Les Croisières en Afrique du Nord

The Années folles were ‘imbued’ with the Orient, its products, its ideas, its landscapes, its customs, its art of living, its myths... It was against this backdrop that new tourism projects were born. The Compagnie Générale Transatlantique aimed to make the Orient accessible and close at hand with its ‘Saharan cruises’, and also developed car tours (notably with Renault and Citroën) and hotels in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The Swiss sculptor and painter Édouard Marcel Sandoz (1881-1971) was both a witness to and part of these tourist tours. He made five trips to the desert, each time bringing back valuable sketches.

The first volume of this book reconstructs the highlights of the Sahara cruise adventure, based on documents held in private collections, associations and libraries, or acquired at public auctions. The second reproduces the work of Sandoz, who, like an ethnologist, studied, documented, described, represented and photographed what he saw, revealing a personal account of his travels, filled with scenes of daily life, landscapes and portraits.