Religious Tourism in Europe

 

I – Walking new paths

Since participating in the ‘Crossroads of Europe’ event almost a year ago in Pavia, Italy, I have felt a lingering hunger within me. The religious routes all came together, certainly, but they were only really invited to talk about figures and technical things. So as I get ready for the second Crossroads edition, this time in Toulouse, I wanted to take a look at how religious tourism is presented, often above the religions themselves, on the European stage.

Print

I am always delighted to find in my letterbox a paper envelope containing a journal printed in ink, with colour photographs to make my mind wander. A journal I can pick out, leaf through, leave on the table, pick up again when I please, then stow away in my library where it will remain for however many years conversing with the novels that, by sharing that space, it will discover and, I hope, will penetrate and pollute it. This is the unfathomable mystery of libraries, where secret dramas are played out that cause the texts to change by the time we pick them up again years after we deposited them there. This sounds a little contradictory of me, I know! I am of course perfectly accustomed to the intangible: I fill digital space unapologetically, often quite repetitively, and the publications I subscribe to have also submitted to it; they have become downloadable. So I take them with me in virtual folders where they no longer see another soul, where they do not even know if they exist in reality or what relation they have with the people who wrote their words. All the same, I hope that they meet some spy software which is trying to ascertain whether they are plotting to destabilise the world or not. If everyone really knew the true power of the written word, and remembered the revolutionary role played by the first works to come off the presses, there would be many more spy programmes around!

This is all to say a sincere thank you to Gaëlle de la Brosse for two reasons: for thinking of me retired away in Strasbourg and for making me want to look through an issue – a special edition, as they are called – which walks us down new, contemporary pilgrimages  

I am also grateful to Luca Bruschi for suggesting I write an article on spirituality, purification of the route and the water, thus harking back to our roots when the springs themselves were a pilgrimage site and a place of purification. So, I am preparing to show this connection between a number of European routes. This article will come out in the next issue of the Revue Via Francigena, which will be presented on 8 June in Colle di Val d’Elsa. These two events coinciding, I was forced to retrace my steps and fill this hole left in me by the Pavia presentations.

Arriving at Santiago de Compostela Cathedral

Twenty-five years

Twenty-five years after! Twenty-five years of frenzied searching for toil and for dialogue, a relentless daily celebration of sharing and exchange undertaken by millions, no, tens of millions of pilgrims and walkers. And then, it must be said, genuine disappointment over a basically diplomatic celebration of European cultural routes in front of the Santiago deCompostela Cathedral last October. A rather eerie celebration, far removed from the pilgrims themselves and the associations which help them take on this difficult undertaking and help give them a boost along the way. Is this better than nothing?

It did, however, provide plenty of nostalgia for the inaugural and 20^th anniversary celebrations when the square outside Santiago de Compostela Cathedral was packed with people and listened to young people in a mixture of English, French, Galician and Castilian; longing for the exposition, which sadly could not be moved elsewhere, that symbolised all of our shared values and all the routes created over all these years; and finally longing for the roads marked with the names of all the European routes, in all European languages: ephemeral yet unforgettable moments.

October 2007. Young people preparing for the reading of the Declaration

It is a difficult feeling to describe, created by all of these occasions, which grew so much stronger each day that October as we went back to our roots under the banners of the Olive Tree, the Euro-Mediterranean Phoenicians, or even the Cluniac monks.

Times have changed and so too have the objectives: more economic now, certainly, and geared toward the need to convince decision-makers that order and methodology have taken priority over the spontaneity of a democratic success which places all the importance on the users! Have we now become merely pilgrimage tour operators, to the extent that we no longer celebrate except to welcome top-level officials rather than for the images, memories and the imagination of a Europe on the move?

October 2007, Europe is the Way exposition

Pilgrimages have been part of the very definition of Hospitality since the beginning. “It has long been considered a gesture of charity which consists of receiving and offering free food and shelter to those in need and travellers, in particular pilgrims. Hospitality was thus considered a demonstration of virtue.” It’s intrinsic, then! Here it is in its purest expression, as a Christian value and as a moment of development for the Route, making faith stronger and more solid, as though hospitality represented an argument for the Route itself and the Route was established along the path of points of sharing, where moral, physical and mental health is given or restored in exchange for foreign culture, yet the deepest foundations of which lie in the sharing of transcendent experiences.

