The historical social science of tourism

Abstract

History holds a special place in the social sciences. Social sciences are historical sciences and the study of tourism is no exception. This paper offers some remarks on the historical reflexivity in tourism studies and raises questions about links between knowledge and tourism using several examples such as the Touring Club de France. It calls for increasing interdisciplinary approaches that take into account the historic context of the phenomena they study.

Keywords:

• tourists
• economic impact
• technology
• space
• identity
• cultural heritage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bertrand Reau is Senior Lecturer in sociology at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne & researcher at the European Center of Sociology and Political Science – European Center of Sociology (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-CNRS-Paris 1). He is a founding member of the seminar «Tourisme : Recherches, Pratiques, Institutions» at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and of the French academic journal : Mondes du Tourisme. His work explores the social use of leisure time (both contemporarily and historically), the political function of ethnic tourism in South-East-Asia and the sociology of science. He has published three books : (with François Denord), La sociologie de Charles Wright Mills (La découverte, Paris, 2014) ; Les Français et les vacances. Sociologie de l'offre et des pratiques de loisirs (CNRS Editions, Paris, 2011) and (with Saskia Cousin), Sociologie du tourisme (La découverte, Paris, 2009). He is the co-editor (with Franck Poupeau) of the special issue «Nouvelles Frontières du tourisme» of the academic journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. He is the co-director of the Master « Economic and Social Experts » at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Notes

¹ Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘What is Historical Social Science’ (Conference in Honor of Charles Tilly, The Social Science Research Council, New York, October 3–5, 2008), http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/content/2008/texts/Wallerstein.pdf

² John K. Walton ‘Welcome to the Journal of Tourism History’, Journal of Tourism History 1, no. 1 (2009): 1–6.

³ I would like to thank Eric G. E. Zuelow, John K. Walton and Igor Tchoukarine for their invitation to participate in this special issue. I would also like to take the opportunity given to me by the editor to make some conclusive remarks on the historical reflexivity in tourism studies and to raise questions about links between knowledge and tourism. This article does not attempt to summarise the articles that make up this special issue.

⁴ Alain Corbin, Le Territoire du vide, l'Occident et le désir du rivage (1750–1840) (Paris: Aubier, 1988).

⁵ Kristin Semmens, Seeing Hitler's Germany. Tourism in the Third Reich (London, New york: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

⁶ Antoine Prost, Douze leçons sur l'histoire (Paris: Seuil, (1996) 2010), 207.

⁷ Hans Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure. The psychology of social institutions (New york: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1954 (1970)), 25.

⁸ Hans Gerth & Charles Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure, 29. See also, François Denord and Bertrand Réau, La sociologie de Charles Wright Mills (Paris: la Découverte, 2014).

⁹ The following section is a reworked version of Chapter 1 of Bertrand Réau, Les Français et les vacances. Sociologie des pratiques et offres de loisirs (Paris: éditions CNRS, 2011).

¹⁰ Les origines du Touring club par Bruel, 1890. In 1891, Edouard Bruel was the délégué général of the T.C.F. in Genève. Archives Nationales Françaises (AN) n°200000028, 0001, and Revue de mars 1935, ‘A propos des origines du T.C.F.’, Marcel Viollette's speech on the occasion of Abel Ballif's death. Archives Nationales Françaises (AN) n°200000028, 0001.

¹¹ Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, Dans les beaux quartiers (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

¹² These actions are anchored in what Christian Topalov has called the ‘champ réformateur’. Christian Topalov (dir.), Laboratoires du Nouveau siècle: la nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880–1914 (Paris: éditions EHESS, 1999),

¹³ Catherine Bertho Lavenir, La roue et le stylo: comment nous sommes devenus touristes (Paris: éditions Odile Jacob, 1999), 104.

