On a drizzling Sunday morning, a crowd gathered early at the base of the Eiffel Tower waiting to ride up the lattice legs of the world’s most famous national symbol. African vendors had staked out their territory on the wet sidewalks, selling glittering Eiffel miniatures displayed on uniform four-foot-square cotton scarves. It was the tail-end of summer—children had returned to school—and the crew of thirty-eight gardeners had weeded and pruned to perfection what remained of the flower beds. Signs in six languages warned tourists to beware of pickpockets. The bust of Gustave Eiffel, the engineer who built the tower for the 1889 Universal Exposition, was stationed modestly near the north pillar.
Standing on the second-level viewing platform was an Australian couple—Liz and Shane—who were celebrating their retirement with a month-long trip through the capitals of Europe. “You can’t come to Paris and not go up the Eiffel Tower,” Liz said, asking me to photograph the two of them standing bravely against the rain with Paris as a backdrop. The picture that would say they had done the tour.
Every day tourists climb the Eiffel Tower or catch their first awestruck view of its elegant silhouette from taxis or trains bringing them into the city that has become the symbol of foreign travel, the reason why people empty their savings accounts or load up their credit cards to squeeze into an airplane and fly off for a glimpse of another world. It is no accident that the Eiffel Tower is the ubiquitous icon of travel and romance and epitomizes why Paris is the first choice of travelers looking for that new experience.
In the twenty-first century France has become the most visited country in the world, beating out the United States, the former champ. France is the reigning diva of all things travel; the favorite cover for travel magazines—the newest wrinkle in Paris nightlife or a hidden corner of the French countryside—and the favorite destination.
This is no small achievement for a country smaller than the state of Texas. It has no tropical beaches like Hawaii, no Alaskan glaciers, no Grand Canyon or Yellowstone national parks. Yet France outdraws the United States and every other country, welcoming some 78 million visitors every year who happily spend over $48 billion to live like the French for a week or so.
This is infuriating to Americans in the tourism business who have watched France edge out the United States. “More Chinese visited Paris (in 2009) than all of the United States,” said J. W. Marriott, Jr., who heads the American hotel giant founded by his father.
That, too, is no accident. The French understood before most other countries that tourism is a serious business, integrating it into major government policy decisions and nursing it as a parallel business that multiplies the economic benefits of all things that are French. Tourist spending boosts the profits of perfume-makers, vintners, art dealers and the corner boulangerie. Now tourism is the premier economic sector in France, the number-one source of employment and the number-one export. (Tourism counts as an export, not import, on the trade balance books.)
France is a master of this seemingly invisible trade that is everywhere and nowhere. Its component parts are spread around the country—airports, train stations, wilderness parks, restaurants, hotels and beaches—essentials of a normal life, not just tourism. The French have figured out the paradox that since tourists are drawn to a country, not a particular resort, it follows that the more France remained France, the better for tourism. So the French national tourist strategy evolved to guard the national lifestyle. That means coordinating with urban and rural planning, cultural majordomos and environmental regulators. They figured the French could remain arrogant forever, but they had to speak English—and now Chinese.
Many governments woke up to the power of this illusive giant when the World Travel and Tourism Council created an accounting system to measure the economic effect of tourism on a city, state or country. With the help of the United Nations, this system of Satellite Accounts has been set up by nations around the world to count the dollars, or euros or pounds or pesos, spent by tourists in their economies. Tourism turns out to be the top single revenue source in countries as diverse as France and Thailand.
With that economic power tourism also became a huge, if unacknowledged, cultural phenomenon. Early on, anthropologists were measuring the consequences on poor and often isolated societies when legions of wealthier, foreign tourists visited. Among the emblematic stories is one told by the British researcher Dianne Stadhams, who asked a young girl in Gambia what she wanted to be when she grew up: “When I grow up I want to be a tourist,” she answered, “because tourists don’t have to work and can spend their days sitting in the sun, eating and drinking.”
Tourism has had just as powerful an effect on the richer countries. In bookstores and many personal libraries, travel guides have replaced history books as the way to understand the world. Walk into your favorite bookstore and the section devoted to travel books will be double or triple the size of those devoted to history.
Tourists are the consumer engine of the world, turning airports into a system of shopping malls and “duty-free” into a way of life. Activists harness the power of tourism to accomplish what would otherwise be a long-shot goal: saving a threatened African wilderness park by turning it into a new tourist destination, or buying up miles of beaches in Central America for a green tourist resort, or even declaring the homely bogs of Ireland a national treasure and putting it on the tourist trail.
No country better exemplifies the power and unstoppable force of tourism than France. No other country has tried harder to harness the tourism beast and avoid its downsides. And no other country has climbed to the top of the heap doing as well as France has.
Yet publicly the French government underplays the role of tourism in its economy, preferring to leave it invisible. Depending on tourism makes the French slightly uneasy or ambivalent, as if they are selling themselves. You rarely hear the French president or prime minister praising tourism as the country’s single biggest economic engine; on the contrary, they are more likely to use the word in a pejorative sense, and while the French government has thousands of bureaucrats working in tourism, there is no senior-level minister of tourism. But there is a secretary of state for tourism, a second-tier cabinet position and an expanding national tourism agency, ATOUT France.
This is an expression of the uncomfortable fact that tourism is seen in France and much of the world as lightweight, a business that makes serious money but on its face doesn’t seem as important as, say, making airplanes or running international banks. It is a question of face, or pride. Travel and tourism may be the world’s biggest industry, it may be everyone’s favorite pastime, a sign of how wealthy we all have become, but it doesn’t fit the self-image of a country like France.
France is the nation of Napoleon, a former empire with colonies that stretched around the globe. For the last fifty years the French government has worked fanatically to remain a major player on the world scene: to insure French remains a universal language of diplomacy; to hold on to one of the five permanent seats at the United Nations Security Council and, as a nuclear power with the world’s fifth-largest economy, to remain a member of the most elite gatherings, attending the political and economic forums. The French are willing to pay the price for that status, turning out some of the world’s best-trained and -educated people and maintaining their top industries and building modern transportation systems.
Yet the multibillion-euro travel and tourism industry in France brings in more money than any other single sector, whether luxury goods, fashion, agriculture, weapons or airplanes—even if it doesn’t fit the high-powered profile of France.
“At a minimum, tourism accounts for seven percent of the national product—it is the premier source for our balance of payments, but despite all of this economic power it is always viewed poorly by the public,” said Philippe Maud’hui, the senior planning official at ATOUT France.
He tried to explain the paradox of the government which, behind the scenes, understands the critical importance of tourism to the economy and the popular French culture that considers tourism a less-than-noble profession. You could say they are snobs about it.
“In business it’s not considered the route to an elite career. No one wants their son to go into tourism. Everyone takes vacations. Everyone is an expert on taking a vacation. Voilà—tourism isn’t serious.”
There is an important economic aspect to this ambivalence. In this era of hyperglobalization, success at drawing tourists could be France’s downfall. The more France depends on tourism, the more the government has to guard against the runaway mass tourism that is destroying life in Venice and the beaches of southern Spain. And tourists can be fickle, looking for the next great destination.
