Introduction

Wednesday July 20, 2022, Menton. After a night during which the thermometer did not dip below 28°C, the day is suffocating under the domineering sun. One “tropical night” after another is doing its job of selling air conditioning systems, as are the scorching days. Sunshine and humidity reach record levels, drought too. The threat of fire looms large. The only solution: sea bathing in water at 27.5°C which, by contrast, seems refreshing, provided you avoid the jellyfish. The media warn of heatstroke, and there is much talk of hyperthermia or dehydration. Yet tourists seem to be getting used to this atmosphere. They are everywhere: on the beach, in the pedestrianized streets, in the shops, on the trains, on the roads. Getting around is complicated. Behind the wheel, I resent these hordes who drive slowly, get lost, park anywhere, cause traffic jams, pollute and prevent me from parking. I get angry, I swear, tired of the noise and the heat. All non-southern license plates are hostile to me, and I have no qualms about honking at the first deviation. I feel invaded. I’m trying to show that I’m different from the idiots who come to throw themselves into this trap set by consumer society. In the street, I quicken my pace and walk in a hurry to mark my difference from the indolent, idle masses. My neighbors, like me, have only one desire: to leave, to escape from this crowded furnace, especially as incivilities within our residence are multiplying, especially around the swimming pool, by strangers renting (clandestinely?) studios or apartments. They are watched like a hawk. Everyone vigilant! Airbnb is in the crosshairs. Finally, like many other natives, I flee and take refuge at altitude. In less than two hours, I go from over 30°C to under 15°C, reaching Isola 2000, where there is hardly anyone around, which confirms the imbecility of the packed coastal crowds. I feel much smarter than them on my mountain peaks.

Friday October 14, 2022, Nice-Riquier station, TER 86037 arriving at 12:41 p.m. from Cannes-La Bocca and bound for Ventimiglia. The platform is packed. The atmosphere is still summery. The sun is out and so are the tourists. English is being spoken more than French on the quay, and it has to be said that the off-season is exceptional. The North Americans are out in force to visit Monaco. The professionals are rubbing their hands, the TER (regional express train) users a little less so, those who are going to work in the Principality or who, like me, are returning from a morning’s work in Nice. The train arrives. We let a few passengers off and quickly try to squeeze into the carriages, but it soon becomes clear: this train is packed. We push to get on. Flip-flops, sliders and other sandals collide with loafers and pumps. Board shorts brush up against suits. Backpacks languish alongside beach tote bags. In the midst of such a crush, a small lady in her 50s tries to find a seat and keeps repeating: “What are all these tourists doing here? Make them go home!” The locals, most of whom work across the border and regularly have to deal with delays, cancellations or strikes, nod in silence, me first.

So I’m an everyday touristophobe. However, I decided to write this book to try to understand these reactions and put myself on the tourists’ side. For I am one, of course, on vacation in Amsterdam, Ireland or the Massif Central. How could I not feel a little compassion for the queues in front of the ticket machines at Nice-Ville station, which force visitors to wait for long periods or even, on many occasions, to catch the next train half an hour later? Or in the face of all those summertime scams, in the face of all those shopkeepers who raise their prices and treat them like cash cows, in the face of all those natives who do not necessarily welcome them very well, as they come to spend their money here? But do tourists deserve to be defended? Aren’t there far more noble and serious causes, such as the sick, the poor, disabled people, suffering children or women, human rights, the victims of terrorism, discrimination, disaster or famine, etc.? All year round, the media cover dramatic events in Bangladesh, Haiti, the Sahel, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Turkey, Syria and elsewhere.

