Abstract EN:

Labelling the activity of mountain guides as vocational has turned it into a sideline, into imagery. As an inheritor of this imaginary construction, as an observer, an actor and a historian, I propose here to upset it by writing a history of mountain guides from 1780 to 1960. The mountain guide came into existence as soon as mountains were viewed as touristic sites. However, the guide himself considered his profession as a mere extension of his usual farming activity in a mountain environment. In his own eyes - and in his client's, usually middle-class person - he delved his legitimacy from his dwelling place and his long familiarity with the mountain. Nevertheless, only in Chamonix could the mountain guides set up and impose a company with established rules directly resulting from a communitarian exploitation of the mountain. In contrast, anywhere else the strangers and the alpinists were the real power, and they managed to outclass the guide. Considering his knowledge of mountain environment as purely intuitive enabled them to devise exclusion procedures such that the mountain guide now just ranked a as sub alpinist. A mere servant of his client, the local mountain guide remained a loyal and faithful underling and had to become acquainted with the mountain as it had been appropriated and remodeled by the client. In view of his dependence on the alpinist, which is evident from the available sources, the mountain guide had to adapt himself after 1930 to the new trends in mountain resort business - to become an alpinist, as in Chamonix or to vanish, as in the Pyrenees. However, a turn of the tide occurred in the period going from 1930 to 1950, with the guide now appearing as the leader in the pair. In the process the local mountain man acting as a guide has been changed into a full-time alpinist, a professional, in short a new type of; mountain man. A new mountain has been reinvented, marked by sport and leisure activities, an evolution that has its counterpart in the society at large.