Alps

The Alps: the name resonates in the history of tourism as the symbol of something magical, a place for happiness, enjoyment, admiration, rest, and expectancy. It gives tangible form to the attractiveness of a space that, scorned and shunned for many years, became, at the end of the 18th century, a multi-purpose playground for populations avid for entertainment and leisure. From mountaineering to hiking, from thermalism to wellness, from winter sports to outdoor music festivals, it is accompanied by sometimes brutal interventions at the sites of the activities. In constantly updated forms, whether in summer or winter, the Alps illustrate the power of the tourism industry and the excesses it imposes on them. Their depletion is now a major concern. Will they survive the era of climate change?

The very beginning

It was not the existence of thermal waters, known since the Middle Ages, that made the Alps the cradle of tourism. It should rather be said that this region was a major driver of tourism. Tourism was not born here – cities, the coast, rivers, and lakes had already experienced similar phenomena in various forms since Antiquity, but it flourished here with astonishing dynamism. Visiting areas that are difficult to access, isolated, sparsely populated, even dangerous if you are unfamiliar with the landscape, and even hateful in the winter, when the abundant cold, snow, and ice do little to arouse any desire to go there and spend time there. However, travellers did not refrain from crossing them when necessary. But this was to reach brighter, more welcoming lands such as Italy, the Mediterranean, and the South. You pass through the Alps; you do not stop there unless you have no choice. Pleasure sits uneasily with such an uninviting topography.

Is it possible to date the first stirrings that announced a different perception? Because crossing the Alps also leads you to look at them and question them. The affirmation of the notion of “sublime” in the 17th century is undoubtedly a serious indicator. Shared by several poets, scholars, and philosophers who embarked on the continental Grand Tour, this aesthetic feeling that links horror to fascination, fear, and respect is evoked by the sight of the mountains. Beyond astonishment, it evokes an emotion that transcends beauty and touches the grandeur of the inaccessible. On his way to Italy in 1701, the English statesman and writer, Joseph Addison, described what he felt as he crossed the Alps: “[they] fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror.” If horror, or what is considered to be horror, can be accompanied by something agreeable, it is because the Alpine space offers desirable aspects, or, at the very least, positive ones. The refinement of the concept continued with the advent of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and, with the pre-Romantics, and especially the Romantics in the 19th century, culminated in the acceptance of excess “which elevates Man above himself”. In the 18th century, the idea became even clearer through the work interest of scholars such as Scheuchzer, de Haller, Deluc, and de Saussure, who, in their exploration of the Alps, discovered a scientific object that helped them understand the creation of the world. Associating a learned description with emotion paved the way for a conquest that British, then European, mountaineers brought to life by scaling the summits, showing the human capacity to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals. Nicolas Giudici rightly saw in these convergences the birth of an “immaterial economy”, contemporary with the “industrial revolution”, which overturned methods of manufacturing and communication, and with the political one, which set methods of governing on a new course. This conjunction of factors is not insignificant. It reveals the profound upheavals that impacted the Western world at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. This validation of height indeed expresses an ideal of domination that, from that point on, accompanied the emerging industrialisation: faith in progress and science, confidence in the power of human “ingeniousness” and merit. The mountain gradually becomes a source of attraction because it offers inspiration, emotion, power, experiences, and spectacle.

Are feeling, experimenting, and climbing therefore associated with pleasure? They are partly so, insofar as the sublime brings fascination into contact with horror, observation shows what the mountain can reveal, and mountaineering places effort alongside achievement. The boundary between feelings can become very blurred. The historian Marc Boyer establishes a list of four criteria that led the Alps to become a tourist destination:

• The criterion of verticality, initially spatial: the higher, or the deeper, the place, the more it merits a visit. The altitude of the peaks, the depths of the gorges, the heights of the bell towers, naves, and towers abound in accounts.
• Temporal verticality follows the same line: the older it is, the more the tourist should marvel at it. Many Alpine religious sites benefit from this rule.
• “Intra-uterine happiness”, as psychologists put it, accounts for the choices of some tourists seeking a return to the peace and tranquillity of the maternal womb. This sentiment, strongly linked to Rousseau, is felt with emotion in the Charmettes valley near Chambéry.
• The anecdotal criterion is also relevant. Guides- whether people or books – know that tourists are attentive to what they are told on site about what once happened there. Anecdotes move and thrill. Switzerland has William Tell; Chamonix and Zermatt have their own collection of Alpine adventures to recount (Boyer, 2004, p. 26).