There is no bureaucratic answer to those puzzles. The attraction of France comes from centuries of civilization, not a series of ad campaigns. The country’s tourism business routinely survives the annual spate of protests and labor stoppages. No official edict is responsible for the alchemy of French wine and food, for the geniuses of French art, literature, music, theater, ballet and the movies.
French officials have even debated whether the government has any power to keep alight the modern world’s obsessive love of all things French, in particular Impressionist art. “We can’t explain any of that, really, why even the Chinese are so crazy about these painters and we can’t take credit for it. All around the world they love Cézanne, Picasso,” said Marco Marchetti, of the Ministry of Culture’s department of patrimony, in an interview in his office around the corner from the Louvre.
What the Ministry of Culture and the government can do, he said, is mount blockbuster exhibits that fans love and which draw millions of tourists to France. Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne have been the rock stars. Claude Monet joined the pantheon with a 2010 exhibit of his paintings at the Grand Palais in Paris. But the government rarely acknowledged that among its motives behind these exhibits is to promote the tourism trade. These shows are for higher purposes. When he opened the Monet exhibit, then President Nicolas Sarkozy said it reflects the “unmistakable emblem of the international influence of French culture.”
Underneath this public posturing, the government understands that tourism will be a driver of the French economy for years to come and that tourism is too powerful and too important to be left to its own devices; either you control tourism or it controls you. The French government stands apart for its early intuition about the importance of tourism and the world’s itch to travel. Now France is at the center of that explosion: over half of travel is to Europe, nearly 20 percent to Asia, 17 percent to the Americas—North and South—and less than 5 percent to Africa.
To keep its position the French government has become tourism’s most important partner, improving or building new transportation systems, national parks, or museums that can make or break a tourist season. Tourism is regulated, promoted and subsidized by the government at all levels. Planning begins in town halls or rural regional boards and moves upward to bureaucrats in Paris who then help transform the world’s love of all things French into more money for a new ski resort in the Massif Central or a camping ground in the Lubéron.
The French dominate on the international scene as well. The United Nations’ World Tourism Organization grew into an independent U.N. body under Francesco Frangialli, the Frenchman who was secretary-general for eleven years. He steered the tourism organization to global prominence, promoting those satellite accounts to prove tourism’s economic heft and pushing the organization into international conferences on development and environmental issues.
Ultimately, the French are gambling that tourism will bring in the money that allows French society to remain French while blocking the relentless drive of the industry from reducing the culture to the single-dimension fluff it appears to be in those countless travel pieces. Put in the most common terms—will officials prevent tourism from turning France into a Disneyland for adults?
In some ways that is an old question. France has been a magnet for foreigners for more than 150 years, long enough to have suffered and recovered from disasters and the sort of hit-or-miss decisions that deform many other countries today.
• • •
The first tourists were the intrepid and often-eccentric English. The educated elite of the nineteenth-century British Isles were easily the most adventuresome people of the era. They routinely decamped to the far corners of their empire, from Kenya to the Raj in India, and returned decades later with baubles and hair-raising stories. Members of the English upper classes with the time and money to travel abroad invented the grand tour of the European continent and called it tourism. Their itinerary included long stays in Paris, Florence, Venice, Rome and Naples. Italy was the destination, the seat of European culture, while Paris was a delightful stop along the way.
These English were self-consciously modern, traveling to see the world described in history books, absorb culture, tramp in nature and collect beautiful objects or “souvenirs.” Hippolyte Taine, the French historian and critic, described the typical English tourist he encountered in Paris as a strange creature with “long legs, thin body, head bent forward, broad feet, strong hands, excellently suited to snatching and gripping.”
The British further whetted this new appetite for travel by hosting the first true world’s fair in 1851. The Great Exposition in London’s Crystal Palace celebrated scientific advances from around the world and was a huge success, overcoming initial ridicule and drawing large crowds from the British Isles and overseas. The passion for travel spread to the United States where Americans, calling themselves excursionists, not tourists, adopted the grand tour as a sophisticated rite of passage.
Mark Twain memorialized these excursionists in his book Innocents Abroad, a journal of his 1867 voyage across the Atlantic through the Mediterranean to the Holy Lands. For most of the journey Twain is his humorous, acerbic self—that is, until he arrives in France and becomes just one more tourist to fall head over heels in love with the country. He disembarked with several passengers at the port of Marseilles to catch a train for a side trip up to Paris.
“At last, and beyond all question, we were in beautiful France and absorbing its nature to the forgetfulness of everything else, and coming to feel the happy romance of the thing in all of its enchanting delightfulness,” he writes. “What a bewitching land it is! What a garden!”
He was besotted with Paris, its cafés, the Nôtre-Dame Cathedral and the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Twain returned to his ocean liner wrestling with his admiration for France. Americans “are measurably superior to the French in some things, but they are immeasurably our betters in others,” he wrote, and one of those was the city of Paris. “We shall travel many thousands of miles after we leave here and visit many great cities, but we shall find none so enchanting as this.”
Twenty years after Twain’s visit, Paris hosted its greatest fair—the 1889 Universal Exposition celebrating the centennial of the establishment of the French Republic. This required a centerpiece that would reflect France’s forward-looking democracy. A contest was held and Mr. Eiffel won. His proposed 10,000-ton tower, with its latticelike construction for the entry to the fairgrounds, was an imposing engineering challenge that met the requirement to demonstrate a scientific advancement.
After much official grumbling about the cost and the aesthetics of the candle-shaped tower—several of the establishment’s leading artists and intellectuals described it as an “odious column built up of riveted iron plates”—the people of Paris fell in love with Eiffel’s folly. At the inauguration Gustave Eiffel said with slight exaggeration that “the tower is now known to the whole world; it has struck the imagination of every nation, and inspired the most remote with the desire of visiting the Exhibition.”
Foreigners did visit, over 1 million from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia, spending over $324 million—huge numbers in 1889. When the tower was slated to be torn down at the end of its twenty-year contract, the city of Paris granted an extension in the face of its international renown. In the century since the tower was built, after the powers-that-be got used to its leggy beauty, the French government has used it shamelessly to evoke romance, longing, sophistication and an intense desire to visit France.
Before long, the growing legion of English tourists wanted to “discover” parts of France beyond Paris. Fond of the seaside in their own country, the English took ferries across the Channel to French coastal towns that the French had never found particularly interesting. Towns like Deauville and Dieppe on the Normandy coast were turned into fashionable resorts, the first example of what would later become mass tourism. Locals did not fare very well. Developers expropriated their land with the connivance of officialdom and made a small fortune off this new craze for beachside resorts. Migrant workers arrived and found work in the new resort jobs of waitress, cook, beach attendant and fishing guide. Prostitutes followed, long before the term “sex tourism” was invented. The pattern was repeated on a vastly larger scale over the next century as tropical beaches from the Caribbean to Thailand became resorts for mass tourism.
But as small as it may seem in retrospect, that first example of a modern tourist resort overwhelmed the northern coast of France. As the historian Graham Robb wrote: “Nothing of this magnitude had happened to the coast of Normandy since the Viking invasions and the Hundred Years War.”
