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  • A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town, 1823-2000
  • Caroline Ford
A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town, 1823-2000. By Alice Garner (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2005) 286 pp. $34.95

By 1910, Arcachon/La Teste, a coastal fishing town southwest of Bordeaux, was France's second biggest fishing port and one of its most popular beach resorts. It was not always so. Garner's elegantly written study of the transformation of Arcachon/La Teste explores how the region came to be experienced as what Lefebvre, a social theorist, calls "lived space," in terms of "people's bodily experiences of a place undergoing transformation" (7).1 Garner is certainly not the first to examine the "modernization" of traditional communities or changes in coastal landscapes. Her work, however, is truly innovative with regard to her sources and her wide array of theoretical perspectives. The book draws on geography, spatial theory, maritime history, fine arts, literature, anthropology, tourism/leisure theory, architecture, urban planning, and the history of medicine. Like Corbin and Urbain, Garner explores the new emotional responses of a largely middle-class tourist population to coastal landscapes and how local communities came to be represented, romanticized, and exploited in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Finally, she analyzes the resistance of fishing families to their exoticization and displacement. Her work will particularly interest environmental historians and geographers for its insights about the changes in the coastal landscape itself.

Garner begins her study between the 1820s and 1840s, when the Compagnie des Landes and the Compagnie d'Arcachon set out to "colonize" and develop this hinterland of Bordeaux through engineering projects—including the construction of channels, the plantation of pines, and the stabilization of dunes. Although both companies ultimately went bankrupt, they opened up the region to further development, and they placed communal lands, particularly the area's salt pastures, or prés salés, under assault, introducing the principle and practice of individual ownership where it had not existed before.

The 1850s and 1860s saw the building of railroads, which opened up the region to tourism. Arcachon gradually became a retreat for monied elites seeking solitude and the restorative fresh sea air. Urban spectators commented on their encounter with the landscape and its people in memoirs and letters that Garner carefully analyzes. She shows the way in which the region and its inhabitants were fashioned into objects of middle-class consumption. Garner tells the story of Arcachon's gradual metamorphosis, the building of opulent villas, and the conflict between bathers, municipal authorities, and fishermen over access to the sea in eloquent and meticulously researched detail. Ultimately, this shore became [End Page 112] a holiday resort, a site of consumption, leisure, and contemplation, and not of productive work.

In one of the book's most interesting chapters, "Posing for Posterity," Garner analyzes the visual representations of Arcachon and native fishermen and, especially, fisherwomen through posters, postcards, guidebooks, and illustrations, which helped to create an identity for the region. Arcachon was famous for its oysters and oyster farming, which is still an important business. Photographers depicted this occupation more than any other. The benaize, a form of head covering worn by female oyster diggers, came to symbolize regional tradition, even though oyster farming had developed only after the 1840s. Countless postcards show women, bent over, skirt or trousers hitched to their knees, bare-legged, suggesting an erotic pose. Garner indicates the ways in which these same women subverted the photographer's gaze. Ultimately, however, by World War I, the viewer of such images is left in no doubt that the beach belonged to the visitors, as Arcachon's original inhabitants and their boats were displaced one by one.

What makes A Shifting Shore unique is the way in which Garner not only captures the image of the people of Arcachon as presented by outsiders, but their experiences as well, even though she recognizes that these experiences are often mediated by the texts and photographs of others. In this sense, Garner's book constitutes social and cultural history at its finest. She has delved deeply into the local archives...

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