VACATIONS

John K. Walton

In British English the word "vacation" normally has a restricted and rather technical sense, applying to the periods when the universities are closed or the law courts out of session. The word "holiday" occupies the space that "vacation" occupies in North America, although it does not necessarily involve geographical mobility in search of health, recreation, or sheer enjoyment: the same word is used for a work-free day or days spent at home as for a period of rest, recuperation, or fun in a different environment. The notion of taking a holiday overlaps with that of tourism, although this latter word, more respectable administratively and academically—television programs advertise or evaluate holidays while local governments provide tourist offices and universities offer degrees in Tourism Studies but never Holiday Studies—tends now to have more up-market connotations involving longer, more ambitious journeys and a less sedentary holiday experience. It was not always thus, however, and in some circles (especially up-market literary ones) the nineteenth-century contempt for the mere "tourist," led by the nose by mentors and guidebooks and incapable of independent cultural judgment, remains as a contrast to the more adventurous, culturally aware "traveller," willing to "rough it" off the "beaten track" and eager to sample other cultures on their own terms.

By the 1840s complaints were proliferating in England about the contamination, expedited by the new railways and steamers, of the chosen destinations of elite travelers by the presence of inferior tourists. This social distinction justified itself in cultural and even moral terms. In John Urry's terminology, the "romantic gaze," which emphasized solitary individuals in direct, sensitized, and informed exchanges with landscape and culture, was being threatened by the "collective gaze," which derived satisfaction from experiencing sites and sensations in company according to shared values that were communicated by mass media and were therefore inferior in the eyes of romantics. Worst of all from this elevated perspective is the "package tourist," perceived as incapable of escaping from the values and practices imposed by the provider of holiday services and as preferring to be insulated from all troubling contact with the host culture—wanting, in fact, all the reassuring cultural landmarks of home in a setting that guarantees sunshine, bathing amenities, and cheap drink. From the 1960s on, working-class holidaymakers in Mediterranean resorts have inherited all the opprobrium that was heaped on Thomas Cook's original package tourists of a century earlier. Those who fancied themselves cultured travelers decried the interruption of their solitary contemplation of cathedrals or Roman amphitheaters by bands of lower-middle-class Cook's Tourists, Baedeker in hand and shepherded by guides.

Elsewhere in Europe similar problems of terminology crop up. The word in Spanish is vacaciones; but an older variant, the verb veranear (to pass the summer), conjures up a more leisured style of holidaymaking in which aristocratic or bourgeois families would spend two or three months at a spa or seaside resort. Turismo is also in use there, with a similar shade of meaning to "tourism" in English. In French, holidays are vacances, but congé overlaps with this concept, meaning "leave from work" and extending to the idea of a holiday away from home; in practice the words are used almost interchangeably. The kind of holiday taken by an estivant (summer visitor), is similar to that of a Spanish veraneante. There are also hivernants, passing the winter in favored climatic locations, above all the Riviera. The slipperiness of the terminology is obvious, as is the sense that the differing shades of meaning can also carry connotations of status and claims to cultural capital.

The notion of a holiday in the sense implied by "vacations" entails an extended trip, more than just an excursion to a local beauty spot or even a day's outing involving a journey of several hours. The holidaymaker makes more of an investment of time and money than the "excursionist" or "day-tripper," those particular bogeys of self-consciously respectable middle-class families looking for sedate pleasures. The emergent discipline of Tourism Studies has prompted extensive but sterile discussion over how long a stay away from home is necessary for the perpetrator to qualify as a tourist; but these efforts notwithstanding, the statistical computations that a standard definition is intended to facilitate remain visibly flawed and approximate and become less plausible the farther back in time inquiry goes. The statistics of holidaymaking are notoriously "soft," and for present purposes it matters little if a vacation is said to be anything from a long weekend to an extended stay of several months.

