84

During the second half of the 19th century, with the development of steamships and railroads, and the opening of new routes such as the Suez Canal, the round-the-world trip became possible for tourists. Thus, beginning in 1872, package tours around the world were organized, reflecting the entry of round-the-world trips into the new tourist industry. This paper studies these first voyages of a new kind through the example of the Société des Voyages d'Etudes Autour du Monde (SVEAM). The corpus, constituted by official documents of the SVEAM, newspaper and journal articles dedicated to the project, and the written accounts of three participants in the trip, allows us to shed light on a poorly known moment in the history of tourism. This paper describes the profile of the first round-the-world tourists (wealth, motives), their itineraries, and the activities which they pursued at their various stopovers.