Page 105 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace

itinerant habitués of international high society resorts, recognised biographies of individual hotels, of varying quality in contextual of the market; the opportunities created by Switzerland’s unique calendar which regularly took them to the same resorts and capitals
the value to a grand hotel of a royal and aristocratic past, especially understanding, depth of research and development of argument, situation at the tourist crossroads of Western Europe; its (related) at the same seasons. Such surroundings also attracted adventurers,
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when associated with events that might be thought to have changed including the recent efforts of Andreas Augustin and his team development of an extensive and intricate railway network social climbers, professional gamblers and fortune-hunters, as had
the course of history. Writing in 1938, he introduced Basle’s to find, pull together and present archival material to document during the second half of the nineteenth century (eventually all fashionable resort environments from the eighteenth century
Hôtel Trois Rois (or, as he says, if you prefer, the Drei Koenige), aspects of the histories of some of the great international hotels using specialised technologies to penetrate improbably far into onwards: the problems associated with distinguishing between
as ‘possibly the most famous caravanserai in Europe. It has certainly had of the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards, providing the mountain fastnesses, enabling further hotel development in people of genuinely high status and/or substantial wealth, and those
more royalties as guests than any other in the world.’ He goes on to where appropriate an outline of important political and diplomatic hitherto remote places); its enduring neutrality in international who were playing a role for purposes of their own, were sufficiently
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provide an exhaustive and remarkable list, drawn from the hotel’s encounters that took place on the premises. The literature on the politics; and the diversity of languages spoken within the country endemic at Bath and other Georgian health and pleasure resorts to
livre d’or, including members of the Japanese and Chinese royal hospitality trades in general pays little or no heed to these aspects (to which English, increasingly the dominant international constitute a major theme of the eighteenth-century and Regency
families, King Farouk of Egypt, the Shah of Persia, and monarchs, of the operation and influence of the international grand hotel: for language of tourism, could readily be added). 16 English novel. 18
ex-monarchs and pretenders to thrones across the whole of Europe. example, the cross-disciplinary collection of essays on hospitality Switzerland apart, the international grand hotel of the railway But in this regard the hotel was a haven, a hybrid between
Even more to the point, however, is that, ‘This livre d’or is full of edited by Lashley and Morrison, aimed at establishing the academic age was a phenomenon of the capital city and of the burgeoning public and private space, which excluded the undesirable much
invisible drama. The signatures of certain German princes in 1866 have credentials of this new discipline, deals with the subject from most networks of centres for elite cultural and health tourism, whether more effectively, by price and ambience, than did the more
a direct bearing on the Prussian-Danish war in which Schleswig-Holstein angles but not from that of politics and diplomacy. 13 these were historic towns and cities of architectural, scenic, artistic or straightforwardly commercial entertainment spaces such as
was ceded to Germany.’ The object of the visit of the Prince Royal of Bennett was right to focus on 1869 as a characteristic musical distinction, spa resorts constructed and organised on a model the Assembly Room, the theatre, the pier or the casino, which
Egypt in 1869 was ‘to have headquarters from which he could invite the founding date for a ‘modern’ grand hotel of the first age of the inherited largely from the eighteenth century (but often with new allowed people of lower status and more limited resources to ‘dress
various royalties of Europe to be present at the opening of the Suez Canal.’ railway, of luxury travel by steamship, and of global imperialism grand hotels inserted in the nineteenth) or coastal climatic or sea- up’, copy fashionable manners and ways of conversing, and gain
Moreover, more recently, ‘The Bank for International Settlements at featuring the rise of settler societies and the economic exploitation bathing resorts, aimed at or capable of embracing international high access alongside the elite. The grand hotel avoided this problem,
Basle has been responsible… for the visits of the leading bankers and heads of the resources of Africa, Asia and southern and central America society. This latter concept developed in step with the new itinerant or reduced its intensity considerably; and it might therefore be
of treasuries of the world,’ such as Norman Davies of the United by European powers, in competition with each other and (on the leisure habits and routines of the aristocracy, the plutocracy, the considered a suitable space for the international conference or other
States and Montagu Norman of the Bank of England. As Graves American continent) with the United States. It was also entirely arriviste and the opportunist. Whether such hotels were purpose-built formal diplomatic encounter, as well as offering opportunities for
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makes clear, there is a sense in which the hotel is not merely the appropriate that his London hotelier, so well-connected across or adapted from older residential buildings, and whether they were less formal interaction.
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backdrop to the dramas of diplomacy and international high international elite networks and so intimately embroiled with situated in older city centres and resort areas or in new fashionable Historical associations of the kind discussed in this chapter
finance that he conjures up, but also a participant or actor in the the world of international high finance, should be Swiss. By the destinations and elite districts within cities, as transport, travel and can take a variety of forms. Simply trading on past visits by great
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processes themselves. 1860s Switzerland’s development as an international playground, guidebook networks proliferated from the mid-nineteenth century, international figures may not be sufficient. The travel courier
Historians of international grand hotels have not developed an extension of the traditional Grand Tour of the aristocratic and they increasingly offered an exclusive, socially filtered environment William Honey recounts his failure to make the classic phrase
these perceptive ideas. They have been drawn largely from the aspiring from the antiquities, churches, palaces and galleries of Paris, to those who could afford to pay for a high quality of space, layout, ‘Napoleon slept here’ effective in quelling the complaints of an
ranks of professionals within the hotel industry, who have, of the Rhine and northern Italy to embrace the romantic and sublime furnishings, cuisine, comfort, ambience and service, and who had Australian client (‘Mr Snort’) on a motor-coach tour through
course, their own insights to offer, or from professional writers landscapes (as they came to be regarded in the eighteenth century) the cultural capital to feel at ease in such surroundings and to meet France to Spain about his accommodation in Autun: ‘At the Hôtel
who are not usually historians by training, and their priorities of Alpine passes, peaks and glaciers, was well established. It was the level of expectation of hotel and fellow customers alike in their de la Poste in Autun I explained to Mr Snort that he was staying in
tend to offer a mixture of economic analysis, business and family soon to receive further stimuli from the interrelated emergence public presentation of self in this restricted, leisured but demanding a place of historic interest: that it lay on the Route Napoléon, and that
history and personal anecdote without exploring the political or of mountain sanatoria and ‘winter sports’ later in the nineteenth arena. The requisite criteria could be met by an expanding pool of the great man had put up there no less than twice. Had it not been good,
diplomatic implications of their subject matter in any systematic century. From the late eighteenth century onwards, Swiss hoteliers aristocrats, financiers, industrialists, property magnates and rentiers I suggested facetiously, the great man would hardly have gone back to
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way. There is also a genre of interesting and thoroughly researched were at the forefront in setting international standards of excellence from the United States, Canada, Latin America and the Levant as well it the second time. I showed him the room that Napoleon had slept in
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hotel histories whose central preoccupations are with architecture, (and, as was often complained, of high prices), helped by the as from Europe (emphatically including pre-revolutionary Russia), (now fitted up with telephone, bath and lavatory); and Mr Snort still did
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design and decoration. Beyond this, we can make use of many sustained high level of demand for hotel services at the top end who operated on a global stage while also following a fashion not get what I meant.’ Something more was needed to make a

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