Toward a Deeper Understanding of History: War, Tourism, and their Links - The Case of the First World War

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Toward a Deeper Understanding of History: War,
Tourism, and their Links – The Case of the First
World War
Bertram M. Gordon

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URL: http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/4611
ISSN: 2259-924X

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Toward a Deeper Understanding of History: War, Tourism, and their Links – The...   1

    Toward a Deeper Understanding of
    History: War, Tourism, and their
    Links – The Case of the First World
    War
    Bertram M. Gordon

1   Yves-Marie Evanno and Johan Vincent (eds.), Tourisme et Grande Guerre : Voyage(s)
    sur un front historique méconnu (1914-2019), Éditions Codex, 2019
2   The relationship between war and tourism was a relatively unexplored area of research
    as late as the end of the twentieth century, when John Walton wrote of his surprise that
    so little attention had been devoted to the study of the impact of the First World War
    on touristic towns (Walton, 1996) and I noted that the history and uses of tourism
    under the difficult conditions of wartime “an almost unexplored area” (Gordon, 1998).
    In the years since then, however, the many linkages between war and tourism in
    history have drawn more attention (Butler and Suntikul, 2013; Elliott and Milne, 2019).
3   If there had been any lingering doubt about the cultural and social importance of these
    linkages, a new book, Tourisme et Grande Guerre. Voyage(s) sur un front historique
    méconnu (1914-2019), edited by Yves-Marie Evanno and Johan Vincent, will put them
    to rest. Focused on the many aspects of tourism largely on the Western front during the
    First World War and to battle sites there in the years thereafter, Tourisme et Grande
    Guerre is a splendid collection of twenty-eight essays by specialists, all making
    excellent use of local archival resources, largely in France but also in other countries,
    including neutral Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland. As Evanno and Vincent write, their
    purpose was to bring together disparate archival work to enable specialists and the
    public at large to have a “new look at the times of conflicts” (Evanno and Vincent,
    “Introduction”, 2019) (Translations from the text of sources are my own).
4   Tourisme et Grande Guerre is divided into three sections, the first focusing on tourism
    during the war, the second on tourism to war sites after the war, and the third on the
    war as a “motor” (Evanno and Vincent, “La Grande Guerre, 2019”) actually helping to

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    expand the tourism industry, already growing during the late nineteenth and early
    twentieth centuries, even if the numbers of tourists declined during the fighting. A key
    point, expressed in the preface by Emmanuelle Cronier, was the increase in state
    involvement in the tourism industry in many countries during the war, paralleling the
    growing governmental role in their economies in general. Tourism was becoming more
    accessible to middle and eventually working classes in addition to the elites, a process
    that was underway in the early twentieth century. It continued, even if diminished in
    some ways, during the war, only to be intensified in the interwar years (Cronier, 2019).
5   The essays in the first section focus on tourism during the war, which, rather than
    tourists actually watching battles, as in the prior cases of Tchernaya during the
    Crimean War or Manassas during the American Civil War, were primarily examples of
    tourists finding new destinations when the war made their previous sites unavailable. A
    case in point was Scotland, where tourists who prior to the war had flocked to spas now
    moved inland as the spas were taken over to become military hospitals (Durie, 2019).
    Tourism within the different national territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
    increased as international destinations which they had frequented before the war were
    now closed to them (Malzner, 2019). Profiting from its location in neutral Spain, San
    Sebastián lured American civilian tourists away from resorts in countries at war
    (Larrinaga, 2019). American soldiers after four months of active service in France were
    given seven days leave, during which they frequently toured in the Dauphiné region.
6   Sex tourism with prostitutes, a topic that receives relatively little attention in this
    book, was also part of the experience of the American soldiers in the Dauphiné, who
    were seen as “rich” by many among the local population (Perrin, 2019). French soldiers
    stationed in Salonica on the Macedonian front also engaged in sex tourism, where a
    kind of exotic “orientalism” added to the appeal (Schaeffer, 2019). Another form of
    tourism, reminiscent of zoo tourism, included French civilians who visited prisoner of
    war camps where captured German soldiers were held in places such as Carnac
    (Richard, 2019).
7   The second section of Tourisme et Grande Guerre shifts the focus from the tourists
    themselves to the tourism industry, with changes in the hotel trade and tourism
    seasons, impacted by the war. Addressing these changes, the essays in this section
    make important contributions to business history, placing the war-related shifts in the
    context of the economic development of an industry that by the early twenty-first
    century had become one of the largest in the world.
8   The outbreak of the war in August 1914, during the height of the summer tourist
    season, was an economic disaster for coast cities such as Saint-Malo in Normandy, and
    although 1915 was equally difficult, the 1916 season brought a new influx of visitors,
    largely women and children. Describing the shifts in summer tourism to Saint-Malo
    during the war, Erwan Le Gall suggests a sense “of making do” [“faire avec”] among the
    civilian visitors to the city, parallel to what Philippe Burrin called the spirit of
    “accommodation” that characterized the behavior of many in France during the
    Second World War (Le Gall, 2019; Burrin, 1995).
9   Beginning in 1915, hotel guests were monitored in Britain, a practice that had been
    restricted to aliens prior to the war (James, 2019). Some Swiss hoteliers, hard-pressed
    for funds because of fewer guests, sought to increase their income by shifting their
    meals from lower priced table d’hôte (all-inclusively priced) to à la carte, where each
    item was offered separately and with higher prices. The shift, as Mathieu Narandal

