ABSTRACT
As Brittany’s, and also one of France’s, pre-eminent natural attractions, the Pointe du Ruz continued in the 1930s to manifest many of the core dilemmas of tourist conversion in the region, and in the country as a whole. More than perhaps any other site, the Pointe tended to activate fears that Brittany was fast becoming a place like any other. As the preceding chapter demonstrated, many French natural and historical sites had come by this time to be accorded formal protection as monumental landmarks. The Pointe, however, earned this recognition only in 1942. Thus, discussion of the site’s visual integrity and seeming diminishment was nearly continuous through the later 1920s and 1930s in the regional and even national press. In one typical 1929 article entitled “Sauvons La Pointe du Raz” (“Let’s Save the Pointe du Raz”), the widely-read Parisian weekly L’Illustration pointedly asked whether the Pointe had in fact become too popular, its once sublime and singular beauty giving rise to unsightly crowding, rapid soil erosion and the crass hawking of fake-Breton bibelots to tourists. 1 La Bretagne Touristique similarly lamented in an article from nearly the same time that the site’s aspect sauvage (wild quality) had been in retreat for many years, noting sarcastically the installation there of “barracks of brick or stone, storage sheds and even a gas station, made brilliant by the rays of the sun reflecting off its hardware”. 2
