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Seeing, Traveling, and Consuming
It is useful in this context to recall Christopher Thompson’s discussion of the
way in which a notionally inclusive leisure activity such as bicycling raised severe
doubts about national and social cohesion. In Stephen Harp’s account of earlytwentieth-century
French tourism and the Michelin Red Guides, we receive
another important reminder of how tourism, as an act of desired reconciliation,
was open to a whole array of social tensions. In this instance, however, not the
train or bicycle but the automobile is the primary means of transportation, and
gastronomy is the focus of the travel experience. Unlike the venerable Baedeker
guides, which gave short shrift to the automobile until the 1930s, the Guide
Michelin, published first in 1900 and free of charge, was based on the vision of
the bourgeois head of household traveling for pleasure with his family by car –
and preferably riding Michelin tires. Such mechanized patriarchal tourism befit
France not only because French roads were higher in quality than those of any
other European country before World War I, but also because the French automobile
industry produced more cars than all other European countries combined
from 1902 to 1907. 30 Beside emphasizing repair shops and tire suppliers, the
Michelin guides paid close attention to hotel prices, the availability of gasoline,
the hygienic quality of overnight accommodations, and (especially after 1918)
food. Gastronomic tourism had of course always been available to the well-heeled
devotees of the Grand Tour, but throughout the nineteenth century, and now more
forcefully just before and after World War I, food came to play a greater role in
leisure travel than ever before. Not only the wealthy bourgeoisie, but now also an
expanding caravan of middle-class motorists were interested in dining while
traveling, and the Michelin guides became the central authority in this area.
Guidebook itineraries focused on different classes of restaurants allowed the
automobilist family to conduct a tour de la France gastronomique, literally eating
their way through the country. That food-based touring was seen by the guidebook
publishers as an essential part of Frenchness was reflected in the fact that they
ignored foreign cuisine, even in the French empire, where it was assumed (usually
correctly) that in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, French people ate French food.
Harp demonstrates that the Michelin guides amounted to a most sophisticated form
of advertising, which on the one hand reinforces criticisms of the culture industry’s
totalizing influence on free time. Yet Harp concludes with the point that we do not
yet understand the problem of reception and use when it comes to historical study
of travel guidebooks. Moreover, insofar that these publications were developed in
close conjunction with the perceived needs and interests of their readers, their
history suggests a complex intertwining of production and consumption, authorship
and reception, rather than a one-way imposition of values from above.
My own contribution to this volume also deals with motorized tourism, but this
time in Germany between the world wars. Germany, the country in which the
internal combustion engine was invented and pioneers such as Carl Benz and
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