Tour guide warned of cows, carts and crowds

Then and now: the 1908 and 2008 editions archives

When the first Michelin Guide to Switzerland was published 100 years ago it contained advice on hotels, buying petrol and even how to deal with cattle-clogged roads.

The venerable volume, according to French tyre giant and publisher Michelin, has been “for 100 years the faithful companion of travellers to Switzerland”. The truth, however, is a little more complicated.

Michelin did indeed release its first guide about Switzerland in 1908. It was a very respectable size – several hundred pages – and in many ways not so different from the famous red guide to hotels and restaurants of today.

The Swiss book was only the third foreign guide after Belgium in 1904 and Algeria-Tunisia in 1907. The first one, on France, was published in 1900.

The idea came from André Michelin, who with brother Edouard, founded the company in 1889. Indeed it was André who is said to have remarked as the first volume was published, “this guide is born with the century, but will last as long as the century”.

However, visitors to Switzerland had to wait more than eight decades for the next edition, published in 1994. Since then a red guide to the country has been issued each year – as has long been the case for neighbouring Italy and Germany as well as for Britain and Spain.

The 2008 guide is, therefore, strictly only the 16th edition. But there are still a good many reasons to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first.

To mark the occasion, Michelin is including a reproduction of the 1908 guide – complete with illustrations – to all those who buy this year’s book.

While it is not a full copy, it nevertheless manages to give a good glimpse of the main concerns and passions of tourists of days gone by.

Livestock and yokes

For example, the preface exhorts the driver on “an excursion to Switzerland” to remember that “he is entering an area inhabited by an almost totally rural population”.

The consequences are: “many small localities often one after another”, “a great many dangerous junctions” and “permanent traffic of livestock and country carriages”.

Industrialised towns also need attention, as “an intense traffic of carts” is the result of factories, from which spill out at lunchtime “thousands of workers into the narrow street”.

Every serious motorist, writes the guide, will therefore understand that “sensible prudence is required and that the authorities were well advised when they set a 30-kilometre-an-hour speed limit in the open country”.

Also praised was the ten kmh limit for towns and mountains where it is “difficult to see far ahead the nature of what is to come” and the walking pace limit “at several dangerous crossings”.

Hotel prices

No problems were, on the other hand, found with the hotels. “The prices are in general moderate,” the guide notes.

The authors point out that prices tend to increase in high season, but this “exaggeration” is justified by the “short duration of nice days in the mountains”.

As with modern guides, the category of hotel still needs to be chosen and like today there are five rankings.

The first category, The Palace Hotels, is deemed worthy of great praise: “grandiose, of great luxury, princely,” enthuses the guide.

The more modest establishments also seem to be acceptable. In the fourth and fifth categories Michelin decided to include only those hotels in which a tourist would find “clean linen and more or less tolerable food”.

swissinfo, based on an article in French by Michel Walter

In brief

The Michelin group has 17% of the global tyre market and employs 121,000 people.

Its guides and maps section only accounts for 1% of its total turnover – €16.9 billion (SFr27.6 billion) in 2007 – but they are still the most popular worldwide.

In 2007 Michelin sold More than one million red guides (hotels and restaurants),
2.5 million tourist guides (green guides and others), 11 million maps.

Switzerland 1908

The Michelin Guide to Switzerland of 1908 mentions under regional particularities: Tête de Moine cheese, the velvet industry in Basel, Bern Bear biscuits, and jewellery and furs from Geneva. There is no mention of the banking sector.

Many hotels have disappeared since the 1908 edition, but a few still exist 100 years on, including the Hôtel de Bergues in Geneva and the Bellevue in the capital, Bern.

The guide also provides the addresses of tyre repair workshops (punctures were very commonplace), and places to buy petrol (often hardware shops or the grocers).

It also provides sunrise and sunset times (“as at the Lucerne horizon”) and a detailed description of the main roads (“lovely, wide and straight”, “winding and curving: moderate speed necessary”).

Whereas the Michelin hotel and restaurant is today red, the 1908 edition was green.