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The Michelin Red Guides: French Tourism
used stars. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Baedeker guides, including
those to France, included an asterisk next to a hotel that was particularly recommended
and eventually one or two asterisks for a noteworthy tourist sight. 61 When
Hachette launched, under the direction of Marcel Monmarché, the new Guides
Bleus (blue guides) to provincial France after World War I, one asterisk noted an
especially good hotel, one or two noted a tourist sight. 62 The Touring Club’s
annuaire had also used asterisks to denote the price ranges of hotels. 63 Michelin’s
innovation was not in using stars or asterisks but in doing so systematically to
recommend places for fine dining. To a greater extent than any interwar guidebook
or any interwar writer on gastronomy, Michelin provided an inventory of French
hotels and restaurants ranking their fare. In essence, the company took the Touring
Club’s “concours de la bonne cuisine [good cooking competition],” which focused
on the restaurants and inns of a few departments, to include the entirety of
France. 64 By 1930s, Michelin had managed to represent the best in French
gastronomy, at the same time that gastronomy itself was becoming an important
part of French tourism.
Michelin ratings were further distinguished by their brevity. The stars became
the sole indicator of relative quality of restaurants. The long descriptions of meals
that were so important in the writings of Curnonsky, Touring Club members, and
various gastronomes, had no counterpart chez Michelin. In gastronomic circles,
writing, reading, and talking about meals was as much a part of the process as
eating itself, hence the irony that Michelin, as identified with gastronomy as any
French institution in the late twentieth century, provided no commentary whatsoever
with its rating. Restaurants received no more detail in the guide than did
the stockistes. The very brevity of Michelin entries added over time to the mystery
surrounding the Michelin rankings. Although the company has made periodic
references to its inspectors, their absolute anonymity, their procedures, and even
at times their number, 65 Michelin has carefully cultivated a secrecy that garners
yet more attention than outspoken clarity of criteria could ever offer.
Michelin managed a considerable feat in interwar France. Although “service to
the client” had been a preoccupation of prewar business people, such as champagne
makers, after the First World War markets were becoming bigger and more
anonymous. Michelin maintained the myth of service to the individual client, such
a fundamental part of its marketing in the prewar years, while obviously profiting
from the growth in the number of tourists in the interwar years and doing
everything in its power to foster that expansion. 66 Clearly, Bibendum’s ratings
were meant to replace the word-of-mouth recommendations of restaurants’ clients
to each other; Bibendum himself became a friend in the know. James Buzard has
asserted that part of the success of Thomas Cook and Karl Baedeker in the
nineteenth century resulted from the ways that companies used the men themselves,
even after their deaths, as images of personal service for tourists in
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