Delphine Guex, Mise en scène et valeur territoriale : tourisme et développement régional dans les Alpes suisses

Abstract

Thèse de doctorat en lettres et sciences humaines, université de Neuchâtel, Groupe de recherche en économie territoriale, dirigée par Olivier Crevoisier (soutenue le 9 décembre 2015).

When the hoteliers were organizing the winter Olympic games. Beyond the local networks in St. Moritz in 1928

“…For our purposes, we should stress that the historical research on the development of tourism from the 19th century onwards constitutes a relevant resource, particularly in that it can invite us to consider local archives in detail. In this sense, the pioneering works of Delphine Guex and Géraldine Sauthier on the examples of Montreux, Finhaut and Zermatt are real sources of inspiration (Guex, 2016;Sauthier, 2016), as are several publications by Roland Flückiger-Seiler or Laurent Tissot relating to hoteliers and hotel history (Flückiger-Seiler, 2005;Schneider, Tissot, 2018), but also of Cédric Humair who offer a framework for understanding the tourist boom between 1850 and 1950 (Tissot, 1995;Tissot, 2003;Humair, Tissot, 2011). While studies on winter sports and mountaineering have been conducted, in the case of Switzerland, by Susan Barton and more recently by Grégory Quin, Sébastien Cala and Quentin Tonnerre, and all of them emphasize the uniqueness of the Swiss case for understanding the development of winter sports (Tissot, 1995;Barton, 2009;Quin, 2017b;Tonnerre, 2021), they rarely use the rich archives of the various winter sports resorts to reveal the local dynamics of how sports practices were structured (Denning, 2019).…”

“…He contributed with Johannes Badrutt and other hoteliers to the pioneering role of St. Moritz as the birthplace for (winter) tourism (Lütscher, 2014) since the 1860s. The transition to a winter-oriented resort was easier in the case of St. Moritz because its mountaineering (summer) tourism was not as highly developed as in Zermatt (Guex, 2016;Sauthier, 2016) or in Chamonix (Schut, Levret-Labry, 2014). Based on the proximity of the valley leading to Mount Bernina, it was Pontresina-and not St. Moritz-which hosted the alpine center for the region (Maier, 2002, 37) (Thöny, 2019) or in France (Larique, 2006), only developing winter tourism during the interwar period.…”