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Stephen L. Harp
14. Do you have a telegraph number? What is it?
15. What are the sights [curiosités] to be seen in your town? (attach a page)
16. What are the interesting excursions to make nearby? (attach a page) 21
In order to assure the honesty of the hotel owner, two members of the Automobile
Club de France, or if there were no local ACF members, two members of the TCF,
needed to attest to the accuracy of the hotel’s responses.
The questionnaire reveals the centrality of care of the automobile for early
automobile tourists. Electric cars needed to be recharged and drivers of gasolinepowered
cars needed to ensure the supply of gasoline. Before many automobiles
were enclosed, a covered garage was useful, and given the value of cars, a locked
garage a reassurance. Early cars were unreliable enough that a repair pit, a hole in
the floor that allowed one to get underneath the car, might also prove handy.
The other most pressing questions concerned the level of accommodations.
Michelin continued to list the average prices of a room until 1908 and needed to
verify them. At a time when a bathtub was not taken for granted, the company
needed a specific statement that one was present. Tourists’ growing expectations
for hotels centered, however, on the WC. Although specific information about the
WCs in a hotel had not been part of the first Michelin guide or the early TCF
annuaires, WCs were important enough to merit detailed questions by 1902. In
this instance, the red guide reflects the preoccupations of an urban French
bourgeoisie which was increasingly adopting new hygienic standards and bemoaning
the lack of them among rural hotel owners.
Here too Michelin fit squarely within a larger tourist movement, picking up on
the Touring Club’s own obsession with toilets at the turn of the century. In the late
1890s, the regular articles in the Revue mensuelle of the TCF focused frequently
on WCs. In 1896, an article complained that either the installation or the maintenance
of WCs was inadequate, even when they were present. In 1897, Emile
Gautier called for “a crusade” in the pages of the review. Implicitly equating
provincials without WCs with natives in the colonies, Gautier claimed that
“cleanliness is an indication of progress, a sign of civilization. All savages are
dirty,” whereas “all civilized people are clean.” Europeans were supposed to know
better. “How many individuals, how many cities [cités, which could imply a place
where workers in particular lived], in the heart of our European societies, so proud
of their prodigious flowering that have not yet picked themselves up from the
apathy of barbarian races!” He was convinced that the English provided the model
for improvement, “one knows that the English people, at least those of the
cultivated elite, are the cleanest race in the world: it is noteworthy [piquant] to
observe that it is also one of the most powerful, one whose influence is simultaneously
the most widespread, the most profound, and the most solid.” There was,
however, cause for hope. The French could go beyond English standards of
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