Here, however, a problem arises in that the notion of holiday depends on an "other," the idea of necessary work. Those privileged people whose life entailed a circuit of high-class resorts in their fashionable seasons were members (or hangers-on) of a leisure class for whom the concept of a vacation was scarcely relevant. Indeed, the observance of the dictates of international fashion was at the core of their construction and presentation of self, and thus resort life might almost be regarded as work rather than leisure, the remuneration being psychic and coming as the reward for suitably directed expenditure of time, money, and expertise, but no less important for that. Crucial to the idea of a vacation, anyway, is that it involves physical displacement, whether to a single destination or to several: change of scene, if not of culture, in pursuit of pleasure and (in some sense) relaxation. Recreational travel can also be in the mind, of course, and travel books have long provided for the armchair tourist. Across Europe in the nineteenth century, shows and spectacles represented the exotic through giant pictures, transparencies, models, and magic lanterns at fairgrounds and theaters before the cinema, television, and then the computer made their own contributions in the twentieth. But over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the desirability of a physical break from quotidian routine became broadly generalized across industrial societies in Europe, though at differing rates in different countries and regions, and with varying and changing destinations and degrees of commercialization. What are the roots of this important set of developments?

ORIGINS OF THE EUROPEAN VACATION

It is tempting to regard medieval pilgrims as the first European tourists, though we might find a more directly commercialized ancestry for the phenomenon in ancient Rome, at Baiae (especially, and for several centuries), Ostia, and around Naples, as extensive tracts of shoreline were thickly sown with the villas of the wealthy. Pilgrims ostensibly traveled for spiritual reasons, rather than pursuing pleasure and reinvigoration through change of scene and break from routine in the style of a modern vacationer; but they followed recognized routes with commercial infrastructures of guides and services, whether their goal was Canterbury, Compostela, or Rome. Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century shows us that individual participants' concerns might be decidedly worldly, even hedonistic. But the roots of the modern vacation can be more securely traced to two other phenomena: the rise of the Grand Tour and of the European spa system from the later sixteenth century.

In its mid-sixteenth-century origins, the Grand Tour was a device for encouraging young aristocrats to experience life and culture at courts and in cities throughout Europe, broadening its horizons in the late eighteenth century under the spur of romantic fashion to include mountain scenery and natural curiosities such as glaciers. The practice came into wider vogue during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extending its social range through the gentry to the middle ranks of professionals and merchants (who might take the Tour later in life) and including growing numbers of Americans in the nineteenth century, before new time pressures and means of transport made the old leisurely patterns obsolete. The goal of the Tour was the cultural centers of northern and central Italy, with their classical remains and treasures of art and architecture. The seventeenth-century tendency to pass through various German states in a roundabout journey had given way by the early nineteenth century to a more single-minded direct route through Paris, Dijon, and Switzerland. Perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 people at a time followed the Tour in any year of the later eighteenth century, and, as befitted this small (but not numerically insignificant) elite, the tourist infrastructure was limited and exclusive, featuring special road transport arrangements, lodgings, guides, vendors of works of art (and manufacturers of fakes), and a growing volume of travel advice literature. What these pioneer tourists sought can be summed up, in the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's telling phrase, as cultural capital: in this case, an ability to claim firsthand knowledge of places, cultures, scenes, languages, and classical allusions that was supposed to mark out the cultivated gentleman and set him and his circle apart from those who did not share his experiences. Individuals might follow their own bent, in pursuit of anything from diplomatic and political expertise to sexual adventures; but above all the Grand Tour gave a valued distinction to participants, setting them apart from social inferiors. This is a recurring theme in the history of tourism and vacations.

The other precursor of modern tourism was the spa resort, which came to offer something more closely resembling a modern vacation. Across Europe the rise of the spa followed a similar trajectory to that of the Grand Tour; but the ostensible motive for spending time taking the waters was, in the first instance, health, as the doctors took over the holy wells and elaborate medical discourses crystallized around the ascribed curative qualities of chalybeate, ferruginous, or sulfurous springs. Spa itself, in Belgium, was one of the first such resorts to attract an international clientele, including a visit from Tsar Peter the Great, while Bath and Wiesbaden were among the substantial towns that grew up around mineral springs. Sociable attractions and fashionable amenities developed in the larger spas to entertain the invalids and their relatives, and to attract the hale and hearty to what were often attractive little upland settlements. The band, the assembly rooms, the public walks, and in some cases the brothel and the roulette wheel provided a range of diversions for those who could afford them, while in many cases inferior accommodation catered to a regional clientele and to paupers sent in hopes of revitalization. The elite social institutions of the spa were easily policed, by subscriptions and dress codes, although masters of ceremonies intervened to preserve politeness in the exchanges between the nobility and the marginal middle ranks. This polite holiday regime, with its daily routines and rituals, reached its heyday in the early nineteenth century over much of Europe. In England the larger spa towns evolved from vacation destinations into retirement and commuter centers, mainly in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Germany and eastern Europe, and over much of Spain and Italy, the spa sustained its popularity through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, although individual resorts generally remained small and their social amenities exclusive.

