Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Mark Twain memorialized these excursionists in his book
Innocents Abroad
, a journal
of his 1867 voyage across the Atlantic through the Mediterranean to the Holy Lands. For
most of the journey Twain is his humorous, acerbic self—that is, until he arrives in France
and becomes just one more tourist to fall head over heels in love with the country. He dis-
embarked with several passengers at the port of Marseilles to catch a train for a side trip up
to Paris.
“At last, and beyond all question, we were in beautiful France and absorbing its nature
to the forgetfulness of everything else, and coming to feel the happy romance of the thing
in all of its enchanting delightfulness,” he writes. “What a bewitching land it is! What a
garden!”
He was besotted with Paris, its cafés, the Nôtre-Dame Cathedral and the Père Lachaise
Cemetery. Twain returned to his ocean liner wrestling with his admiration for France.
Americans “are measurably superior to the French in some things, but they are immeasur-
ably our betters in others,” he wrote, and one of those was the city of Paris. “We shall travel
many thousands of miles after we leave here and visit many great cities, but we shall find
none so enchanting as this.”
Twenty years after Twain's visit, Paris hosted its greatest fair—the 1889 Universal Ex-
position celebrating the centennial of the establishment of the French Republic. This re-
quired a centerpiece that would reflect France's forward-looking democracy. A contest was
held and Mr. Eiffel won. His proposed 10,000-ton tower, with its latticelike construction
for the entry to the fairgrounds, was an imposing engineering challenge that met the re-
quirement to demonstrate a scientific advancement.
After much official grumbling about the cost and the aesthetics of the candle-shaped
tower—several of the establishment's leading artists and intellectuals described it as an
“odious column built up of riveted iron plates”—the people of Paris fell in love with Eif-
fel's folly. At the inauguration Gustave Eiffel said with slight exaggeration that “the tower
is now known to the whole world; it has struck the imagination of every nation, and in-
spired the most remote with the desire of visiting the Exhibition.”
Foreigners did visit, over 1 million from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia, spend-
ing over $324 million—huge numbers in 1889. When the tower was slated to be torn
down at the end of its twenty-year contract, the city of Paris granted an extension in the
face of its international renown. In the century since the tower was built, after the powers-
that-be got used to its leggy beauty, the French government has used it shamelessly to
evoke romance, longing, sophistication and an intense desire to visit France.
Before long, the growing legion of English tourists wanted to “discover” parts of France
beyond Paris. Fond of the seaside in their own country, the English took ferries across the
Channel to French coastal towns that the French had never found particularly interesting.
Towns like Deauville and Dieppe on the Normandy coast were turned into fashionable re-
sorts, the first example of what would later become mass tourism. Locals did not fare very
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