LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 34

well. Developers expropriated their land with the connivance of officialdom and made a
small fortune off this new craze for beachside resorts. Migrant workers arrived and found
work in the new resort jobs of waitress, cook, beach attendant and fishing guide. Prosti-
tutes followed, long before the term “sex tourism” was invented. The pattern was repeated
on a vastly larger scale over the next century as tropical beaches from the Caribbean to
Thailand became resorts for mass tourism.
But as small as it may seem in retrospect, that first example of a modern tourist resort
overwhelmed the northern coast of France. As the historian Graham Robb wrote: “Noth-
ing of this magnitude had happened to the coast of Normandy since the Viking invasions
and the Hundred Years War.”
The French government noticed all the money passing hands in these tourist resorts
and in 1911 created a Tourism Board devoted to the new industry. This office was assigned
the job of producing “propaganda” to entice more foreigners to visit. Before this experi-
ment got traction, World War I broke out and France became a bloody battleground. In
the immediate, heady days of peace, France revived its Tourism Board and opened bur-
eaus in Barcelona, Luxembourg, London and Geneva to sell France as a holiday destina-
tion. To that end, the Tourism Board commissioned modern Art Deco posters to promote
rail travel like the Le Train Bleu to the Riviera or wintering on the sands of Juan-les-Pins
at Antibes, posters that have since been endlessly reproduced to evoke those early stylish
days of luxury travel.
Since tourism involved international commerce, the French government helped form
the International Congress of Official Tourist Traffic Associations in 1925 to regulate the
tourist traffic between neighboring European countries, focusing on classic issues of bor-
der security, tariffs and tax collection. The biggest problem at the time was how to keep
track of automobiles crossing international borders. In 1934 the Europeans added the In-
ternational Union of Official Organizations for Touristic Propaganda in Brussels that be-
came a forerunner for the current UNWTO.
The biggest contribution of the French government to the tourism industry was inad-
vertent.
In 1936, France elected Léon Blum as its first socialist prime minister. In that era of
strikes and industrial clashes, Mr. Blum ran on a platform appealing to the workers, prom-
ising to ease their burden, shore up the fledgling unions and help farmers and the new
middle class share in the wealth of industrialized France. He made good on his word and
passed a number of sweeping reforms, including a 1936 law that required two weeks of
paid vacation for every French citizen.
It is impossible to exaggerate the effect of this law and its mandate of the unheard-of
luxury of a paid vacation. It was easily the most popular of Blum's reforms and spread
across Europe. Under Blum, the government arranged low-cost trips for French families
to the Alps and various camping grounds. “Les Vacances” (French for “vacation”) created