Enacting Brittany

Efforts to preserve, display and promote Breton cultural differences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a significant advance in heritage tourism, and a departure from what is commonly perceived to be a French intolerance of cultural diversity within its borders. This book explores the means by which key actors - middle class associations, businesses, governmental bodies, cultural intermediaries - pursued tourist development in the region and the effect this had on Breton cultural identification. Beyond those interested in the history of French tourism, this study will also be invaluable to historians and social scientists concerned with understanding the dynamics involved in the emergence of mass tourism, its causes and consequences in particular locales in the present as well as in the past.

Patrick Young is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

Introduction; 1: From Romance to Patrimony: Breton Culture and 'Originality' in the Nineteenth Century; 2: Tourism, Culture and Place in a Changing Brittany, 1860-1914; 3: "La Bretagne, au sein de son passé": Dilemmas of Tourist Modernity in the French Countryside; 4: Refashioning Breton Costume; 5: Of Pardons, Loss and Longing: Breton Religious Processions in an Age of Tourism and Cultural Change; 6: A Tasteful Patrimony: Landscape Preservation and Tourism in Brittany; 7: From Terre du Passé to Modern Leisure Ground? Brittany in an Age of Mass Tourism; Changing Contexts of Bretonnitude, from Vichy to European Union and Globalization