Une lecon des choses : Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France

This essay examines the intersecting histories of tourism, colonialism, and national identity during the interwar period. It analyzes the 1931 Colonial Exposition, guidebooks to the colonies, and organized tours sponsored by the Touring Club de France to argue that French tourism helped to perform the ideological work of legitimizing the goals and ideology of Greater France. While colonial tourism invited and propelled French people to travel to the colonies—whether on a simulated journey at the exposition, through the imagined geographies and cultures depicted in tourist guidebooks, or in actual travel to the colonies themselves—an important effect was to showcase "touristically relevant" sites and the pleasures of consumer-oriented évasion. Hence, as demands for independence accelerated and were realized, the French tourist industry shed any mention of these destinations as part of the nation and represented the former colonies as exotic yet safe and culturally comfortable (i.e., sufficiently "French") destinations.