LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 38

tion into the permanent home of the country's collection of Impressionist paintings, and
most recently the Quai Branly Museum of indigenous art was inaugurated in 2006.
That is just a portion of the cultural world opened up by the new ministry. From the be-
ginning, Malraux was keen on establishing and supporting arts festivals around the coun-
try: music in Aix-en-Provence, photography in Perpignan, film in Cannes. The aim was
to raise the profile of French culture; the result fifty years later was a multimillion-dollar
cultural tourism business.
And so it went for several decades. Decisions and innovations of the French govern-
ment, somehow, eventually provided the undergirding of the classic tourism industry of
today. Tourism officials told me repeatedly, “This was done without regard to tourism,”
while relating how critical some innovation had been for tourism.
Trains and transportation came next. The French were among the first nations to bet
their future on a system of fast trains. Called Train à Grande Vitesse (train of great speed),
or TGV, the government began laying the first tracks for the system in 1974. Soon the
whole country was tied into this expanded rail network of fast and common trains, allow-
ing the French to travel without using their cars and freeing up the clogged highways.
Eventually, the trains were connected to the airports. Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport be-
came a model hub, with its connections by commuter train, bus and the TGV copied by
countries around the world.
Another turning point came at the dawn of industrialized agriculture. At risk were those
gentle green fields and quaint villages so admired by Mark Twain. As the agricultural
powerhouse of Western Europe, France saw farming as its destiny, and by the 1980s the
Ministry of Agriculture was pushing back against pressure to promote huge farms found
in countries like the United States. Instead, the government promoted a mix of farm sub-
sidies to preserve local small farmers and the French way of life. Through national and
European laws, the government paid a premium to farmers who followed old-fashioned
conservation practices like planting grass and tree buffers along river banks to keep the wa-
ters pure and prevent soil erosion. Farmers who grew hedge rows or repaired their scenic
barns were rewarded by the government. And so were the farmers whose vineyards, fields
and orchards supply the chefs in Paris with the fresh, high-quality produce they need,
whether Roquefort cheese or baby spinach. A complicated system that uses subsidies and
specialty labels eventually insured that French cuisine and small French farmers could
survive modernization.
By 1990, when the world tourism industry cracked open with the end of the Cold War,
the French innovations of the previous forty years were a boon rather than a drag on high-
quality tourism. Instead of being passed over for countries newly open, France became the
top attraction with its museums, easy transportation and special regional flavors.
So France started pulling together the disparate strands of government policy that af-
fected tourism, however indirectly, to make a unified policy and to work with private in-