With the sociologist Jean Viard, director of research at the CNRS, on the occasion of the spring holidays, we are talking today about this new trend which seems to be taking hold in the habits of the French: leaving close to home.
franceinfo: We no longer necessarily want to fly to the end of the world, Jean Viard. Is it linked to the Covid no doubt and then also in part, to ecological concern?
John Viard: So it’s always complicated. We are talking about holidays, at the same time, there is the war, there is the Covid and the presidential election. At the same time, this is what is fascinating in societies, it is that we are totally caught up in these contradictions. But hey, there you go, afterwards, it’s true, there’s going to be a vacation. Some are already on vacation, since it is by region and spread out. There has been a fundamental movement for some time to realize that one does not have to go to the end of the world to be out of place. This is a phenomenon that we have already observed for 20 or 30 years.
But it’s true that with the pandemic, basically, we haven’t gone far from these choices. Firstly because I was not allowed to move around, but also because basically, if you tell yourself if I am sick, I prefer to be at home, I prefer to speak the “right” language in the hospital to understand what I’m being told. As a result, it developed a local regional activity which was often a little more than excursions, day trips.
There is a fundamental movement and there, if we look at the reservations, for example for next summer, with the rise in the price of gasoline, we can clearly see that there are people who calculate to make wholesale a return trip with a full tank. If you live in Paris, this year there are more reservations in Brittany and Normandy than on the Mediterranean coast or south of Bordeaux, where you need two or three full tanks of gas.
It also saves money…
But of course, it saves money. This modifies the strategies, because it is clear that in traveling, the idea is all the same that on vacation, we first go close to home, because it is cheaper. The Marseillais rarely go to Brittany. People from Bordeaux mainly go to the coast, below their homes. You always have to remember one thing, there are only those “poor Parisians”, if I may say so, who have neither the sea nor the mountains, but the other French people, that is to say when even the bulk of society has either the sea or the mountains close to home. Most people go on vacation where it’s the least far, because obviously it costs less.
So the direct result is that we all rediscover our territory, our plural territories. And maybe it’s also a good thing for our attachment to our country?
France has always been a country where we first stayed on vacation at home. Not only because, historically, holidays were invented in France, but also because France is a country in which there are mountains, different seas, completely different landscapes, whether you take Alsace, or the Basque Country, Corsica etc, you are on the diversity of situation which means that, on the whole, it is not always worth going far.
After the distant trip, he has either financial reasons, for example, you are going to the Maghreb, to Morocco, because in fact, the stays are cheaper, because people are paid less, because the economy , indeed, is very differentiated, either you have a tourism of discovery: having gone to New York, having gone to London, which is part of learning about the world. It is important to imagine these different types of travel, and it is true that the pandemic has redeveloped local travel.
Each country has different traditions. Italians have always visited other cities in their country a lot. It’s very regionalized, Italy, including the people, rarely change regions, but on the other hand, they went to visit Naples, Rome. They love their cities which are extraordinarily beautiful. The Germans, after reunification, started visiting the cities because there was the whole part that had been banned since the war, it goes both ways. So there has been a big development of internal tourism.
And it’s true that France has always had a rather hexagonal tourism, but hexagonal towards the coasts and the snow. However, there is a development of urban tourism, and in particular Airbnb, at the moment, plays a big role in the development because you can find accommodation anywhere, where there are no hotels, and so suddenly you see Japanese, English, French people from the North arriving in a small village where we have never seen a tourist. There are also all these diffusion phenomena which reinforce the demand for proximity, which has shaken up the pandemic.