Each year in France approximately 1.5 million people practice
naturisme or "naturism," an activity more commonly referred to as
"nudism." Because of France's unique tolerance for public nudity,
the country also hosts hundreds of thousands of nudists from other
European nations, an influx that has contributed to the most
extensive infrastructure for nude tourism in the world. In Au
Naturel, historian Stephen L. Harp explores how the evolution of
European tourism encouraged public nudity in France, connecting
this cultural shift with important changes in both individual
behaviors and collective understandings of the body, morality, and
sexuality.
Harp's study, the first in-depth historical analysis of nudism
in France, challenges widespread assumptions that "sexual
liberation" freed people from "repression," a process ostensibly
reflected in the growing number of people practicing public nudity.
Instead, he contends, naturism gained social acceptance because of
the bodily control required to participate in it. New social codes
emerged governing appropriate nudist behavior, including where one
might look, how to avoid sexual excitation, what to wear when cold,
and whether even the most modest displays of affection --
-including hand-holding and pecks on the cheek -- were permissible
between couples.
Beginning his study in 1927 -- when naturist doctors first
advocated nudism in France as part of "air, water, and sun cures"
-- Harp focuses on the country's three earliest and largest nudist
centers: the ?le du Levant in the Var, Montalivet in the Gironde,
and the Cap d'Agde in H?rault. These places emerged as thriving
tourist destinations, Harp shows, because the municipalities -- by
paradoxically reinterpreting inde-cency as a way to foster European
tourism to France -- worked to make public nudity more
acceptable.
Using the French naturist movement as a lens for examining the
evolving notions of the body and sexuality in twentieth-century
Europe, Harp reveals how local practices served as agents of
national change.
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