The marketing of cultural tourism has closely followed this institutional turn, and it is no longer oriented exclusively toward officially recognized sites or “monuments”; while these have the advantage of making it less possible to substitute other products for those on offer and thus limiting the competition, they are relatively few in number. Tourist agencies have definitively expanded the term “culture.” Thus, in a brochure published by the Malaga Chamber of Commerce designed to promote cultural tourism in the Mediterranean region, we find this definition: “Cultural tourism means traveling to places that are different from one’s usual residence, motivated by the desire to know, understand, and study other cultures: a voyage rich in experiences through cultural activities.”66 In the case of international tourism, one of the goals of cultural tourism is to increase the proportion of profits that go to service providers from the destination country in relation to the proportion destined for the companies – generally based in the country of origin – that organize the trip or the visit. While a tourist staying in a vacation camp or traveling entirely under the auspices of an international tourism company contributes little to the destination country, tourists seeking “authentic” cultural experiences must move about in a more autonomous fashion, so that their expenses will be distributed throughout the territory they visit.
Seen in this context, ordinary objects can take on value and arouse interest among tourists, all the more so if their “traditional” production is on display during visits to workshops or businesses; this then becomes “craft tourism,” promoted in France by the Association pour la visite d’entreprise (Association for Visits to Businesses).67 This process of valorization is appropriated more and more often by community members who adopt for themselves the perspective initially brought to bear on them by external observers and make an effort to shape their everyday practices and objects accordingly. They may revert to making things in the ancestral manner, both to affirm a reconstructed identity68 and to sell their products to tourists; the latter, in search of authenticity and exoticism, are looking for objects that can be brought home and added to collections.69 Hence the trend in lesser-known or quite unexpected places toward “greeters,” who offer tourists individualized visits in which the greeters’ personal stories and the community’s history are merged.
Responding to the demand for security is a central concern for cultural tourism, for security is also a primordial economic requirement. The task has two principal aspects. The first, a more or less conventional aspect, consists in keeping the most heavily visited places free of deviants deemed potentially dangerous, unpleasant, or even morally disturbing – such figures as pickpockets and beggars, Roma, mentally ill persons, itinerants, drug addicts, or alcoholics. But, beyond that, more generally, places celebrated for their beauty, charm, or traditional character must keep at a distance everyone who might affect their quality, which is associated with a certain “lifestyle” and a certain “know-how”: poor foreigners need to be excluded, for example, and even the poor in general, at least when they are not “typical” of the locality. But security questions affect the workings of a tourist economy even more urgently when a country is threatened by terrorist acts such as those that occurred in London in 2005 and in Paris in 2015, in January and again in November.70 Such acts, as their name indicates, aim to leave people feeling terror-stricken and shell-shocked.71 And few groups are as susceptible to fear as tourists, on the one hand because they travel to other countries precisely in search of calm, luxury, sensuality, and even a peace that they do not always find in their home countries, and on the other hand because, without social ties in the country they are visiting, they are easily disoriented and led astray.
The expansion of cultural activities
Another indicator that an economic sphere of enrichment is taking shape is the development of a particular domain that involves numerous activities generally brought together under the term “cultural.” These include the performing arts and artistic or graphic pursuits, but also publishing, ancient artifacts, museums, and organized special events, festivals, and salons. The fact that these cultural domains are in constant interaction with those we have just identified (luxury, heritage, tourism) helps make them hard to circumscribe. As we have seen, culture in the broad sense is understood as a major force for attracting tourists; at the same time, many cultural activities and sites are economically dependent on tourism. The extension of heritage creation in France is concentrated around sites and monuments that belong to the regional or national patrimony; their constitution and maintenance count as cultural activities. In addition, films and television series whose financing is partly conditioned on their localization in France promote an image of sites such as castles and landscapes associated with the most touristic regions.72 During the last twenty years, too, we have witnessed a rapid and significant growth in the connections – especially the financial ties – that unite the vast and fuzzy domain of culture with that of the luxury economy. Companies specializing in fashion and fashion accessories – those that make watches, jewelry, perfume, and so on, but also the hotel and restaurant industries – contribute considerably to highlighting a territory in view of attracting tourists, and these same companies, especially the major producers of luxury goods, play a growing role in financing cultural and artistic activities, injecting capital that compensates for the relative decrease in state funding and other public support. In exchange, these businesses benefit from an aesthetic authority that increases the prestige of their brands and augments the advantageous profit margins generated by the sale of their products.
Despite the blurring of boundaries and the absence of focused statistical studies, since the activities and professions considered as the heart of the vast and fuzzy domain of culture are overseen in France by an ad hoc government ministry, there are accounting frameworks that allow us to follow the most stabilized aspects of this domain and, in particular, its evolution over the last twenty years. As it happens, the statistics produced by this ministry show a significant increase in the economic role of culture in the global economy and in the number of persons employed in the cultural domain. And this is the case even though these studies unquestionably fail to take into account the entire set of activities that we have tried to characterize in a provisional way; in addition, the studies do not always focus on the same types of activity.73 Thus one study carried out at the request of the Ministry of Culture and Communication,74 designed to measure the added value of the entire cultural sphere in 2011, estimated it to be 57.8 billion euros, or 3.2 percent of overall added value in France – as much as the agricultural sphere when agrobusiness is included (and the amount rose to 44 billion euros in 2013, according to another source from the same ministry).75 And these figures do not take indirect economic benefits into account – for example, the benefits that accrue when cultural activities incite increased tourism. In terms of value added between 1995 and 2013, the growth in cultural activities was particularly significant in audiovisual productions, performing arts, visual arts, and heritage creation; growth in these sectors doubled or even tripled.
The domain of culture in France is divided between a commercial sector, which involves audiovisual productions in particular76 (39.4 percent of the value added in the production of cultural commodities in 2013), and a smaller non-commercial sector, under the aegis of central or regional government agencies; the role of this sector is especially pronounced in the performing arts and heritage sites (respectively 42.6 percent and