Stubbornly independent, haphazardly beautiful, and entirely unconcerned with the opinions of others, Marseille is the most un-French of French cities. Located on the south coast of the nation, Marseille and its rambunctious, blue-collar roots make it feel a world away from the extravagant collection of yachts and villas that make up nearby Nice and the Cote d’Azur. From its origins, Marseille was a city that had a knack for making itself heard and for ensuring that, by accident or design, it was at the center of events.
Luciano Canfora details the surprising link between the city and the most famous of ancient Roman emperors in his 2007 book, Julius Caesar: The People’s Dictator, translated by Kevin Windle and Marian Hill.
“In an aside in the second book of his Commentaries on the civil war, in admirably modest and impersonal style, Caesar reports his own nomination as dictator,” Canfora explains. The war was wide-ranging, with battles waged across the Mediterranean—in northern Africa, in Greece and Italy, and on the Iberian peninsula. As Caesar traveled back to Rome from Spain in August–September 49 BCE,
he passe[d] through Tarragona, then Narbonne, and finally Marseilles. “There he learn[ed] that a law had been passed about a dictator, and that he himself had been nominated dictator by the praetor M. Lepidus.” Apart from the pleasant “surprise” with which Caesar learn[ed] that he himself ha[d] been nominated to the dictatorship, we should note the constitutional difficulty.
Those constitutional difficulties are too expansive to describe here, but they gave Caesar “a veneer of legality” that allowed him to promote his bold claim to rule. Suffice to say that Marseille, the oldest city in France, also developed a bloody-minded streak that would have no doubt impressed Caesar himself in the coming centuries.
“A fiercely independent commune for much of the first half of the thirteenth century, [Marseille] had fallen in 1252 to Charles of Anjou, king and founder of the expansionist Angevin dynasty of Naples and count of Provence by virtue of a strategic marriage,” writes historian Daniel Lord Smail. But
in Charles’s own lifetime the Angevin dynasty—hobbled by the revolt of Sicily in 1282 and undermined by the general decay of Mediterranean trade that followed on the heels of the Muslim reconquest of the Levant—was falling swiftly from the heights to which it had once aspired. Preoccupied with its own intrigues, the crown had little energy to spare for the governing of Marseille. By the fourteenth century, the city had begun to drift out of the orbit of Naples, quietly seizing the independence it had tasted a century before, and thus following a trajectory at odds with the processes of centralization more common in the later Middle Ages.
It was during this era that Marseille perhaps first developed its reputation for violence and criminality. It’s an obloquy that hasn’t always been fairly placed. Smail points out the distinct lack of fines and punishments in archival records that were meted out for offenses such as homicide and serious wounding, both commonplace crimes in other cities at the time. However, it’s possible that this absence may have more to do with the canny nature of recidivists embroiled in the legal system than from a genuine lack of bloodshed on the streets, as Smail illustrates.
“In 1351,” he writes, one
Uguo Jaume, originally from the fishing village of La Ciotat but then residing in Marseille, was brought before the palace judge and charged with the murder of Martin Jordan, a citizen of Marseille.… Uguo, who denied the accusation, was led to a room in the basement of the royal palace and thence to an eculeum, the wooden horse used for torture; there in the presence of three judges and a notary, his hands were bound behind his back and then raised until he hung above the ground. As he hung there, he called out to the notary, “I ask, I ask and require you. Uguo Berengier the notary, to make a public instrument for me.” Immediately the judges ordered him to be brought down from the horse; an act was made; and the prisoner was released.… [P]owerlessness was compensated for by legal acumen.
Marseille continued to plough its own furrow over the next few centuries, only very reluctantly agreeing to become the capital of Bouches-du-Rhône in 1790 when France was divided into its current regional system of departments. By that time the city was one of the most important shipping hubs in Europe, as William H. Sewell. Jr explores in The American Historical Review.
The dockworkers’ Society of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and of Our Lady of Mercy was founded in 1817, Sewell writes, “shortly after the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Officially a mutual benefit society, it was actually a reconstitution of the dockworkers’ corporation,” an exceptionally powerful guild from the Old Regime.
