Thomas Daum: "There is the splendor of rural landscapes sculpted over time"

Thomas Daum is professor of geography and co-author with Eudes Girard of an uncompromising essay on tourism 2.0: From dream travel to mass tourism (CNRS Éditions). Without waiting for confinement, he planned to experience river navigation for the first time this summer, to counter the world's speeding.

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LE FIGARO. - What does river tourism inspire in you?

Thomas DAUM. - First, the slowness in a world so fast (until two months ago). River tourism allows an imperceptible evolution, during the journey, of our landscape vision, anticipating the approach of cities, allowing to leave it slowly, far from 130 km / h by car and 320 km / h by TGV. Then there is the welcome constraint. The axis of circulation is determined by principle: scarcity of possible confluences where to branch off. But this constraint results from an ancient choice of societies (economic history) and a balance between the genius of men and natural constraints (physical geography: altitude, declination, swamp, ...) whose discovery becomes the reason to be traveling.

The attractiveness of water enhances three geographic areas: water, the towpath and the urban or rural landscape. A concrete lesson in history and geography?

That's quite right. Very interesting on the artificiality of what appears a priori natural: the river. We can only navigate on canals dug for two to three centuries since flow, current and level variation prevent us from doing it on natural rivers as our imagination could do by remembering David Crockett or Fenimore Cooper . The regular locks also remind us that on spaces a priori of constant altitude, variations exist.

The canals enlighten us on a priori natural landscapes

As for the towpath, it evokes its pre-industrial origin from before the steam engine, to its transformation into a cycle path decorated with informative panels on fauna and flora: as if we were eternally children of the primary school to educate, going through its status as a theater of sordid murders in cheap crime novels. And then there is the splendor of rural landscapes sculpted over time. Here again we have this impression of natural agricultural plots exposing landscapes that are entirely artificial, port cities devoted to river activity and today half dead.

Do you think river tourism allows you to rediscover the spirit of travel?

Yes, for those over 50 who have, with a few means, already "done" as they so hideously say, Asia, New York, Tierra del Fuego, the capitals of Eastern Europe, and who can understand, and wish, that slowness is now the condition of the journey. But still it is necessary that this navigation is accomplished by being alone with relatives and not on "Giants of the rivers" with 250 passengers ... But no, because it does not allow to take side roads at the last moment. River tourism is organized travel ... but in the past.