In the form of letters, correspondence, or poems, travel writing, and the first travel guides, happily disseminated information and feelings in bulk. They presented the methods of transport used, the places passed through, the characters encountered, the lodgings frequented, as well as what was seen and what should be seen. Goethe is a perfect example of this. His writing summarises the attraction the Alps held over Europe’s elites in the last third of the 18th century. His interest in the Alps lies not in the “human” reality, even if height affects the inhabitants’ psychology, but rather in the “great scenes of nature”, endowed with a specific flavour that gives visitors the feeling of being greater themselves. These accounts do not omit the “reality” of a terrain which, on the one hand, offers the luminous sides of a dazzling nature that reveals the sublime, but which, on the other hand, also shows, despite technical and material improvements, the difficulties of access and travel, not to mention those that weigh upon the lives of its inhabitants. Discovering the mountains means plunging into the unknown. Its appeal cannot be conceived without a share of risks that are difficult to evaluate and only moderately controllable.

The conclusion is no less enlightening. From a frightening world, the Alps become a world that is “desired” and “loved” because they bring together what lends the sublime its reality. Seeing the Alps clearly means coming into contact with the majestic and the terrifying, but it also means imagining seductive and enriching forms of travel.

System

This tourist “invention” of the Alps follows a chronology that varies by region and the areas it penetrates. In this contagious effect, transport methods play a central role. Already perceptible by the time the Napoleonic wars ended, the first phase of tourism cannot be dissociated from the arrival of the railway in the 1840s. Lower costs, shorter distances, and improved accessibility: all contributed to making the “railway revolution” of the nineteenth century a condition for the “tourism revolution”. The railway line leads to the destination while creating it. Companies quickly recognised the benefits of travel for pleasure: increased traffic, new flows, and new financial revenue.
However, this approach only considers part of the profound transformations brought about by leisure travel. An indisputable sign of the material, technical, cultural, and economic changes sweeping across Western societies in the second half of the 19th century, tourism only has meaning if it is itself capable of forging the instruments that enable all these needs to be met. In this respect, it must also be conceived as an activity equipped with a technical, commercial, financial, and logistical framework that delivers the safety, comfort, entertainment, pleasure, and speed sought by the clientele, whose numbers continued to grow. These constraints were all the more pronounced because they operated within an international context still marked by limited standardisation of services, convergence of tastes, and the circulation of knowledge. In other words, the connection between the expression of an expanding social demand (the attraction for leisure travel) and its material realisation (the organisation of the journey) required the fitting out of structures capable not only of catering to this demand, but also of rendering it possible in real terms through the provision of information, the coordination of transport, the planning of the stay in the host countries, and the assurance of returning home. In this sense, tourism should be understood as a system integrating all the components required for its material realisation, from supply to demand and vice versa.

With the publication of the first travel guides in the early 19th century, the tourism system gained a key tool in the diffusion of knowledge: road conditions, accommodation quality, classification of sites, descriptions of hikes, announcements of new destinations, all included with prices, distances, locations, historical notes, safety information, exchange rates, etc., in short, everything that would enable an individual to find their way through the profusion of Alpine spaces. The development of guides, as much as their diversification, attests to the enthusiasm for Alpine tourism. For example, between 1863 and 1913, the German publisher Baedeker published 25 English-language editions of his guide to Switzerland and the neighbouring parts of Savoie and Italy, with the number of pages exceeding 450. The record was perhaps set by Alexander Gregory’s practical guide, which ran to 54 editions between 1856 and 1910. Tourist literature became both commonplace and necessary for anyone wishing to venture along Alpine routes.

Alongside the publication of travel guides, which described in advance the physical and practical configurations of the country visited, and also the information provided by railway companies (particularly timetables), travel agencies gave form to efforts to build a genuine technology enabling tourism to function in the very best conditions, to aspire to an international impact. Their appearance in the mid-19th century testifies both to the strength and the limits of the railway companies. They lent a decisive impetus to the conquest of the Alps. They marked a genuine industrialisation of Alpine tourism by devoting themselves to integrating a new clientele, one less wealthy and less socially integrated into networks of knowledge than the tourists of the first half of the 19th century. Very soon, recognising the effects on traffic, they adopted many initiatives to develop leisure travel. While, from this perspective, they met a demand that grew as personal experiences accumulated and spread, they also showed, very early on, a dynamism that can be interpreted as characteristic of a supply-driven policy.

The most striking example is the agency created by Thomas Cook in 1841. After developing his business in the British Isles, he turned to the continent, organising an exploratory journey into the Swiss Alps in 1863, followed by many others. He quickly conquered other destinations and became a leading player in the development of Alpine tourism. Henry Lunn’s agency devoted itself more specifically to developing winter sports, organising stays in several resorts and buying stakes in hotels. In reference to the great movement of the emergence of winter sports, François Walter does not hesitate to speak of a change in paradigm: “winter, as a constraint, would disappear in favour of playful winter”. (Walter, 2014, p. 297)

