TOURISM

Until the late twentieth century, the history of tourism was not a serious subject for historical inquiry. Before the advent of social history, political historians duly noted where decisions and pronouncements were made, and the place of leisure travel becomes obvious only in retrospect: French Emperor Napoleon III met Count Cavour (Camillo Benso) in the comfortable French spa town of Plombières to plot what turned out to be a war of Italian unification against the Austrians; and King William of Prussia had been taking the waters at Ems when the Ems dispatch was issued in 1870, provoking the French to declare war. Even the emergence of social history initially left the history of tourism at the margins. Careful analysis of workers, peasants, the bourgeoisie, and eventually women, that is, specific social groups, eventually made room for analysis of cultural practices besides work, such as tourism. The neglect was unfortunate because the history of tourism has revealed just how much various social groups used travel to set themselves off from others and thus to construct differences of class and gender as "natural" social divides. In fact, tourism, like other forms of consumption, was as much a defining characteristic of social position as the work with which it was often contrasted.

the michelin red guide: automobile tourism and gender roles

In 1900, Michelin published the first Guide Michelin to France. In the preface, Michelin noted that "this work desires to give all information that can be useful to a driver traveling in France, to supply [the needs of] his automobile, to repair it, and to permit him to find a place to stay and eat, and to correspond by mail, telegraph, or telephone" (p. 5). Offering this new red guide free of charge, the company recognized that by encouraging automobile travel it fostered the consumption of tires. In essence, the guide offered knowledge about tires and about French towns, thus providing a sort of informational infrastructure for early automobile tourists.

Interestingly, the red guide and advertisements for it reinforced societal assumptions about sexual difference in early twentieth-century Europe. In an age when many wealthy men did not even drive their own cars, they were still portrayed as in charge in their planning of trips and management of the chauffeur. Women, by contrast, were presumed to be flighty, hopefully attractive, and concerned with maintaining their beauty.

Advertisements for the red guides played on the idea that men, the providers, needed to supply a comfortable place to stay for women, the presumed consumers. In one case, Michelin recounted the tale of newlyweds traveling without a red guide. After the chauffeur informed them that a mechanical breakdown would leave them stranded overnight, the Viscount René de la Ribaudière (a name suggesting bawdiness as well as aristocratic origins) and Giselle, his new wife (the text notes that "she was not yet [really] the countess"), got a room in a hotel that was, according to the owner, "the best in the region." After retiring to their room, they found a bat, and

it took a quarter of an hour and all of the eloquence that M. de la Ribaudière had in order to calm down Giselle. However, the little viscount did not waste any time, and he quickly addressed his very imminent wife the most legitimate compliments on the beauty of her legs and the finesse of her ankles, when suddenly he cried out in distress. "Ah! my God, what is the matter?" Giselle asked him. [He replied,] "my darling, where did you get this bit of red on your shoulder which was so white a moment ago?" The same exclamation came out of both of their mouths, "Bed bugs." They killed 10, then 100, then 577; they could not have fought off the yellow invasion with more ardor. Finally, overtaken by sleep, Giselle resigned herself to stretching out on her uncomfortable and hard bed. And the viscount wanted to begin the conversation again. "Oh, no, my dear," she told him…. When the sun rose, Giselle was still not yet Madame de la Ribaudière, though she looked like cream with strawberries [that is, her cream-colored skin had many red marks resembling strawberries]. ("Lundi de Michelin," Le Journal, 6 July 1908, p. 5)

By playing on the notion of consummation of the marriage, Michelin suggested that the viscount, how-ever desperately he may have tried, did not get to have sex with his new wife because he had not ordered a copy of the red guide, so he did not realize there was a fine hotel nearby. Having not fulfilled his role as good provider, the viscount could not fulfill his role as a husband in the act of sex. Thus, marketing of the red guide—which began ostensibly as a list of mechanics and places to buy gas—could assert assumptions about the appropriate behavior of men and women: men were supposed to take care of the practical details while traveling, by buying a red guide, and women were to worry about their appearance.

