Cartographic Transcendence: Mapping the Process of Mourning in Great War Tourism Guidebooks

By the time the Great War reached an armistice in 1918, travel companies, publishers, and even tire manufacturers had compiled guidebooks for tourists interested in visiting the battlefields of the Western Front. Using the three-volume Michelin Illustrated Guides to the Battlefields (1920) as primary texts, this essay argues that the various maps embedded in these books were instrumental in converting American tourists into what David W. Lloyd would term “pilgrims” – those who would visit these hallowed war-torn sites and emerge from the experience with a greater level of spiritual transcendence. To this end, then, maps were facilitators of the mourning process, even framing or formatting the way in which surviving loved ones could express their grief to themselves and to the outside world. Once pilgrims arrived at the American cemeteries in Europe, they entered a space whose design was so geometrical and exact that it took on a remarkable resemblance to the very guidebook maps that had led them there. In achieving a 1:1 scale with the landscapes they represented, these maps offered a multivalent, transcendent experience whereby mourners could be emotionally and spiritually immersed in that hallowed terrain where their soldiers fell and would remain.