The Blue Guide. By Roland Barthes.

Excerpts From:
Mythologies

The Blue Guide (* Hachette World Guides, dubbed 'Guide Bleu' in French) hardly knows
the existence of scenery except under the guise of the picturesque. The picturesque is
found any time the ground is uneven. We find again here this bourgeois promoting of
the mountains, this old Alpine myth (since it dates back to the nineteenth century)
which Gide rightly associated with Helvetico-Protestant morality and which has always
functioned as a hybrid compound of the cult of nature and of puritanism (regeneration
through clean air, moral ideas at the sight of mountain-tops, summit-climbing as civic
virtue, etc.). Among the views elevated by the Blue Guide to aesthetic existence, we
rarely find plains (redeemed only when they can be described as fertile), never
plateaux. Only mountains, gorges, defiles and torrents can have access to the
pantheon of travel, inasmuch, probably, as they seem to encourage a morality of effort
and solitude. Travel according to the Blue Guide is thus revealed as a labour-saving
adjustment, the easy substitute for the morally uplifting walk. This in itself means that
the mythology of the Blue Guide dates back to the last century, to that phase in history
when the bourgeoisie was enjoying a kind of new-born euphoria in buying effort, in
keeping its image and essence without feeling any of its ill-effects. It is therefore in the
last analysis, quite logically and quite stupidly, the gracelessness of a landscape, its
lack of spaciousness or human appeal, its verticality, so contrary to the bliss of travel,
which account for its interest. Ultimately, the Guide will coolly write: 'The road
becomes very picturesque (tunnels)': it matters little that one no longer sees anything,
since the tunnel here has become the sufficient sign of the mountain; it is a financial
security stable enough for one to have no further worry about its value over the
counter.  
 
Just as hilliness is overstressed to such an extent as to eliminate all other types of
scenery, the human life of a country disappears to the exclusive benefit of its
monuments. For the Blue Guide, men exist only as 'types'. In Spain, for instance, the
Basque is an adventurous sailor, the Levantine a light-hearted gardener, the Catalan a
clever tradesman and the Cantabrian a sentimental highlander. We find again here this
disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of
man (which is why we come across it so often). The ethnic reality of Spain is thus
reduced to a vast classical ballet, a nice neat commedia dell'arte, whose improbable
typology serves to mask the real spectacle of conditions, classes and professions. For
the Blue Guide, men exist as social entities only in trains, where they fill a 'very mixed'
Third Class. Apart from that, they are a mere introduction, they constitute a charming
and fanciful decor, meant to surround the essential part of the country: its collection of
monuments.  
 
If one excepts its wild defiles, fit for moral ejaculations, Spain according to the Blue
Guide knows only one type of space, that which weaves, across a few nondescript
lacunae, a close web of churches, vestries, reredoses, crosses, altar-curtains, spires
(always octagonal), sculpted groups (Family and Labour), Romanesque porches, naves
and life-size crucifixes. It can be seen that all these monuments are religious, for from
a bourgeois point of view it is almost impossible to conceive a History of Art which is
not Christian and Roman Catholic. Christianity is the chief purveyor of tourism, and one
travels only to visit churches. In the case of Spain, this imperialism is ludicrous, for
Catholicism often appears there as a barbaric force which has stupidly defaced the
earlier achievements of Muslim civilization: the mosque at Cordoba, whose wonderful
forest of columns is at every turn obstructed by massive blocks of altars, or a colossal
Virgin (set up by Franco) denaturing the site which it aggressively dominatesall this
should help the French bourgeois to glimpse at least once in his life that historically
there is also a reverse side to Christianity.  
 
Generally speaking; the Blue Guide testifies to the futility of all analytical descriptions,
those which reject both explanations and phenomenology: it answers in fact none of
the questions which a modern traveller can ask himself while crossing a countryside
which is real and which exists in time. To select only monuments suppresses at one
stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the
present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves
become undecipherable, therefore senseless. What is to be seen is thus constantly in
the process of vanishing, and the Guide becomes, through an operation common to all
mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness. By
reducing geography to the description of an uninhabited world of monuments, the Blue
Guide expresses a mythology which is obsolete for a part of the bourgeoisie itself. It is
unquestionable that travel has become (or become again) a method of approach based
on human realities rather than 'culture': once again (as in the eighteenth century,
perhaps) it is everyday life which is the main object of travel, and it is social
geography, town-planning, sociology, economics which outline the framework of the
actual questions asked today even by the merest layman. But as for the Blue Guide, it
still abides by a partly superseded bourgeois mythology, that which postulated
(religious) Art as the fundamental value of culture, but saw its 'riches' and 'treasures'
only as a reassuring accumulation of goods (cf. the creation of museums). This
behaviour expressed a double urge: to have at one's disposal a cultural alibi as
ethereal as possible, and to maintain this alibi in the toils of a computable and
acquisitive system, so that one could at any moment do the accounts of the ineffable.
It goes without saying that this myth of travel is becoming quite anachronistic, even
among the bourgeoisie, and I suppose that if one entrusted the preparation of a new
guide-book to, say, the lady-editors at L'Express or the editors of Match, we would see
appearing, questionable as they would still probably be, quite different countries: after
the Spain of Anquetil or Larousse, would follow the Spain of Siegfried, then that of
Fourastié. Notice how already, in the Michelin Guide, the number of bathrooms and
forks indicating good restaurants is vying with that of 'artistic curiosities': even
bourgeois myths have their differential geology.  
 
It is true that in the case of Spain, the blinkered and old-fashioned character of the
description is what is best suited to the latent support given by the Guide to Franco.
Beside the historical accounts proper (which are rare and meagre, incidentally, for it is
well known that History is not a good bourgeois), those accounts in which the
Republicans are always 'extremists' looting churches - but nothing on Guernica - while
the good 'Nationalists', on the contrary, spend their time 'liberating', solely by 'skilful
strategic manoeuvres' and 'heroic feats of resistance', let me mention the flowering of
a splendid myth-alibi: that of the prosperity of the country. Needless to say, this
prosperity is 'statistical' and 'global', or to be more accurate: 'commercial'. The Guide
does not tell us, of course, how this fine prosperity is shared out: hierarchically,
probably, since they think it fit to tell us that 'the serious and patient effort of this
people has also included the reform of its political system, in order to achieve
regeneration through the loyal application of sound principles of order and hierarchy.'