The accidental diplomat

WASHINGTON'S CONSERVATIVE French bashers -- the ones who urged us last year to eat our Freedom Fries and pour out our bottles of Bordeaux -- may be dismayed to learn that vacationing Americans refuse to stay away from France. To the surprise of industry observers, travel to France -- along with the rest of Western Europe -- is booming this year. And Americans, whose first-quarter entries to France increased 10 percent this year, aren't about to let a weak dollar or the still-prickly relations between Messrs. Bush and Chirac get in the way of a quick jaunt to the City of Light or a two-week tour of Provence.

To be sure, the pursuit of fresh croissants and the little piano shop on the Left Bank is more fraught in a time of war and terrorist threats -- especially when every conflict with a haughty waiter or petulant concierge can take on the flavor of a minor international incident. But the recent geopolitical unpleasantness isn't the first time tourists have found themselves in the tangled thicket of Franco-American relations. In the early years of the Cold War, the politics of tourism became intertwined with transatlantic diplomacy and American grand strategy. If the Americans who landed in 1944 to liberate France from the Nazis were a first wave, the postwar hordes of middle-class tourists helped open an important cultural front in the struggle between America and its Soviet rival.

In "Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France" (North Carolina), historian Christopher Endy looks at French-US relations through the lens of tourism as he explores the nexus between foreign policy and the leisure industry. Endy's book is rich in detail on such matters as tipping protocols, the politics of travel guides, and the persistent tensions between American tourists and their French hosts as France, with the help of American dollars, began its ascent to its current rank as the world's No. 1 tourist destination. Endy, whose book is part of the "New Cold War History" series edited by eminent Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, focuses on the quarter century after World War II, but his research sheds light on the era of "Rick Steves' Europe."

"This might seem like trivial stuff -- I'm writing a book with `Cold War' in the title and talking about how people tipped in Paris cafes," Endy said in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles, where he is an assistant professor of history at California State University. "But such little exchanges were at the heart of tourism. They were the way in which most Americans encountered France, and can be fraught with anxiety. I think they still are for people."

Indeed, the numbers alone suggest just how serious a matter tourism was for a nation emerging from the war and occupation. By one estimate, Endy writes, American tourists provided one-fourth of all dollars earned by Western Europe in 1949, with American tourist industry earnings accounting for 81.7 percent of French merchandise exports to the United States. Between 1948 and 1952, Americans spent at least $214 million in France -- roughly the equivalent of nine percent of the nation's $2.4 billion share of Marshall Plan aid, which itself contained provisions for bolstering American tourism in France.

But even well into the 1960s, protecting the special touristic relationship remained an urgent priority for many French officials, including Charles de Gaulle. For all his resistance to American policy on Vietnam and NATO, the general's famous "certain idea of France" seemed to include hotels and cafes staffed with reformed French waiters wearing state-sanctioned smiles and packed with dollar-wielding American tourists.

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France's tourism industry struggled in the years just after World War II. Food, fuel, and electricity shortages did not make selling the glories of French civilization an easy task, while depleted civilian ship fleets (the jet plane had not yet taken off) made even getting to Europe a considerable challenge.

Still, both governments went to considerable lengths to stimulate travel. Shortly after V-E Day, in order to head off negative word-of-mouth from returning American GIs, the French provisional government created the French Committee to Welcome the Allied Armies. The committee sponsored free five-day excursions to Lourdes and other sites, with the US Army picking up the bill for the gas (and the wine). Later, the French government issued special visas exempting foreign visitors from strict postwar rationing measures, prompting jibes from Communist party officials that American bourgeois visitors were being pampered at the expense of ordinary Frenchmen -- as well as worries that making France too comfortable for American visitors would give the impression that the country didn't need foreign aid after all.

As leisure travel (and the Cold War) picked up steam in the late `40s, the American tourist became a geopolitical player -- a "consumer diplomat," in Endy's phrase -- who would spread American dollars, and American values, abroad. While George Kennan was sketching his plans for containment, and American troops massed on the Korean Peninsula, a group of US Commerce Department officials and Marshall Plan bureaucrats schemed to enlist tourist dollars to bolster the shaky economies of France and other Western European democracies, which policy makers worried were vulnerable to communist movements.

But first they had to the make French hotels and cafes safe for middle-class tourists for whom European travel had previously been out of reach. From 1948 to 1952, a Marshall Plan-funded operation called the Travel Development Section employed a platoon of efficiency experts to advise French hoteliers on modernization plans, while also waging lesser battles against such foes as baffling cover charges and tipping practices. "A hotel must be considered a production plant," proclaimed TDS chief Th J. Pozzy, a French-born naturalized US citizen from Maine.