The fact that, in claiming a secular aspect to it, this route of faith and spirituality has now become a route of European dialogue, a sort of open-air laboratory for (re)constructing Europe, is not just a tangible sign of modernity, it is confirmation that taking to the route is tantamount to abandoning prejudices and being ready to be ‘measured’ on the strength of one’s hospitality.

New routes?

When reading this Pèlerin special edition, you do see, page after page, that times have changed in the variety of options on offer. And you are quickly reassured that our values are not fading away when you read the testimonies of the walkers. Perhaps these walkers may become guardians of European language and spirit, or discover the end of selfishness and the beginning of dialogue, simply by putting one foot in front of the other. Having followed them for 25 years, I am fully convinced that they have changed, but only for the better, keeping alive the spirit of travel and retracing bit-by-bit the pilgrimage and its changes through history as paths cross, follow on from one another and muddle with each other.

The portfolio which opens the issue is superb. It makes you want to grab your bag and head off to discover Europe immediately; celebrate it by toiling up its ascents and finding relief at its summits; breathe Europe in deep when at times the odour of its politics stifles you. What better week could there be to so than the week in which we remember the dates of the treaties which wrote Europe, from London to Rome.

Saint Martin on the Loire, on the way back to Tours

We are not wanting for choice, not by any means: Saint Michael in the succession of hilltop sanctuaries where the New Jerusalem becomes more than just a symbol; Saint Martin of Tours, connecting the key places in the life of the converted soldier, evangelist and showing the first example of a monasticism open to the world; the Tro Breizh so dear to Gaëlle which invites you to venerate the Seven Founding Saints of Brittany; Saint Gilles du Gard, which adjoins a footpath toward Santiago de Compostela, the end of the Regordane Way and peers out across the sea towards the Holy Land; and finally Assise from Vèzelay to the epitome of the symbol of a Route of Peace, a Via della Pace. The Via Francigena also passes here, a symbolic delineation of all the roads which lead to Rome on which you come to recognise walkers on the way back down from Norway, breaking off from the paths which connect another Finisterre in Nidaros – the Trondheim Fjord.

On the Via Francigena

A global phenomenon, thanks to the diverse origins of those who walk it. A European phenomenon thanks to the network in which the many smaller tributaries have set about feeding the well-established and well-signposted flows towards Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Nidaros or Mont Saint Michel. Thousands of walkers converge, mingle, surprise each other and at times get on each other’s nerves, each separately thinking back to their homes, but all looking toward the same goal.

In this way, on goes the spirit of those who set out again after the Second World War to feel the physical release which comes with crossing a border, although their borders are now more personal than political. The European prison camps and gulags have almost all been opened. There remain social barriers, but the routes have also helped to remove them, as the time spent walking, sharing in the fatigue, opens the way to better understanding. A sharing of the load in times of to a certain extent, as well. Sharing your fear, even though its face has changed.

“La vertu de l’ascension” (virtue of the ascent) as Jean-Christophe Rufin writes (Immortelle randonné : Compostelle malgré moi, Editions Guérin, April 2013) in a fit of mysticism, which I prefer to call spirituality. By describing how he progressed down his long pilgrimage path without a break, except the odd break to his body, he also conjures up the Buddhist pilgrimage, steadily disciplining his body and feeling a breath of wind from a desired beyond, from a world a French president called the world of dark forces. Step by step, every walker does steadily find his faith now as they did after the great drama of the century. In his or her own way, each one holds a shaky conviction created from the bits of pieces of their lives and hopes. The immortal walk reconnects us with our roots. When could we take the time to search inside ourselves thus if not in the solitude found of a mass on a long walk? What other routes lead us back to our roots in this way and instil in us a blind trust that there is a history there, a story not yet finished?

Hospitality

I would like to reiterate (see ‘Hospitality – the Foundation of a European Culture: the Bridges of Europe’, Arles’ meeting, 1st European Congress of the Union Jacquaire de France, 1 March 2008) that this is in some ways a giant leap into the unknown: a common European vision, yet one in which we must respectfully acknowledge local differences impervious to open identities. Therefore, I can only welcome the fact that over 25 years other pilgrimage routes have been added, routes to other sanctuaries, some older, some more modern, others parallel, complementary or alternative routes, or on which we again look to explore the paths of monasticism, in the East as in the West. This diversity enhances the European approach, compiling a map, complex undoubtedly, but alive and moving, of a Europe on the move, culminating in the victory of Hospitality over Hostility, and rediscovering use of the land, like an understanding of the landscape for he or she who becomes its host.

