Making Mass Vacations: Tourism and Consumer Culture in France, 1930s to 1970s

Abstract

In the 1950s, French political geographer and social critic André Siegfried denounced modern mass tourism as “tourism de série . . . organized, almost mechanized, collective, and above all democratic.” Echoing derisory discussions of mass culture and mass consumption, Siegfried criticized modern tourism as a degraded aspect of cultural and social democratization, best exemplified by banal American hotel chains. Siegfried complained that modern tourism had essentially destroyed older regimes of pleasure and substituted only amusements. Someone who yearned for the older “aristocratic” era wherein wealthy leisured elites sojourned in grand hotels, he believed that the only hope for the future was with “people of refined taste, knowing how to distinguish . . . between filth and beauty.”André Siegfried, Aspects du XXe Siàcle (Paris, 1955), 107, 123–25 and 148.