As such, French hoteliers would have to cut back on the fussy -- and labor-intensive -- practices of the traditional hotel, with its large complement of baggagistes, concierges, and valets, and focus instead on the material conveniences: spick-and-span private bathrooms with lots of hot water, modern furniture, and large glasses of water -- with ice. Nevermind the desires of a hotel's potential French clients: American officials went so far as to suggest that the French put an end to their own traditional August vacation, "to make room for visiting Americans."

While some French executives embraced TDS's vision of French hotels spiffed out with American-style amenities (and stuffed exclusively with American tourists), many others leapt to the defense of traditional French hotelry. After all, they pointed out, it was Old World charm, not up-to-the-minute plumbing, that drew tourists in the first place. France, one traditionalist thundered, must resist the "monster hotels of the new world." And those glasses of ice water? The very notion is "sad, quite simply," sniffed an editorialist in the French trade magazine L'Htellerie.

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By the time the TDS disbanded in 1951, French hotels had largely resisted a move to American standards -- to the evident satisfaction of American tourists, who, according to a 1950 poll cited by Endy, considered French hotels excellent or good. But many of its larger goals were taken up a decade later by a very different hospitality crusader -- Charles de Gaulle.

By the end of the 1950s, the postwar travel boom was in full swing, with nearly 800,000 Americans making visits to France at decade's end -- a 200 percent increase from 1950. Within a month after the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1959, de Gaulle appointed a new minister of tourism, who promptly turned toward winning tax breaks for hotel construction and expanding overseas tourism marketing. But de Gaulle's biggest offensive came in a more intangible area. As much as he enjoyed twitting American foreign policy, when it came to American visitors (who would account for 40 percent of all tourist dollars in the 1960s) de Gaulle wanted France to be all smiles.

Though surveys showed that most American visitors found French service courteous and helpful, Gaullist officials decided Old World manners were wanting. Shortly after taking office in 1960, Jean Sainteny, de Gaulle's hospitality chief, called for the recovery of the "legendary smile of the French" -- a plea that earned him the sobriquet "high commissioner for smiling." The 1965 tourist season saw a "National Campaign for Reception and Friendliness," whose centerpiece was cheques-sourire, or smile checks, which tourists mailed to the French tourism office when they received friendly service from a waiter or hotel employee. (The 10 most honored French workers were awarded a trip to Tahiti.)

American Francophiles were horrified by this assault on traditional French hauteur. "The day may come when prettily housed, flawlessly served tourists will nostalgically prowl this country in search of an old-fashioned curmudgeonly French concierge or a surly Paris waiter to sneer at them on their way," one commentator groused. (Though Endy is skeptical of the friendliness campaign, he acknowledges that France's byzantine tipping and billing practices remained an abiding source of transatlantic friction. As one Californian complained to The New York Times in 1964, "It bites me when these French look at me like I'd beaten a child with a stick when I don't distribute money all over the restaurant when I leave.")

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Endy argues that the sense of a friendliness "crisis" in France came both from within and without. Even as Americans endured their own debates over the emergent Ugly American stereotype, American politicians, frustrated by Gaullist foreign policy, loudly called for boycotts on travel to France in language that could almost be ripped from last spring's headlines. In 1965, J. William Fulbright urged American tourists to "spare themselves the sophisticated debauchery and artistic pick pocketing of Paris."

But French politicians also chimed in with reservations about French hospitality. In 1964, Gaullist minister of finance and future French president Valy Giscard d'Estaing, frustrated by the hotel sector's resistance to Gaullist technocratic ideals, denounced it as "the most disagreeable, quarrelsome" industry in France. Meanwhile, Senator Edouard Bonnefous bemoaned his country's lack of manners -- a comment quickly picked up by a Newsweek article denouncing France for its "poor service and incomparable insolence from servants." One Parisian barman, at least, was only too happy to confirm Bonnefous's observation: "We're naturally inhospitable to foreigners," he told the Newsweek reporter.

Even Paris Match picked up the theme. Had the French become the "grouches of Europe," the magazine wondered?

Ultimately, Endy writes, these debates "masked the reality of largely satisfied Americans coming to France in ever increasing numbers." What played out in the 1960s was an internal struggle between modernizers and traditionalists over what made France distinctly French -- a dispute that still rages today in the age of le Big Mac and the euro.

"The French were trying to have it both ways: to keep their local communities and adapt to the pressures of the international marketplace," Endy says. It's a balance, he adds, that France has maintained today. Well, almost: After all, while France as a whole may be the world's number-one tourist destination, its single most popular attraction isn't the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre -- but Euro Disney.

Matthew Price is a regular contributor to the Globe.