The Olive Tree Route in Santiago de Compostela

Coming back to the anthropology of Hospitality, it is important to follow some good guides. For example, the term is reviewed by the 90 authors Alain Montandon brings together for the work Le Livre de l’hospitalité: Accueil de l’étranger, published by Editions Bayard in 2004. The thoughts of Michel Serres, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault and Marcel Mauss are mixed with those of two authors united by hope: Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida, who are at the very heart of the anthropology of a value which relates to ancient religious laws and codes of ethics.

The universality or even the unlimited nature of Hospitality according to Lévinas represents the very opposite of racism and highlights the infinite massacres which have tried to do away with or wipe out many types of Others deemed unacceptable or ‘unwelcomable’, to test out a neologism, for example: the Jew, the Gypsy, the Homosexual, the Communist in a fascist regime and the reverse, the Dissident in the communist regime. “‘Guest, we don’t know what to call you: is there any indiscretion in asking you your name?’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘I have some doubts about it myself; so suppose you call me Guest,” writes William Morris in News from Nowhere, 1891.

“Having reached the end of the journey, I said to myself, ‘I haven’t arrived’: I understood that the goal was not a material one” says Jean-Christophe Rufin. Many say the same. Beyond all doubt, this is the deepest meaning of this new tourism we call ‘cultural and religious’.

Tourism in Three Waves

 

When I began writing this ‘Destination Europe’ blog, I set out with a wish of writing a brief history of the prevailing uncertainties which gave rise to a common European policy created to put an end to the continent’s erratic presentation vis-à-vis its international customer base and at the same time present tourists from other European countries, including Council of Europe- but not yet European Union member states, with coherent routes, intelligent solutions and brand new proposals through which they could rediscover the continent they share.

After all, for me it merely felt like a return to the basis of the programme to which I have dedicated myself for 25 years: the Cultural Routes. As a result, I had simultaneously presented the key parts of a course for students who wanted to develop the way in which those in charge of tourism around the world, but Europe in particular, imagined ‘Destination Europe’.

Where are the tourism policies?

Given the decisions taken by the European Commission since the Lisbon Treaty came into force, the underlying issue revolves around the likelihood of a more voluntary reintegration of tourism policies into European policy after 15 years of disenchantment. Admittedly, such a reintegration has the look of a virus, for tourism affects practically every sector of policy and at the same time is affected by changes in every sector. To mention only some, purposefully erratically: the ‘health without borders’ directive, which will lead Europeans to travel to the place of treatment or cure of their choosing; or the difficult implementation of the Schengen Convention and temporary obstacles to free movement; how about the environmental protection policy, which directly influences the education of tourists on the matter; the common agricultural policy and the question of the place and role of local production in the image of destinations, or even the measures to do with fishing and responses to the crisis affecting marine fishermen.

Oenogastronomy. The Phoenicians Route. Sicily

The above question stems from changes in the market and a critical analysis of what the people who get tourists on the move, accompany them and look after them say. I do not need to remind you of the period of stunning popular success experienced by tourism after the end of the Second World War. This wave, the like of which had never been seen before, began as the social advances of the thirties arose, interrupted by the war. It rode the changing consumer trends of the post-war boom, with its slogans highlighting comfort as paramount in ‘home economics’, when the flexibility of the readymade, off-the-rack, disposable industries hailing from the US supplanted the celebration of domestic manual labour and recycling or reusing things with the joy of the new, of more is better. Captured by nascent marketing and advertising, these new habits meant that the public reacted positively to a readymade, convenient type of tourism. From a society of housework we transformed unawares into a society of family leisure activities “where family and free time collide with the solid entrenched hierarchies of some and the working class vision of others.” (Jean Viard)

However, this wave also engendered a tendency for offers to lose their allure quickly, a tendency which persisted and escalated over forty years, bringing success to the bigger operators who could come up with response-products for mass tourism and set up the logistics to cope with it, with one focus of dream construction, a combination of three key words: sea, sex and sun. This approach still dominates a large part of the tourism market today.

