Pathological Tourism
Most of us like to travel and see a bit of the world every now and then, but some people take that to extremes. We’re not talking backpacker types and those driven by an adventurous spirit who roam the world for years on end, but ones who literally can’t stop wandering. Dromomania is the medical term for an uncontrollable psychological urge to travel, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became something of a rage in France.
Tourism can be something like an addictive drug, and one of the best case studies exemplifying that was that of Jean Albert Dadas, a gas fitter from Bordeaux, France. In 1881, while serving his term of conscription in the French Army, Dadas went AWOL and started traveling. He abandoned his post, and headed to Prague in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and from there, to the Prussian and German capital, Berlin.
From Berlin, Dadas continued on into the Russian Empire, and ended up in Moscow. There, he was arrested on suspicion of radical terrorism – he had the misfortune of arriving soon after Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated. The authorities did not believe his explanations for why he was in the Russian Empire, but finding no evidence linking him to terrorism or radicalism, simply ordered him expelled.
Dadas ended up walking all the way to Constantinople, and there, he was assisted by the French Consulate, which arranged for him to travel to Vienna. He settled in the Austrian capital for some time, before hitting the road again, finally returning to France, worn out and a bit incoherent, in 1886. His case gained widespread publicity in France, and from the mid 1880s until around 1909, his example was emulated by numerous Frenchman, who gave in to an uncontrollable urge to travel.