The coming of the railroad and trans-Atlantic steamships in the Belle Époque and of automobiles, movies, and inexpensive box cameras during the interwar years, all enhanced by the opera, theater, and gastronomy, facilitated the emergence of France as a leading tourism destination. During the interwar years, the Michelin Tire Company and Thomas Cook’s promoted battlefield tourism with guidebooks to First World War sites. Now a country that “one had to visit” to be considered culturally sophisticated in much of the western world, an elevated status appreciated by many locals as well, interwar France attracted Americans including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Josephine Baker, and Germans such as Friedrich Sieburg, who wrote of “living like God in France.”
