Untitled

Stephen L. Harp
the company avoided overt references to class or wealth at a time when automobile
use exploded in France, but the guide itself offered a new stratification. In one
sense, access to fine eating establishments was rationalized and even democratized
to the extent that good contacts or membership in an exclusive gastronomic club
were no longer necessary to locate and dine in restaurants reputed to be the best in
France. In another sense, the stratification took a new twist. Only the filthy rich
could actually afford a three-star restaurant. For the less well-off, but nevertheless
bourgeois in interwar France, the guide offered the spectacle of the rich and
famous, revealing where they ate and what they ate there.
Despite the reduction of pages devoted to narrow, technical information, the
overall size of the guides grew considerably. From 399 pages in 1900, to 774 in
1922, to 1,022 (not including maps) in 1929, and to 1,107 in 1939. The numbers
of stockistes and garages grew. More towns received a listing, and more of those
with listings had a map. The number of hotels and later restaurants grew as did
prefatory information about how to use the complicated abbreviations of the guide,
which were designed to save space. At the same time, advertising, except for
Michelin tires, tire-changing equipment, guides to the battlefields, regional
guidebooks, maps, and golfballs, disappeared entirely.
In the meantime, the company began charging 7 francs for the guides to France
in 1920, a price that grew with interwar inflation to 10 francs in 1925 (about twice
the price of a decent hotel room, equalling approximately five hours of work of a
provincial worker earning the average wage), 33 20 francs in 1928, 25 francs in
1933, and 30 francs in 1939. Although Alain Jemain has reported the company’s
version of the pricing strategy to be the result of André Michelin’s trips to garages
where he found Michelin guides used to prop up a work bench and André’s
assertion that people respect only what they pay for, the new pricing coincided
with the guide’s increased focus on hotels and restaurants, rather than information
about Michelin tires. 34 Initially, people appear to have bought fewer guides than
they had accepted gratis. Whereas Michelin had printed 75,000 in 1919 and 90,000
in 1920, the company printed only 60,000 in 1922 (no guide appeared in 1921
because of the firm’s preoccupation with producing guides to the battlefields). 35
The number printed climbed in the late 1920s and 1930s. Between 1926 and 1939,
Michelin sold approximately 1,340,000 guides to France, just under 100,000
yearly on average. 36 Although these numbers were quite high compared with
the press runs of moderately popular novels, for which the average printing was
about 15,000 copies in the early 1920s, they paled in comparison with those of
Michelin’s own interwar pamphlets, which ranged in several cases from 500,000
to 1 million copies, and with the sales of maps, which totalled 33,300,000 from
1926 to 1945. 37
The major innovation of interwar guidebooks was their inclusion of restaurants.
Before the war, the price of board (pension), as well as the room, was included for
202