From paid holidays to mass tourism: a typological evolution

Abstract

The 1919 ratification of the 48-hour working week by the Organization Internationale du Travail [International Labor Organization], created by the signatory countries of the Treaty of Versailles, raises a new challenge to industrialized society: the organization of workers’ free time. Divided the day into “three eights” — eight hours of work, eight hours of rest and eight hours of sleep — the social framework of leisure is understood as a moral duty of the state. This issue takes on a never before considered dimension with the attention given to the instrumental use of popular recreation by European totalitarian regimes and its centralization in organisms of a political and ideological character. Leisure, in this context, would work as a privileged area of indoctrination and diffusion of the nationalist rhetoric that supports the construction of fascist dictatorships. But the recognition of the necessity to organize leisure was not restricted to totalitarian states, nor was it an exclusively political and/or social issue.