Second Cities: Marseille

A personal view of France’s fearless and chaotic gateway to the Mediterranean

No one in France seems to agree on whether or not Marseille is larger than Lyon, or which one deserves the moniker of France’s second city, but Marseille is certainly the elder and more experienced of the pair. The oldest city in France, it has survived exposure to the wild storms and acrid heat of the Mediterranean and all accompanying human dramas. Siege, plague, corruption, and poverty have all shaped the face of perhaps the most derided and misunderstood city in Europe. 

Marseille is unpretentious, even it’s most prominent landmark and cathedral; the strangely Byzantine and ornate Notre Dame de la Garde, seated on a mountain peak above the city, is decorated with strung toy airplanes and seascape paintings likely picked up for a few francs in the thrift markets of the Noailles district sixty odd years ago. Its golden statue of the Virgin Mary watches over Marseille from the basilica’s terrace, much like Milan cathedral’s Maddonina.

It might sound clichéd but the city truly is more Provençal than French, in much the same way Munich is more Bavarian than Prussian. Provençal culture is not one that has readily surrenders or compromises itself to the rapid and blanket evolution of globalised culture. Marseille’s history has always defied the traditions of European urbanisation; it’s geography has changed into a sprawling metropolis, retaining open-air memories of preserved Stone Age bays, relics overlooked by the sterility of modern economic measures. Even Le Courbousier’s Cité Radieuse, intended to revolutionise the aesthetics of public housing, is now marketed as another renovated hotel rather than a cultural landmark.

The context of the wider region makes it harder to define the city’s character. Marseille might at first glance feel most akin to Genova, but it has a curiously detached relationship with Italy. Inevitably inhabited by the Romans, the city owes much more to the seafaring Greeks, the same sailors who first mapped the southern coast of the British Isles and most of whose writing we have lost. The many Lebanese, Ivorians, and Vietnamese in this city can all trace their lineage to the old port’s former position as France’s gateway to the once imperial world of the tropics.

Countless boats are concentrated in the narrow space of the Old Port, with the phalanx of their sails blocking out any clear view of the Mediterranean. The nearby cathedral of Sacre Coeur, separating the Old Port from the New, is vastly concave and traps unremitting dry heat, drawing in the choking smell of incense beneath gilded frescoes, designed in a navigational layout. The Old Port, before the vast accumulation of sailboats, had existed as the city’s harbour uninterrupted for a millennium, despite Nazi efforts to destroy it in 1943. Now it is a tourist trap, sheltering rusting cruise-ships, but it was a point of adventure when Marseille was capital the 11th century county of Provence and a naval power of the first order. 

The waterfront has been modernised, most notably at the Mucem, the city’s elaborately built anthropology museum, the most visited cultural institution in France outside of Paris. However, the modernity of this building has been cleverly subdued by the set of walkways and turrets connecting it to the 17th Century Fort Saint-Jean, paying homage to the old and not fretting over innovation and the expense of heritage. That is not to glorify that heritage unduly. The nearby Vielle Charité, another 17th century structure and former almshouse, stands as an impressive ovular domed structure with a faded orange hue. It is also grim reminder that Marseille has not been built on vast sustained wealth, but rather endurance of difficulties. There has been a long and brutal history of poverty and survival, the mark of a culture of fishing in the Mediterranean’s infamous winter gale, the Mistral. 

The Charité, built by architect Pierre Puget, was intended to be a grand urban renewal project, and never fulfilled that ambition, symbolising the city’s resourcefulness in a sense. Throughout the 20th Century, the building was divided into tenements, yet its monumental courtyard and central chapel remain impressive architectural marvels, albeit with unsettling air. This was the epicentre of the Plague of 1720, which killed a hundred thousand of the city’s residents. Despite its dilapidated state, the Charité stands as a testament to Marseille’s ability to preserve its past, and persevere towards a better future.

In light of the Plague came the beginnings of renewal, and the wide boulevards such as the Promenade du Prado followed. The city’s main thoroughfare, the Canebière— ascends from the waterfront of the Old Port, shaded by tall Poplar trees. King Alexander of Yugoslavia was shot dead here in 1934, one of the many contributory European crises that exploded in 1939.

