La production d'identités territoriales à usage commercial dans l'entre-deux-guerres en Bourgogne

Abstract

The production of territorial identities with commercial usage during the inter-war years in Burgundy The development of tourism leads to changes in the models and representations of territorial identities. In the XIXth century, political leaders and members of learned societies developed a set of practices to produce cultural and political territories and identities such as the development of regional and local languages, folklore, heroes, and ethnographic museums. Using the regionalist creed at the beginning of the XXth century, national tourist associations drew upon these models of identity but transformed them by placing the emphasis on their more spectacular and entertaining dimensions. In addition, these models of territorial identity donned a more commercial character (gastronomy as a territorial marker, carnivals, folksongs, literary prizes. ..) as the link was established between the development of a cultural specificity attributed to a region and economic development. Regionalism in Burgundy adopted these regionalist and gastronomic dimensions linked to tourism as shown by the gastronomic fair of Dijon in 1921 which was in all intents and purposes a shop window for regional products designed to promote the region. While the town of Beaune, through its political and intellectual representatives, used the model of territorial identity inherited from the XIXth century to create a regional folklore centered on wine for a wide but essentially local audience, the town of Meursault innovated with its "Paulée" in 1924, which was less a celebration of regional identity for local consumption than a gathering of regional and national elites seeking to project the regional identity to a wider audience. This "Paulée" was conceived as a means to defend wine producers supporting the Law on labels of origin implemented in 1919 against the wine merchants. A decade later, in the context of economic recession, the largest wine producers, allied this time with the merchants of Nuits-Saint-Georges, founded the "Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin" as an instrument for the commercial promotion of quality vintage wines. This collective action, relayed by the national and international press, sought to conquer new markets with the end of Prohi¬ bition in the United States and accompanied the development of French marketing based on luxury goods. The use of regional identity and flolkore as an instrument for marketing wire ran parallel to the institutionalization of French ethnography, which discounted these forms of commercialized folklore. After World War II, the political forms of folklore instrumentalized by the Vichy regime lost all semblance of legitimacy, while the commercialized form of folklore continued to flourish and develop but was largely ignored by professional ethnographers.