Stephen McGinty: Raise a glass to the Scot who invented holidays in France

FRANCE came to visit Glasgow last week, and with a day off and an invitation to the "auld alliance" for croissants and coffee, I thought it only good manners to accept. So, at around 11 o'clock on a bright spring morning I ventured into the breakfast room of the Millennium Hotel in George Square to find the entire country spread out, each region scattered to a different table, all anxious to promote their wares.

All, that is, except Corsica. Where, pray tell, was Corsica? Sure, geology had booted it off the bottom millions of years before, but it couldn't still be in a huff. No, I was assured, Corsica was not in a huff, Corsica was in Manchester. The reason Corsica was lingering in Manchester while the rest of France had headed north was on account of the difficulty in reaching Corsica from Scotland. The land that bequeathed us Napoleon figured Scots wouldn't make the effort to explore their sandy beaches and rugged countryside, but I assured their regional colleagues that they were wrong and they promised to pass the message on. So c'mon Corsica.

The event, organised by the French Tourist Board, was designed to educate journalists and travel writers on the diversity of a nation that is too often defined by Paris and the Cte d'Azur. Paris was in fact there, and while you might imagine the city's representative to have been buffing her nails and exhaling bored breaths in the manner of a destination that attracts more tourists than any other on the planet, she was instead charm personified and agreed that the tourist could find much to enjoy in Paris in August, when it is at its most deserted, but when an artificial beach lines the Seine.

Then there was Miss Toulouse, who extolled the virtues of the "ville rose", the Pink City, as it is known on account of the way the light plays on its russet brickwork, while the reps from Languedoc-Roussillon, which sits like a stubby finger jabbing at Spain, educated us on its remarkable archaeological sites, such as the Roman amphitheatre of Nmes, dated to the first century AD, which today hosts concerts and bullfights.

The Midi-Pyrnes seduced us with Rocamadour, or the Sacred Town, a medieval beauty that is suspended on a cliff and illuminated by the setting sun. Then there were the cave paintings in the mountains of Arige, horse, deer and bison daubed by hands 10,000 years ago. While the chteaux of the Loire are justly celebrated, who knew about the tree houses suspended in woodland in Amboise?

Gazing at the French Tourist Board hard at work, I thought how much has changed since a Scotsman "invented" the French holiday. Oh yes, alongside penicillin, television and the telephone, we Scots can claim to have created the concept of a fortnight in a gte. The man to whom the thousands of Scots who each year flock to France should raise a glass of Merlot is Tobias Smollett. He was born in Renton, Dunbartonshire, in 1721, trained as a surgeon, but was seduced by literature and doggedly made a living by the quill, long before it was fashionable, or even financially possible.

Fond of the good life, he was rarely one article ahead of the bailiffs. While his second novel, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) would influence Charles Dickens, it was his Travels Through France and Italy, published 15 years later, that sparked a tourist boom.

Smollett and his wife had sought solace in travel after the death of their daughter, and his letters home, which were later collected in a volume, detailed the cities he loved, such as Nmes and, in particular, Nice, while guiding the reader from one good inn to the next and warning against those establishments who would take advantage of the novice traveller. The result was a flood of British tourists anxious to explore the country for themselves, one which, 250 years on, continues to flow.