Enacting Brittany: Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871-1939 by Patrick Young (review)

This substantial study of Brittany and bretonnitude shows the contribution that tourism studies can make to our understanding of the process of modernization in France, which Eugen Weber famously described in his landmark study Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). Of course, as Patrick Young shows here, Weber's work has been superseded, and, thanks to the efforts of Anne-Marie Thiesse (Écrire la France (Paris: PUF, 1991)) and others, we are now able to see that the relationship between centre and periphery in the making of this notoriously centralized country was not a one-way process. In fact Brittany, like other regions, found new ways of articulating local traditions and identities 'under the auspices of modernity and the French nation state' (p. 5). Tourism, Young argues, holds great promise 'as a window onto the larger construction of Breton culture and place particularity in modern times' (p. 5). In his investigation Young draws on a wide range of sources, from government planning and policy, promotional materials and guidebooks, to what he calls the 'intricate dynamics of tourist encounter' (p. 8). These encounters might be recorded in travel narratives, visitors' diaries, or in letters of complaint to the Fédération des syndicats d'initiative de Bretagne, either from travellers who feel short-changed, or even exploited (p. 125), or from locals who do not wish to be photographed by tourists (p. 129). Young's key sites of 'tourist exchange' are costume and heritage festivals, religious pardons, and natural landscapes, and he shows how reinvented festivals have enacted a shared Breton inheritance, deliberately trading on the region's picturesque reputation (p. 71). He briefly addresses Breton nationalism's dismissal of such festive manifestations as mere 'folklore', but stops short of exploring the ways in which tourism depoliticizes difference. Unfortunately, the French language poses a problem throughout this book, as French words and phrases are too often disfigured by typographical or grammatical errors. While it is a pity to have to read quotations from Stendhal's Mémoires d'un touriste (1854) or Pierre-Jakez Hélias's Cheval d'orgueil (1975) in translation, the use of English becomes problematic in the case of key lexis, whose equivalents are not always exact — for example, 'sauvage' and 'savage'. Despite these shortcomings, Young has created a remarkable work of synthesis that will be a valuable resource for all those interested in Brittany, France, travel writing and tourism, and postcolonial studies. And he has demonstrated beyond doubt that it is impossible to answer the question 'What kind of cultural specificity and difference vis-à-vis the rest of France would Brittany have today?' without taking the role of tourism into account.