page_title: Mont Blanc massif
section_title: Tourist beginnings
hierarchical_section_title: Mont Blanc massif / Human history / Tourist beginnings
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Détails du groupe en bronze représentant Horace de Saussure et son guide Jacques Balmat, sculpture Jean-Jules Salmson (1887) Further information
context_page_description: The Mont Blanc massif is a mountain range in the Alps, located mostly in France and Italy, but also straddling Switzerland at its northeastern end. It contains eleven major independent summits, each over 4,000 metres in height. It is named after Mont Blanc, the highest point in western Europe and the European Union. Because of its considerable overall altitude, a large proportion of the massif is covered by glaciers, which include the Mer de Glace and the Miage Glacier – the longest glaciers in France and Italy, respectively.
  The massif forms a watershed between the vast catchments of the rivers Rhône and Po, and a tripoint between France, Italy and Switzerland; it also marks the border between two climate regions by separating the northern and western Alps from the southern Alps. The mountains of the massif consist mostly of granite and gneiss rocks and at high altitudes the vegetation is an arctic-alpine flora.
  The valleys that delimit the massif were used as communication routes by the Romans until they left around the 5th century AD. The region remained of some military importance through to the mid-20th century.
context_section_description: In 1741, the Chamouny valley and its glaciers on the north side of the massif were discovered and written about by two aristocratic travelling Englishmen, named William Windham and Richard Pococke. The descriptions of their exploits were published across Europe, bringing the mountains of the Mont Blanc range to the attention of a wide audience for the first time. In 1760, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure offered a large financial prize to the first people who successfully ascended Mont Blanc. The summit was finally attained on 8 August 1786 by two Chamonix men, the guide Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel Paccard. The decades that followed saw the gradual opening up of Chamonix to the world, as well as the rest of the Mont Blanc massif. The many published accounts of climbs and impressive sights amongst or around the mountain range attracted numerous wealthy and notable visitors, for whom a visit to marvel at the Sea of Ice (the Mer de Glace) became a fashionable thing to experience.
  In July 1816, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley toured the Alps and visited Chamouni (as it was then known), as well as the Mer de Glace and the Bossons Glacier. They jointly published their accounts and letters in a work entitled: History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. The book concludes with Mont Blanc, a 144-line poem by Percy Shelley, written whilst in Chamonix and which was inspired by the river Arve, the snow-covered summits, the chaotic glaciers and the forests that he experienced during their visit.
  Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
  
  Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene—
  
  Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
  
  Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
  
  Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
  
  Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
  
  And wind among the accumulated steeps;
  — Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
  Amongst many other notable visitors were: Goethe (1779); Chateaubriand (1805); Madame de Staël; Victor Hugo; Louis Pasteur and Franz Liszt (1836), plus two successive wives of Napoleon Bonaparte: Joséphine de Beauharnais (1810) and Marie Louise of Austria (1814). In 1849, John Ruskin spent a month in Chamonix, from where he painted some of the massif's mountains before undertaking the Tour of Mont Blanc. When Savoy was eventually annexed to France in 1860, Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie visited the region to mark the event and undertook to enhance road access leading to the end of the Arve valley.
  The 19th century saw considerable economic development which turned the small agricultural town of Chamonix into a base for tourists, with luxurious hotels and mountain lodges being built to accommodate them. A trade in selling local items to visiting foreigners soon developed. Crystals collected from across the massif were much in demand, as were locally produced goods such as horn trinkets and honey.
  In just 50 years the Mont Blanc massif, and Chamonix and Courmayeur in particular, had become a popular destination for many travellers, and its economy changed from 80% agriculture to 80% tourism. It saw the emergence and spread of the sport of alpine mountaineering, and visitor numbers increased significantly. By the end of the 18th century, Chamonix was home to around 1,500 summer visitors. By 1850 it was welcoming 5,000 visitors, and by 1892 those numbers had risen to 24,000 a year. In 1906, the eleventh edition of a guidebook written by Edward Whymper about Chamonix and the Mont Blanc range estimated that 130,000 visitors had gone there during the previous season. It also reported that the railway service to Chamonix, which had previously been suspended in winter, was now running throughout the year. The tourist boom to the mountains had started. In 1924, a Winter Sports Week was held in Chamonix, with patronage from the International Olympic Committee. It attracted over 10,000 paying visitors and was retrospectively named as the
caption: Statue of Jacques Balmat and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in a monument erected at Chamonix in 1887.[75]
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