THE SEASIDE AESTHETIC

From the late eighteenth century, however, new destinations came to the fore. The vogue for the seaside was the most enduringly important across Europe, mutating over time with the growing popularity of the Mediterranean and of sunbathing, but, except where transport problems and limited disposable incomes sustained the dominance of spas with local clienteles, coming to hold sway as the dominant holiday form. The seaside holiday was boosted by two eighteenth-century developments. First, the medical fashion for sea bathing in cold, boisterous northern waters helped turn something dangerous, forbidding, and frightening into a healthy activity. The medical vogue for sea bathing is an example of cultural preferences rising through the social strata rather than trickling down through emulation, for the doctors who began to prescribe cold bathing and (in some cases) seawater drinking regimes, in England in the first half of the eighteenth century and then across western Europe, were giving a "scientific" veneer to already popular practices. Right across western Europe, from northwest England through the Netherlands, France, and the Iberian Peninsula to Corsica, there is evidence of popular sea-bathing rituals that celebrate the health-giving properties of the sea at certain times of year. The medical profession recast and formalized these beliefs, imposing its own medical rituals that prescribed the number and duration of baths to be taken for specific ailments and the precautions that had to be adopted. This in turn necessitated a prolonged stay at the seaside to fulfill the requirements of the "cure," just as in the case of the spas. Thus the health seekers and their friends created a critical mass of demand that encouraged speculation in accommodation, entertainment, and amenities, promoting the rise of that distinctive but versatile kind of town, the seaside resort.

The second development was the new aesthetic of the maritime landscape and of the sea itself. The romantic revaluation of the later eighteenth century brought the untamed sea and the untidy shoreline within the canons of the picturesque and the sublime, rendering maritime landscapes fit subjects for the painter and enabling wind, tempest, storm-surge, and wreck to be appreciated and enjoyed as noble spectacles and with a suitable frisson of horror. The sea was fecund and full of reminders of creation and its vestiges. Those who braved its perils were also ennobled and romanticized, and they and their boats gradually became fitting additions to the composition of marine paintings. All this made the seaside an attractive destination and encouraged the building of houses for visitors facing the waves, in contrast with seafaring settlements that tried to shelter from their fury. A similar cultural reassessment of mountain scenery made upland areas from the English Lake District to the Alps into tourist destinations in their own right, with evangelical dimensions of proximity to God and romantic anthropologies of the stalwart and unassuming virtues of mountain peasantries (though these might coexist with fears of brigands, just as brave fishermen might otherwise be presented as lazy, untrustworthy, and of doubtful morals).

On these twin foundations the seaside holiday based itself, beginning in England in the 1730s, spreading to France, the Low Countries, and north Germany toward the end of the century, and gravitating outward to (for example) Sweden by the early nineteenth century and Spain by the 1820s. The resorts soon attracted pleasure seekers who required the amenities of polite society, just as at the spas; and such visitors soon turned the vocabularies of the picturesque and sublime into lazy cliché in ways that caught the satirical ear of Jane Austen. In Britain especially the seaside competed effectively with the spa to become the dominant vacation destination by the early nineteenth century. In northern Spain the two kinds of resort were often complementary, with wealthy health seekers taking a cure in an upland spa and following up with a stint of sea bathing, while in Germany most of the North Sea and Baltic resorts were distant from population centers, enduringly hard to reach, and less dynamic in their growth. But everywhere the seaside, like the spa, became a bourgeois as well as an aristocratic destination. It was, however, open to a wider range of people, as it was more difficult to regulate access to and use of the beach, which lent itself to a wider range of activities than the pump room and assembly rooms; it also provided a much more child-friendly environment, thus ensuring the growing popularity of the family holiday, complete with buckets and spades, in the early nineteenth century.