The Palais Longchamp, a grand 19th-century building houses the city’s museum of fine arts. The palace, with its elaborate fountains and sweeping staircases, is a testament to that ambitious cultural renewal of the 1800s. In that regard, the architect, Henri-Jacques Espérandieu, might be the utmost contributor to the city’s idiosyncrasies. The mastermind of Marseille’s two cathedrals and the Palais Longchamp, he was fittingly killed by his own creation, catching pneumonia while working on the crypt of Norte Dame de la Garde in 1874. Espérandieu, whose name loosely translates into ‘awaiting God’, is Marseille’s Gaudi. Certainly incomparable to the storybook Catalan mysticism of Sagrada Familia, but Espérandieu is a true innovator of genius and one of the strongest fixtures of architectural marriage between the west and eastern Mediterranean after the schisms of the Renaissance. His Sacre Coeur is in many ways a companion to it’s namesake in Paris, attesting the bravery of the fallen soldiers of the Franco-Prussian war, but it is also a beacon to sailors and fishermen foraying into the dangers of maritime labour.

The surrounding bay is a natural amphitheatre, complete with its own archipelago, the Frioul islands. The Greek navigators of the sixth century BC recognised the benefits of this natural geography and settled here, foraying all the way to the south coast of England from their new settlement. The Greek influence still permeates, especially in the ecclesiastical architecture of the city’s cathedrals, but it has been interlaced with multiple other cultures in the meantime; Syrian, Algerian, Senegalese, Vietnamese. Remnants of the French Empire, to which Marseille was the army’s last port of departure, especially for the tens of thousands of regular men drafted to fight in Algeria, France’s last desperate attempt to assert itself as a true colonial power. 

Beyond the Old Port lies the Château d’If, an island fortress that once served as a prison. The castle, made famous by Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, housed a variety of prisoners, from thousands of Protestant captives during the Wars of Religion, to the corpse of Field Marshal Jean-Baptiste Kleber, who safeguarded the French Revolution from German intervention at Valmy, and who was laid to rest here by Napoleon for sixteen years. Even the Rhinoceros painted multiple times by Albrecht Dürer was brought here to be shown to King Francois I in 1516, before it drowned in a storm off the coast of La Spezia.

The island is the first in a chain of limestone outcrops that stretch along the coast, providing a scenic exit from Marseille for those traveling by ferry to Nice, Corsica, or Genova. This keeps to the context of Marseille as a city of the Mediterranean rather than terrestrial France, consistent with the interchange of Aragonese, Moorish, and Venetian influence across the Ligurian sea and through the centuries. The sea is the city’s lifeblood, perhaps best exemplified by Marseille’s favourite meal, the Bouillabaisse, a stew, made from the most bony and unmanageable Mediterranean fish, is complex, rich, and deeply rooted in tradition.

The breadth and proportion of the curving coastline around the huge natural bay that nests the city, makes for dramatic vistas of incoming clouds and sultry lasting sunsets onto the crowded south facing beaches, the more gentrified and picturesque beaches at Malmosque and the busy Plage des Catalans. The naming of this place clarifies certain particularities about the city’s cultural orientation.

The Cote d’Azur is barely a few hours away but the lifestyle in Marseille is entirely different, much less Italianate and glamorous. Marseille’s orbit feels tethered to the Pyrenees, and an admiration for classic Spanish culture is evident as much in the cuisine as the local character. Italian migrants during the depression years of the 1930’s were largely shunned but Spanish immigrants fleeing the Civil War settled in traditionally Socialist Marseille en masse.

The Calanques, thin lagoons stretching inland through slanting cliff faces, made a perfect settlement for prehistoric settlers and are the basis of Marseille’s uninterrupted habitation. This ancient and evident presence (even Marseille as a city proper is five hundred years older than Paris) inculcates the way of life seen in cave paintings; the harmony between the bulls roaming the plains, grazing wild horses, and nomadic man; a triumvirate which came together in the agricultural practices that fostered the surplus capable of sustaining civilisation, and a triumvirate that remains, albeit graphically, anchored in the ancient practices of bullfighting. This local bullfighting culture, and it’s Provençal variation inspired paintings of Chagall, Matisse, and Van Gogh, who found the way of life more welcoming, and the surrounding landscape much more enticing than in Paris.

