "Le Theme du Soleil dans
la Publicit6 des Organismes de Vacances," Communications, 10 (1967), 35-50. Guy Debord considered vacations to be "spectacular commodities": "The social image of the consumption of time
is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations-moments portrayed, like all
spectacular commodities at a distance, and as desirable by definition. This particular commodity
is explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look
forward to. Yet, even in such special moments, ostensibly moments of life, the only thing being
generated ... is the spectacle" The Society of the Spectacle (New York, 1994), 112; originally published in French, 1967).
99 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London, 1990),
142.
100 Jane Kuenz, "It's a Small World After All: Disney and the Pleasures of Identification," South
Atlantic Quarterly, 92:1 (Winter 1993), 65. Noticeably absent in advertising images, film, and other mass-produced images of vacations were differently abled people, the elderly, single parents, and
those not within dominant ethnic and racial groups. These exclusions obviously raise questions
about the inclusiveness of contemporary images of "mass vacations" and remind us that visions of
normativity also produce exclusions.
101 For one example of this logic, see Huguette Durand, "Le tourisme, du bien de luxe au bien
de premiere necessite," Revue economique et social, 2 (July 1972), 129-52.
102 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Specta-
cle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, 1990), 61.
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 277
Perhaps the most pointed example of the confluence of commerce an
ture within commercial tourism can be seen in the history of Club Medite
or Club Med.103 Founded in 1950 by Gerard Blitz, a Belgian Jewish d
cutter, who had spent the years immediately after the war operating a re
tation center for concentration-camp survivors, Club Med's operative i
and orientation celebrated self-indulgent physical pleasures and the e
from one's daily life and habitual social relations. Club Med villages anc
the emergent imagery of the sea and the sun as privileged sites for bod
fillment and diversion by providing the space to act out new social rol
transgressive behaviors. The "vacation experience" represented and so
Club Med became, in France and elsewhere, both a cultural icon and a s
cant economic force. As two scholars noted in 1971, "Club Mediterran
probably the only organization in France which shares with the Communis
ty the dubious honor of leaving no one indifferent."'04 Thus, Club Med
alyzed here not as the sum of commercial tourism but as a leading edge
mercial tourism's cultural meanings and growing economic power.
Club Med was quite different from social tourism in emphasis, althou
tially there were shared characteristics. Club Med was legally constitut
non-profit association rather than as a commercial organization. The fir
Med village in the summer of 1950 was on the Spanish island of Majorca
some 2,500 people (mostly urban and French) paid a single-price, whi
cluded drinks, for a low-cost vacation. The village had a casual make sh
mosphere, and vacationers stayed in U.S. army surplus tents and slept o
army cots. Vacationers, or gentils membres (friendly members, hereaft
spent their time swimming, playing sports, relaxing, and eating at group
Club employees were called gentils organisateurs (friendly organizers
after GOs). After the first successful summer, Club Med villages proli
along the sunny Mediterranean coasts and the Adriatic sea.
During its early years, Club Med's ambiance was quite non-conform
the era. Villages in the 1950s were focused around an ethic of liberatio
social hierarchies, interpersonal and personal constraints, and stuffy bo
attitudes. The cost was modest, activities in the villages often improvis
accommodations and facilities always casual. Showers consisted of
without hot water; sanitary facilities were minimal; and the unsteady
bles doubled as shelters when it rained. As for the food, the coffee had to
chicory, and the wine was watered down. Comfort, one of the touchst
consumerism, was not at issue. The particular atmosphere at early Clu
103 The following summary of the early years of the Club is drawn from Christine P
Yves Raynouard, Histoire et Legendes du Club Mdditerrande (Paris, 1967); Alain Ehren
Club Mediterranee, 1935-1960," in Ouvry-Vial, Les Vacances, 117-30; and Alfred Mayo
Mediterranee," Holiday, 42 (August 1967). A fuller version of this section is in Ellen F
"Packaging Pleasures: Club Mediterranee and French Consumer Culture, 1950-1968," Fren
torical Studies, 18:1 (Spring 1993), 65-81.
