The Tourist Invasion
Northern France Tourism
Once the war ended, the urge to travel as a civilian, not a soldier, became strong. In Britain, there was a longing to
escape the austerity of war, socialism and bomb damage. Only a very few, however, were in a position to afford and
arrange such a luxury.
In the late summer of 1945 Winston Churchill, recovering from his defeat in the general
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election, went to stay at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo.
He registered under the nom de guerre of Colonel Warden and
followed `une veritable cure de Pommery Rose I934', to use the words of Monsieur Roger, the chef sommelier, who had
to beg for more supplies.
Britain remained in the grip of rationing for much longer than France, and appeared no closer to pulling itself out
of destitution. The chief obstacle to travel, for those who were prepared to respect the law, was the £25 travel
allowance imposed by the Labour government. More and more Britons began to flout it in their desperation to escape
the greyness and austerity of Attlee's Britain, which, in comparison with France, seemed to have progressed little
beyond Nissen huts, short-back-and-sides and suet pudding. The appeal of Paris fashions, boulevard cafes and
sumptuous food became overwhelming.
From May 1948, American citizens had been allowed to bring home 400 dollars' worth of goods, but the real boom in
tourism began in the summer of 1949. By then, travel arrangements were easier and Europe slightly better prepared.
`We are informed that 3 million tourists are upon us,' wrote Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh in April 1949. `The Ritz
say they have no room until 10th October. `Americans in Europe,' Letitia Baldrige wrote home from her job in the
United States Embassy, `do create harm and ill-will often. I hate to think of the careless, complaining, spoiled
people who flounce through these struggling countries making the Europeans feel even more embittered and
inferiority-complexed.' The main objection among Europeans of the old school, however, seemed to be sartorial.
`You should have seen them in the Ritz here as I did this morning,' Nancy Mitford wrote to Waugh at the end of August,
`all dressed up in beach clothes.'
To greet the invasion of dollar-packing tourists, shops in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore had arranged window
displays on the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. Fresh oranges and bananas symbolized `greed', a point which may have
been lost on tourists from a land of plenty, while at Lanvin `envy' was represented by a headless mannequin in formal
brocade and weighed down with jewellery. Cartier even laid in `gold swizzle sticks at 11,000 francs and a semi-automated
version at 21,000', appliances which horrified the French.
People were drawn to Paris for a combination of reasons, whether shopping, sightseeing, the inspiration and excitement
of the place or simply curiosity. For those who had dreamed of the Montparnasse era, the voice of the nightclub
singer Jacqueline Francois singing `La Vie en Rose' was enough to make them feel `like a young Scott Fitzgerald character
sopping up the romance of Paris'.
The city also symbolized sexual liberty, from the sequinned G-strings of the Folies Bergere to the excitement of
seeing the art student revellers from the Quat'zarts Ball. On the night of 5 July, they swarmed across Montparnasse
`dressed, or rather underdressed,' noted the American ambassador when his car was good-naturedly overrun, `as Indians or
Japanese warriors, with smears of paint, the only visible garments being loin cloths'.
But while the younger American longed for such liberty, his stuffier compatriots expressed shock and disapproval.
French indiscipline political, sexual, hygienic and gastronomic provided subjects for much moral condemnation. In the summer of 1948, the first trickle of tourists criticized the seemingly endless political crisis as one Cabinet
after another failed from July to September. And puritanism was outraged by the waste of grande cuisine at a time when
France as a whole was supposed to be `on welfare handouts'. Even the gastronomic extravagance of the French middle
class struck many of them as immoral, and they did not keep their views to themselves. Often their censure was
influenced by their own inability to cope with rich and unusual food. Laden with remedies for upset stomachs, they
had a horror of squatting over a hole in the floor. Nor was their concern with hygiene helped by the water shortages
in the summer drought of 1949.
The French were not the only ones taken aback by opinionated or self-absorbed tourists. In June 1949, a young American
woman staying at the Ritz rang David Bruce at the United States Embassy to ask him ,to have her mattress changed as it
was too lumpy'. Later Bruce was accosted at a party by a New York model who demanded to be introduced to some
interesting French people because she wanted `to increase her vocabulary'.
Bruce, however, was certainly not stand-offish with the swelling American community in Paris. He made an effort to
go to every soiree vernissage of exhibitions by young American painters however much he disliked their work. One
exhibition which the Bruces attended with more enthusiasm than usual was that of Edward G. Robinson's wife at the
Andre Weill gallery. She was selling her paintings for charity to help rebuild a French village. Over the next
few weeks, while Robinson was filming on the Cote d'Azur, Gladys enjoyed herself in Paris. The Bruces saw her
again for lunch at Maxim's, `slightly over-cocktailed but very funny', before she staggered forth for a fitting
with Marcel Rochas.
Extract from “Paris After The Liberation 1944-1949”, Written by Antony Beevor. Penguin Books, United States of America: 2004.
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