The French government noticed all the money passing hands in these tourist resorts and in 1911 created a Tourism Board devoted to the new industry. This office was assigned the job of producing “propaganda” to entice more foreigners to visit. Before this experiment got traction, World War I broke out and France became a bloody battleground. In the immediate, heady days of peace, France revived its Tourism Board and opened bureaus in Barcelona, Luxembourg, London and Geneva to sell France as a holiday destination. To that end, the Tourism Board commissioned modern Art Deco posters to promote rail travel like the Le Train Bleu to the Riviera or wintering on the sands of Juan-les-Pins at Antibes, posters that have since been endlessly reproduced to evoke those early stylish days of luxury travel.
Since tourism involved international commerce, the French government helped form the International Congress of Official Tourist Traffic Associations in 1925 to regulate the tourist traffic between neighboring European countries, focusing on classic issues of border security, tariffs and tax collection. The biggest problem at the time was how to keep track of automobiles crossing international borders. In 1934 the Europeans added the International Union of Official Organizations for Touristic Propaganda in Brussels that became a forerunner for the current UNWTO.
The biggest contribution of the French government to the tourism industry was inadvertent.
In 1936, France elected Léon Blum as its first socialist prime minister. In that era of strikes and industrial clashes, Mr. Blum ran on a platform appealing to the workers, promising to ease their burden, shore up the fledgling unions and help farmers and the new middle class share in the wealth of industrialized France. He made good on his word and passed a number of sweeping reforms, including a 1936 law that required two weeks of paid vacation for every French citizen.
It is impossible to exaggerate the effect of this law and its mandate of the unheard-of luxury of a paid vacation. It was easily the most popular of Blum’s reforms and spread across Europe. Under Blum, the government arranged low-cost trips for French families to the Alps and various camping grounds. “Les Vacances” (French for “vacation”) created a minor revolution. In one stroke, travel and leisure became a right of the masses, not just the privileged or the elite.
“Before 1936, there wasn’t a real tourism industry,” said Mr. Maud’hui of the ATOUT France agency. “That is when we leaped into another era. Now travel was for everyone, for everyone.”
Three years later World War II broke out. France was occupied by Germany, and when the war ended in 1945, the devastation to French society and its economy was enormous; the immediate postwar situation desperate. The French turned to the Americans for help. At that stage the United States was the only wealthy nation still standing; its economy accounted for half of the manufactured goods in the world.
Washington responded, generously, with the Marshall Plan, spending billions for the economic recovery of the countries of what was then known as Western Europe. It was motivated in part by humanitarianism and partly by politics to insure that none of the countries became a part of the Soviet bloc in the beginning years of the Cold War.
When the United States extended aid to France through the Marshall Plan, officials from both countries decided that tourism would be the best avenue for reviving the French economy. Back then, the logic of turning to tourism seemed obvious. France was broke. It was incapable of quickly rebuilding its manufacturing sector in order to sell goods overseas and earn the hard currency it needed. What made sense was to bring the money to France, to have American tourists with dollars fill the tables at cafés and restaurants, buy souvenirs, take train rides and patronize hotels and country inns. The one thing that had survived the war was the French way of life, the siren song for Americans since the days of Mark Twain. During the years between the world wars, American writers like Ernest Hemingway memorialized the free-spirited glamour of Paris in books and composers like George Gershwin in song. Americans already knew they were enthralled with the idea of Paris.
The economics of the program were sound. The goal was to more than double prewar tourism to at least 3 million visitors by 1952. That required a complete overhaul of much of the industry, starting from the ground up. Top French hoteliers and restaurateurs were sent to the United States for training in modern business aimed at pleasing American tastes. Most hotels in Paris were as tired and tattered as the country. In the United States, the French hoteliers learned new basics like supplying plump pillows, placing a lamp by the bedside for reading and making sure windows could open easily. They were taught the grander requirements that could help them earn handsome profits, such as installing expensive gift shops in their hotels where tourists could buy souvenirs easily and adding large meeting rooms to the hotel so it could host conventions.
The French were excellent students; they wanted to make money. Once they understood what makes a hotel modern and comfortable, they convinced officials at the Marshall Plan to help underwrite a miniboom in hotel room construction. By the end of the plan France boasted 452,471 rooms, more than any other country in Europe. They also latched on to the idea of making Paris a popular city for conventions. From those American-inspired beginnings, Paris grew to become the world’s most popular city for meetings.
Getting American tourists into those hotel rooms was the next step. Airfares were out of reach for middle-class America, so Marshall Plan officials fought hard to convince the airlines to add a lower “tourist fare” for flights across the Atlantic. They won but only by promising to subsidize the lower fares for the airlines. Then they set up propaganda or promotional committees made up of French and American government officials as well as private companies like Pan American Airways, American Express and the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, the precursor to the International Herald Tribune in Paris. The committee spent millions on advertisements to convince Americans to travel to France; advertisements to promote the 2,000th birthday of Paris in 1951 cost the then-huge sum of $100,000.
U.S. officials also hoped that American tourists would play a role in diplomacy. In one of the first modern instances of tourism purposefully used as public diplomacy, both governments decided that American tourism would strengthen the ties between the two people and win the French over to the American side of the burgeoning Cold War. At that moment the French Communist Party was one of the strongest political parties in the country. The French government sided with the United States against the Soviet Union but not because of those American visitors. On the contrary, this was the moment when the Americans and the French discovered how much they didn’t like each other. The American tourists thought the French were “haughty,” and the French thought the Americans were vulgar consumers. At one point the U.S. State Department had to print advisories to American travelers with “tips for your trip” for getting along with the French.
This was the first hint that simply letting tourists loose in a foreign country would not necessarily lead to better understanding. Mass tourism by people who couldn’t speak the native language often had the opposite effect. (The French eventually solved that problem by learning English, now the international language.)
The plan did fulfill the American goal of getting France back on its feet and firmly within the western camp, as well as establishing a new pattern of trade with the United States. The biggest impact, though, was on France, which exceeded its goal of wooing 3 million tourists to the country in 1952. American government aid had kick-started the modern tourism industry in France with those hotel rooms, tourist airfares and inculcation of the idea of Paris as the ideal city for glamour. From then on, the French government kept its hand in all aspects of tourism.
This American-subsidized tourism fit in nicely with the new order being established by some of France’s most conservative politicians. They wanted to erase any possibility of European nations fighting each other in yet another world war. So they initiated the idea of a new European community with Germany and other European powers that would eventually become the European Union. This new Europe began with the notion of shared authority over coal and steel and the shared belief that the state should spend its money on social benefits such as health, housing, education, pensions and public infrastructure—not armies and weapons.
This time tourism had the desired social effect and helped bring together these European neighbors. During what the French call “the golden years” of the 1960s, two- and three-week paid vacations became the norm in Europe. People from the north—English, French, Swiss and Germans—headed south, to the warm Mediterranean climates. They took the railways or drove in their newly affordable cars to the seashore. The coast of Spain became the Miami of Europe, with inexpensive pensions and new package vacations. New, inexpensive charter flights took tourists farther afield to places like the Greek islands.
Again presaging modern mass tourism, the Europeans traveled in packs—the English with the English, the French with the French, the Germans with the Germans—so that the exotic would be familiar. It was an extension, of sorts, of the Marshall Plan. The wealthier Europeans of the north traveled south to the poorer areas of their continent, spending their money where it was needed. What economists strive for—redistribution without taxation.
About this time, France took a step that inadvertently elevated the standard of tourism by creating the world’s first Ministry of Culture in 1959. The newly elected President Charles de Gaulle wanted to revive and enhance French culture. He appointed the writer André Malraux the first minister of culture, with a mandate to give the public free access to the culture of France.
