ABSTRACT
“Great Pity for the Windmills of France: Yet Another Profanation!” Scrawled out angrily in large print at the very top of his October 25, 1934 letter to the Touring Club de France’s (TCF) central office, the Parisian Marc Lefebvre’s cri de coeur captured the anguish of the seasoned traveler coming unexpectedly upon a despoiled picturesque view. The sight of windmills draped in ads for products like Cinzano vermouth and Moreuil chocolate had for some time alarmed travelers to Brittany and other French regions, prompting many of them to lodge formal complaints with the TCF. Where most of these communications—or at least those available today in the Club’s archive—tended to include photographs with only the most rudimentary identifying text, Lefebvre’s letter offered an extended account of his unhappy discovery in the rich language of travel narrative. Departing from the medieval town of Dol near the northern coast, Lefebvre had set off on Route 155 toward the venerable and thoroughly touristed St Malo. It was a route that provided him at one point with a spectacular view of the Bay of St Michel, with the rocks of Cancale on one side and the famed Mont on the other. As he motored along the coastal landscape, marveling at the evocative names and panoramic views of the coastal towns, Lefebvre noticed a series of old windmills, long idle but “raising their bare arms as if in protest against the misery of an age in which centralized mechanization had stripped them of their crowning activity…and against the tourist for having approached these vestiges of a bygone age” (see figure 6.1). Windmills covered with advertising along route 155, Île-et-Vilaine department, 1934. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315579429/d235de56-d226-416f-8083-3e201acbf880/content/fig6_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> From ‘Lutte contre l'affichage et l'éléctification’, Archives Contemporaines 53 AS 9912, Article 34, Committee on Sites and Monuments.
