Paper long abstract:

Tourisme et Travail, a popular tourist organization linked to the CGT (confédération générale du travail, main french alliance), created in 1944, whose main clients are works councils, considers holidays as a means of education and political consciousness for a popular public. The Maghrebi countries constitute before and after the independances, from the 1950's to the 1970's, favored destinations for this organization. Their proximity indeed enables low cost journeys in countries with undeniable touristic qualities. The ways in which these holidays in countries of the South are presented to Tourisme et travail's tourists, of popular origin but from countries of the North, as well as the practices and encounters between the tourists and the autochtones, are revealing of Tourisme et travail's political project and of its ambiguity.

Holidays in Magrheb are indeed presented by Tourisme et travail as an occasion for a political conscience taking. Before the independances, although the journeys are scarce, the aim is to show the wrongdoings of colonial rule. Thereafter, holidays in Maghreb become an occacion for talking up the accomplishments of new independant countries. However, beyond the speech, the maghrebi countries remain an exotic elsewhere. The mental representations largely follow colonial clichés and classic holiday stereotypes, be it through the choice of visits, the descriptions of the autochtones or the iconography used to debrief the journeys.

These representations have effects on the practices. Tourisme et travail hopes to promote tourism based on meetings between the visitors and the autochtones. The speech given is that of an alternative tourism opposing itself to commercial tourism, qualified as superficial. This alternative tourism is based on authenticity, characterized as the discovery of the countries and the peoples through debates, conferences, meetings with inhabitants, trade-unionists. This gap between intentions and practices puts into perspective the originality of Tourisme et travail's holidays. The so-called authenticity often rests in misunderstandings which lead Tourism et travail to construe in friendly terms behaviours that originate from purely commercial relationships. It is so with the practice of haggling. Moreover, Tourisme et travail's activities take place in a context partly determined by the practices of commercial tourism, internalized by some professional autochtones as well as users. Appropriation by the users, as well as by the employees and directors of the centers abroad, local tourist professionals, of Tourisme et travail's speech should thus be questionned, as well as the conflicts that derive from it. The discrepancies and contradictions between representations and practices are significative of a part of the organization's inertness in relation to colonial heritages, although being an organisation that claims to hold a different view on the maghrebi countries. They attest for the pregancy of commercial relationships and of the economic inequality between tourists and autochtones, essential element of analysis for evaluating crossed touristic relationships bewteen countries from the North and the South.