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the plan France boasted 452,471 rooms, more than any other country in Europe. They
also latched on to the idea of making Paris a popular city for conventions. From those
American-inspired beginnings, Paris grew to become the world's most popular city for
meetings.
Getting American tourists into those hotel rooms was the next step. Airfares were out
of reach for middle-class America, so Marshall Plan officials fought hard to convince the
airlines to add a lower “tourist fare” for flights across the Atlantic. They won but only by
promising to subsidize the lower fares for the airlines. Then they set up propaganda or pro-
motional committees made up of French and American government officials as well as
private companies like Pan American Airways, American Express and the European edi-
tion of the New York Herald Tribune , the precursor to the International Herald Tribune in
Paris. The committee spent millions on advertisements to convince Americans to travel
to France; advertisements to promote the 2,000th birthday of Paris in 1951 cost the then-
huge sum of $100,000.
U.S. officials also hoped that American tourists would play a role in diplomacy. In
one of the first modern instances of tourism purposefully used as public diplomacy, both
governments decided that American tourism would strengthen the ties between the two
people and win the French over to the American side of the burgeoning Cold War. At
that moment the French Communist Party was one of the strongest political parties in the
country. The French government sided with the United States against the Soviet Union
but not because of those American visitors. On the contrary, this was the moment when
the Americans and the French discovered how much they didn't like each other. The
American tourists thought the French were “haughty,” and the French thought the Amer-
icans were vulgar consumers. At one point the U.S. State Department had to print advisor-
ies to American travelers with “tips for your trip” for getting along with the French.
This was the first hint that simply letting tourists loose in a foreign country would not
necessarily lead to better understanding. Mass tourism by people who couldn't speak the
native language often had the opposite effect. (The French eventually solved that problem
by learning English, now the international language.)
The plan did fulfill the American goal of getting France back on its feet and firmly with-
in the western camp, as well as establishing a new pattern of trade with the United States.
The biggest impact, though, was on France, which exceeded its goal of wooing 3 million
tourists to the country in 1952. American government aid had kick-started the modern
tourism industry in France with those hotel rooms, tourist airfares and inculcation of the
idea of Paris as the ideal city for glamour. From then on, the French government kept its
hand in all aspects of tourism.
This American-subsidized tourism fit in nicely with the new order being established
by some of France's most conservative politicians. They wanted to erase any possibility of
European nations fighting each other in yet another world war. So they initiated the idea
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