The hyperactive Malraux jumped into the job. With equal doses of imagination and egalitarianism, Malraux assembled a bureaucracy to register, repair and recover all that was considered France’s patrimony or national heritage. Malraux built on the work begun a hundred years earlier by Prosper Mérimée, also an author, who as France’s inspector-general of monuments spent over eighteen years listing and protecting France’s historic masterpieces. He blocked locals from destroying masterpieces, saving 4,000 buildings by classifying them as historical monuments, including the bridge at Avignon and the basilica at Vézelay. Malraux institutionalized this preservation and went further by getting laws passed requiring the centuries-old buildings to be cleaned. And he declared that, if at all possible, these gorgeous buildings and monuments had to be open to the public—French and foreign alike.
Under Malraux, the French museum system became one of the most expansive in the world. Paris alone seems to add a new major museum every decade: the then-audacious Centre Georges Pompidou, which included the National Museum of Modern Art, opened in 1977; the Musée d’Orsay was a masterful 1986 conversion of a Beaux-Arts railroad station into the permanent home of the country’s collection of Impressionist paintings, and most recently the Quai Branly Museum of indigenous art was inaugurated in 2006.
That is just a portion of the cultural world opened up by the new ministry. From the beginning, Malraux was keen on establishing and supporting arts festivals around the country: music in Aix-en-Provence, photography in Perpignan, film in Cannes. The aim was to raise the profile of French culture; the result fifty years later was a multimillion-dollar cultural tourism business.
And so it went for several decades. Decisions and innovations of the French government, somehow, eventually provided the undergirding of the classic tourism industry of today. Tourism officials told me repeatedly, “This was done without regard to tourism,” while relating how critical some innovation had been for tourism.
Trains and transportation came next. The French were among the first nations to bet their future on a system of fast trains. Called Train à Grande Vitesse (train of great speed), or TGV, the government began laying the first tracks for the system in 1974. Soon the whole country was tied into this expanded rail network of fast and common trains, allowing the French to travel without using their cars and freeing up the clogged highways. Eventually, the trains were connected to the airports. Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport became a model hub, with its connections by commuter train, bus and the TGV copied by countries around the world.
Another turning point came at the dawn of industrialized agriculture. At risk were those gentle green fields and quaint villages so admired by Mark Twain. As the agricultural powerhouse of Western Europe, France saw farming as its destiny, and by the 1980s the Ministry of Agriculture was pushing back against pressure to promote huge farms found in countries like the United States. Instead, the government promoted a mix of farm subsidies to preserve local small farmers and the French way of life. Through national and European laws, the government paid a premium to farmers who followed old-fashioned conservation practices like planting grass and tree buffers along river banks to keep the waters pure and prevent soil erosion. Farmers who grew hedge rows or repaired their scenic barns were rewarded by the government. And so were the farmers whose vineyards, fields and orchards supply the chefs in Paris with the fresh, high-quality produce they need, whether Roquefort cheese or baby spinach. A complicated system that uses subsidies and specialty labels eventually insured that French cuisine and small French farmers could survive modernization.
By 1990, when the world tourism industry cracked open with the end of the Cold War, the French innovations of the previous forty years were a boon rather than a drag on high-quality tourism. Instead of being passed over for countries newly open, France became the top attraction with its museums, easy transportation and special regional flavors.
So France started pulling together the disparate strands of government policy that affected tourism, however indirectly, to make a unified policy and to work with private industry to organize tourism so it didn’t distort society, pollute the country or turn livelihoods upside down. They created a planning process that is painstakingly tedious. Bureaucrats, committees, reviews, studies, analyses, more reviews, studies and analyses, then new policies to be implemented, reviewed and studied. But they are happy with this singular approach.
“It is much better to do tourism with the same eye, one supporting the other,” said Philippe Maud’hui. That is the price of aiming for the high end of tourism, not necessarily the rich but those who will leave France better than they found it. Since every country is looking for the same mix, France is attracting attention from other ministries of tourism asking if the French have found the answer for good tourism or a momentary sweet spot.
• • •
Bordeaux is wine—the grand, expensive red wine of connoisseurs. The prized vineyards begin inside the city limits of Bordeaux and spread in all directions—south, east, north and west—through suburbs and villages, flat plains, soft ridges and knots of pine trees, hugging both banks of the Gironde River, which flows into the nearby Atlantic Ocean. Nothing is too good for these fields of stubby, carefully pruned vines that have enriched the famously tight-fisted and conservative Catholic elite of Bordeaux for centuries. They once traded barrels of their red wine for wool, cotton, spice and sugar at the river port in the heart of Bordeaux City, in front of the customs house when trade with the new world and Africa made it one of the busiest European ports on the Atlantic. Today the wine is bottled and labeled and then shipped in cases to nations around the globe; a single bottle of the best premier cru can sell for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. While French fashion, films, art and architecture have their ups and downs, French wine has remained the standard against which all other wines are measured. And Bordeaux is at the top of the heap.
Until recently Bordeaux was the antithesis of tourism. Yet I had come to Bordeaux with my husband at the strong suggestion of officials in Paris and New York. I had asked them to name the best example of the future direction of tourism in France—a region that has put in place all the elements they talked about at length during my interviews with them. I was surprised at the answer:
“Bordeaux—thanks to Alain Juppé, that is where you can see the future of tourism.”
“Juppé has given us a work of art in Bordeaux.”
“Bordeaux. Alain Juppé is bringing it up to the level of a major destination, like Florence, Italy.”
This sounded as unlikely as saying Savannah, Georgia, was the future of the American tourist market. When I had lived in France in the late 1980s, raising two young children there, Bordeaux had the reputation of a boring, faded beauty, its former glory hidden behind grimy buildings and abandoned warehouses. My French friends warned me against traveling there for anything but the wine. The city was a wreck.
Then Alain Juppé became mayor of Bordeaux in 1995 and he transformed the city. It was by-the-book planning, all bottom-up, with local officials deciding what to save, what to raze, what the city could support, what was beyond its means or desires. Then the city coordinated the plans with the regional, national and European authorities, who approved them and then paid a good share of the costs. It took more than ten long years.
Mayor Juppé’s plan was simple, which made it all the more difficult. Return the town to its breathtaking eighteenth-century beauty by ordering the owners of historic buildings to follow the law passed by Malraux and clean off the dirt that had caked the façades since the industrial era. Scrubbing off the grime revealed an almost golden sheen to this rare urban masterpiece. Then he attacked the industrial wasteland of abandoned warehouses that lined the river port and cut the city off from the beautiful Gironde. The warehouses were pulled down and replaced by a riverside park designed by Claire and Michel Corajoud, top French landscape architects. The quai became a promenade with gardens, paths and in the center a long shallow reflecting pool or “water mirror” to catch the light from the sky and reflect the old eighteenth-century bourse, or stock exchange.
Finally, Juppé built a modern tramway system that eliminates unnecessary driving and opens up the old city to pedestrians again with public squares, green spaces and car-free walkways.
For Bordeaux, this was the equivalent of the Boston Big Dig. For French tourism officials, it was the Big Payoff. From the beginning, they had watched and fostered the renaissance of Bordeaux, promoting this “sleeping beauty” as returned to the living and figuring out how Bordeaux could add new glamour to the French tourist agenda.
