ADVERTISING PROVENCE: TOURISM, THE PLM AND THE REGIONALIST MOVEMENT ANNE DYMOND Lorsqu’une locomotive pourra transporter Paris en quelques heures dans toutes les extrémités de la France, les Provençaux ne tarderont pas à devenir Parisiens. Taxile Delord, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, 1841. Although little studied, tourist posters played a role in the creation and maintenance of both regional and national identities in the Third Republic. The development of the French railway system has long been decried by regionalists and others as a central element in the homogenization of French cultural life. Yet the role of the tourism was more complex. It was praised by some regionalists as both an economic necessity and of significant cultural value for the region. Provençal regionalists believed that displaying their region for the tourist gaze would encourage a renewed regional pride and consequently aid the longed for cultural renaissance. Moreoever, the sudden onslaught of large-format colour travel posters after 1890 seductively selling the southern coast introduced a new means of visualizing and knowing the distant reaches of the nation. 1 Such posters worked in concert with governmental programs designed to encourage a national knowledge of the diverse regions of France to strengthen national identity. Yet the advertising poster also provided the Provençal regionalist movement a means of asserting its own version of cultural identity and thus was one tactic used in the ongoing reconfiguration of the relation between Paris and ‘la province’. 2 Although colour lithography had been available from the mid-nineteenth century, it was not until the 1880s that new laws liberalizing the press allowed 1 Eugen Weber, ‘In Search of the Hexagon’, in My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 64 discusses how vague visual conceptualizations of the nation were. On the popularization of maps as a form of knowing the nation, see Patrick Young, ‘La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire: The Touring Club de France and the French Regions, 1890-1918’, in Histories of Leisure, edited by Rudy Koshar (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p. 173. 2 As Julian Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France 1890-1914: Jean Charles-Brun and French Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003) has shown, support for regionalism was not confined to the political right, and was found in a very wide range of political beliefs, united against a centralist model of government. Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 50 No. 1, Spring 2011 05 Dymond 28/01/2011 09:44 Page 44