There are certainly areas that deserve the menacing reputation they have been allotted, the city is full of sloping and crudely constructed blanched sandstone tower blocks. The collapse of Marseille’s housing has provoked local outrage, even as recently as 2017 when two residents were killed in a building collapse. In the searing heat these frustrations can become volcanic, and the city has a history of clashes with central government in Paris due to what Gaston Deferre, Marseille’s mayor of over thirty-three years saw as condescending indifference.

The locals don’t seem to mind when I ask them about the state of things. Everyone I ask tells me that the economy is broken, but they pride themselves on toughness and don’t lament the situation. “The city is full of things to do, but in Marseille we are really in the streets, you know?” Even the city’s iconic football stadium, the Stade Velodrome, with its dipping corrugated architecture, looks unfinished.

Burst water-mains, washing lines in the street, and flaking window shutters clattering in the sea breeze are constant features of the narrow side streets. People flock to the outcropped beaches, and the crystalline shallows for morning swims. The beaches are covered in sharp rocks, but the feeling is one of collective care, there is very little indifference or misanthropy here that might mark larger, wealthier cities with a sense of elite exclusivity.

In the aftermath of the Israeli-Gaza conflict, Marseille has unintentionally become a fascinating prism into the sentiment of the conflict and its deeply rooted history. Marseille has the third largest Jewish population in Europe, after only London and Paris, and the connection to the heritage of Islam is well known here; many of the Algerians who sided with the French army during the war in the 1960’s fled to this city in avoidance of reprisals, a considerable amount of sub-Saharan countries with a Muslim majority have sent their sons and daughters here in search of better opportunities, and the Phoenician settlers who were venerated as the seafaring peoples who connected France with the eastern Mediterranean find their descendants in modern Lebanon. The African and Arabic neighbourhoods to the west of the city; around the St Charles railway terminus also contain large Muslim populations punctuated by Sudanese, Egyptian, and Syrian restaurants.

The Jewish influence is demonstrable, especially along the Rue Paradis that intersects the city centre and Nicolas Sarkozy even chose the city’s Synagogue as his platform to denounce antisemitism. To have such large, diametrically opposed populations in a such a crowded city policed by Secular Republican principles seems a rare and very poignant magnification of the wider West’s diplomatic approach to the Middle East.

Marseille is not a city of easy beauty. It is gritty, raw, and often rough around the edges. Even the beach areas surround a military base with imposing iron railings borne into the stone, and barbed wire strewn across the railings visible from the waterfront. The areas around the Gare St. Charles train station are marked by urban decay, with graffiti-covered walls, dilapidated buildings, and streets littered with rubbish. Yet even in these less glamorous parts of the city, there is a vibrancy. The people of Marseille, known for their broad-mindedness and resilience, live with a sense of purpose and pride. While the modern streets of Marseille extend in all directions from the Old Port, offering glimpses of a city in flux, older quarters such as the hill-top Le Panier retain a timeless charm. Here, the narrow streets are lined with small colourful buildings, and the sense of boutique charm is palpable. 

Gaging the size of Marseille is a thankless task. Some locals tell you less than a million people live here, others say two million and my estimate would lean towards the latter. From the heights above the city it seems never ending, and has grown to incorporate the nearby towns of Cassis and Aix-La-Chapelle, one of France’s most prestigious university towns. The west of the city is vastly residential, but does contain an important monument, Marseille’s own Arc de Triomphe, brilliantly underscoring the confusion endured by the local population throughout the Revolutionary era, constructed by the Bourbons, decorated in homage to Napoleon, and inscribed in dedication to the virtues of the Revolution.

I must admit, my first impression of the city, ten years ago, was not positive. It reminded me of the worst elements of Paris and London. Rubbish bags ripped open and flung around the pavements, standoffish glances, jarringly loud car horns, and dilapidated department stores, with dust gathered mannequins and stagnant inventory. However, reaching the Old Port, the optics change, and the disarming sense of history grows.

Maybe Marseille should market itself more aggressively as a tourist destination, but with the Spanish government declaring a crisis over the sheer number of foreign visitors occupying the Barcelona, the Marseillaise have been shrewd in the long run. After all, the economic lethargy and infrastructural decline of modern Marseille is just another episode in a history of hardship as long as any other in Europe. The harsh reality of industrial urbanism perched on an inadmissibly tough geology has made for a city that refuses to be anything other than itself.