Watch below the wide-ranging video interview with Kristen Grauer, the U.S. Consul General in Marseille, conducted by France Revisited’s Gary Lee Kraut on October 8, 2021. (With apologies for pronouncing Madame Consul General’s title as “counsel” instead of “consul.”) Also see further below Marseille & les Américains, a documentary produced with assistance by the consulate about the U.S. presence in southeastern France during and immediately after WWII, from August 1944 until early 1946.

Timeline for the 25-minute video interview
00:00 – Introduction and Kristen Grauer’s background as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State.
02:33 – How does the U.S. Consulate General in Marseille help Americans in southern France and Monaco? Lost passports, missing persons, natural disasters and civil unrest.
08:18 – Will the U.S. Consulate get me out of jail if I’m arrested?
10:07 – The U.S. Consulate’s involvement in American economic development.
12:21 – The consulate and the U.S. Sixth Fleet.
13:14 – Operation Dragoon and the invasion of southern France, “the Second D-Day,” in August 1944. (See further information about the landing and about Marseille and the Americans at the bottom of this page.)
17:03 – Kristen Grauer speaks about American WWII heroes Varian Fry, who helped writers, artists and other anti-nazis flee persecution in Europe (the square in front of the consulate has been renamed in his honor) and Vice Consul Hiram Bingham, who bypassed the official policies of the United States in order to provide visas and passports to allow many to obtain visas allowing them escape France.
19:11 – Kristen Grauer’s travels in and impressions of southern France and Monaco.
22:34 – Does Kristen Grauer enjoy the anise-flavored spirit pastis and the rosé wines of Provence? Does she play pétanque?

Kristen Graeur is a career diplomat who previously served in France as the economic officer at the American Embassy in Paris (2010-2013). She most recently served at the U.S. Department of State as the Deputy Director in the Economic Bureau’s Office of Economic Policy and Public Diplomacy. Earlier in her career, she completed tours as an embassy economic officer in Baghdad, Iraq, and Moscow, Russia, and as a political officer in Monrovia, Liberia and Cotonou, Benin. As a career diplomat rather than a political appointee, her assignments don’t necessarily follow the election cycle. She has held her current position as Consul General in Marseille, a 3-year assignment, since the summer of 2020. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, completed a mid-career Master of Science in National Resource Strategy at the U.S. National Defense University’s Eisenhower School, and is a graduate of the Foreign Service Institute’s long-term economic course. She is married and has two sons.

The U.S. Consulate General in Marseille covers southern France (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Occitanie), Corsica and Monaco. For more information about services provided by the consulate, including its location and contact information, see here.

Operations Dragoon 1944 and Marseille & the Americans

Even among the millions who’ve toured the D-Day Beaches in Normandy, few American visitors to France are aware of the second major D-Day landing in France during the summer of 1944. Code-named Operation Dragoon, it involved the amphibious invasion on August 15, 1944 by the U.S. Seventh Army on a stretch of the Riviera just west of Saint Tropez.

After penetrating inland, forces veered west toward the Rhone Valley. Free French forces then entered the scene to capture the ports of Toulon and Marseille. Led by the Americans, together they pushing German forces to withdraw from the south. Within four weeks, the U.S. forces that had entered from the Riviera linked up with some of those that had earlier entered from Normandy to continue their northern and eastern drive.

Travelers to the region can visit the Rhone American Cemetery in Draguinan, 25 miles from the coast. It’s the burial site of 851 servicemen, with an additional 294 names inscribed on the Wall of the Missing.

After the southern landing and for the following two years, there were major American bases between Marseille and Aix-en-Provence through which two million soldiers would transit. The Consulate General assisted in the creation of a documentary about that American presence. The 4-part documentary entitled Marseille & les Américains is available in French and in English. Here’s Part 1 of the English version.

The Consulate General in Marseille also recently supported an upcoming film on Jamaican-American Harlem Renaissance author Claude Mckay who lived in Marseille from 1924-1929.

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Imagine visiting Boston in the 1980s and looking for the bar from Cheers, or New York City in the 1990s in search of the Seinfeld diner, or again in 2001 for the coffee shop in Friends. Do that and you can well imagine the excitement that fans of France’s longest-running TV series, Plus belle la vie (Life’s so sweet), feel when they come to Marseille in search of the Mistral Bar in the Mistral district.