¹⁴ ‘Although born of modernity, engineers react in the manner of other professions […]. But the biggest number from the middle class, working in companies, including the largest, which are the only ones with a frame not provided by traditional employers, that is to say, the owner families. They begin to feel the contradictory effects of their intermediate position in the corporate hierarchy. Many seek, in accordance with theses Lyautey on the social role of the officer or of Le Play, engineer itself as intermediaries and mediators function between classes.’ Christophe Charle, Histoire sociale de la France au 19^e siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 252.

¹⁵ One can get an idea about Abel Ballif, the general secretary of the T.C.F., through Alex Poyer's description: ‘One hand should hold the rudder; it is laborious and dedicated, this is what to ask. […] If the province is the body and the heart of the nation, Paris does it is not the head and brain, and can it be that the director thought emanates from elsewhere’? Alex Poyer, Cyclistes en sociétés: Naissance et développement du cyclisme associatif français (1867–1914), Thèse de doctorat d'Histoire (Lyon: Université Lyon 2, 2000).

¹⁶ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991).

¹⁷ The T.C.F. welcomed financial support from celebrities such as: writer Emile Zola; president of the Republic, Felix Faure; agrégé in history and geography André Bertholet; a doctor and head of the Ormesson hospice, Léon Petit; Prince Antoine d'Orléans; and even Lord Dufferin, the ambassador to England.

¹⁸ Delegates praised the merits and contributions of the T.C.F. while conducting recruitment campaigns throughout France. Bertrand Larique, L'économie du tourisme en France des années 1890 à la veille de la Seconde guerre mondiale: organisation et développement d'un secteur socio-économique (Bordeaux: Université Bordeaux III, 2006), 40.

¹⁹ Chiffres de Bertrand Larique, 2006, L'économie du tourisme en France des années 1890 à la veille de la Seconde guerre mondiale: organisation et développement d'un secteur socio-économique, 44–5.

²⁰ Julian Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France, 1890–1914: Jean Charles-Brun and French Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

²¹ Saskia Cousin, Les miroirs du tourisme. Ethnographie de la Touraine du Sud (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 2011).

²² Anne-Marie Thiesse, Ecrire la France. Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Epoque et la Libération (Paris: PUF, 1991), 207. See also, Catherine Bertho, ‘L'invention de la Bretagne. Genèse sociale d'un stéréotype’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35 (1980): 45–62.

²³ ‘Although he claims relentlessly increasing political, economic, local, administrative, regionalism draws an ecumenical, non-partisan program that greatly appeals to provincial bourgeois republicans in search of resources and legitimacy. Thus tourism organised at first by the countryside, allows federalist claims to align with the affirmation of a cultural, artistic, and literary’. Saskia Cousin, 2011, Les miroirs du tourisme. Ethnographie de la Touraine du Sud, 71 and 72.

²⁴ Le Touring Club de France inaugurated a regionalist book prize in 1930. Anne-Marie Thiesse, Ecrire la France. Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Epoque et la Libération, 212.

²⁵ Anne-Marie Thiesse, 1991, Ecrire la France. Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Epoque et la Libération, 212.

²⁶ Anne-Marie Thiesse, 1991, Ecrire la France. Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Epoque et la Libération, 212. Roger Chartier analyzes the impact of Vidal de la Blanche's géographie on the way of making history using a monography focused on a localized territory unlike the sociological aspirations of Durkheim who proposes a ‘statistical’ analysis. The relations to regionalism are also relations between scientific disciplines. Roger Chartier, Au bord de la falaise. L'histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998).

²⁷ Anne-Marie Thiesse, 1991, Ecrire la France. Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Epoque et la Libération, 217.

²⁸ Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, the French colonial state used tourism for propaganda purposes, the T.C.F. created an ‘office of colonial tourism’ in 1910 and organised large cruises in the colonies. Benoît de L'Estoile, Le goût des autres: de l'Exposition coloniale aux arts premiers (Paris: Flammarion, coll. ‘Champs’, 2010).

²⁹ This question spans the work of the anthropologist Saskia Cousin. 

