LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 31

“In business it's not considered the route to an elite career. No one wants their son
to go into tourism. Everyone takes vacations. Everyone is an expert on taking a vacation.
Voilà —tourism isn't serious.”
There is an important economic aspect to this ambivalence. In this era of hyperglobal-
ization, success at drawing tourists could be France's downfall. The more France depends
on tourism, the more the government has to guard against the runaway mass tourism that
is destroying life in Venice and the beaches of southern Spain. And tourists can be fickle,
looking for the next great destination.
There is no bureaucratic answer to those puzzles. The attraction of France comes from
centuries of civilization, not a series of ad campaigns. The country's tourism business
routinely survives the annual spate of protests and labor stoppages. No official edict is re-
sponsible for the alchemy of French wine and food, for the geniuses of French art, literat-
ure, music, theater, ballet and the movies.
French officials have even debated whether the government has any power to keep
alight the modern world's obsessive love of all things French, in particular Impressionist
art. “We can't explain any of that, really, why even the Chinese are so crazy about these
painters and we can't take credit for it. All around the world they love Cézanne, Picasso,”
said Marco Marchetti, of the Ministry of Culture's department of patrimony, in an inter-
view in his office around the corner from the Louvre.
What the Ministry of Culture and the government can do, he said, is mount block-
buster exhibits that fans love and which draw millions of tourists to France. Pablo Picasso
and Paul Cézanne have been the rock stars. Claude Monet joined the pantheon with a
2010 exhibit of his paintings at the Grand Palais in Paris. But the government rarely ac-
knowledged that among its motives behind these exhibits is to promote the tourism trade.
These shows are for higher purposes. When he opened the Monet exhibit, then President
Nicolas Sarkozy said it reflects the “unmistakable emblem of the international influence
of French culture.”
Underneath this public posturing, the government understands that tourism will be a
driver of the French economy for years to come and that tourism is too powerful and too
important to be left to its own devices; either you control tourism or it controls you. The
French government stands apart for its early intuition about the importance of tourism and
the world's itch to travel. Now France is at the center of that explosion: over half of travel is
to Europe, nearly 20 percent to Asia, 17 percent to the Americas—North and South—and
less than 5 percent to Africa.
To keep its position the French government has become tourism's most important part-
ner, improving or building new transportation systems, national parks, or museums that
can make or break a tourist season. Tourism is regulated, promoted and subsidized by the
government at all levels. Planning begins in town halls or rural regional boards and moves
upward to bureaucrats in Paris who then help transform the world's love of all things