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Book Review
| A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town, 1823–2000. By Alice Garner. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. ix + 286 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.
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| This splendid book presents an engaging and sympathetic account of the multiple transformations experienced by a small French coastal town, Arcachon, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a story tinged with a certain pathos, as we watch the seemingly inexorable decline of fishing as a livelihood starting during the latter decades of the 1800s —a profession of hardy folk and picturesque customs pushed aside by the gradual emergence of tourism as the primary factor in the local economy. Alice Garner expertly guides us through this slow but wrenching social and economic shift, laying out the human costs and the cultural resistances to change, alongside the legal, technological, and political factors through which the changes came about. |
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Garner starts her story with the "prehistory" of Arcachon—a quaint cluster of oyster shacks and holiday houses nestled on a small bay off the Atlantic coast of France, south of Bordeaux. She paints a vivid portrait of the hardscrabble existence eked out by the people who inhabited this extremely isolated stretch of French coastline: their perpetual struggle to survive in a hybrid space of tidal flats and salt marshes, part-land, part-sea. Her account offers a particularly nuanced and empathetic analysis of local power struggles as they played themselves out over decades of time: schemes by local notables to enclose or appropriate common lands—all in the name of "progress" and the "common good," to be sure—as well as the (sometimes surprisingly successful) efforts of resistance and countermobilization carried out by the poorer citizens of the region. |
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Her narrative is sophisticated and multi-dimensional in its approach, bringing to bear the concepts of anthropology and urban studies, theories of space and leisure, as well as environmental history, in weaving her account. Her chapter on the visual representation (and self-representation) of the local fishermen through postcards, for example, offers a highly original analysis of the imagery and "staging" of beachside life; her discussion of the "medicalization" of tourism—the nineteenth-century notion of a stay at the beach as an essential tool in healing the sick—further enriches our understanding of the many factors that contributed to transforming this town. |
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This book should prove highly appealing not just to scholars of French history or the history of tourism, but to general readers as well. It takes a particularly fascinating local story and uses it as the starting point for exploring far broader questions about economic modernization and its attendant social, cultural, and human costs. It captures the rich complexity of this process in clear and vivid language, leaving the reader feeling almost as though he or she had actually come to know at first-hand this wind-swept corner of France's Atlantic coast. |
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Michael Bess is professor of history at Vanderbilt University. He recently published The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960–2000. |
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