During our trip to France, Bill and I caught a rapid train from Paris and in less than three hours arrived at Bordeaux, in the southwest corner of France near the Atlantic Ocean, the Pyrenees Mountains and a little farther to the east, the Mediterranean.
Our first day in Bordeaux we were bowled over; once again it was the city Victor Hugo had described as a cross between commercial Antwerp and elegant Paris, but without the capital’s crowds or high prices.
To avoid a full blast of propaganda from the city’s tourist office, we went first to the vineyards, to ask the old families what they thought about this new transformation and the tourism that followed, whether they felt as if their city had sold out to the tourism gods.
Château Haut-Bailly is one of the region’s finest wineries, producing Graves Crus Classés. The château sits on a high ridge just south of the city of Bordeaux, surrounded by vineyards that are four centuries old. Véronique Sanders is the manager, and she said the wine is in such demand these days that it takes her a mere twenty minutes to sell her entire annual production—about 160,000 bottles. England, which ruled the region for three hundred years, is still the top market, but the Japanese and Chinese are buying more and more.
“When I go to Asia, it’s like I’m a rock star,” she said. In Hong Kong she is asked to autograph bottles and in Japan she was made into a character in a manga comic strip. The château has always been part of her life. Her great-grandfather Daniel was a Belgian wine merchant who bought the vineyard in 1955. The family eventually sold the property to Robert Wilmers, an American banker, and his French wife Elisabeth. The Wilmers completely restored the eighteenth-century villa and asked Véronique to stay on, making her the fourth-generation Sanders behind the exclusive label and the rare woman leader in the stuffy wine hierarchy of Bordeaux.
She said one of her first changes as manager was to open the doors of the château to tourism, albeit tourists at the high end.
In 2003, as Bordeaux city was beginning to draw tourists, she had a long conversation with Mr. Wilmers about getting ahead of the trend and using tourism to boost the reputation of Château Haut-Bailly. She said she told him: “Let’s consider tourism a new métier, a new profession, in addition to what we do. We need to have a dedicated team for tourism—get organized. If we open up to high-quality tourism, we will be better known as a top-quality wine.”
Wilmers agreed despite a high cost that Sanders politely refused to disclose. Sanders showed us how she built the tourism around the heart of the operation. We circled the edge of those formidable old vines raised without chemicals, their heavy fruit about to be harvested by hand and piled in small baskets. Sanders bent down over a squat vine and cradled a bunch of grapes. “This is where all the work is done—90 percent of wine is made here, outside, in the fields.”
Next we went to the outbuildings where the alchemy takes place: the vats and cellars. They have been updated but not airbrushed. “My grandfather insisted that cellars be humble; he said they are cellars, not cathedrals.”
Then we headed to the small boutique, the first part of the new “métier.” The shop sells books, goblets, decanters, aprons, tee-shirts, but very little wine. Château Haut-Bailly is not aiming for the large tour bus crowd that generally buys inexpensive “souvenir” wine. “We want them to buy our wine when they return home,” she said.
The true focus of the tourism trade was two new large reception and conference rooms built for meetings, seminars, meals and tastings. Lunches are served at $154 per person and dinners at $196 a person, always accompanied by a variety of the château’s wines. To insure the food matched the wine, Sanders hired a young chef from a three-star restaurant to supervise the kitchen.
At first, her boss wondered why he was shelling out so much money for these “indirect benefits,” said Sanders, but now he is a convert. She has no trouble filling up her bookings with Frenchmen and foreigners who don’t flinch at paying these prices for the chance to dine at one of Bordeaux’s majestic wineries.
Afterward, we tasted that wine in the château’s airy salon and over lunch in the classic high-ceilinged dining room. The menu was haute cuisine: small plates of foie gras with quail and grape, then lamb and gnocchi, Dutch cheese and candied peach, ending with figs and red fruit.
We were now six: Véronique, her husband Alexander Van Beek, who is the director of two nearby châteaux, and another couple who own a glossy French magazine, Vins & Spiritueux. Finally, I asked about Juppé and tourism. There was uniform enthusiasm. No Gallic shrugs, no mouths turned down at the corner, no acid asides.
“He is an excellent mayor. It helps a lot that Bordeaux has had a face lift and is pulling in so many new tourists,” said Van Beek, who added that his wineries are making a handsome profit in this new era.
For all of these changes, we felt we were back in the late nineteenth century while driving through wine country on our way back to the city. The landscape and the mood, the dominance of those vineyards, still have the feel of the novels of François Mauriac, the Bordeaux native who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952.
“There we stood together,” he wrote in The Knot of Vipers. “The future harvest of the grapes was fermenting under the blue-tinted leaves, drowsing in the sun.”
Many of the old Bordeaux families from the Mauriac novels still live in the region and have proved less hidebound than their reputation. Olivier Cuvelier, a wine trader and member of one of those families, said the change in Bordeaux, and the influx of tourism, has been “huge, huge, and very strong. Before, we were important here, in the region. Now we sell around the world.”
The transformation coincided with the explosion of wine drinking in countries that had never indulged before—especially in Asia. Now Bordeaux hosts regular wine expositions and the only problem is the lack of enough good hotel rooms. “Our city breathes again, we welcome visitors, and our wine is selling.”
More people travel, more people drink wine, more people come to newly revived Bordeaux. Tourism, once a negligible part of the economy, now brings in 1 billion euros, or $1.4 billion, a year to the region, second only to wine in economic importance. And receipts for wine are growing; they are now up to 3 billion euros, or $4.1 billion, a year. Each nurtures the other.
I spent five days trying to find a tourism skeptic in Bordeaux and I failed. Typical was Yves Harté, the associate director of the Sud Ouest, the top newspaper of the Bordeaux region. He moved to Bordeaux when it was at its worst. “I wrote the story of the last cargo ship to make a delivery to Bordeaux. It was around 1980 and the ship was named the Yo Pugon and was carrying trunks of wood from Africa,” he said. “I used the event to write a portrait of the city. Then it was closed, hidden, very dark, its charm disappearing.”
We were having coffee in the city’s spacious central plaza, which is flanked on one side by the restored opera house, at one time the largest in Europe, and on the other by a mansion that is now the city’s only five-star hotel. I told Harté that I was naturally suspicious of the Cinderella story about a politician resurrecting the city. Juppé is a brilliant former prime minister from a conservative political party who was on the path toward even higher office when he was convicted in 2004 of misusing public funds for his political party, in effect taking the fall for his party’s corruption. While he was prime minister, Juppé was also mayor of Bordeaux. (In France officials can hold several offices at the same time.)
Harté laughed. “I am sure, without a doubt, that none of this transformation of Bordeaux would have happened without Juppé,” he said. “He changed the whole look of the city, and rapidly. Before, we used cars for everything, now we walk and we have the tramway. . . . We are all rediscovering our city.”
So are tourists. Walking around Bordeaux, across the clean modern tramway tracks, past the golden stone façades of the Old Town’s eighteenth-century architecture and over to the glorious promenades along the river, it was clear the town’s rejuvenation was contemplated with tourism in mind. There was evidence everywhere. L’Intendant, the city’s famous wine shop with an interior shaped like the Guggenheim Museum, has a full-time Chinese sales clerk. The tables at the two-star St. James restaurant are filled with foreign tourists like my husband and me.
