LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 32

French into more money for a new ski resort in the Massif Central or a camping ground
in the Lubéron.
The French dominate on the international scene as well. The United Nations' World
Tourism Organization grew into an independent U.N. body under Francesco Frangialli,
the Frenchman who was secretary-general for eleven years. He steered the tourism organ-
ization to global prominence, promoting those satellite accounts to prove tourism's eco-
nomic heft and pushing the organization into international conferences on development
and environmental issues.
Ultimately, the French are gambling that tourism will bring in the money that allows
French society to remain French while blocking the relentless drive of the industry from
reducing the culture to the single-dimension fluff it appears to be in those countless travel
pieces. Put in the most common terms—will officials prevent tourism from turning France
into a Disneyland for adults?
In some ways that is an old question. France has been a magnet for foreigners for more
than 150 years, long enough to have suffered and recovered from disasters and the sort of
hit-or-miss decisions that deform many other countries today.
• • •
The first tourists were the intrepid and often-eccentric English. The educated elite of the
nineteenth-century British Isles were easily the most adventuresome people of the era.
They routinely decamped to the far corners of their empire, from Kenya to the Raj in In-
dia, and returned decades later with baubles and hair-raising stories. Members of the Eng-
lish upper classes with the time and money to travel abroad invented the grand tour of
the European continent and called it tourism. Their itinerary included long stays in Paris,
Florence, Venice, Rome and Naples. Italy was the destination, the seat of European cul-
ture, while Paris was a delightful stop along the way.
These English were self-consciously modern, traveling to see the world described in
history books, absorb culture, tramp in nature and collect beautiful objects or “souvenirs.”
Hippolyte Taine, the French historian and critic, described the typical English tourist he
encountered in Paris as a strange creature with “long legs, thin body, head bent forward,
broad feet, strong hands, excellently suited to snatching and gripping.”
The British further whetted this new appetite for travel by hosting the first true world's
fair in 1851. The Great Exposition in London's Crystal Palace celebrated scientific ad-
vances from around the world and was a huge success, overcoming initial ridicule and
drawing large crowds from the British Isles and overseas. The passion for travel spread to
the United States where Americans, calling themselves excursionists, not tourists, adopted
the grand tour as a sophisticated rite of passage.