LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 37

of a new European community with Germany and other European powers that would
eventually become the European Union. This new Europe began with the notion of
shared authority over coal and steel and the shared belief that the state should spend its
money on social benefits such as health, housing, education, pensions and public infra-
structure—not armies and weapons.
This time tourism had the desired social effect and helped bring together these
European neighbors. During what the French call “the golden years” of the 1960s,
two- and three-week paid vacations became the norm in Europe. People from the
north—English, French, Swiss and Germans—headed south, to the warm Mediterranean
climates. They took the railways or drove in their newly affordable cars to the seashore.
The coast of Spain became the Miami of Europe, with inexpensive pensions and new
package vacations. New, inexpensive charter flights took tourists farther afield to places
like the Greek islands.
Again presaging modern mass tourism, the Europeans traveled in packs—the English
with the English, the French with the French, the Germans with the Germans—so that
the exotic would be familiar. It was an extension, of sorts, of the Marshall Plan. The
wealthier Europeans of the north traveled south to the poorer areas of their continent,
spending their money where it was needed. What economists strive for—redistribution
without taxation.
About this time, France took a step that inadvertently elevated the standard of tourism
by creating the world's first Ministry of Culture in 1959. The newly elected President
Charles de Gaulle wanted to revive and enhance French culture. He appointed the writer
André Malraux the first minister of culture, with a mandate to give the public free access
to the culture of France.
The hyperactive Malraux jumped into the job. With equal doses of imagination and
egalitarianism, Malraux assembled a bureaucracy to register, repair and recover all that
was considered France's patrimony or national heritage. Malraux built on the work begun
a hundred years earlier by Prosper Mérimée, also an author, who as France's inspector-
general of monuments spent over eighteen years listing and protecting France's historic
masterpieces. He blocked locals from destroying masterpieces, saving 4,000 buildings by
classifying them as historical monuments, including the bridge at Avignon and the basilica
at Vézelay. Malraux institutionalized this preservation and went further by getting laws
passed requiring the centuries-old buildings to be cleaned. And he declared that, if at all
possible, these gorgeous buildings and monuments had to be open to the public—French
and foreign alike.
Under Malraux, the French museum system became one of the most expansive in the
world. Paris alone seems to add a new major museum every decade: the then-audacious
Centre Georges Pompidou, which included the National Museum of Modern Art, opened
in 1977; the Musée d'Orsay was a masterful 1986 conversion of a Beaux-Arts railroad sta-