The Michelin Guides to the Battlefields of the First World War: The Destruction of War as a Tourist Attraction

In September 1917, amid the deadliest of the fighting, Andre Michelin published the first in a thirty-one-volume set of Michelin guides to the First World War battlefields. In these guides, the perspective of the witness to the war, confronted with the wreckage of their reality, was marketed for the first time as a desirable tourist experience for the general public. This perspective has unexpectedly come to prominence once again in recent times, after the demise of the last surviving veterans of the First World War, with a new edition of the Michelin guide (2014), which invites contemporary tourists to explore the battlefields of the First World War. Through a sustained diachronic textual analysis of the rhetorical devices used - both then and now - to transform the experience of witnessing the war into a desirable leisure activity, this article defines a new marginal figure: the 'panoramic witness'.

Automated summary

This article discusses the rhetorical devices used in transforming the experience of witnessing war into a tourist activity during the First World War and now, and defines a new marginal figure called the 'panoramic witness'.