Brittany Hotel Industry and Second World War: Total Crisis, Global Opportunism (1940–1952)

Abstract

Until recently, the scarcity of information led to the belief that the tourist industry was incompatible with the war. It had even become a historiographical weakness and an opportunity for authors to make a long ellipsis in order to avoid the subject. For the Côte d'Azur, Paul Gonnët wrote in 1993 that “the Second World War, despite the influx of refugees until 1943, was a long and double crisis for the hotel industry: many hotels were requisitioned and the front passed through our militarily occupied region” (Gönnet 1993). For his part, Jean-Marc Lesur refers to the conflict as a before-and-after pivot, but the period is not really studied (Lesur 2005). In France, this subject is also ignored because the classification of archives changes between the modern period (1800–1940) and the contemporary period (since 1940).