ABSTRACT
Addressing the delegates, the Minister of Public Works indeed heralded the Estates General as welcome evidence of “a government taking into account the touristic organization of France, sketching out a program destined to carry it out, and moving this program from the realm of speculation to that of fact.” It
showed, he added, that tourism was “not a pastime of the rich, nor a sport, still less an industry or form of commerce; it (is), literally, the entirety of France fully developed in its economic interests, encouraged in its regional life, conserved in its traditions, extended in its hospitality, beautied by its sites, increased ten-fold in all of its material, moral, intellectual and artistic riches.”2 is ambition to mine the nation-building potential of a formerly elite leisure activity was one that now more directly propelled tourist development eorts in France, as too in other European countries in the early twentieth century. From the establishment across Europe of touring associations, governmental oces and budgetary allotments dedicated to national tourist development, to the state-organized leisure initiatives of the 1930s in liberal and non-liberal regimes alike, it is clear that the nation was now far more present in tourism than it had been previously.3