104 Peyre and Raynouard, Histoire et Legendes, 7.
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278 ELLEN FURLOUGH
villages came in part from those who were creating the organization. One recent book on Club Med has characterized the GOs as "neither servants or
flunkies, but a band of chums (copains), good-looking, sporty, fun-loving ..
they ate, played, danced and slept with" the GMs.'05 GOs in those early years
were generally young women and men whose lives had been profoundly dis
rupted by the war. For Andre Regad, who had been deported to Buchenwald
and then after the war did odd jobs, being a GO at Club Med was "an adven
ture," a way to see the world and "other ways of living." He added that many
GOs who found it difficult to return to a normal life saw the Club as "an an-
chor," a kind of surrogate family. Many were sports enthusiasts, so the Club of-
fered a way to turn their hobby into a job. GOs from the 1950s recalled how
striking it had been to experience their bodies differently and more freely. For
example, Pat Mortaigne remembered that "it was a revelation to live with my
body in the sun." Jean-Pierre Becret had wanted to find work "where there were
no clothing restraints; it was very important for me."106 There was also a great
deal of autonomy for the director and GOs of individual villages, and each year
the village director chose the team of GOs for the next season. This informality and relative lack of hierarchy also reflected the personality of the founder,
Gerard Blitz, who was an egalitarian, sensual person, attracted to yoga, Buddhism, and a relaxed management style.
Club Med grew rapidly during the early to mid-1950s, but its financial affairs were rather chaotic and strained. By the late 1950s, Club Med rationalized
its operations, consistent with an emergent business climate inclined toward expansionist and more aggressive strategies within firms and more moder management techniques. Club Med's s new and dynamic approach to business modernization was exemplified by Gilbert Trigano, a former communist who had
become involved with Club Med through his family's camping supply business
and who moved rapidly up the Club's hierarchy. In 1957 Club Med was legally reconstituted as a commercial organization and began to buy out its main
competitors. In 1961, the bank of Edmond de Rothschild (the gentil capitaliste)
bought 35 percent of the Club's stock for 10 million francs; and a 1968 agreement with American Express provided another important capital infusion. From
the early 1960s, with its financial affairs stabilized and its business strategies
rationalized, Club Med entered into a period of rapid and sustained expansion
and financial success.107 Plans for and decisions about villages were, like any
other consumer commodity's design and execution, created in Parisian corporate offices and replicated in selected environments. The training of GOs hired
105 Alain Faujas, Trigano: L'Aventure du Club Med (Paris, 1994), 56-57, 54.
106 Ehrenberg, "Le Club," 124-8.
107 On Rothschild's involvement, see Claude Riviere, "Une epreuve d'endurance: une interview
d'Edmond de Rothschild," Entreprise, 719 (June 21, 1969), 14-15. By the early 1970s, there were
57 villages dispersed over 23 countries. Club Med employed 10,000 people, serviced around 2 million GMs, and had profits of over a billion francs. (Faujas, Trigano, 259-60).
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 279
by the Parisian office took place at a special facility, and in 1965
opened its first luxury "hotel village" at Agadir, Morocco. The clien
older and financially better off. Far from being, as its advertising
"antidote to civilization," by the late 1960s Club Med had beco
multinational corporation and one of the major players in the co
tourism and leisure industry.