the grand tour

In the eighteenth century, the British had been predominant as early tourists. Before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, many aristocratic and wealthy British families sent their sons on a Grand Tour of Europe. To have done a Grand Tour set a young English man apart from his contemporaries, not to mention his social inferiors. For the growing upper middle class, a tour of classical ruins was construed as cultural training, not unlike attending university. Lasting for several months, a tour usually included Paris and often other major European capitals and was almost always dominated by the Italian cities. Venice, Florence, Rome (including the digs at Pompeii), and sometimes Naples were must-sees, while Genoa and Turin usually figured as stopping points en route from the Alpine crossing to the south. Art collections, architecture, classical ruins, and brothels were the main attractions.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars interrupted much international tourism, particularly by the British, until 1815. However, in the course of the nineteenth century, the idea of the Grand Tour remained an important image as the numbers of Europeans with the time and financial resources to travel grew. Napoleon's road building across France and through the Alps facilitated access by reducing travel times. Museums opened their doors, following the example of the Louvre, which became public during the Revolution. The populations capable of affording a tour grew. In addition, the number of women traveling, escorted by female family members, servants, and friends—and sometimes husbands and fathers—steadily increased.

Both evolving aesthetics and accessibility changed the destinations and the perceptions of early nineteenth-century tourists. The Alps, long considered a mere untamed obstacle en route to Italy, became a destination in their own right and an important stop on many a Grand Tour. Mountain climbing for the few and hiking for the many became primary attractions. Romantic sensibilities also led to interest in Gothic cathedrals along with the classical monuments. The few travelers to Greece in the nineteenth century, which seemed more accessible after its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832, were in search of classical ruins overrun by vegetation and partially destroyed by time; here Lord George Gordon Byron's poetry was an obvious inspiration. During the period from 1792 to 1815, a heyday of early Romanticism, the British Lake Counties so dear to William Wordsworth became primary alternatives for wealthy British tourists unable to tour the Continent. With a volume of Wordsworth in hand, visitors sought the uncontrolled nature he had described.

taking the waters: spas and seasides

Named for Spa, a well-known spring of mineral water in what would after 1830 be known as Belgium, spas had long existed in Europe. The Romans had established baths filled with spring water, and some of those same baths remained in operation throughout the Middle Ages, attracting both local inhabitants and the infirm from farther away. In Hungary, baths experienced a boom in the eighteenth century. Improved roads and coach service made the baths more accessible, and towns such as Bath in western England, Vichy in south-central France, and Baden-Baden in the southwestern German state of Baden became important destinations.

Until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, baths frequently remained large pools in the open air, situated within the towns and open, without charge, to all who wished to bathe. Although only scattered evidence has survived, it appears that in the early modern period bathers of both sexes of all social groups wore little clothing, frolicking in the baths. By the early nineteenth century, as bourgeois usage grew dramatically, so too did the expectations for regulation of access. In France, the open-air pools largely disappeared, replaced by individual bathing compartments where a bather would not come in contact with anyone but spa staff. At least in France, the strict separation of the sexes and careful attention to appropriate attire resulted in part from women's complaints of men's behavior at the baths, so the institution of new norms of propriety may have resulted as much from women's increased presence as from a desire for social control on the part of the bourgeoisie in general. Nevertheless, a clear segmentation by social class clearly took place. The poor and working poor found themselves excluded from many of the baths, and an array of new hospitals for the poor requiring hydrotherapy segregated them from the wealthy bathers.

In the nineteenth century, doctors largely controlled access to the baths. Doctors developed a complement of hydrotherapeutic techniques, including hot and cold pressurized showers, hot mud packs for the body, and individualized boxes for prescribed steam baths. During an average three-week course of treatment, the majority of a patient's time was often not spent in the bathing pools themselves. Even when patients were in the bath, the duration of daily treatments was closely controlled by the spa's staff.