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     writes, led to changes in the kitchens. Chefs now needed to be skilled in the
     preparation of larger repertoires of dishes (Narandal, 2019). Another increase in state
     involvement in the tourism industry was the establishment and government funding of
     national tourism organizations (NTOs), for example in Switzerland, where the
     government helped fund marketing campaigns aimed at rebuilding the postwar tourist
     trade (Hoppler 2019).
10   The war also impacted the tourist guidebook trade with the appearance of battlefield
     tour guides, notably the Michelin Guides Bleus, which engaged in their own war with
     the German Baedeker guidebooks and began directing tourists to war sites within a
     year of the end of hostilities. Several of the contributors to Tourisme et Grande Guerre
     differentiate between “pilgrimages” and “battlefield tourists,” the former being friends
     and relatives of soldiers visiting sites where their loved ones fought and died, the latter
     being curious onlookers less emotionally involved in the war. Pilgrims tended to visit
     immediately after the war. “Battlefield tourists,” sometimes viewed negatively by
     pilgrimage tourists and the local population, came later (Morlier, 2019; Connolly and
     Godden, 2019; Roy, 2019; Lloyd, 1998; Lefort, 2019; Mariotti, 2019). The negative views
     of tourists, some of whom visited battlefields to collect souvenirs (Mogavero, 2019), was
     an attitude that has frequently been expressed toward tourists in history (Christin
     2017). Tourist guidebooks helped make the war sites “immortal” and the increased use
     of automobiles in the postwar world added to the numbers of visitors and the
     sanctification of the battlefields (Connolly and Godden, 2019).
11   The third section of Tourisme et Grande Guerre, the largest of the three with twelve
     essays in contrast to eight in each of the first two, is devoted to some of the longer term
     impacts of the First World War on the tourism industry. As the authors note in their
     introduction to this section, tourism to war sites reflected power relationships, an
     example Verdun, where they suggest that the tourist literature glorified the French
     combatants to the detriment of the Germans (Evanno and Vincent, “La Grande Guerre,”
     2019; Gordon, 2018). As the years went on and nature did its work of changing the
     physical characteristics of the battlefield sites, the tourist quest for “authenticity”
     expanded. By the late 1920s, veterans returning to battlegrounds where they had
     fought could, on occasion, no longer recognize the sites. Graves and memorials had
     replaced the actual battlefields (Gregor, 2019).
12   As in the first two sections of the book, the essays in part three show the many variety
     of ways in which tourism in general and war tourism in particular intersect with other
     aspects of social history. The power relationships inherent in tourism were especially
     clear in the case of Hartmannswillerkopf, a mountain in the Vosges in Alsace, which
     had been under German control prior to the war and had been the site of a battle
     during the conflict. As elsewhere, different groups in France wished to honor the dead
     but, as Nicolas Lefort points out, the majority of the dead from Alsace and Lorraine had
     served in the German army during the war. Entirely new itineraries were drawn up by
     several French organizations to convert the memory of the fighting at
     Hartmannswillerkopf from a German to a French narrative (Lefort, 2019). In another
     case, the sacralization of the Verdun battlefield extolled the French and paid little
     attention to the Germans who had fought and died there. Tourism revived the
     economic fortunes of Verdun, devasted during the war (Roy, 2019). Reflecting the
     political implications of war tourism, the numbers of Italian visitors to sites of memory