Venice, between history and consumption

Leisure and patrimonialisation

A fundamental change, however, occurred in parallel as the general level of research steadily increased, a change which has touched the entire tourism network over the last 25 years only because of the arrival of a deep anthropological crisis. A crisis which intervened “after 25 years of hegemony of the work ethic” and provoked thought on a shift from a leisure society to a society which tends to leave part of the population languishing the enforced leisure time of unemployment, and a change based on the upheaval of information and communication, not to mention the overhaul made to the map of Europe. It is a rather schizophrenic combination of globalisation and inward withdrawal. Destination Europe tourism has provided graduated responses, which seem to be both a symptom of the changes and a remedy for the concerns borne of the upheavals which affect the fundamental notions of the individual and the family.

Jean Viard writes that “tourism had to recreate the desire for heritage, the sea, the mountains, the countryside… and make cities another type of scenery. Making ‘artialisation´ desirable, enhancing the landscape, are actions which embellish reality and freeze it in the state in which it was discovered.”

 We shall come back to this for ‘artialisation’, which is also known as ‘patrimonialization’ and was evident in the enthusiastically received relief maps exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, is already being questioned, which shows that the next phase has begun in its wake. We have switched from the exotic dream for everyone to the elite dream for everyone, adapting the Grand Tour to fit working-class budgets, then to a return to tourists and tourism providers both sharing the values of traditional ways of working, in which the importance of handcrafting, local production and recycling “in a sustainable development framework’ are a part of the now-growing offer. As is often the case when three waves follow one after the other, the last wave is a synthesis of the preceding two, by implanting technology into a context which as such connects the need for proximity and for travelling abroad. No doubt the need for synthesis, accord and consensus we feel when we lose our way will lead us to recover the two others.

By passing through these three stages, overlapping them and hybridising them, tourism has taken up an essential position in policy for economy, integration and culture at a European level down to a local level.

Paris, between artialisation and patrimonialization

Work ethic and leisure ethic

The sector is important for the economy, due to its resistance to the financial crisis relative to other sectors of production, which have adapted by the breakdown of machinery, or neglect or relocation of men. It is important for jobs and local development in areas which have transitioned from a traditional society dominated by family economy to a postmodern society in which visitors and permanently-relocated pensioners have taken up a brand new role in the provision of wealth based on cooperation, even co-responsibility. It has human importance for it mixes cultures by renewing circulation around a continent which has long shared geography, politics and mentalities. Finally, cultural importance due to the fact that diversification and thematic enrichment of the offer, as well as profound changes to the use of free-time capital and views on work ethic which put heritage in a curious situation where protection and consumption must go hand in hand, all the while prompting discussion on identity.

Let me give you one example, yet one which is all the more striking as it touches a demographic which is taking over, active pensioners: personal accommodation for this growing section of the population focuses on both daily life and tourism, for working time is almost permanently muddled with leisure time: “… the accommodation with “the view” (of the sea, mountains, the countryside or even towns) has integrated the art of landscape, acquired through travel, into the intimacy of daily life; on a quasi-Japanese model of togetherness (if you look at Augustin Berque’s writing), where society is brought together by sharing the same point of view and mutual knowledge of it (which is also the practice of television)” (Jean Viard). I would add that the accommodation which doesn’t have the view recreate it by use of miniature gardens or by returning to the practice of neighbourhood gardening.

But before I set out on a report on behavioural changes and the nature of the initiatives responding to these changes, I must look at the powers exerted by the European Institutions which complement tourism in Europe, and thus the responsibilities they share more or less willingly in the actions they propose and their, at times, management of these changes.

This will be the topic of the following posts.

 

Jean-Paul Clébert. Vivre en Provence. L'Aube. 1993.

Bertrand Hervieu et Jean Viard. L'Archipel paysan ou la Fin de la république agricole. L'Aube. 2001.

Hervé Le Bras. L'Adieu aux masses. L'Aube. 2005.

Jean Viard. Court traité sur les vacances, les voyages et l'hospitalité des lieux. L'Aube poche. 2006.

Jean Viard. Eloge de la mobilité. Essai sur le capital temps libre et la valeur travail. L'Aube poche. 2011.

Jeremy Rifkin. La fin du travail. La Découverte. 1996 et 2006.