What was the nature of its appeal? As the "antidote to civilization
was ultimately packaging the care of the self and its recuperation thr
relaxation, and pleasure. This "cure" rested on various constitutive
beled the esprit du Club, or club spirit. As the nature of Club Med ch
ing the 1960s, this esprit became more formalized and less spontan
viding advertising themes and helping to structure the planned envir
other words, the ethos of the Club came to be as carefully packaged
er consumer commodity. The strongest element of this esprit was tha
be diametrically different from everyday life and to provide "mental
ical detoxification." Club Med villages were seen as closed spac
from their surroundings and from other tourists, places where peo
turn to nature and discover a simpler and more "authentic" way
Since these villages were to be distinct from everyday life, there e
orate welcoming and leaving rituals so that people would both symb
physically enter and leave its "closed" world. Inside, a village rep
utopian society of personalized and more intimate relations and an
life. Closure within these villages was not seen as a limit but as a c
liberty.'09 By the early 1950s, the explicit model for this "counter-
a mythologized Polynesia, a theme that infused the rhetoric and pract
Club. As the U.S. army tents wore out, they were replaced by grass-r
nesian huts. The costume at Club Med villages became the flower
sarong; Worn by women and men, the sarong signified the liberate
nativism. By 1955, Club Med established a village on Tahiti and ad
as a "pilgrimage to the source ... an earthly paradise.""0 A second
the Club's esprit was the stated objective of erasing social barriers a
tions by abolishing their most visible signs. People in the villages
each other in the familiar "tu" form, called each other by their first
avoided discussions about their occupations within "civilization."
dress code was cast as a "rupture with daily life," proof that "ther
108 Henri Raymond, "L'Utopie concrete: Recherches sur un village de vaca
francaise de sociologie, 1 (July-September 1960) 323-33.
109 Ardagh, The New French Revolution, 284-5 and Henri Raymond, "Hommes et
inuro: Observations sur une soci6et de loisirs," Esprit, 274 (June 1959), 1039.
O0 Club Mediterran6e, "Nous revions (peut-etre)," DixAns de Vacances (Paris, 1
dent vous pr6sent fa9ons practiques de nouer votre par6o," Le Trident, June 1958 an
This village was not only the most expensive (240,000 francs payable in 12 installm
tailed a serious time commitment. The voyage took one month, and there was a ma
month minimum stay.
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280 ELLEN FURLOUGH
cial differences when everyone is in a bathing suit." Club publications a
gued that the policy of replacing cash with colored beads muted externa
of status.1 I A third element of the Club's esprit was its emphasis on leisur
play: Far from being focused on a utilitarian or productive end, a Club M
lage was represented as a "leisure society" oriented solely toward pleasu
relaxation.12 Club Med sought to eliminate the work, frustrations and a
of taking a vacation by preparing food and providing easily available
even hair salons, on the premises to meet people's immediate needs. By
middle to late 1950s, several family-oriented villages provided childre
tivities. Each village had a wide range of available sports and often inc
lessons by Olympic champions.113 Opportunities for play culminated in
ly animations in which vacationers were encouraged to be childish and p
to demonstrate that seriousness was a convention of another time and
(Needless to say, there were no Russian films.) Even the labor of GOs wa
structed so they would not appear to be working, and all reminders of
such as cooking and service facilities were carefully tucked away from
As a result, the villages' esprit was intended to enhance the physical and
tal well-being of the individual. As with other elements of consumer cu
physical health and physical beauty were central to this vision. Corpore
occupations pervaded all aspects of the Club, and its vacations celebrat
beautiful, active, playful, and physically fit body. There was also an emp
in line with sexualized aspects of consumer culture, on the erotic and li
body. An erotically charged climate was central to the "pleasures" tha
Med promised. The sexuality valorized at the Club was predominantly h
sexual, casual, spontaneous, and perhaps even beyond the edges of propr
As a male GO boasted, "I knew the taste of all the suntan oil in the villa
One can, in this sense, speak of Club Med as a site for performing an ex
ed repertoire of sexualities and playful, perhaps even transgressive, d
Whether it is possible to interpret this erotically charged climate as "libera
or not, it is certain that for people at the time Club Med vacations sign
loosening of the rules regarding sexuality. The village manager in Tahiti,
had the reputation of being the village with the most emphasis on physical
ty and liberated sexuality, asserted that "the Club was the revenge of the
tiful on the intelligent."115
11l Raymond, "L'Utopie concrete," 327 and Le Trident, Summer 1969.