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     in France, where their compatriots had fought and died, diminished after 1936, when
     Fascist Italy allied with Nazi Germany (Buzzi, 2019).
13   The takeoff of tourism to First World War battle sites coincided, not only with the
     popularization of automobiles but also increasing use of postcards, many of which
     showed the destruction of the war, and small Kodak cameras, used especially by
     American tourists. A growing industry of cinema also contributed to the popularization
     of wartime sites for tourists. Discussing the ways in which time changes the sites [“Le
     temps fait son œuvre”], Olivier Verdier writes that in Lorraine, Verdun became the
     focal point of popular war memory tourism, so much so that a myth was created
     around the “trench of bayonets,” a “falsification consecrated by popular fervor” that
     became a monument in the 1920s and remains so to the present (Verdier, 2019). A line
     of buried soldiers had been discovered with fixed bayonets, presumably by nearby
     explosions as they were defending their trench. More likely, however, the bayonets had
     been placed there later (Prost, 2002).
14   More recent source material used includes web sites, which not only address the war
     but also help bring the current accounts of war tourism up to date. Commemorations of
     the centennial of the war in 2014 and the years that followed also heightened interest
     in many of the sites and led to an increase in war-related material on the internet
     (Pavan Della Torre, 2019). This even included the participation of the Musée de la
     Grande guerre de Meaux in the creation of Léon Vivien, a fictional poilu who
     communicated his wartime experiences on the front to his friends via Facebook in 2012
     to show how frontline soldiers lived during the war (Deraedt, 2014; Gordon, 2019).
15   The many uses of the internet highlight the variety of ways in which tourism, in its
     broadest sense of “curiosity in motion,” intersects with war (Gordon, 2018). As Franck
     David suggests, the process of identifying a space as a site of heritage
     [“patrimonialisation] with monuments to the dead bestow identity upon it and this
     patrimonialisation is made real by tourism. This process, he continues, is enhanced by
     the spread of m-tourism, namely the dissemination of tourist information on mobile
     devices (David, 2019; Di Meo, 2017). The management of sites of memory is paralleled
     by the task of museums, which also seek to convey a sense of the past to a continually
     changing audience. With the last survivors of the war having died, museums need to
     engage their visitors emotionally in a struggle between the tensions of preserving
     memory and the enhancement of tourism (Artico, 2019).
16   In summary, the essays in Tourisme et Grande Guerre make a superb contribution not
     only to our knowledge of the relationships between war and tourism but also to our
     understanding of the continuities in the development of modern tourism. In many
     ways, the memory and battlefield tourism cases studied in this book help create a
     broader understanding of war itself, notably in the seemingly everyday activities that
     humanize it and, in a broader sense, make war acceptable. In their conclusion, Evanno
     and Vincent call for future work to study other wars in other parts of the world
     (Evanno and Vincent, “Conclusion” (2019)). It can no longer be said now that the study
     of the links between war and tourism are “an almost unexplored area” (Gordon, 1998).

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AUTHOR
BERTRAM M. GORDON
Mills College, Oakland, California, bmgordon@mills.edu

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