Un petit mois de bonheur -Yvon le Vaillant
A brief month of happiness
Alain Laurent (34) is a philosopher who has become disillusioned with the holidays of his
contemporaries. He knows what he is talking about, having worked for eight years as a holiday event
organiser. An observer of society, he has a diploma on the concept of leisure activities, and has written a
thesis on holiday clubs.
From where does this disillusionment come? For eleven months of the year, we live day-to-day in a
closed, shut off, grey, and oppressive society – living exclusively in the daily grind; and so there is a
“rising up because of, but also against, the industrial world,” and then holidays arrive, that single, free
month, like a longed-for oasis in the grey of life, like the foremost instant in which everything will at last
become possible. Freedom and happiness will have been rediscovered. Now, we observe that all this
free time has not been properly taken advantage of, that we have not made it deliver to us all its
possibilities, that the holidays are closed, grey, reactive; holidays stuck in the guided movements of
herds of sheep, in organisatory perversion and passivity…
It is enough to look around us, as he has done. Holidays seem to have been colonised, in the same way
as our daily lives, by technocracy and profit. We thought to escape, but we remain in the same world.
Let us take clubs as an example; they arose like hope itself. Laurent does not deny their positive
elements: the sun and sea; that lively satisfaction within reach of (almost) everybody; the freedom and
enjoyment of the body; isolation shattered. He simply reproaches them for “going too far”, for saying to
people, “Come and consume the sun and the sea here”, and for thinking, imagining, and making
decisions in the individual’s stead.
Yvon le Vaillant, Le Nouvel Observateur, 2-8 July 1973