France has had tourism policies for the mountains; She hasn’t had one for a long time. And the recent decision to award the 2030 Winter Olympics to the French candidacy will not facilitate the just transition that global warming, more significant than in the plains, calls for.
The snow plan of the 1960s, under the presidency of General de Gaulle, was a response to the rural exodus which emptied the mountains of their living resources and to the project of retaining in France the clientele of French skiers who frequented neighboring Alpine countries. This resulted in the creation ex nihilo at high altitude of numerous winter sports resorts and the development of vast ski areas, now among the largest on the planet.
Avalanches and deadly landslides coupled with poor real estate sales prompted the State to change direction, which was expressed in the Vallouise speech, delivered by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, on August 23, 1977: “Too many second homes are being scattered as agricultural land is sold. Too many ski resorts were established without sufficient consideration of local populations and environmental constraints. The State’s effort will henceforth focus on tourism integrated with other activities, accessible to as many people as possible, respectful of the sites and landscapes. »
Mostly wealthy foreign clienteles
In 1985, the State adopted a “mountain” law, which intended to both develop and protect – which, de facto, France had already been doing for around twenty years with the creation, in 1963, of of the Vanoise National Park: everything was prohibited in its central zone when (almost) everything was permitted in its peripheral zone, where some of the most important French winter sports resorts were developed.
But it is clear that this “mountain” law, supplemented in 2016 by the “mountain II” law, has not been able to slow down the progression of high-altitude real estate, ski lift equipment and artificial snow, while that, at the same time, hopes of democratization of skiing were disappearing from a market driven by the growing arrival of foreign customers, the vast majority of whom were wealthy.
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Thus, for six decades, mountain tourism development has been engaged in a headlong rush – which I had already analyzed in my thesis, published in 1978, “The integrated winter sports resorts of the French Alps” (Masson ) –, real estate growth constantly requiring the expansion of ski areas and these in turn requiring the construction of new residential programs. This is how Tarentaise alone came to have a total of 427,500 tourist beds at altitude, or more than the combined population of the two conurbations of Annecy and Chambéry!
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