Having become a centre offering multiple interests, the Alps acquired the attributes that made them usable: transport adapted to the rugged topography (rack railways, funiculars, cable transport, cable cars, etc.), hotels imposing themselves into the landscape, cultural and sporting practices based on thrills (mountaineering, hiking), medical establishments for the afflicted (sanatoriums), and features in the landscape overlooking the void or framing a viewpoint (belvederes, panoramas, orientation tables). The affirmation of a winter hedonism was marked, in this respect, by the extension, even the creation, of the tourist season. Hotels normally opened from May to September but could host their guests from December to March. Hence, their unreserved support for the development of winter tourism, committing themselves at tourist offices to fit out skiable slopes and ice rinks, build ski lifts, and organise races. A genuine staging of the Alps translated this enthusiasm, carrying along with it, sometimes with a slight delay, local populations, mountain residents, or inhabitants of the plains, who struggled to grasp the economic and material potential. However, it also revealed the first signs of resistance. By turning it into a playground, there was a risk that the Alps would disappear under developers’ ambitions. Social and political pressure was such that many projects were abandoned, the most famous being the plan to build a railway line to the summit of the Matterhorn. Artists, mountaineers, and mountain guides joined forces in 1905 to halt what they deemed a sacrilege.

Ruptures and strains in the reign of “white gold”

The First World War brought this momentum to an abrupt halt. Hotels stood empty, mountains were abandoned, funiculars fell silent, developers were left dismayed, construction projects were suspended, casinos closed, and bandstands went mute: tourism became little more than the repository of a paradise already felt to have been lost. For those generations whose point of reference remained the Belle Époque, the subsequent recovery could only seem bitterly disappointing. Once war had broken out, certainties and uncertainties coexisted, and this climate endured until the end of another conflict that would erupt thirty years later. However, these dark years were punctuated by occasional brief periods of respite. Decimated in many places, Alpine tourism revived as soon as conditions stabilised. The years 1923, 1926–1929, and 1936–1939 again saw tourists return in large numbers, enjoying not only mountains and lakes in summer, but also snow-covered landscapes that were increasingly accessible in winter. The picture was therefore mixed, but the trend was towards expectation, reaction, and defence. For a long time, the return to the “good years” remained the focus, the ridgeline to conquer that, despite all your efforts, grew more distant the closer you believed yourself to it.

After a brief period of adjustment, the end of the Second World War paved the way for an unprecedented period of prosperity, which textbooks describe as thirty glorious years, to which one might add, so far as tourism is concerned, a further three decades which were more unpredictable, yet generally just as lucrative. Although the sector has experienced several downturns since 1973, its overall momentum continued to strengthen. The Alps remained a favoured destination, but they now faced growing competition. Exoticism could no longer be reduced to eating fondue or hearing the Alpine horn. They had to secure their place within an increasingly accessible world.

This renewed dynamism was based on a major transformation affecting travel more broadly. Thanks to the diversification of its forms and practices, and the boom in private motor vehicles and commercial aviation, it also benefited from rising living standards, enabling new segments of the population to stay in establishments their parents could not have afforded and to reach places once reserved for a handful of adventurers.

For many, these new points of reference were closely associated with the American way of life, which came to be seen as a benchmark. The influx of American tourists into Western Europe played a major role in the post-war tourism boom. This clientele favoured more fast-paced modes of travel and consumed landscapes and spectacles with particular intensity. In doing so, it helped shape subsequent generations of tourists—more cosmopolitan, and more diverse in their financial means—inclined to seek emotion through initiatives combining music, theatre, and film festivals, sporting events, and the pursuit of wellbeing, or even through business tourism as a source of brief moments of respite.

It is true that the long-term “massification” of tourism products, together with the vertical integration pursued by producers seeking to control the process, led to broad homogenisation and standardisation—not to mention the gradual depletion of destinations. However, in counterpoint, this trend also reveals a capacity for distinction and renewal. Behind standardisation lies both producers’ deliberate effort to channel ever-larger crowds into consuming an increasingly diversified range of products, and the sector’s parallel ability to refresh its offer by incorporating new clienteles—whether disenchanted with established formats or previously left at the margins of the market. The emergence of “fun” board sports and the rise of wellness, for example, helped revive many winter resorts, which, in the 1980s, began to experience saturation and waning interest among younger generations weary of their parents’ traditional downhill skiing. The Alps became a particularly vivid expression of this drive for creativity and reinvention. In this respect, Alpine tourism is also a generational phenomenon: from snowboarding to mountain biking, the palette of new activities is vast. If “inventing the customer” demands continuous effort on the part of tourism promoters and equipment manufacturers, this challenge derives from the convergence between, on the one hand, the emphasis on the consumer’s singularity and, on the other, their fundamentally ordinary character.

The clouds darkening the future of Alpine tourism are well known: climate disruption, greenhouse effects, and pollution combine to weigh upon a sector in search of new momentum. Is hiking still prudent when mountains are threatened by the melting of glaciers and the disappearance of permafrost? Will skiing remain possible without snow? There are so many questions without any clear answers. “Soft”, responsible, ethical—or more broadly ecotourism—seek to give new meaning to what increasingly appears as a presumed right to enjoy mountain landscapes. Will they be enough?

Laurent Tissot

Bibliography

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