THE RAILWAY AGE

The special status of the seaside, especially in England, was confirmed in the railway age. For a century from the 1840s the railway journey became an almost inevitable introduction and conclusion to a vacation, as well as linking the different stages of a tour and making possible day excursions from the holiday base. Railway companies might also provide steamboats, piers, and hotel services. The railways built on existing patterns of holidaymaking, extending them to new social groups and broadening their geographical range rather than starting something entirely new, in England at least. Brighton had attained an off-season population of 40,000 using road transport before the railway arrived from London in September 1841, and Margate's visiting season had prospered in the eighteenth century using sailing vessels to carry Londoners down the Thames estuary. By the same token railways to the French Riviera and in parts of the Swiss Alps augmented established tourist flows rather than initiating them, while San Sebastian, which became Spain's premier seaside resort in the later nineteenth century, was already attracting visitors by road from Madrid (despite the strenuous nature of the two-day journey) before it began to benefit from its strategic position on the Madrid-Paris rail route after 1864. But the journey was emphatically part of even the most sedentary holiday, as the process of packing and booking tickets conjured up anticipations of the pleasures that awaited at the other end, and a whole literature of travel nostalgia emerged later to celebrate first the stagecoach and the diligence, then the steam railway itself.

The economies in time and money that the railways and steamers brought, and their greater convenience and (eventually) safety, opened vacations out to a widening public in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in England; and demand was channeled disproportionately into the seaside. New resorts blossomed on hitherto neglected shores, although the railways that fed them had almost always been constructed for other purposes, and larger resorts spread and subdivided, developing distinctive areas for different social groups as the working classes began to join their social betters at the beach. On the European mainland this came much later than in England, where brief but conspicuous working-class seaside holidays within London's orbit or wherever industrial areas had easy access to the coast were older than railways. A full-scale working-class holiday season emerged in the northwest in the 1870s, fueled by the rising family incomes of (especially) the cotton factory workers and the attractions of Blackpool, the first working-class seaside resort. The petty bourgeoisie might have their week at the seaside, traveling from Madrid to San Sebastian by special cheap trains and economizing on everything except the basics of a presentable turnout; small farmers from the Castilian plains might travel to Santander by the mixed train to follow a medically prescribed bathing regime, sleeping in fifth-rate fondas and gawking obtrusively at sea, ships, and city sights. Parisian shopkeepers and small traders might find their way to Normandy outside the fashionable season; but there as in Germany the working class proper was excluded. The scale of French middle-class outrage when the Popular Front government introduced paid holidays in 1936, promising a wage earners' exodus to coast and country, indicated the limited nature of what had gone before; and even then, most beneficiaries of the new legislation stayed at home and relaxed rather than invading the holiday preserves of their betters.

It was not just a matter of resources; people had to want vacations away from home, and to be prepared to save for them rather than spending spare cash locally on daily or weekly pleasures, or insisting on accumulating savings as a hedge against disaster or a route to property ownership or a small business. Seekers after health, tranquillity, scenic beauty, spiritual uplift (associated especially with mountains), status and cultural capital, in varying mixtures and combinations, were joined in growing numbers by those who wanted commercial pleasures in a setting that offered relief from the constraints of everyday life. The seaside came to cater to this preference very effectively, alongside the others. The abundance of coastal sites ensured that all tastes could be satisfied, from those who wanted exclusive quiet in ruggedly romantic surroundings to those who preferred formal classical architecture and fashionable promenades, to those in turn who wanted cheap amusements, from Punch and Judy to the music hall, and someone else to cook and clean up. The seaside resorts of the railway age offered a distinctive range of entertainments for those who wanted them. The pleasure pier was an English innovation (seldom exported) that linked land and sea, provided access to steamer excursions, and offered promenades and bands above the waves in surroundings enlivened by wrought-iron Gothic and Oriental architecture. It was also one of the homes of the minstrel show (which involved putting on blackface and singing "plantation" songs to the banjo) and the Pierrots (comedians and songsters with whitened faces). These entertainers also accompanied the Punch-and-Judy puppet show on the beach, alongside, in the more popular English resorts, a variety of stallholders who might use a knife to remove corns, sell medical recipes or horoscopes, or read character from the bumps on the head, a popular version of phrenology that long outlasted its pretensions to medical science. Fringe and officially discredited beliefs flourished alongside donkey rides and later fairground amusements, which offered strange sensations and threatened dignity and seemliness by exposing hidden parts of the body in unpredictable ways.