“In the 1840s and 1850s,” Sewell explains,
the dockworkers enjoyed an enviable position. Not only were they extremely well paid but they had unmatched job security, a workable pension plan, and an equitable system of allocating work during periods of unemployment. Their elaborately organized society was tolerated by the authorities, and by means of their society the dockworkers themselves controlled the organization and pace of their work, kept interlopers off the docks, and saw to it that good wages and working conditions were maintained. Moreover, dockworkers knew they could pass all these advantages on to their sons. By comparison with almost any other workers in Marseille, or in France for that matter, the dockworkers had a very comfortable situation.
Comfortable it may have been, but the piecemeal development of Marseille had, by the twentieth century, resulted in the presence of some of the worst sub-standard housing in France. This situation caught the attention of the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier, who built one of the first of his modernist architectural projects in the south of the city; it opened for residents following the end of the Second World War.
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Donald Tomkinson was one of the first writers to make a foray into this new world of concrete, sharp lines, and streets in the sky, writing about the project in a 1953 issue of The Town Planning Review.
“Unité d’Habitation constitutes, then, a fresh approach to the familiar problem of the flatted community,” Tomkinson writes. “As the name itself conveys, it entails the provision not merely of dwellings, but also of sufficient social services to establish a ‘unity of living.’” This was Le Corbusier’s guiding principle, which he attempted
to demonstrate in full at Marseilles. Into a single block, he…packed an entire suburb of sixteen hundred people, virtually self-contained, with its own hotel, shops, restaurants, laundry, child welfare and medical supervision. These “services,” according to Le Corbusier, [were] an essential part of the conception. Without them, the flatted dwelling remains an anachronism: the currant-cake, as it were, without the currants.
Away from the more structured innovations of Le Corbusier, Marseille began to enjoy an organic regeneration of its deprived inner-city neighborhoods during the 1980s and 1990s. The wisteria- and mural-filled alleyways of the Le Panier district delight visitors today, but the area was once considered a no-go area for its high levels of crime.
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In a chapter of Locality, Regeneration & Divers[c]ities, edited by Sarah Bennett and John Butler, Jesús Pedro Lorente traces the evolution of the neighborhood. Though artists began moving into the quarter in the 1980s,
the arts presence in the area started to grow and become noticeable only after the opening of the Vieille Charité cultural complex. Consequently, in the 1990s the art scene in Marseille has been torn in two halves: South of the Cannebiere Boulevard, in the well-to-do district, have remained professional art dealers, like the Galerie Roger Pailhas or the Galerie Athanor and the historic hub of well-established galleries (Veer, 1994), whilst the less favoured North districts and the Panier in particular have experienced a boom of fringe art, flourishing in alternative places.
Marseille’s artistic inclination is matched by an obsession with food which, typically, is very different from what appears on plates in the rest of France. Stéphane Hénaut and Jeni Mitchell evocatively describe the distinct local larder in their 2018 book, A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment, noting that “[m]any of the world’s historic port cities feature phenomenal local cuisines, rooted in local seafood and flavored by their diverse populations, and Marseille is no different.” In fact,
[o]ne of its oldest and best-known specialties is bouillabaisse, originally a simple fisherman’s soup designed to use up all the leftover bits of the daily catch but today a much pricier and elaborate affair. Luckily, there is a panoply of seafood to be enjoyed at more reasonable prices, just as local residents have done for centuries—steamed mussels, fresh oysters, octopus stew, grilled sardines.
For those among us who avoid the fruits and fish of the sea, we can look inland to enjoy Provençal cuisine, with its
rich, garlicky aioli; anchovy-suffused tapenades and tarts; [and] artichokes à la barigoule (braised in white wine and olive oil). And there is a robust Italian influence, one that is unsurprising given several centuries of Italian migration to the city. It may sound ridiculous to visit France and order pizza, but all doubts will be dispelled after tucking into the Marseille version, crisp and wood-fired, topped with a hearty tomato sauce, anchovies, and olives.’
Whether it be in its politics, its architecture, or its food, there’s nothing to suggest that Marseille has lost any of its innately quixotic spirit and desire for a pugnacious style of “individualité.”
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