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The Michelin Red Guides: French Tourism
as a brotherhood, une fraternité of equals for which sons might be prepared. For
wives and daughters the calculations of distance would presumably prove taxing
and irrelevant given their designated stations in life.
Over time, the Michelin guide gave increasing importance to accommodations
over technical matters. In addition to more maps, more stockistes, more mechanics,
and more information generally, hotels became a focal point for improvement.
Beginning in 1902, the guide included a questionnaire that a hotel owner wishing
to be listed needed to fill out and send back to Michelin in Paris. The questions
reveal annals about the assumptions of early urban bourgeois tourists in the French
countryside as well as about Michelin’s efforts to control hotel owners, an effort
that complemented the TCF’s own rigorous work. The Michelin questionnaire
reads:
1. Is your hotel open all year?
2. How much should an automobile tourist expect to spend daily at your hotel?
– for an average room including service and lighting?
– for breakfast in the morning?
– for lunch?
– for dinner?
(Specify if wine is compris)
3. Do you offer TCF members a reduction of 10 percent?
4. Do you have hygienic rooms [chambres hygiéniques] in the TCF style?
5. Does your establishment have a bathroom?
6. Do you have advanced WCs [des WCs perfectionnés]? (We call advanced
WCs those that are equipped with water flush mechanisms with mobile seat,
and of which the walls are covered in tile or earthenware, kept in extreme
cleanliness and always equipped with toilet paper).
7. Do you have a dark room for photography?
– Does it have a red light, basins, and water?
8. Do you have in the hotel itself a covered garage?
– Is it completely closed/locked [fermé]?
9. Do you make people pay for the garage? How much?
– Do you agree to let people with the Michelin guide park for free?
(The only hotels listed in our guide agree to this condition)
10. Do you have a repair pit [une fosse à réparations] in the hotel?
11. Do you have a stock of gas in the hotel?
12. Do you have in the hotel a source of electric energy that would permit
motorists to recharge an electric car? Or only batteries for lights [accumulateurs
d’allumage]? Do you know of any in your town? What is the address?
What are the prices?
13. Do you have an intercity telephone? What is the number?
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