France took a step that inadvertently elevated the standard of tourism by creating the world’s first Ministry of Culture in 1959. The newly elected President Charles de Gaulle wanted to revive and enhance French culture. He appointed the writer André Malraux the first minister of culture, with a mandate to give the public free access to the culture of France. The hyperactive Malraux jumped into the job. With equal doses of imagination and egalitarianism, Malraux assembled a bureaucracy to register, repair and recover all that was considered France’s patrimony or national heritage.
Malraux built on the work begun a hundred years earlier by Prosper Mérimée, also an author, who as France’s inspector-general of monuments spent over eighteen years listing and protecting France’s historic masterpieces. He blocked locals from destroying masterpieces, saving 4,000 buildings by classifying them as historical monuments, including the bridge at Avignon and the basilica at Vézelay. Malraux institutionalized this preservation and went further by getting laws passed requiring the centuries-old buildings to be cleaned. And he declared that, if at all possible, these gorgeous buildings and monuments had to be open to the public—French and foreign alike.
Under Malraux, the French museum system became one of the most expansive in the world. Paris alone seems to add a new major museum every decade: the then-audacious Centre Georges Pompidou, which included the National Museum of Modern Art, opened in 1977; the Musée d’Orsay was a masterful 1986 conversion of a Beaux-Arts railroad station into the permanent home of the country’s collection of Impressionist paintings, and most recently the Quai Branly Museum of indigenous art was inaugurated in 2006.
That is just a portion of the cultural world opened up by the new ministry. From the beginning, Malraux was keen on establishing and supporting arts festivals around the country: music in Aix-en-Provence, photography in Perpignan, film in Cannes. The aim was to raise the profile of French culture; the result fifty years later was a multimillion-dollar cultural tourism business.
Malraux built on the work begun a hundred years earlier by Prosper Mérimée, also an author, who as France’s inspector-general of monuments spent over eighteen years listing and protecting France’s historic masterpieces. He blocked locals from destroying masterpieces, saving 4,000 buildings by classifying them as historical monuments, including the bridge at Avignon and the basilica at Vézelay. Malraux institutionalized this preservation and went further by getting laws passed requiring the centuries-old buildings to be cleaned. And he declared that, if at all possible, these gorgeous buildings and monuments had to be open to the public—French and foreign alike.
Under Malraux, the French museum system became one of the most expansive in the world. Paris alone seems to add a new major museum every decade: the then-audacious Centre Georges Pompidou, which included the National Museum of Modern Art, opened in 1977; the Musée d’Orsay was a masterful 1986 conversion of a Beaux-Arts railroad station into the permanent home of the country’s collection of Impressionist paintings, and most recently the Quai Branly Museum of indigenous art was inaugurated in 2006.
That is just a portion of the cultural world opened up by the new ministry. From the beginning, Malraux was keen on establishing and supporting arts festivals around the country: music in Aix-en-Provence, photography in Perpignan, film in Cannes. The aim was to raise the profile of French culture; the result fifty years later was a multimillion-dollar cultural tourism business.
And so it went for several decades. Decisions and innovations of the French government, somehow, eventually provided the undergirding of the classic tourism industry of today. Tourism officials told me repeatedly, “This was done without regard to tourism,” while relating how critical some innovation had been for tourism.
- Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment