Iparralde and the Imagined South: Tourism, the Basques and Myths of the Midi in Twentieth-Century France

Abstract

I first encountered the idea of the Midi as a teenager, travelling to Decazeville in Aveyron to spend August 1965 with the family of a French pen-friend. As the southbound train passed Brive-Ia-Gaillarde a large advertisement proclaimed the town to be 'Le riant portail du Midi', conjuring up a sense of arrival in a land of relaxation and happy frivolity. The small mining and heavy industrial town of Decazeville failed to live up to this cheerful billing: it was hospitable but workaday, helping to fuel subsequent scepticism towards the promotion of regional identities by tourism organisations. The surrounding villages and valleys shimmered enticingly in the summer heat, but afternoon excursions to Rodez, Conques or the Gorges du Tarn, enjoyable as they were, failed to satisfy my inner curiosity about the identity and location of the 'Midi' that this self-styled 'gateway' conjured up. This article explores those issues in the context of southwestern France, with a focus on the debatable lands that constitute the French Basque Country, and with special reference to relationships betwf;en tourism and the construction of imagined identities, over the century of tourism development between the middle of the Nineteenth Century and the accelerating changes that gathered momentum from the 1960s. My next encounter with the Midi, two years later, took me to the west of Brive along what is, beyond Bordeaux (or at least Bayonne), the Atlantic coast main line to the Spanish border at Hendaye and Irun, continuing to San Sebastian and ultimately Madrid. This side of France is not the classic idea of the Midi, whose epicentre is a long way to the east, perhaps in Languedoc and Roussillon, extending to the Cote d' Azur.! The concept includes Bordeaux, of course, and extends beyond that city to the south as well as the east and south-east: we do encounter references to the Midi-Atlantique as well as the Midi-Pyrenees,