Charlie Matthews, a thirty-six-year-old Englishman fluent in French, agreed. He left his job as a wine salesman in London and moved to Bordeaux a few years ago to join the tourism gold rush. As Bordeaux beautified, he saw a niche for himself. No one was doing wine tourism. Through his contacts selling the wine of various châteaux in the region, he put together a tour agency to bring Brits to Bordeaux to visit those châteaux and drink their wine. “I knew the English market very well and the French market. I wanted to be in France,” he said.
Like everyone else in Bordeaux, he aimed for the top. Matthews’s tour agency is called Bordeaux Uncorked, which for $1,600 a person, offers a visit of four nights and three days through the city and top vineyards. Each tour is tailor-made “to avoid château fatigue.” Within one year Matthews was making a good profit with a staff of two—himself and his wife. His core clients, he said, are the exclusive clubs of London: “The Carlton Club, the St. James Club—the traditional market where red wine, or claret, always means a glass of Bordeaux.”
When the tour is made up of men from an elite London club, it includes meals in the best châteaux. “These clubs buy lots of wine and that will open doors.”
It all seemed of a piece, this renovation and the tourism boom. I asked Stephan Delaux, the president of the Bordeaux Tourism Bureau and the deputy mayor of the city, how it had happened, the chicken-and-egg question about which came first. Delaux had been at Juppé’s side as the plan for the city took form.
He gave me a surprising answer. On the one hand, Juppé’s plan was to rejuvenate the city, he said, not bring in tourism, and that was why it succeeded. The key to good tourism is to do your planning for the people who live there, for the citizens, and if that is done well, then the visitor will be happy. At the same time, Delaux said he and the mayor knew from the first days that “very clearly the project will be the foundation for creating Bordeaux as a tourist destination.”
“I was born here, I’ve lived here all my life and I know the beauty of Bordeaux, it is part of me,” he said. “We had been a city of millionaires fascinated by the river and trade since the eighteenth century, a golden age . . . then Bordeaux lost its role, no trade, no industry, and we treated our city’s patrimony badly . . . our wines are absolutely magical, so why wasn’t Bordeaux seductive, too?”
Delaux said the tourism campaigns were planned in parallel with Juppé’s urban renewal. “Before, Bordeaux was absolutely not touristic—no, not at all. Tourists were condescending towards Bordeaux. They were only interested in the vineyards.”
The public works proceeded apace, cleaning the city, uncovering buildings that had been shrouded in two centuries of filth. “We were shocked by its beauty.”
The tourism policy was built around the city and the wine—“le vin et la ville”—and coordinated between the city, region, and national governments and tourism agencies. Delaux said it would take days to describe the system.
In 2002, while the city was still torn apart by construction of the tramways and landscaping the river front, Delaux tested the waters and invited travel writers to Bordeaux. Success. From the New York Times: “With layers of grime stripped away, the true, tawny splendor of elegant neo-Classical cornices, pediments and porticoes has re-emerged. The effect is spectacular.”
Five years later the renovation was complete. In 2008, after serious lobbying, greatly aided by Juppé’s connections, Bordeaux was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization. Half of the old city was declared to be of universal significance worth preserving. Within the tourism industry, recognition as a World Heritage Site is the equivalent of winning four stars for a restaurant or an Olympic gold medal for an athlete. Bordeaux’s profile as a top tourist destination soared.
“Now everything has changed. Tourists came from around the world. Starred chefs came to open restaurants. . . . Families came. . . . Deluxe tourists came. Tout le monde,” said Delaux.
And tourism to Bordeaux and the region went from a negligible industry to the second-biggest source of income.
Mr. Juppé was out of the country when I visited Bordeaux; I later met him in Washington, where he was on an official visit to the Pentagon. After his official talks he had a short time to talk about Bordeaux.
“I was not surprised by the success of our project,” he said. “I was reassured. Bordeaux is extremely attractive now.”
On the role of tourism, Juppé was just as strong. “Surely, I thought, it will be attractive to tourists. And that was very, very important that it attract tourists. That would be our financial foundation. Those fifteen years of work of rejuvenation led to Bordeaux becoming a World Heritage city.”
When I asked how much it helped that he was a mayor with national and international experience and connections, he smiled again. “Ah, that is a specialty of France. That we work at all levels. Above all, yes, it helps very much that I had been a minister and a mayor. It works together.”
One of the most perceptive comments came from Robert Parker, the American wine expert who is careful with his praise. Parker has visited Bordeaux as often as three times a year for decades to taste and give scores to the wine. His ratings are revered and feared the world over.
After the renovation Parker gave the city of Bordeaux a personal rating: “I remember the old days and the rotten, abandoned buildings on the waterfront; now it is a ravishing destination.”
• • •
“Tourism cannot be outsourced.” Philippe Maud’hui of ATOUT France made that declaration in his crowded office on the Place de Catalogne, surrounded by stacks of documents and data showing how much tourism contributes to the economy and how. It is so obvious it was startling. But the fact that tourism is the rare industry that will never be replaced by factories in Vietnam or by I.T. centers in India is often forgotten, he said, and another reason why the French government is investing time and energy in it.
ATOUT France alone has 480 employees, more than half of whom are posted overseas to thirty-five countries to sell the merits of a vacation in France as tourism diplomats. The newest offices were opened in Brazil, China and India. The agency’s budget is $106 million, with only $46 million paid by the national government. (The rest comes from private businesses and local public partners.) While Maud’hui says this isn’t enough to keep up with the competition, it is enough to underwrite the extensive research done to help shape government policy, describe tourism’s economic contributions, pinpoint who comes to France and why, and then plot the future.
In a series of interviews in Paris, Maud’hui and other French officials gave me thick books with a full profile of tourists and tourism in France: which nationality prefers to come to Paris for luxury shopping, who goes hiking in the mountains, who goes to casinos and who rents homes in the countryside. They know that Disneyland outside of Paris is the most visited site and that the Louvre remains the most popular museum in France, and the world. Germans and the British are the most numerous by far. Americans rank eighth but are falling behind.
“By 2020 more Chinese will visit France than Americans,” said Christian Delom, also of ATOUT. “That means we have to make many changes . . . more Chinese-French restaurants, Chinese speakers in luxury-goods stores, and monitoring Chinese tour agencies.”
These tourists are spending money throughout the economy. Marco Marchetti, of the Ministry of Culture, gave me a 2009 study showing that heritage tourism, by the French and foreigners, contributed $20 billion to the French economy. It was important data to have as the government began slashing budgets during the Great Recession and culture looked vulnerable. The study showed a solid return on the government investment and that rather than costing money, “protected heritage is an important source of jobs and revenue.”
When the global recession hit in 2008, all European governments reexamined their budgets, cutting back across the board. In France, though, the Culture Ministry’s budget was spared the worst. In 2010, France actually increased its culture budget by 2.7 percent, while most European countries were slashing theirs. Frédéric Mitterrand, the minister of culture, said this showed that “the cultural offering is a determining element in our attractiveness as a country and its economic development.”