1 12 Henri Raymond, "Hommes et Dieux h Palinero," 1031.
113 The comraderie around sports regularly continued beyond sojourns in Club Med villa
1952, for example, Club Med organized a 'village' at the Olympic games in Helsinki. See in
dent: "Le Club aux Jeux Olympiques," 3 (1952); "L'Entrainment Vacances," 24 (January
and "Pour avoir la Ligne," 23 (November 1953).
114 Jean Francis Held, "Le Bonheur en Confection-II: Des filles, du soleil, des garcons," Le Nouvel Observateur, August 3, 1966. There is evidence of a "secret history" of homosexuality within
Club Med villages as well, pointing toward a gay subculture of GOs in the 1950s. Club Med currently operates "Club Atlantis," vacations especially targeted toward gay (male) GMs.
115 Quoted in Peyre and Raynouard, Histoire et Legendes, 124. For analyses of the sexualized
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 281
Club Med was squarely within, and constitutive of, French consumer cultu
and consumer capitalism. Indeed, the seeming contradiction between Club
Med's self-representation as the "antidote to civilization" and its realizatio
were part of its essence and crucial for its success. Club Med villages were n
of course, utopian worlds without social hierarchies. While Club practices a
publicity stressed its "classless" character, Club Med villages, like other aspe
of consumer culture, (re)invented social distinctions. In the 1950s and 196
Club Med was an experience constructed predominantly by and for white, e
nomically advantaged Europeans and some Americans. There was no "c
erosion" at work, although there may have been some mild shaking up of co
ventions. Club Med vacationers were relatively young (67 percent under 30
1961), and the largest group was drawn from the middling salaried sectors.1
Indeed, the social composition of Club Med consumers drew heavily from t
social group that Pierre Bourdieu and others have termed the "new midd
class," and the ethos of this group provided a template for Club Med's espr
This new middle class elaborated new notions of pleasure and perceptions
the body and practiced American-style consumerism.117 In a passage striki
ly similar to the ethos of Club Med, Bourdieu stated that these novel formu
tions of pleasure and the body "made it a failure, a threat to self-esteem, not
'have fun' . .. pleasure is not only permitted but demanded ... the fear of n
getting enough pleasure ... is combined with the search for self-expression
'bodily expression' . . . and the old personal ethic is thus rejected for a cult
personal health and psychological therapy." 8 I am not arguing here that C
Med was reducible to a class phenomenon but, rather, that it provided an id
space to act out this new culture, thereby contributing to its formation. This w
in short, a space to redraw social and cultural boundaries and hierarchies an
to create social distinctions, and hence social exclusions, rather than aboli
them.
Club Med also reinforced and in some cases re-invented social hierarchies
between people in the villages and in host countries. Club executives chose geographical locations for Club Med villages not only for their exquisite physical beauty but also for the region's lower costs. Sites were seen as culinary resources and inspirational guides for ersatz architecture, populated by people
aspects of another mass tourist site, see Karen Dubinsky, "'The Pleasure is Exquisite but Violent':
The Imaginary Geography of Niagara Falls in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Canadian Stud-
ies, 129:2 (Summer 1994), 64-88.
116 The largest proportions in the late 1950s and early 1960s were teachers, secretaries (predominantly women), technicians, but GMs also included cadres, people from the liberal professions and commerce, students, and a very small group of workers (mostly from the relatively wellpaid trades of metallurgy and printing). Le Trident, 59 (November 1958) and 76 (March 1961), and
Raymond, "L'Utopie concrete," 324-35.
1 7 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, 1984);
Luc Boltanski, The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society (Cambridge, 1987), 109-16; and
Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 1944-1958 (Cambridge, 1989), 396-9.