From the 1870s the larger English resorts also acquired Winter Gardens, which provided indoor promenades and decorous music but soon moved down-market wherever working-class demand pressed strongly. As the seaside vacation market became visibly lucrative and attracted investors in syndicates and limited companies, a range of other entertainment complexes were built that offered dancing, shows, exhibitions, and even zoos and circuses. As in the United States, the popular resorts (and more pretentious ones such as Southport and even Spain's San Sebastian) found room for large-scale fairgrounds on dedicated sites, and these introduced their customers to an exciting range of up-to-the-minute technologies, stirring the senses in novel ways. Resorts on the western European mainland experienced fewer pressures to go down-market, and the casino (whether privately or municipally owned) tended to be the main entertainment center, sometimes offering roulette, chemin de fer and the full gambling menu, but more usually—and more noticeably—presenting innocuous fare of concerts, dancing, and special events for children. At the French resorts in Biarritz and Deauville, and in Monte Carlo and San Sebastian, casino nightlife carried an atmosphere of the demimonde, and resort entertainment for the elite was distinctively daring.

These distinctive forms of seaside entertainment augmented the peculiar attractions of the beach itself, where children played in the sand and all ages bathed according to regulations that were strict on paper but often loosely interpreted in practice. This was especially the case in England, where into the twentieth century the lumbering, wooden bathing machine, which provided changing space and protection for modesty, and was backed into the water by a horse, demanded substantial sums from would-be bathers, segregating the sexes and imposing body-concealing costumes. The regulations were often flouted by those who preferred the freedom of recreational nude bathing, or, more respectably, wanted to bathe in costume en famille. In the new century disrobing in public on the beach became more widely tolerated; the practice was controversial, however, because it offended the prudish and those with vested interests in controls. Elsewhere in Europe customs varied: the French beaches were carefully monitored for safety but permitted mixed bathing and revealing costumes that shocked some English visitors; the Spanish used bathing machines and policed morality in almost English style; the northern Europeans were much more relaxed by the early twentieth century.

The growing popularity of sunbathing, alongside the continuing transition from the medicinal and regulated to the recreational and liberated use of the sea, brought conflicts over the morality of bodily exposure further to the fore. The myth that the fashion designer Coco Chanel invented sunbathing, making a tanned skin chic and enabling the French Riviera to develop a summer season in the mid-1920s, survives tenaciously. In fact the fashion for what was now seen as a healthy brown skin was well established before World War I in places as far apart as San Sebastian and the Baltic, although the prevailing nudity that amazed and delighted the British trade unionist Harry Pollitt at Libau in 1921 was confined to northern European beaches. As with sea bathing earlier, the vogue for sunshine and fresh air as prescriptions for good health was promoted by a rising tide of medical opinion. Likewise, fashionable cures for tuberculosis had called for mountain air and beginning in the 1860s had helped to boost the Swiss Alps as a destination. This trend coincided with a fashion for the freedom of the open air and the abandonment of restrictive clothing conventions. The Mediterranean, hitherto shunned as enervating and malarial, was now seen as a potential destination for beach holidays, although the international popularity of its shores, the French and Italian Rivieras apart, was a phenomenon of the 1950s onward. In Spain a backlash was beginning on the eve of the civil war in the mid-1930s, as Catholic campaigners against bodily exposure and sexual temptation claimed a connection (at that point speculative) between sunburn and skin cancer; but this was swimming against a very powerful tide.

By the interwar years the seaside holiday was well established as an annual institution across Europe, from the Irish Sea to the Black Sea (in Romania and the Crimea) and from Norway to Andalucía in Spain. The English working class most especially adopted the practice, helped by cheap transport and the development of specialized, popular resort districts on accessible coastlines. Its social range (and the number and variety of bathing resorts) decreased as an observer moved from west to east, but a spell at the seaside, from a weekend to a full summer, was the dominant mode of vacationing.

