CULTURAL TOURISM: FRENCH ATTRACTIONS

This is an article about some famous tourist attractions in France according to the academic subject “cultural tourism”. It is a subject which is a point of interest for us because it is part of a patrimony and culture. It seems that it can be useful for Indonesian people to know a little bit of a French culture. It is hoped it will give the desire to come and visit France. In order to write this article, we first used our personal knowledge of those tourist attractions that we have already visited several times for some of them. To complete those information and adjust some details, we read some press articles and use each tourist attraction official websites. In this article, we will present four famous tourist attractions: two in Paris, one in Normandy and one in Bordeaux. They are The Château Pape Clément, The Mont Saint Michel, The Eiffel Tower, and the Palace of Versailles.


INTRODUCTION
France is the world's most popular tourist destination receiving 82 million foreign tourists annual. Visitors are attracted by historic cities, a beautiful countryside, the castles of the Loire Valley, and Brittany and Normandy. The country concentrates many cultural tourist attractions, not only in the capital, Paris. In this article we chose to present four tourist attractions well-known for several reasons: The Château Pape Clément, The Mont Saint Michel, The Eiffel Tower, and the Palace of Versailles.

METHODS
In order to write this article, we first used our personal knowledge of those tourist attractions that we have already visited several times for some of them. To complete those information and adjust some details, we read some press articles and use each tourist attraction official websites. Some books and researches are also reviewed to strengthen related statements.

DISCUSSION
First of all, we chose one of the most famous tourist attraction in the region of Bordeaux, especially for wine lovers: the Château Pape Clément.
Château Pape Clément is one of the oldest Grands Crus of Bordeaux. His vineyard was implemented in the XIIth century by Bertrand de Goth, younger of a noble family from Bordeaux region. Bertrand de Got became Pope in 1305 under the name of Clement V. This is where the Château inherited its name from and its wine became an icon. Château Pape Clément welcomes also companies for seminars as well as exceptional stays with its five luxury rooms.  The third attraction is the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel tower history represents a part of national heritage. It's as been the symbol of France and Paris for decades. But when Gustave Eiffel, the man who built the Tower, achieved its construction in 1889, the tower was only meant to be temporary in the Parisian landscape and was far from being the Parisians' favorite landmark. In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, a competition was organized with the aim to "build on the Champ-de-Mars an iron tower with a square base, 125 meters wide and 300 meters high." Out of the 107 proposals submitted, Gustave Eiffel's was chosen. At the time, many were against the building because they found it not beautiful.
When the project came to be built, it had been established that the licensing rights linked to the convention for the tower's construction would last only 20 years, followed by imminent destruction. However, two million people visited the Tower during the Universal Exposition. Following this incredible success, the buildingbecame a symbol of French industrial power. The Tower was as equally as successful during the 1900 Universal Exposition. Determined to avoid the Tower's destruction, Gustave Eiffel went to great lengths to prove its scientific utility. Scientific experiments were conducted in the fields of astronomy and physiology but what would really save the Tower in the end was its use as a radio antenna tower, first for military communications and then for permanent, radiotelegraphy communications; in fact, the Tower served many a purpose during the First World War. The Eiffel Tower is part of the French history.
Every year approximately seven million visitors climb the Tower. Its success is such that many countries all over the world have replicated the Tower more or less identically to the original one. Building the castle and maintaining the court there was phenomenally expensive, but did a good deal to establish the dominance of French style and taste in the whole of Europe, giving French luxury manufacturing advantages that long outlasted the fall of the Old Regime.
Versailles is also the « Grand Trianon », which is the private residence of the king and many gardens with a total area of 830 hectares.  France. In every city you can find a monument which symbolize a part of the history. Don't miss to learn and to understand a bit of French history if you come to visit these places.
There are so many ways to understand what culture means (Mudana, ed, 2003). However, the condition of cultural tourism in France is a bit different from we find in Bali. In France, most of the cultural tourism products are represented by physical cultures. The practices of cultural tourism in Bali are dominated by various products of art, especially traditional music and dances (Mudana, 2000;Mudana and Ardini, 2013). This fact almost always makes the tourists want to repeat their travelling to Bali (Sutama, Mudana, and Astawa, 2017