118 Bourdieu, Distinction, 367.
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282 ELLEN FURLOUGH
who were potentially objects of "local color" during excursions. Club Med w
in this sense, a reconfigured colonialist adventure that could be purchased.
this period of (reluctant) French decolonization, Club Med vacationers cou
continue to partake of colonialist "exoticism," providing a profit for Club M
even if their country no longer controlled the region politically. For examp
one journalist who went to a Club Med village in Morocco in the mid-196
delineated the "modem" playful vacationers from the "natives" by describi
the way the Club's beach property was carefully roped off. While the va
tioners were on the beach, Moroccans guarding the area "spent most of th
time inside straw beehives, in which they avoid the sun that the members h
come so far to find."119 In the mid-1970s, the seven Club Med villages in M
rocco employed 950 Moroccans; of those 96, or 10 percent were GOs and
other 90 percent were service workers who cleaned the rooms, served at t
restaurants, and washed dishes. The Moroccan clientele at these villages w
between .5 and 1 percent.'20 As with other aspects of consumer society, Cl
Med created and sustained hierarchies privileging the economically advan
taged, physically vigorous, "attractive," and "moder." Club Med's claim to
an antithesis to civilization, where work would be replaced by leisure, also
pended upon the productive labor of people in the tourist industry. For its
ployees, Club Med villages were hardly devoid of work. Rather, their work
environments were at the forefront of the growth and proliferation of vacati
oriented consumer service industries in which "the social composition of
those who are serving in the front line may be part of what is in fact 'sold
the customer." Such services require ongoing "emotional work" such as bein
pleasing, smiling, and making people feel comfortable. This is a proliferati
of feminized work; and whether women do the majority of this labor or not
tends to be low paid-a characteristic of the pay rates of GOs.'21 The fant
that Club Med was creating, in which the "natives" were not really exploit
and workers did not really work, was one that masked and thus helped perp
uate power relationships.
A fundamental element within commercial tourism in general and Club M
in particular was the imperative to pay, in all senses, attention to the self, a p
spective in tandem with the emergent mythology of consumerist self-fabr
tion. Crucial to this project was (and is) the endless longing and impossibili
of attaining and retaining a youthful, healthy, playful, sexy, body. One cou
by definition, never be satisfied, hence fueling desires for new and impro
commodities. As a result, vacations themselves came to be loaded with ma
119 Mayor, "Club Med," 76-78.
120 Hassania Bezzaz, 'L'Implantation du Club Mediterran6e au Maroc," Memoire, Cen
d'Etudes Superieurs du Tourisme (Paris I, Sorbonne, 1977), 41 and 48.
121 Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 68 and 70. Useful studies of employees include Virginia Boscolo
"Les G.O. du Club Mediterranee," in Jeunes Professions, Professions de Jeunes?, Denys Cu
ed. (Paris, 1991), 103-50 and Ali Imane, Du Club Mediterranee (Paris, 1985).
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 283
complicated psychological, visual, and sensual expectations for those taking a
vacation. Relaxation and stimulation, Edenic surroundings filled with sunny
days and perfect weather, a happy and memorable family experience, better and
more varied sex were all part of the factors fueling the never-ending quest for
the perfect vacation.
By the early 1970s the burgeoning commercial tourism sector clearly dominated that of social tourism. Social tourism retained its place within French vacations but either progressively shrank or aligned itself within the formulations
of commercial tourism. Crucial to this process was the fact that the cultural
similarities of values, expectations, and imagined pleasures between social and
commercial vacations were becoming more prevalent than their differences.
And, those values, expectations, and imagined pleasures were being bought and
sold on a commercial basis.
CONCLUSION
In France, the period from the mid-1930s through th
one for establishing vacations as a political right, elab
means of access, multiplying institutions devoted to
ing images of the pleasures and promises of the vacat
cess to paid vacation time was extended to a much br
France's democracy, a development that became polit
the acceleration of mass vacationing as a new order o
mass consumption, and a subject of mass culture eme
only after the war. That era witnessed significant ru
nomic policies of austerity, limited domestic market
tions. Economic growth and capitalist modernization,
ical democracy, frustrated consumer demand and m
encouraged reconfigured social structures, loosened o
sumer spending, and fueled expectations concerning
the "New Europe."
