Club Méditerranée
Club Méditerranée: a utopia made real?
This text is the updated version of the entry published in the Dictionnaire culturel du sport, edited by Jean Saint-Martin and Michaël Attali, Armand Colin, Paris, 2010.
In 1935, the Ours Blancs (a water polo team composed of White Russians), led by Dimitri Philippoff organised a holiday camp in Calvi. This initial experience inspired their friends, swimmers, and water polo players (Paul Morihien, Gérard Blitz, Tony Hatot, and Mario Lewis). During the Second World War, members of the Racing Club de France water polo team created, with their friends, holiday clubs (1949), the Club Olympique (1950), the Villages Magiques, and ultimately Club Méditerranée. The aim was to combine sports activities and entertainment with transport, accommodation, and catering within an “all-inclusive” package, a village. With these clubs, the promoters were, in a sense, selling a way of life. They did not belong to the traditional bourgeoisie. Their families had recently become rich. Several of them were foreign (Russian, Belgian, Armenian, etc.). They developed an early form of cosmopolitanism through swimming competitions. Most of them had left school early. The package they proposed appealed to a clientele often associated with the new lower middle class and the urban middle class. Their clubs resembled a “successful makeshift arrangement” in that they responded to the aspirations of rising social classes (educated and cultivated) and helped renew leisure activities. Thus, they produced a cluster of social self-promotion and converted their sporting resources. For the most famous of these clubs, its founder, Gérard Blitz, wanted a name that would evoke light, water, and air; for him, the Mediterranean embodied these natural elements. At the beginning of 1950, he asked Tony Hatot to file the statutes of the “Club Méditerranée” association with the prefecture. Both men were champion swimmers, but as Blitz was Belgian, he could not officially serve as the association’s president. During the first summer season, 2,300 holidaymakers gathered in Alcúdia, in the Balearic Islands.
Making so-called “elite” sports such as water skiing accessible to these new holidaymakers illustrated the avant-garde spirit of the early years. Water sports were a central activity: swimming and water polo, of course, but very quickly scuba diving, water skiing, and sailing. In 1954, Gilbert Trigano joined Club Méditerranée as treasurer. In 1956, the association merged with Villages Magiques, supported by Elle magazine. In 1957, with already 22,000 clients known as “Gentils Membres”, Club Méditerranée became a public limited company with variable capital. The 1960s-1970s marked the transition from an association, led above all by amateurs, seeking to make the most of their own way of life, to a multinational established in numerous countries and managed according to modern management practices. In 1963, Edmond de Rothschild became the majority shareholder of what was now a public limited company. In 1966, the company was listed on the Paris Stock Exchange and counted 110,900 clients; four years later, in 1970, the Club acquired its main competitor, the Club Européen du Tourisme (CET). This economic success was accompanied by an image that conveyed values extending far beyond the company’s immediate clientele. Hedonism, abundance, and self-care were ideas very much in line with the aspirations of the post-1968 generation. While the Club developed its range of sporting leisure activities from the 1950s to the 1960s (water sports, volleyball, tennis, horse riding), the 1970s marked the end of this avant-gardism. For example, in 1975, the company was not among the first to offer windsurfing to its clients. Although it provided a wide range of sporting and leisure activities, it was no longer truly a trendsetter. At the same time, the Club also became the symbol of consumer society. As such, it became the object of criticism. It also became famous, to its detriment, through the caricature of it by the Splendid troupe in Les Bronzés, a 1978 film by Patrice Leconte, which helped shape representations of the brand: tactless Gentils Organisateurs, ridiculous clients, etc. Nevertheless, the company continued its global expansion in the 1980s, establishing itself in the United States and then in Asia. It came to be known as Club Med.
The organisation evolved from an artisanal phase to full-scale industrialisation. At the same time, club hotels began to appear, offering the same packages. The number of sports tourism products increased. Competition intensified. Growth eventually stalled: the 1.23 million clients reached in 1993 marked a peak, followed by a period of decline. In 1997, Serge Trigano, the son of Gilbert Trigano, who had been appointed CEO in 1993, was replaced by Philippe Bourguignon. The latter implemented an activity diversification strategy to attract a new clientele. Club Méditerranée became a service-oriented company: Club Med World (catering, entertainment), Club Med Gym, and Club Med Découverte were created. “Oyyo”, a low-cost canvas village for young people, symbolised this attempt to open the market to a less affluent clientele. It was unsuccessful. In 2002, Henri Giscard d’Estaing was appointed Chairman of the Management Board. The “upmarketing” strategy implemented sought to reduce the number of villages and improve service quality by refocusing on a wealthier clientele, often at the expense of employees’ working conditions. This had represented the most loyal share of the Club’s customer base over several decades, enabling it to reach 1.5 million clients in 2019. The COVID-19 crisis, however, impacted this highly international model, based on the premise of “happy globalisation.”
Bibliography
- Raymond Henri, 1960, «Recherches sur un village de vacances», Revue française de sociologie, I, p. 323-333. Online.
- Laurent Alain, Libérer les vacances ?, Seuil, 1973.
- Interview de R. Guinot et M. Joachim. par L. Charles et J. Defrance, janvier 1985, «Quand une philosophie engendre une technique », Culture Technique, n° 13, p. 87-91.
- Réau Bertrand, «S’inventer un autre monde: Le Club Méditerranée et la genèse des clubs de vacances en France (1930-1950)», Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, n°170 décembre 2007, pp. 66-88.
- Raynouard Yves et Peyre Christiane, Histoire et légendes du Club Méditerranée, Le Seuil, 1971.