BETWEEN THE WARS AND AFTER

The interwar years also saw the proliferation of new types of holidays, whether developed for profit or by voluntary organizations. Some of them intended to provide cheaper, healthier, less pretentious alternatives to the commercialized formality of the urban seaside resort. As part of the interwar trend toward relaxation and informality, the holiday camp made headway. In reaction against the restrictions of boardinghouses and lodgings, with their curfews and regulations, the holiday camp offered cheap accommodation in tents or chalets, with self-made entertainment on site (in contrast with the urban commercial theaters and music halls of established resorts), and celebrated freedom and the outdoor life. It had ancestors in turn-of-the-century England, both in the clusters of shacks and converted tramcars that colonized cheap seaside land and offered bohemian escape from convention for people of limited means, creating an alternative aesthetic scandalizing to the planners of the 1940s, and in the tented encampments that provided cheap, morally regulated, alcohol-free seaside accommodation for young men. The camps of the 1930s, and especially those of the more commercialized 1950s, gained a reputation for sexual adventure but also (increasingly) for a new kind of mass-market regimentation. Their French counterparts remained less commercial in their organization, usually run by voluntary bodies aiming to make unpretentious, natural holidays accessible to workers who were entitled to them as citizens; but Club Méditerranée, which started life in 1950, attracted a more up-market clientele and a reputation for sensual pleasures in simple surroundings whose essential artificiality was carefully masked. Hitler's enormous holiday barracks on the Baltic Coast in the late 1930s offered a very different vision of the purpose of vacations, precisely targeted at industrial efficiency and the physical development of the "master race."

Another strong interwar trend across western Europe was the outdoor holiday in a mountain or forest setting, which emphasized the virtues of walking and climbing in groups in terms of health, fitness, and closeness to nature and sometimes God. Again, this type of holiday built on earlier developments like England's Holiday Fellowship, which sought to divert working people from the fleshpots of the popular resorts, where holiday savings were said to be dissipated in a debilitating round of commercial pleasures, and to encourage them to improve body, mind, and spirit in healthy and uplifting communal endeavor. Such initiatives were undertaken by socialists and religious enthusiasts alike, with overlapping agendas. In Germany the antagonisms between young Nazis and socialists were fought out in youth hostels and through hiking songs. As was indicated by the controversy over paid holidays in France, it is an error to imagine that vacations are necessarily detached from politics.

Building on developments from the later nineteenth century, growth areas in interwar vacationing included visits to historic and literary landscapes; these entailed pretensions to deploying and enhancing cultural capital and might be regarded as a legacy of the Grand Tour, extending its range to hitherto neglected areas such as southern Spain. The motor tour took advantage of the flexibility of a new mode of transport and diversified demand away from existing "honeypots" while necessitating interaction with host cultures, if only in seeking directions, refueling, and repairs. The cruise offered an insulated, on-board social life while providing brief, controlled contact with prescribed sights and experiences at ports of call. Other enjoyments included the winter sports holiday, especially in Switzerland. The great city as tourist destination, as exemplified especially by Paris with its shops, museums, and nightlife, combined three major holiday priorities in varying proportions according to individual preference and amply allowed for the ubiquitous anthropological tourism of people-watching. At the other end of the spectrum was the rustic holiday, with a tent or farmhouse for accommodations and its celebration of the simple life. In this last, especially, the traveler-tourist distinction came into play, and in the 1930s, even more so than a century earlier, there was a lively market for travelers' tales describing voyages on foot and by local transport to places off the beaten track in Europe as well as farther afield. Contempt for mere tourists was often explicit in this literature.

Such contempt, as has been noted, had a long history and did not abate as travel agencies proliferated and incomes and aspirations rose from the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1950s and 1960s it reached a sustained peak of vitriol with the rise of a new kind of airborne package holiday industry, which increasingly took working-class people from northern Europe to the sunny beaches of the Mediterranean. The package tour put together by a travel company that contracted to provide transport, hotels, food, and guidance was well-established before World War II. By the 1930s many British firms were producing thick books (no mere brochures these) describing tours down the Rhine or single-destination holidays at the Belgian seaside, priced in guineas. Many postwar offerings followed this pattern, with travel by coach (tour bus) initially more common than by air.