In this context, vacationing performed important id
than being a natural effect of these extraordinary ec
cal transformations, vacations helped to secure and rat
vealed competing emphases and interests. Leisure tim
deeply implicated in cultural and labor politics, as w
ideological systems, during the interwar period. Vaca
122 I use the term "ideological work" here in the sense emplo
Poovey. In Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gen
(Chicago, 1988), Poovey argues that ideologies exist not only as ide
"given concrete form in the practices and social institutions" of pe
that while ideologies may appear coherent, they are actually "fissur
interests and ... are always in the making." As such, beliefs and id
the way they are experienced by people differently positioned socially
within institutions and practices (pp. 2-3).
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284 ELLEN FURLOUGH
titlement linked to demands for democratic access to the leisure pastimes and
social privileges of elites. In the context of the post-war economic boom and
the consolidation of the social welfare state, the paid vacation continued to be
seen as an entitlement, but its meaning and function also became associated
with the benefits of capitalist modernization linked to social welfare and an assured standard of living. Vacations signified a right (and rite) of citizenship, and
post-war struggles over vacation time reflected divergent meanings of how
those rights were to be exercised and understood. As such, questions of access
to vacationing were enmeshed within broader critiques of the unevenness and
human costs of capitalist economic growth, the distribution of its benefits, and
the ongoing gap between the plenitude of vacation images and lived experiences.
For advocates of social tourism who rejected the doctrine
dividualism upon which the post-war French state rested, h
the group Tourism and Labor, vacations served as a site fo
mulations. Others, exemplified here by the VVF, saw in so
to emphasize social, rather than individualist, values, and t
opportunities for those people who found that postwar pro
proved elusive. Social tourism, in its institutions and pract
upon the French state to help fulfill the promises of "vaca
tensions of equality of rights coupled with inequality of a
mobilize discontent and articulate dissatisfaction. While so
widen social access to vacations, the terms were not always
given the strength of the individualist pleasures and app
tourism. Social tourist organizations themselves recognized
cations, even if the vacation experience they were selling dif
tinct ways from those of the commercially marketed one.
tourism's notion of "vacations for all," inextricably fused a
rations of the Popular Front era and with assertions of right
in a modern welfare state, continues to be one of France's
entitlements.
The ideological work of vacations can also be seen in the ways vacations
modeled and ratified the values, norms, and ethics of emergent capitalist consumerism. While these were articulated and experienced unevenly, the increasing cultural convergence of the meanings of vacations cut through the differences among various forms and enabled the development of commercialized
vacations. Vacations in the post-war era not only became an increasingly important focus for a growing commercial infrastructure and of consumer spending but also a culturally constitutive aspect of mass consumption. The values
encoded within modern mass vacations-of individual choice, pleasure, selfgratification, being "elsewhere," abundance and comfort, beauty and youth and
a return to nature-converged with and helped create the values of post-war
consumer culture. This synergy of escapist, pleasure-oriented values and an in-
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TOURISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE 285
dividualist consumerist culture derived from an ideology rooted in the care of
the self and thus relied upon a logic of individual needs to be met by commer-
cialized leisure pursuits targeted toward various mass markets. The pleasures
of vacationing also depended upon and helped perpetuate their supposed opposites within society: To experience relaxation assumes an operative notion of
stress; to be playful means one must have times of seriousness; sexual transgressions depend on sexual boundaries; discovering one's "authentic" self suggests its suppression in the routines of everyday life.