We are constantly stirred to have compassion and, faced with such a spectacle of the world, it is reasonable to think that tourists are not to be pitied the most. They are having a good time, while part of the population is under house arrest, while in our rich countries part of the population cannot go on vacation. Moreover, there is no humanitarian association, NGO or tourist rights league to defend them; no media action to denounce their conditions; no revolt or rebellion on their part in tourist resorts. While some of the actions of locals can be seen as forms of xenophobia, tourists are in no way in the same situation as migrants, who are criminalized, raped, locked up, extorted or risking their lives. Some even disguise themselves as tourists to cross borders. For example, Ventimiglia’s “human rights defenders” “provide migrants with suitcases on wheels, sunglasses, beach towels, tourist guides or French novels, all things that might make them ‘pass for’ tourists at a checkpoint”1. Here, on the French–Italian border, several worlds rub shoulders: that of the border workers who move from one country to another on a daily basis without a care in the world; that of the tourists who cross the border in anticipation of discovery; and that of the migrants who stumble across it, risking their lives. The summer spectacle of tanned, happy tourists crossing paths with resigned migrants does not encourage us to defend the former.

Isn’t it a form of quixotism to take the side of tourism and tourists, a word so negatively connoted that it is difficult to admit to being one, or to apologize for having been one? Is this not an untenable and totally irrational position, given that tourism has, since its beginnings, been the target of damning allegations and unappealable judgments condemning or mocking the practices of those who practice it: panurgism, depravity, degradation of landscapes, congestion of places, etc.? To use Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s reflections, “there are few things in our civilization that have been so thoroughly mocked and so diligently criticized” (1996). The Covid-19 pandemic only increased the prosperity of tourism bashing, while raising awareness of tourism’s influence in our economies. But it is worth noting that 9/11, as well as the attacks in Bali and Mombasa (Kenya) in 2002 had already prompted some, such as Gérald Messadié (2003, p. 11), to question tourism and predict its decline. Turning your nose up at tourism is as old as tourism itself, as Jean-Didier Urbain (1991) and James Buzard (1993) have shown in their remarkable works, as well as, in another register, Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut who dedicated a long chapter to tourism in their delightful essay Au coin de la rue l’aventure (1979). Their subversive joy in discrediting anti-tourist clichés, through singularly brilliant formulas, demonstrates the thousand ways in which the tourist has been mocked.

Common sense in Western bourgeois culture, perhaps particularly in France (Iribarne 2006), places tourism on the side of the vulgar, the unrefined, the decadent. Associated with hedonism, it has something infantile about it. As an object of study, it is obscene in its triviality, in the crudity and lack of modesty of the bodies revealed on the beaches, in the sexuality which has developed around vacations (Littlewood 2001), supposedly and fantasmatically in the tropics (Cocks 2013, p. 127 ff.), by the inappropriateness or inconsistency of many practices (shopping, lazing about, etc.). Can we still support tourism, at a time of climate disruption and the energy crisis, which is based on “useless” mobility that jeopardizes our future? The question has become a moral one. Isn’t it wrong to travel when this mobility isn’t necessary? Wouldn’t we all be well-advised today to be Stoics and follow Pascal in his Thoughts (1669, Diversion, no. 139), declaring that “all of men’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room”? The choice to be a tourist has thus become untenable and immoral.

Is the tourist an outsider? In the 19th century, the focus was on train users, who embodied the passivity of tourists and the invasion of territories by the travel industry. Today, guilt has changed fashion with flygskam, or flight shame, the shame of taking a plane for reasons deemed futile, associated with the promotion of the train. Tourist behavior is therefore neither normal nor moral, all the more so since tourism is fully assimilated with consumer society, accused of propagating a conformist mass culture and subjected to mind-numbing media (television, radio, magazines, Internet, blogs, social networks, etc.). Today’s tourist is thus a mass being within “mass tourism”, an expression describing a set of notions, images and myths corresponding to a situation that came into being from the 1950s onwards, although the expression was already attested to in 19232. The creation of the “tourism” class on Air France in 1952 demonstrated the access of a new clientele to air transport, one that was being installed in the back of planes, in denser cabins. The problem at the heart of tourismophobia, then as now, is that of mass.

And yet, on closer inspection,...