David Crackanthorpe







Marseille is among the most mysterious cities in the world and one of the hardest to decode.
​Blaise Cendrars



Together with Provence, Marseille became part of France in 1481

but the union, on the Marseille side, has never been wholehearted

and the benefit, if any, never counted as much of a blessing.

Between their shield of hills and the open frontier of the sea, the

Marseillais have watched the mainland state and its centralising

policies with a sceptical eye. “We are a separate republic,’’

declared the leading industrialist and député Jules Charles-Rouxin

1907, “neither national nor French.’’

Recognition of this feature of Marseille history is essential to any

understanding of the city and empathy with its people. They are

stamped for good with the mark of independence and their guard is

seldom down. The Pagnolesque stereotype of the Marseillais as

extrovert, loquacious and superficial is a smokescreen designed, in

the words of the historian Richard Cobb who interpreted the city so

well, to conceal the reality of this “very complex, very hard-working,

and rather austere city.’’Any first-time visitor to a bar on the

Vieux-Port will hear not stentorian volubility as in Pagnol’s caricature, but what has been called a talkative nonchalance, open and with the easy warmth that implies. So Marseille seems preserved by the extraordinary mix of its people as a contradiction and an enigma - one that not even so ardent a lover as the novelist Blaise Cendrars claimed to solve. “My God,’’ he wrote, “how difficult this town is,’’ adding that the people were insolently happy to be alive, but secretive and hard. Even the city’s beauty, scarred and sometimes disfigured from 2,600 years of careless use, seems enigmatic. It took a native-born writer of great talent to find the key: “Marseille is beautiful in its humanity,’’ explained Jean-Claude Izzo, author of Total Khéops and other best-selling novels set in his home town, “in its familiarity like bread to be shared by all.’’ This beautiful image is the best antidote to all the clichés and unexamined assumptions that France’s most ancient city has for long suffered. In contrast to those, the writer Joseph Joffo described the reality of the town as he found it when he first came from Paris during the Second World War,  “… a sense of joy, a quick, living air that took my breath away. Marseille that morning was for us a great laughing fête …’’

Marseille is certainly the most cosmopolitan of Mediterranean towns; with fourteen per cent of its population having immediate overseas origins and perhaps three quarters of Marsellais  descended from immigrants -  Italian, Greek, Armenian, Spanish, African among others  ̶  it remains more open to the outside world than any other town in France, and despite a powerful and exclusive bourgeois caste notoriously turned in on itself, has preserved a freedom from the stereotypical attitudes and values of the mainland and above all of the capital. This exceptionto the rule of the pensée unique, that trodden pathway of French thought, becomes the more evident to visitors the longer they stay and is one of the city’s most refreshing aspects: the young Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Marseille is now what Persia must have been in antiquity, Alexandria in the middle ages, a … babel of all the nations … you hear a hundred unknown languages.’’

                                                                                                     The sound of languages unknown to northern ears in a babel-like crowd would

                                                                                                     across the ages feed suspicions of vice, crime, enviable sexual licence, and

                                                                                                     propensity to political corruption. All these are systematically ascribed to the

                                                                                                     Marseillais as part of their practice of life in a city whose magnificent surroundings

                                                                                                     and climate, and fascinating history of pleasure and rebellion since its foundation

                                                                                                     by Greek colonists from the isle of Phocaea combine to make it the object of

                                                                                                     metropolitan envy. By Parisians, Marseille has long been seen as an enticing

                                                                                                     forbidden city a few hours away on the train. But it is true that licentiousness, in a

                                                                                                     port where prostitution, delinquency and drug dealing have always flourished, is

                                                                                                     permanent although much less than it was when the harbours were crammed with

                                                                                                     the world’s shipping. Now the cruise ships, container vessels of idleness, bring with

                                                                                                     them an international blandness which on the whole keeps passengers and crew

                                                                                                     on board and not roaming the narrow streets of Le Panier, formerly the centre of a

                                                                                                     world of brothels where all languages were one.

                                                                                                                                        

Until 1660 when its walls were demolished by order of Louis XIV the Panier, with tortuous streets and stairways and dark crowded houses was all of Marseille; for twelve hundred years the population of all classes lived packed side by side at night and in the daytime found open air on the sea or in the fields and woods of their hinterland hemmed in by tall hills. Only recurrent plagues reduced the overcrowding and until the Nazis blew up the streets nearest the Vieux-Port in 1943 the city continued its seemingly immutable existence as amaze of alleyways down to the water’s edge. But after 1660 a new and elegant town was laid out to the east of the Panier and this first extension has ever since grown and spread in every landward direction until much of the territory of the commune with its scattered villages has been eaten up. Within all this development are many fine streets and handsome public buildings but Marseille has always been careless of its inheritance, building without regret on the demolished remains of what stood before, regardless of historic value. Visitors must search for what is left, the magnificent baroque workhouse called the Vieille Charité high up in the Panier, the Château Borély, the Opéra, the Cours Pierre Puget, the abbey of Saint-Victor above the vibrant Vieux-Port and much else half-hidden in the random spread of  a mercantile city valuing the advantage of the geographical site above its historic heritage.

However, the spectacular outlying parts of the commune (by far the largest in France) are prized and preserved. The unique beauty of the calanques, deep fjords mostly approachable only on foot, bathed in a liquid maritime light and clothed in Mediterranean vegetation including many rareties is part of Marseille’s secret life, not much known to visitors from outside. Perhaps the best approach to this joyful world, largely unchanged since the Phocaeancolonists first discovered an idyllic land, is by paths leading over the hill from the university campus at Luminy. And to experience something of the impression these adventurers perceived as they approached in their fifty-oared ships, it is enough to take the navette to the arid, rocky and roadless islands strung across the bay. From there, and especially on the return journey, all Marseille and its amphitheatre can be seen laid out mountains, towers, docks, masts, and overlooking all to dominate the sea reaches, the iconic basilica of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde. You may come back to the ceaseless activity of the Vieux-Port with the sense, if only for a moment, of having possessed Marseille almost entire. 

Marseille by David Crackanthorpe is published by Signal Books of Oxford.