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The Michelin Red Guides: French Tourism
cleanliness; to do so, France required a “national league,” and that league was the
TCF, which would lead the crusade for WCs for the sake of the French nation. “It
is a crusade to undertake. To succeed, one need only want it. The Touring-Club
wants it. It will thus have deserved [praise not only] from the nation [patrie] but
from humanity. So be it!” 22 Regularly thereafter, the TCF reported on the progress
of equipping hotels with WCs. In 1899, it provided drawings of WCs that it offered
for sale to hotel owners, according them a 25 percent reduction over the retail
price with the difference covered by the TCF. 23 Toilet paper was similarly
subsidized to encourage its adoption. The TCF even showed its model toilets at
the Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1900 along with an entire “hygienic
[hotel] room.” 24
In the pages of the TCF’s Revue, the WC became identified with tourism
generally and the attendant economic progress of France. In an era of growing
nationalism, the TCF often deployed nationalist arguments in favor of its members’
personal interests. In 1901, an article in the Revue entitled, “The Defense of
National Interests,” reminded readers that “France is both better gifted [in touristic
treasures] and worse served than most of her neighbors.” 25 WCs were key to the
salvation of France because they helped to make French hotels competitive with
those of other countries. As H. Berthe wrote in the Revue, “We should thus
consider the hotel industry not as a private enterprise, but as an essentially national
work, destined to raise up in large measure the intellectual level of diverse social
classes [he does not indicate how] and to contribute powerfully to the financial
prosperity of the country [pays].” 26 Thus, clean toilets in hotels could improve
overall hygienic standards of lower classes while bringing in money that would
enrich France as a whole. Nationalism was a convenient mental fig leaf to hide
bourgeois self-interest in having hygienic accommodations, a much-vaunted
hygiene that separated themselves not only from “natives” in the colonies but also
from those in the provinces. Hotels, and the WCs in them, were supposedly crucial
to the economic future of France. André Michelin, who ran the firm’s advertising,
was quite attuned to trends in the world of tourism and arguments for it; he no
doubt realized the importance of WCs for rich French tourists in the first decade
of the twentieth century, hence the preoccupation of the red guides.
Advertisements for the red guides further exploited the new focus on hygiene
with the gendered notion that men, the providers, needed to supply a comfortable,
hygienic place to stay for women, the presumed consumers. In one telling
newspaper advertisement, Michelin recounted the story of newlyweds traveling
without a red guide. After the chauffeur informed them that a mechanical breakdown
would leave them stranded overnight, the Viscount René de la Ribaudière
(a name suggesting bawdiness) and Giselle, his new wife (the text notes that “she
was not yet [really] the countess”), got a room in a hotel that was, according to
the owner, “the best in the region.” They then sat down to eat.
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