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Jennifer Bidet, Vacances au Bled. La double présence des enfants d’immigrés, Raisons d’agir, 2021

Christophe Gauchon
Traduction de Nelson Graburn
Cet article est une traduction de :
Jennifer Bidet, Vacances au Bled. La double présence des enfants d’immigrés, Raisons d’agir, 2021 [fr]

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1In this sociological survey, Jennifer Bidet provides first-hand information on the role holidays play in maintaining ties between immigrant families and their country of origin. Holidays are not the primary object of this research, and tourism even less so. For the author Bidet, it is above all a question of questioning the “double presence” of the descendants of immigrants, that is to say “their inscription in two disjointed social spaces in which they do not occupy the same position with regard to class, gender and ethno-racial inequalities”. However, the holidays offer good opportunities to observe the relationship of emigrants and their children to their country of origin and to France. Holiday behaviors and practices therefore are considered first from this research objective, which does not prevent the first-hand information provided by this study from shedding light on an often poorly documented aspect of tourism.

2The survey mainly concerns families residing in the urban region of Lyon; the majority of them are from the region of Sétif, and though the publication of the book is recent, the interviews date mainly from 2010-2011. Bidet does not consider the question of the transmission of these holiday practices to the grandchildren, and therefore of their perpetuation, even in other forms.

3The approach is first chronological; author Bidet describes the slow shift from stays that must maintain the link to the country in the context of an emigration experienced as temporary, towards more regular round trips that are truly part of vacation time. Of course, these holidays have their special characteristics: the weight of family conventions is very present there, the choice of the destination strongly constrained, the stay strictly summer... A generation of children of emigrant parents will thus learn to differentiate the time of the holidays in Bled from the practice of the leisure activities to which they have access in France. The offspring of emigrants are strongly aware of experiencing very different holidays from those of other French people: “It was not a holiday, but it was our holiday”. But beyond the folkloric images conveyed in movies or songs, the holidays in Bled are not monolithic. They depend closely on the resources available in Algeria, and vary from one family to another according to the kinship network, the social category of origin, housing conditions, and so on.

4While the 1990s necessarily marked a stagnation in these practices, they then resumed with an increase in flows: 1 million stays in 2005 and 1.7 million in 2013, and with more diversified practices. Like Ireland or Ghana, the Algerian state promotes “origin tourism”. For young adults, vacations in Bled are increasingly emancipated from the family setting: the stay in Algeria indeed allows access to vacations that remain unaffordable in France, even if they pose other problems. The stigmatization by origins that these young people face in France is replaced by class prejudices when they rub shoulders with the Algerian bourgeoisie in holiday villages or private beaches on the coast. But overall, even if it is necessary to choose between staying with the family and other destinations, Algeria is experienced as a place of emancipation: “Oran is the Saint-Tropez of Bled!”.

5Finally, Bidet examines a few particular situations; holidays in Algeria require constant rethinking which reveals advantages and disadvantages compared to the situation in France: the practice of religion, the relationship between the man and the woman within a couple, the construction of a second home in Algeria in the village or town of origin or on the contrary in a holiday region…

6Jennifer Bidet asks little about the feedback effects of these vacations in Bled on the lives of immigrants and the children of immigrants in France, for example on gender issues which are the subject of Chapter 7; however, as for all tourists, holiday experiences also reflect on the practices of daily life, either by imitation or by rejection. Similarly, in Bled the Algerians and their children are seen only as vacationers, and their role as mediators or organizers of tourist practices in the country is not considered, insofar as it is undoubtedly much less developed than in Morocco for example.

7But Bidet's study has the very great merit of showing that these "holidays in Bled" are part of a range of choices that evolve over time, generations and settling in France: paradoxically, the vacations of the first Algerian immigrants in the Lyon urban area took place in the campsites of Ain or Isère, when they did not yet have the means to envisage stays in Algeria (or when the political situation was not conducive); and for the younger generations, in the 2000s, staying in Algeria became one possible option amongst many accessible tourist destinations (Turkey, Santo Domingo, etc.) between which they made different choices from one year to another . If vacations in Bled have been a massive practice, they have therefore always been experienced in very different ways depending on the individual, according to family backgrounds and according to integration trajectories.

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Référence électronique

Christophe Gauchon, « Jennifer Bidet, Vacances au Bled. La double présence des enfants d’immigrés, Raisons d’agir, 2021 », Via [En ligne], 21 | 2022, mis en ligne le 22 août 2022, consulté le 17 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/8643 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.8643

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Traducteur

Nelson Graburn

University of California, Berkeley

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

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