³⁰ Elias proposes ‘the image of many individuals, who, by virtue of their reciprocal dependence are linked together in multiple ways, thus forming interrelated associations or configurations in which the balance of forces is more or less unstable’ Norbert Elias, Qu'est-ce que la sociologie? (Paris: Agora, (1970) 1991), 10.

³¹ Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire, (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 30.

³² Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire, 31.

³³ Michel Foucault, L'archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

³⁴ Pamela Ballinger, ‘Mobile natures: tourism, symbolic geographies, and environmental protection on the Croatian Adriatic’; Nataša Urošević, ‘The Brijuni Islands – A Paradise of the South Sea: Media representations of the elite Mediterranean resort in the first tourist magazines’.

³⁵ These questions are valid for the other producers of knowledge, which is mobilised by tourism (historians, archeologists, biologists, scholars, etc.)

³⁶ Nataša Urošević, ‘The Brijuni Islands’.

³⁷ Nataša Urošević, ‘The Brijuni Islands’.

³⁸ Such an approach poses, of course, other methodological problems related to participant observation.

³⁹ Pamela Ballinger, ‘Mobile natures’.

⁴⁰ Igor Tchoukarine, ‘The Sea Connects; It Does Not Divide’: Czech Tourism on the Interwar Adriatic, 10.

⁴¹ Igor Tchoukarine, ‘The Sea Connects; It Does Not Divide’, 10. On the contrary, the intervention of the Yugoslavian State, despite a financial situation in deficit, in order to maintain the maritime lines of transportation did not set the development of tourism as a goal. This is anchored in a context of rivalry with neighbouring Italy. This is anchored in a context of rivalry with ;neighbouring Italy. Nevertheless, the situation benefited tourists.

⁴² Igor Duda and Igor Stanić, ‘Tanned guardians, followers and pioneers. Yugoslav directed tourism across Tito's Brijuni Islands’, 17.

⁴³ Rory Yeomans, ‘The adventures of an Ustasha Youth leader in the Adriatic: transnational fascism and the travel polemics of Dragutin Gjurić.’

⁴⁴ In France during the interwar period in the youth camps, authorized relaxation (by adults) constraints varied according to the supposed capacities of each member of a social group to control themselves. The ethos specific to higher social categories authorised a form of self-control, which is not permitted for the working-class youth. Indeed, a continuum was outlined between activities associated with political and religious values and other more flexible activities associated with the autonomy of adolescents. And what about the case of the Political School or the trips of the Ustasha Youth studied here? See, for instance, Rémi Fabre, ‘L’émergence d'un mouvement: les premiers camps de vacances de la FFACE 19061914’, Gérard Cholvy (dir.), Mouvements de jeunesse chrétiens et juifs: sociabilité juvénile dans un cadre européen 1799–1968 (Paris: Cerf, 1985), 141–60. Arnaud Baubérot, ‘La nature éducatrice. La pédagogie du camp dans les mouvements de jeunesse protestants’, Ethnologie Française, n 4 (2001): 621–9. Laura Lee Downs, ‘Dai Faucons Rouges alle colonies rouges: la pedagogia socialista della repubblica dei ragazzi in Francia, 1932–1952’, in Marco Fincardi (dir.), Le Reppubliche dei ragazzi nel mondo, Annali dell'Istituto Gramsci dell'Emilia-Romagna, 4-5/00-01 (Bologne: Éd. Clueb, 2003), 69–96.

⁴⁵ Maura Hametz, Replacing Venice in the Adriatic: Tourism and Italian Irredentism', 1880–1936, 15.

⁴⁶ A transnational perspective also allows scholars to avoid overestimating the national determination of internationally recognised tourist destinations such as Venice. See for instance, Eric G. E. Zuelow, ed., Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History (Biddeford: Ashgate, 2011).

⁴⁷ Rory Yeomans, ‘The adventures of an Ustasha Youth leader in the Adriatic’.

⁴⁸ Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire, 32.