Then international tour operators began booking acres of bed space in new purpose-built hotels on Mediterranean coastlines, offering lowest-common-denominator catering (but with much better facilities than prevailed in the popular British resorts), and focusing on beaches, sunshine, and relaxation while striving to insulate holidaymakers from the shock of parachuting straight into novel cultures. This seemed to some observers to add up to a new form of "mass tourism" that exploited its customers, creating a narrow range of holiday experiences that met existing expectations without broadening horizons. This was a patronizing view, denying the agency of holidaymakers, who were reduced to mere ciphers and whose preferences, as expressed in spectacular growth in demand, were discounted. It rested on more than a century of prejudice, which embraced (for example) the ways in which working-class holidaymakers in England's Blackpool created their own vacation culture by shaping the supply of entertainment to their preferences. What it increasingly ignored was the proliferation of niche markets within the complex world of the travel trade, the variety of uses to which the package holiday might be put, and the access it gave to new commodities and cultural practices. Meanwhile, the state as entrepreneur was setting up resorts of a similar kind in eastern Europe, especially on Romania's Black Sea coast, which attracted East German visitors in growing numbers, and also in France at Languedoc, where Gaullist technocrats promoted futuristic complexes aimed at diverting demand from the Riviera. Moreover, the advent of mass car ownership across Europe opened up the prospect of increasing flexibility through touring holidays while disrupting the routines of older resorts accustomed to captive, sedentary families using amenities clustered around railway stations, and generating all the new problems of parking and traffic management. The older form of mass tourism, the railborne seaside holiday in one's home country with children, fell into decline but not yet terminal collapse, except in the case of ill-endowed provincial resorts that had grown only for want of accessible alternatives.

Overall, the explosion of vacations in Europe after World War II, though prepared by developments between the wars, was a major social phenomenon. The time set aside for vacations increased dramatically, rising to five to six weeks in places like Germany. Class differences remained. Many working-class people did not in fact travel during vacations. The wealthier middle classes sought steadily more exotic destinations. But the importance of the vacation took on unprecedented contours, and also differentiated Western Europe from other advanced industrial societies such as the United States and Japan, where vacation time remained more limited.

The historiography of these phenomena has developed in interesting ways. As the content of this essay suggests, historians have focused more on destinations, technologies, and processes in the tourist industry than on vacations themselves. Serious narratives of the vacation experience, grounding theories in evidence, are in short supply, although Alain Corbin's work on changing ideas about desirable environments to visit has been helpful as an approach to eighteenth-century developments, particularly in France. As the inventor of the seaside holiday and of many aspects of tourism in the modern world, England has been the focus of the most developed historiography. Pimlott's The Englishman's Holiday, a remarkable book by a civil servant first published in 1946, eventually helped to encourage studies of seaside resorts from an urban history perspective, comparing and contrasting towns and coastlines as holiday destinations. The other dominant genre in Britain has been the study of elite tourism in relation to perceptions of landscape and literature, with a strong bias toward the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. France is the other European country with a developed historiography, with more emphasis on the social and political values surrounding the development of vacations and the perceptions and expectations of holidaymakers, themes that are not neglected in the excellent regional studies of holiday destinations by Gabriel Désert and Michel Chadefaud.

As for twentieth-century topics, retrospective glances by sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and planners have been more influential than the scant work by historians, with conspicuous exceptions like Ellen Furlough on France and Nigel Morgan on England. The vacation as a historical theme in its own right would benefit by borrowing and testing insights from the work of John Urry, Jean-Didier Urbain, Rob Shields, and others in sociology, cultural studies, and related disciplines. A social and cultural history of the vacation and its meanings for the vacationers themselves must take due account of race, class, gender, and the sense of self. Vacation genres, such as the honeymoon, cry out for historical analysis, as work on Niagara Falls has shown in the United States, and the themes of liminality and carnival need further exploration in relation to vacations, particularly for eastern and southern Europe. John Pemble's The Mediterranean Passion has shown how subtly and accessibly they might be pursued even within a conventional historical methodology. A strong platform has been built for the vacation as a theme of social history.

See also other articles in this section.

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