The ideological work and cultural logic of vacations clustered certain characteristics and cast them as distinct from others, forging seemingly dichotomous definitions of vacations and everyday life. Selling vacations as a consumer good depended upon invoking antinomies between work time and leisure
time, which in turn obscured the imbrication of vacations within the culture and
social imagination of everyday life, as well as the labor involved in producing,
sustaining, and paying for those vacations. This construction of vacation time
as a time apart, an autonomous space for trying out new personal behaviors, for
marking social distinctions, and for the (re)discovery of the self, was central to
the forging of consumerism's culture of distraction, fantasy, desire, and patterns
of behavior expressed in a person's lifestyle. And, because vacations became a
privileged space and time for achieving "compensations" deemed absent in
everyday life, that sphere became one where attaining satisfaction and fulfillment was difficult-although rendered less so, sang the jingles of commodity
culture, with the purchase of the right products.123
Mass vacations were a crucial element of mass consumer culture in France
by the early 1970s, but they were not reducible to it. Not only did the vacatio
move in and out of commodity status, but its particular meaning as both an as-
pect of commercialized leisure and a right of citizenship questions any easy or
inevitable synthesis between mass vacations and mass consumer culture. The
history of mass vacations also challenges assumptions that the values within
mass culture have been apolitical. As historian Luisa Passerini reminds us, mas
culture in the European context "has always been connected with political and
social conflicts between authoritarian regimes and large masses of people, or
over the extension of democracy and the dimension of welfare."124 It is not
123 These supposed dichotomies were part of the modern rationalization and separation of
spheres, such as work and leisure, that geographer David Harvey has argued helped define Fordist
modernity from the early twentieth century to around the mid- 1 970s. Harvey's work also explores
significant transformations in time and space, as well as the standardization of products, that characterized Fordism. My analysis of the making of modern vacations, however, suggests that the
Fordist project was not only incomplete (that is, that vacations were neither fully rationalized nor
an homogenized product) but that the separation of work and leisure and of everyday life and vacations was not fully realized either. Vacations involved work, and their cultural images and material artifacts were part of, and extended, everyday life. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA, 1990), especially
chapter 8, "Fordism" and Part III "The Experience of Space and Time."
124 Luisa Passerini, "The Limits of Academic Abstraction," International Labor and Working-
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286 ELLEN FURLOUGH
simply that mass vacations contain "traces of collective memory [and] ...
dissent embodied in mass cultural forms."'25 Vacations and the ways in wh
they were (and are) understood and experienced rest upon more than shards
memory wedded to mass-mediated cultural imaginaries. In France, the con
butions of the Popular Front, the social welfare state, and social tourism for s
curing access to vacations as an increasingly salient aspect of a French and
ropean standard of living are vital elements, along with mass consumer cultu
in the ways in which vacations have been experienced and understood. Th
means that while increasingly transnational, and mass-mediated "master nar
tives" regarding tourism have been important, they have not solely determi
the making of modern vacations in particular historical and national conte
Andre Siegfried was, then, both prescient and wrong-headed. Vacations d
become more democratic and more organized. They also became increasing
understood as a consumer product. They did not, however, become seriali
and banal, nor should they be seen as evidence of mass cultural manipulatio
and consumer passivity. People's desires and aspirations found express
within modern vacations, and even if the larger economic structures and
imagery were not always of their making, they contained elements to whi
people responded. I have also argued against Siegfried's claim that m
tourism and vacations destroyed regimes of social distinction and exclusivi
Rather, they expressed new values, pleasures, desires, social practices, and
dividual aspirations, in essence multiplying possibilities for the expression
social and individual identities. Vacations in France worked to preserve soci
privileges as well as social entitlements. Indeed, the vacation's ability to be r
resented both as popularly accessible (a product for mass consumption) and
a mark of social distinction, as well as its particular status as both a collect
entitlement and an individual acquisition, made it seem an exemplary consum
good and practice within a modern liberal democracy.
Class History, 37 (Spring 1990), 27-28. Indeed, given the particulars of French history, it is po
ble that the preservation of paid vacations will form the basis for collective action as the Fre
standard of living is challenged in the changing social and political climate of "downsizing" an
retrenchment of social welfare states.
125 Jackson Lears, "Power, Culture, and Memory," Journal of American History, 75:1 (June
1988), 139.
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