“Pushing back the walls” in a time of pandemic: Language, tourism, and freedom

Tourism has always been intertwined with a search for—and a promise of—freedom, a promise that is all the more seductive in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to explore the resumption of “post-lockdown” tourist activity in France from a sociolinguistic perspective, examining how the relationship between tourism and freedom has developed during this particular period. Based on fieldwork carried out in two French destinations that are particularly representative of the way in which the health crisis has transformed tourism, the first part of the analysis focuses on the linguistic aspect of touristic supply and demand centered on the natural environment. In the second part, this supply and demand is analyzed in relation to a search for freedom and its (co)construction, giving rise to the identification of emerging freedoms in tourism, that is experiences of freedom created in and by discourse. To conclude, this paper looks at what these analyses can tell us about the relationship between tourism and freedom, whether before, during, or after the pandemic.