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The Michelin Red Guides: French Tourism
move removed the uncertainty for the tourist, that urbanite alone in the provinces,
and continued to provide free advertising for the hotel, while reinforcing tourists’
collective control over the latter. 28
In the years before the war, the Michelin red guides became a major marketing
device for the company. Print runs climbed from 35,000 for the 1900 edition, to
52,815 in 1901, to 70,000 in 1911, and 86,000 in 1912. 29 The 1900 edition
contained 400 pages with 13 city maps, the 1901 edition 600 pages with 80 city
maps, the 1912 edition with 757 pages and approximately 600 city maps. 30 The
guide received a hard cover, so that it would hold up better, and it took on a larger
format, reaching by 1912 the rough dimensions of late-twentieth-century red
guides. Although tourist sights, or curiosités as both the Touring Club and Michelin
consistently called them, were listed as one-line entries under the nearest city, the
red guides did not provide any significant details about those sights, leaving to
the Joanne, Baedeker, and TCF tourist guides the determination of what needed
to be seen in France and why. Michelin did, however, expand the approach of the
red guides beyond France just as it had expanded its tire production and sales
outside France. By 1912, Michelin published guides to the British Isles, the Alps,
and Rhineland (northern Italy, Switzerland, Tyrol, Bavaria, southern Württemberg,
the Rhineland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), Les pays du soleil
(Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, southern Italy, Corsica, and the Riviera), Spain and
Portugal, and Germany in several different languages. In 1912 Michelin boasted
that the combined international and French distribution of guides had totaled
1,286,375 between 1900 and 1912. The staff had the responsibility for more than
1,300 city maps. 31
After the First World War, as improved roads and better road signs made France
increasingly accessible by car, there was a commensurate expansion in the number
of hotels, inns, and restaurants catering to automobile tourists. In addition, tires
themselves required less specialized knowledge on the part of the driver because
the number of stockistes who could repair and replace tires increased, tires lasted
longer, and they were easier to change. In 1912, the guide had over 600 pages, 62
of which concerned tires. By 1927, however, the first section of the guide devoted
to changing tires included only 5 pages, out of 990 total. The prewar guide to hotels
and stockistes quickly became a guide to hotels and especially restaurants. The
company continued to claim that it was at the service of the client, but these elite
clients’ perceived needs changed considerably after the First World War. Gastronomy,
often claimed to have undergone a renewal before and just after the war,
soon became the veritable raison d’être of the Michelin guide. Gastronomy itself,
once the preserve of royalty and the aristocracy, had become widely accessible to
wealthy bourgeois eating in restaurants in the nineteenth century. As the notion of
regional gastronomy, by definition in the provinces, grew in the interwar years,
Michelin adapted the guide to meet tourists’ perceived desires. 32 In the process,
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