Social stratification was a defining characteristic of spa towns. Locals worked in the baths, in the hotels, and in the newly organized casinos. In towns such as Vichy and Aix-les-Bains (in Savoy), service to wealthy travelers was the primary employment for local residents. While the wealthy travelers registered their names, addresses, professions, and the number of accompanying servants—all markers of social station in the nineteenth century—before going off to the baths for their cures, locals lost their earlier (nonmedical) access to the baths. Spa employees and larger municipal police forces further kept the homeless and begging poor out of the casinos and off the important promenades, where their presence was assumed to damage the appeal of the spa town.

After 1750, first in Britain and then on the Continent, the aristocracy and increasingly the middle classes also began to flock to the seaside, spurring the development of resorts. In many parts of Europe, though sources are comparatively scarce, there is evidence of swimming or playing in sea water on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. As bourgeois interest in the seaside grew, so too did municipal regulations governing use of the beaches. In the first half of the nineteenth century, nude bathing was banned on most beaches, which were also usually segregated by sex. Although access to the sea remained open to people of all social classes, the primary beachfront connected to resort towns was largely reserved for wealthy travelers whose expenditures supported local economies.

Although Romantic interest in the sea as untamed nature was not unlike the "discovery" of the Alps, the motivation for travel to the seaside, as in the case of spas, was also ostensibly medical. For skin and particularly pulmonary ailments, especially tuberculosis, doctors often advised an extended stay on the coast. By the early nineteenth century, doctors also began to regulate immersion in the water. Doctors offered careful instructions as to the preparation, duration, and necessary movements during daily baths in sea water.

Doctors and bathers made an important distinction between men and women. While women in particular were prescribed strict guidelines, carried out by attendants who manned the individualized bathing boxes ostensibly for the preservation of female modesty, doctors exercised comparatively little control over men, who customarily treated jumping into the waves as a sort of male rite of passage, a proof of their virility. The medicalized control established at the seaside was thus inseparable from a broader social control of women's movements and their bodies in the nineteenth century.

riding the rails and reading the guidebooks

Although the network of European roads and coach services improved steadily in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, facilitating tourism among wealthy Europeans, the development of the railroad allowed faster and considerably cheaper transportation, dramatically increasing the number of people who could afford to travel. The greater accessibility made possible by the railroad did not erase social distinctions but rather altered their contours; just as the railroad had first-class, second-class, third-class, and even fourth-class carriage, tourist destinations changed to accommodate both greater social diversity but also the desire for social differentiation by those who could afford better.

The railroad had an ironic effect on established tourist destinations. For example, on the southern coast of England, Brighton had been a favored destination of the English nobility and royalty in the eighteenth century. However, when the railroad connected Brighton to nearby London, the middle and lower middle class of the city began to make day trips to Brighton. The royal family and social elite relocated their social season to the north, placing themselves outside the logistical and financial reach of these new tourists. In France, where the warm and more desirable seasides were in the south, the railroad made it possible for the wealthy of Paris and of Europe to easily make a journey impractical for those of limited means. The empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III of France, made Biarritz on the southwestern French coast a sought-after resort town once the railroad line was established. On the Riviera, the French annexation of Nice in 1860 facilitated the development of a French railway line from Paris. Nice expanded rapidly and its wintertime (the social season on the Riviera) population exploded as the international social elite swarmed in.

More tourists with more destinations sought ever more information about where to go, what to see, and how to get there most easily. Because tourists on land were by mid-century traveling almost exclusively by railroad, guidebooks adopted railway itineraries as their organizational framework. In Britain, John Murray published little red guides to sights and hotels of Europe, in a format quickly adopted by Karl Baedeker in Germany. With guides in several European languages covering western, northern, and southern Europe by 1914, Baedeker and his successors built a veritable empire of guidebooks, directing tourists where to go and what to see. In France, Adolphe Joanne launched a similar series published by Hachette, which had a monopolistic control of bookstores in French rail stations.