Adding to the culture budget reflects the overall design of French tourism. In the age of global homogeneity, when a luxury shopping mall in Dubai looks an awful lot like the new malls in Shanghai, French tourism is definitely and obsessively moving in the opposite direction. It is concentrating on what is unique, digging down, not flattening out, and betting on what can never be outsourced.
All the other tourism policies flow from this: avoiding mass tourism, tying the country together with efficient public transportation, taking advantage of often impossibly rigorous environmental regulations, and leaving it up to the locals to decide what’s best for them.
“We rejected the models found in Spain and Morocco of resorts with everything included, especially beach resorts. It goes against who we are. Our accent is on cultural tourism, on local tourism. We make great efforts to oblige tourists to meet French people. Sure we have the Riviera and Deauville, but they are the exception,” said Delom, director of strategy for the French tourism agency.
I stumbled across an unexpected example of this a few years earlier when I interviewed the deputy secretary of planning at the French Ministry of Agriculture about a completely different trade issue. Behind his desk I noticed three large colored maps; two seemed out of place. One traced the passenger train lines spread across France like overlapping spider webs. The second was sprinkled with symbols representing the annual cultural events. The third was a typical topographical map showing arable lands.
Alain Moulinier, then the deputy minister, explained that the maps showed how agriculture and tourism need each other. “Tourism brings in three times more money than agriculture,” he said, and the appeal of France to tourists is rooted in its landscape and cuisine, in its countryside or “la France profonde.” The trains take the tourists around the country. The festivals are spread out to attract visitors to every corner of France and spread the wealth. And the farmers raise the food that will fill their plates at remote one-star restaurants.
To keep that countryside beautiful, France slowly developed layers of rules and regulations that many farmers and developers find odious. All of the coasts are public preserves—from the sandy strands of the Mediterranean to the cliffs along the English Channel stormed on D-Day. “We can’t fill our beaches with hotels like Spain; they are all protected,” said Delom.
“It’s not perfect, but what we try to do is have national laws for protecting nature. Then with development codes and work rules we have created the qualifications we need to reject industrial tourism.”
The attention to detail spans the ministries, including farm subsidies, either from the French government or the European Union. I met Christian Vachier, the last sheep farmer in his small commune in the mountains of the Lubéron in the northern regions of Provence, not far from Bordeaux. During most of the year Vachier raised his flock on thirty-six acres of pasture. In the summer he sent them off to wild mountain meadows where they grazed a wide swath that acted as a firebreak in the hot, dry forests. This traditional, land-intensive and expensive form of animal husbandry was underwritten by checks from the E.U. and the French government and done with the full approval of the tourism side of government since Vachier and his lambs preserve the landscape. And once slaughtered, the lamb is featured in smart restaurants in nearby Aix-en-Provence, which in turn brings in more tourists.
“Those beautiful landscapes—hills, pretty forest, vineyards—are largely maintained by man. In France we don’t forget this is why many tourists come here,” said Patrick Falcone of the Ministry of Agriculture. “Now each region has to decide what is acceptable before it opens up. Tourism has to improve the economy, for as many as can benefit, and improve the local quality of life—perhaps create more public spaces, improve cultural life, build a new railway station . . . maybe bring better train or bus service.”
When all of that has been accomplished, the marketing campaign kicks in. These campaigns with catchy slogans receive the lion’s share of attention. National tour agencies spend millions on the ads that pop up on the computer screen, the lush color enticements on television and the full-page advertisements in the newspapers and magazines. Behind these schemes is the data collected that tell the French how to sell their country overseas: outdoor adventure and camping to the Dutch, city and urban vacations to Americans, cultural events to Brazilians. Their marketing force is divided into three groups: Europe and Africa; the Americas; Asia and the Middle East. And it is divided by specialties: urban and rural with river, forest, camping and mountain specialties; families, senior citizens, youth, gays and the handicapped; sports, service and study; culture, wine and cuisine; and special events. The list is endless.
Jean-Philippe Pérol heads the American division from his office in New York. He told me that France has evolved into a brand that appeals to what is known as the “global village” tourists. “They have a higher education, with the kind of lifestyle that means they travel a lot, expect luxury and look for the trendy hotel, the trendy exhibit. That is what we do well.”
These marketing campaigns are done as if France were a commodity, a product. Officials said they have to protect their brand, or label, that tourists have to feel they receive high quality at a reasonable price—a goal more than a few might question when faced with the high prices in Paris. And every year, like good corporate executives, the government tourist officials put out an annual Report on Activity that runs over 120 pages and reads like a corporate report to shareholders.
• • •
For all of their successes, and their role as a world leader, French tourism is still plagued with problems. Some are predictable, such as underinvestment in lodging in many areas, with an insufficient number of hotel rooms in new markets (like Bordeaux) and not enough vacation homes to rent (Provence). Crowds are also growing unmanageable in the summer in Paris. The Left Bank is colonized by visitors during July and August, and popular spots like Giverny, the former home of Claude Monet, become mob scenes on many weekends.
At Giverny you feel the familiar twinge of regret at the sight of the intimate home of a revered artist forever fossilized for visiting crowds. It is the price for preserving the stunning flower beds that Monet planted in splashes of bright colors just as he painted his landscapes. Tourists who take photographs on the bridge over the famous lily pond later buy coffee mugs, straw hats like the one worn by Monet and posters at the cavernous gift shop in a former studio. In 2010 those visitors included Brazilians in large numbers, Americans visiting from a cruise ship, Danes, Swedes, Italians and a large number of Japanese. This is a museum after all, and generous benefactors, led by Americans, saved Giverny. “We don’t understand why so many tourists like to visit the homes where artists painted their works,” said Marchetti. “But it enriches our patrimony.”
The question more than a few French are asking is whether in this age of tourism their country has gotten so used to being admired by the throngs peering at their “patrimony” that a subtle shift is taking place and France is failing to produce more artistic wunderkinds like Monet.
That question feeds into the French feeling that there is something unhealthy about this tourism, that it desecrates their lives, and reduces their country to that product sold by the marketers. This uncertainty only deepens as tourism penetrates into more pockets of life in France.
Many are reluctant to acknowledge how pervasive tourism has become. Nina Sutton, a lifelong Parisian and a close friend of mine, is a prime example. She is a first-class journalist and writer who rose in the ranks when women were still rare, living through the ups and downs of raising two daughters while maintaining a career. Now that her children are grown, she rents out one of her two adjoining apartments to tourists. Her apartment in Montmartre is the epitome of late-nineteenth-century Victorian Paris, with her family’s paintings and furnishings evoking that luxurious era. She has no problem renting her flat; the income is a boon. Yet no one is more eloquent about the downside of tourism than Nina.
“I worry that we will become commodities in tourism. Motor coaches pollute the air to stop for five minutes in front of Notre Dame, five minutes at the Tour Eiffel. Herds of tourists who do not respect or appreciate what they’re seeing,” she said.
When I asked her how she squared that with her small tourism operation, she sounded like the tourism officials I had just interviewed in her city. “My visitors aren’t like that at all. They are precisely the kind of people you want to meet. That is the key to productive tourism, to respect each other. The British are the best,” she said.
Alain Minc, an economist and close advisor to former President Sarkozy, confirmed this ambivalence at the highest level. Minc said that he was never able to engage Sarkozy on the subject of tourism—diplomacy, war and peace, yes, but not tourism even in the depths of the world crisis of 2009.
