Roland Barthes On The Blue Guide (1955), Monuments, People and Picturesque Landscape

Some excerpts from Roland Barthes' essay in "Mythologies"

First published in French (in book form), in 1957.

Le Guide bleu appeared in Les Lettres nouvelles, 31 (October 1955), 501-04.

-The promotion of the "bourgeois" taste for picturesque hills and mountains against flat ground, plains and other types of scenery.

-The over-emphasis on monuments instead of human life.

"Only mountains, gorges, defiles and torrents can have access to the pantheon of travel".

"For the Blue Guide, men  exist only as 'types'... they are a mere introduction, they constitute a charming and fanciful decor, meant to surround the essential part of the country: its collection of monuments.... To select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people"