The Murray, Baedeker, and Joanne guidebooks, like their eventual competitors, offered practical information about the quality and prices of hotels, admission prices to museums, train schedules, detailed information about the sights a dutiful tourist should not miss, and even advice about appropriate behavior. In short, the guidebooks attempted to instruct the novice tourist in how to travel. By providing abundant information updated in frequent re-editions, guidebooks took some of the uncertainty out of travel, but arrangements remained entirely in the hands of individual tourists, who needed to negotiate not only with hotels but also with the multitude of different train companies even within a given country.

For the lower middle class and skilled workers with limited means, less time, and little familiarity with the profusion of train schedules and fares, Thomas Cook offered both greater certainty and moderate prices. A British cabinetmaker and minister, Cook organized his first tour by railroad for working men and women attending a Temperance meeting in 1841. In 1851 he negotiated prices with the railroads and lined up accommodations for some 165,000 British men and women who traveled to the see the Grand Exhibition in London (some 3 percent of visitors). By the 1860s, as railroad fares declined within Britain, often obviating the need for his services, Cook focused on tours of the Continent, beginning with Paris (1861), then Switzerland (1863), Italy (1864), and Spain (1872). In several respects, Cook and his competitors opened up touring to social groups that had not traveled in the past. Initially, "workingmen," usually skilled artisans or lower middle-class tradesmen on day trips, formed the primary travelers. Without this early group being abandoned, as the destination increasingly became the Continent, Cook's tourists also came from a broad spectrum of the middle class; not only doctors, lawyers, and salaried employees but also teachers and ministers, who had time but limited incomes, were a primary constituency.

Cook's tour came to embody the increased access to travel in nineteenth-century Europe. As a result, those travelers who could afford longer, slower, and more costly trips ridiculed the month-long Cook's tours to Continental Europe as offering no time for the real appreciation of the monuments, museums, and landscapes seen in a blur. The perceptions of social distinction shifted; for the modest, touring offered status, but for the wealthy the fact of touring the Continent often became less important than in what company and how one did.

The most obvious social change among tourists became in the nineteenth century the increased presence of women. Although a few women had done the Grand Tour or had taken the waters in the eighteenth century, in the course of the nineteenth century tourism by women unaccompanied by men became standard. The railroads and guidebooks (which were often, as in the case of the Baedeker, downright sexist even by nineteenth-century standards) facilitated travel, making it easier for women to travel without the company of men. In Cook's tours both single women and women traveling in groups were actually more heavily represented than men. While ease of transport was clearly one reason, the broader cultural changes in nineteenth-century Europe were another. Whereas men had been the primary collectors of art early in the century, women increasingly became connoisseurs of art, music, and culture generally, though the remunerated professions of artist, curator, or academic remained the preserve of men. Bourgeois women's predominance in the church was also a factor; in largely Protestant Britain women had an important role in the Temperance movement, sometimes necessitating travel by train, and in Catholic areas women were proportionately better represented in the organized group tours to

pilgrimage sites, such as the spring at Lourdes in the Pyrenees mountains.

By the end of the nineteenth century, growing nationalist and imperialist sentiment, laced with Social Darwinism, was also reflected in well-off Europeans' travel. Guidebooks could be quite nationalistic. In the 1860s, the Baedeker guides in the German language fervently claimed that French-held Alsace-Lorraine should in fact be part of united Germany. British guides frequently deplored the supposedly inadequate hygiene on the Continent, especially the absence of toilets flushed with water. In countries with expanding empires, most notably Britain and France, trips to the colonies gained in popularity among the wealthy. Although their numbers remained small, Britons and to a lesser extent other Europeans, very often under the auspices of a Cook's tour down the Nile, traveled to Egypt in search of cultural exoticism; by the 1880s they were reassured by the British protectorate. Britons also went to Palestine to visit the "Holy Land." Among the French, the colonies of Algeria and later Morocco were sometimes destinations. While traveling outside Europe, Europeans could congratulate themselves on their own national—in having a grander empire they could be superior to other Europeans—and racial superiority, presumably manifest in the vast material divide between them and indigenous peoples.