“There was never any discussion by the president about the importance of tourism to the economy, not even during the recession,” said Minc. “I’m convinced with the right policy we could have even more tourism, but it was not easy to convince him to do more. He told me, ‘We are the number-one tourism place in the world. Why do we need to change?’ ”
Minc said tourism is of sufficient economic importance that French ambassadors around the globe should consider encouraging tourism part of their portfolios. “Tourism should be a business of diplomacy. There is nothing more cosmopolitan than tourism,” he said in his high-ceilinged office with its outsize Richard Avedon portrait of Samuel Beckett. “We have such a competitive advantage.”
But the biggest problem brought on by tourism is the same one threatening many countries in Europe. What keeps officials awake at night is the fear that too many tourists are buying second homes in France, a phenomenon that is snowballing and pushing locals out of their homes. Cities aren’t immune. In some neighborhoods of Paris, such as the popular sixth arrondissement on the Left Bank where I once lived, foreigners are colonizing apartment buildings and the local café is giving way to brand-name luxury stores like Ralph Lauren. “There are quartiers where most Parisians can’t afford to live anymore,” said Maud’hui.
In the French countryside some villages are nearly ghost towns in the winter when the second homes are boarded up and their wealthy owners return to their lives in another country. Local shopkeepers disappear and the village is without the boulangerie, the café or the grocery store.
“In France, too, tourism can be an illness, a malady,” said Falcone, of the Agriculture Ministry. “You have the big problem of second homes that raises the prices for all homes. It becomes more and more difficult for locals to buy, and they move. This undermines your village life and soon your rural life.”
The trade-offs are difficult. In the seventies and into the nineties, foreigners played the opposite role, buying decrepit buildings for a song, restoring them and bringing life back to many isolated villages. Peter Mayle, a British writer, made a small fortune writing about his life in Provence beginning with his trials while redoing a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in A Year in Provence and then living the dream of the French “vie en rose” in Toujours Provence. Those days are over, and now the French fear they might be reaching the point of no return.
France may suffer from too many fans. Despite its reputation as overpriced, France is consistently rated as one of the best countries for retirement, for “luxury on a budget.” Forbes magazine called it especially friendly for American retirees because of its high-quality, low-cost health care system. Europeans have voted it one of their favorite retirement spots because, in the words of the London Daily Mail, France is “sheets ahead of its European counterparts for quality of life.”
That indescribable charm and joie de vivre was uppermost in the mind of Ambassador Frances Cook when she bought a second home in France. Retired from the U.S. Foreign Service, she is now chair of an international consulting firm based in Washington and traveling often. Her roots in France are deep, beginning with a junior year abroad in Aix-en-Provence and continuing with official assignments in Paris. She wanted to live in the south, in Provence, in an apartment with character. When canvassing the region to look for such a gem, she had one stipulation. She would only buy in a village with a thriving primary school. “I didn’t want to buy into a dying town or a town that was all foreigners, and the best gauge is the school,” she said.
She found her ideal apartment in a restored convent in Bargemon, a village in the foothills not far from Saint-Tropez. When in Bargemon her days are spent with the French villagers and doing the rounds at the cafés, restaurants, greengrocers, hairdresser, boulangerie and boucherie. The village boasts two pharmacies, two medical clinics, ten art galleries and studios, a garage, a bank, a plumber, three electricians, a mason and several general contractors. The caliber of the musical concerts at the village church is astonishing and religious feasts are celebrated with the sincerity of earlier eras.
At the same time, Cook is part of a thriving foreign community dominated by Europeans who have moved to this Var region permanently and others, like Cook, with second-home hideaways. The British outnumber all others and publish a community newsletter called the Var Village Voice, which they began in 1995. (There are roughly 200,000 Brits living permanently in France—most clustered in the south or up north along the English Channel.)
It is idyllic in the Var and the Var Village Voice chronicles the rarefied expatriate lifestyle: news of wine tastings, a citrus fruit festival, art exhibits—often by foreign artists—new restaurants, choral ensembles, truffle festivals, operas, balls, and appreciative letters like this one from a man who identified himself only as Graham. He wrote: “We enjoyed as always the Christmas edition and put the Foies Gras article to good use, much to the amusement of the shop in Le Touquet as we read each label with care avoiding the tins which he was keen to move. . . . ”
But some stories about the “ugly foreigner” seep into these otherwise light news items. Some of the expatriates are more famous than others: actor John Malkovich, Peter Mayle (of Toujours Provence) and Ridley Scott, the English film director. Scott made headlines for launching a “chicken war” against his French neighbors who raise poultry. Sir Ridley complained that the “chickens cackled offensively and the smell wafted into his property,” according to the Var Voice, which noted that Christophe Orset, the neighboring chicken farmer, has lived in the village for thirty years, while Sir Ridley visits only a few weeks a year. The courts threw out the case and the famous director lost his chicken war.
That battle between Scott and the chicken farmers is something of a metaphor for the French fear of foreigners upending their lifestyle. The French prefer foreign owners like Ambassador Cook, who consciously tries to support the French lifestyle in all of its quirkiness and not fight against it. But they are looking warily at what is happening to other European countries to see how to avoid matters getting out of hand.
Recently a British government report on rural living loudly warned that rich foreigners and British citizens, especially from London, were buying so many second or vacation homes that local residents couldn’t afford to live in their villages. They had become “ghettos of the very rich and elderly” without the working people and families needed to keep villages alive. The language was more dire and vivid than the warning in France in part because much of the best regions of rural England have already been ceded to the second-home world. The report, called “Living Working Countryside,” was published in 2008 and painted a picture of real estate prices out of reach of locals. The answer, said Matthew Taylor, the report’s author, was not to build more houses willy-nilly, which would destroy the rural countryside and turn it into a “Costa Brava” of concrete. Instead, the report recommended methods to use zoning laws to restrict second-home buyers and to encourage the construction of “social homes” at low prices for locals. Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of England, has become an extreme case. It is the wealthiest county in England because of the predominance of rich second-home owners. Yet it has such deep pockets of poverty that it is the only county in England that qualifies for emergency poverty funding from the E.U. It is a grim picture of what happens when the balance tips in favor of wealthy second-home owners. Instead of reviving a dying town, these outsiders buy it out from under the locals. But British officials, many of whom own second homes, refused to take action to restrict them. Lord Taylor wrote to me in an email that he had been “made aware in advance that (second homes) was the one area that the government would not touch—either because they were unconvinced there was any need, or—in my view—because it was too much of a hot potato.”
The French have more safeguards to allow locals to control their development through zoning and development rules. In extreme cases mayors can purchase a home or a boulangerie for the village and then rent it out to a French citizen to maintain the “equilibrium.” Or the mayor can freeze new development.
“Tourism development must, must work for the local population,” said Maud’hui of ATOUT. “There is a limit when foreigners owning a second home change the economy and the environment. Say 15 percent or 20 percent may be the limit. Eventually too many foreigners will narrow the future.”
And that is when tourism becomes that nightmare the French most fear. “We are far, far from that, but we think about it,” said Maud’hui.
France, the gold standard for tourism, with strong government support to protect local communities, still has to work overtime to avoid the pitfalls of mass tourism. In Venice, tourism has already undermined its way of life.