bicycle and automobile tourism

While the overwhelming majority of travelers in the early twentieth century continued to use the railroad, technological innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries placed renewed emphasis on traveling by road as well as rail. The "safety" bicycle with two wheels of the same size became a fashionable rage for sportsmen rich enough to buy one in the 1890s. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the automobile began to rival the bicycle among sportsmen, and it quickly became a means of tourist transportation for aristocrats and bourgeois Europeans. The automobile's price and extremely high maintenance costs made it a socially exclusive mode of transportation. An automobile allowed wealthy men, accompanied by women and usually a mechanic/driver, to make long trips, veritable adventures given the poor reliability of automobiles when compared to trains.

Both bicycle and automobile tourism necessitated a new infrastructure eventually provided by local and national authorities. Well-maintained, eventually paved roads with road signs became the subject of important lobbying efforts by tourists enamored of the new forms of transport. An array of nonprofit organizations emerged across Europe to advocate the interests of first cyclists then motorists. Inspired by the British Cyclist Touring Club, "touring clubs" funded by members' contributions and often public subsidies, worked with local and national governments to provide an infrastructure for all forms of tourism, though cycling received pride of place in the 1890s. After 1900, touring clubs, working alongside more socially exclusive automobile clubs, also argued for roadway improvements necessary for automobiles. In several countries, the touring clubs, while overwhelmingly bourgeois, were among the largest of associations. The Touring Club de France, founded in 1890, had nearly 100,000 members in 1914. The Touring Club Ciclistico Italiano, founded in 1894, dropped "cycling" from its name in 1900 and itself grew to 450,000 members in the interwar years.

conclusion: tourism and social distinctions

Before the 1790s, when the English term tourist, itself derived from the French term tour, first emerged in the English language, traveler was the primary designation used for what one might call the "leisure traveler." In the course of the nineteenth century, most European languages acquired a term equivalent to the English tourist. Since the nineteenth century, tourists and social observers have often distinguished between travelers and tourists. Late-nineteenth-century travelers condemned Cook's tourists as superficial. Travelers supposedly appreciated what they saw and experienced whereas tourists completed a list of things that "needed to be seen." Many historians and other writers have often accepted the distinction at face value, stressing the difference between the old bourgeois, aristocratic, and educated travelers and the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century hordes who supposedly understood little besides how to have a good time.

In fact, the terms reveal more about the people employing them to reinforce social difference than about any real difference between leisure travelers and tourists. Many middle-class travelers in the nineteenth century, even "Cook's tourists," could be far more interested in European art and architecture, which also offered them the possibility of a sort of cultural capital upon returning home, than the fabulously wealthy who spent much of their time simply enjoying themselves in the company of their compatriots. In short, the distinction that some have made between travelers and tourists, like the distinctions that post–World War II tourists often make between themselves and other, presumably less knowledgeable and culturally sensitive tourists, are not "real," measurable differences.

In the nineteenth century, social distinctions made between those who could afford to take the tour, take the waters in a spa, or go to the beach and those who could not mirrored the social segmentation of European society as a whole. Similarly, the prescribed roles for women and men further reflected widespread assumptions about the "natural" differences between the sexes. Tourism, having afforded some people the occasion to join their presumed cohorts and set themselves off from other people, thus provides a fascinating glimpse at the social hierarchies that characterized nineteenth-century Europe.

See alsoAutomobile; Cycling; Popular and Elite Culture; Railroads; Transportation and Communications.

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Stephen L. Harp