They won’t find the Mistral, of course, since it’s a fictional bar in a fictional neighborhood, but the Mistral district was largely inspired by the Panier, which is a very real and stroll-worthy district just a ten-minute walk from the Old Port.

Created in 2004 and still going strong, Plus belle la vie is an easy-going prime-time urban soap opera with myriad characters. It’s a glossy, brightly colored soap, not quite comedy, not quite drama, far from “true” but with frequent nods to issues of the day. Extracts from the series can be seen on its official website.

Since the show is shot then shown with little delay its writers are able to incorporate current events into the storyline. This allows characters to discuss the issues of the day while living out their fictional lives, loves, friendships and melodramas. Demonstrations held during parliamentary debate on same-sex marriage, the aftershock of the terrorist attack against the weekly Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket, and the French moratorium on the exploitation of shale gas have all been discussed by characters while the subjects were still headlining the news. Questions of racism, homosexuality, violence, rape, and drug and alcohol addictions all find a place in the not-to-be-taken-too-seriously soap-opera-style intrigue. The show is broadcast at 8:25pm, overlapping with the prime evening network news hour.

Most of the scenes of Plus belle la vie are shot behind the closed doors of the La Belle de Mai studios, in the 3rd district of Marseille, rather than in the Panier. Nevertheless, fans visiting Marseille and looking for the Mistral Bar, one of the central settings in the series, will often end up reveling in a drink at the Bar des 13 Coins, 45 rue Sainte-Françoise on the Panier’s Place des Treize Cantons, which the show’s production designer says inspired the fictional Mistral Bar in the TV series. The Bar des 13 Coins is a small family café-restaurant with outdoor tables on a shady terrace with three big trees and colorful artwork on the facade. Like a café-bar on a village square in Provence, this is the venue to meet friends to share the trials and joys of everyday life in the sunny side of France.

In a sense, Plus belle la vie could take place anywhere in France, except for the occasional view of the Mediterranean or of Notre Dame de la Garde Church or talk about the OM, Marseille’s soccer team. Furthermore, the actors don’t even speak in the colorful singing accent of southern France, let alone with the slang of Marseille. Some say that if the real local accent were spoken it would be necessary to have subtitles in French. But even removed from local reality “Plus belle la vie” has been a hit in Marseille as well as throughout France.

Viewers have love-hate relationships with the assortment of characters, while the central character remains the neighborhood itself. Which brings us to the real Panier, a district of narrow, sloping streets, colorful facades and shutters, laundry hanging out the window, and a history of written history dating back to the ancient Greeks.

From ancient Greeks to poor immigrants to cut-throat films to gentrification

Settled in 630 BC by the ancient Greeks, the Panier (long before it took on its current name) was the area first settled in Marseille. More recently, due to its location near the seaport, the Panier has continued to welcome successive waves of immigration: Neapolitans, Corsicans, South Americans, North Africans, Vietnamese and Comorians from the islands near Madagascar.

This neighborhood draws its name from the Logis du Panier, an inn that existed in the area in the 17th century and probably had a basket (panier) suspended outside. The Panier became a poor, working class neighborhood, what the French call a quartier populaire, when in the 17th century, wealthy merchants left it to settle in the new neighborhoods in the east which were created under the impetus of Colbert during the reign of Louis XIV. By the mid-19th century the Panier had acquired its reputation as a rough, dangerous, crime-ridden area, a reputation that it held onto until several decades ago.

The “Mediterranean noir” writer, Jean-Claude Izzo (1945-2000), who grew up in the Panier, paints an old Bronx-like picture of the area in “Total Chaos” or “Total Kéhops” in French. Izzo’s crime fiction follows the protagonist Fabio Montale, a disillusioned local cop making his rounds on the hard, seedy  streets of this neighborhood, a den for gangs and drug dealers, full of sailors, prostitutes and whorehouses.

Izzo also vividly describes the demolition by the German occupying force of a section of the Panier in 1943, as they considered its maze of narrow streets to be a haven for resistant fighters, refugees, criminals, prostitutes, Jews and Communists. On January 24, 1943, some 30,000 inhabitants from the neighborhood were evacuated, with about 2,000 sent to concentration camps. Then 1,500 houses in the lower section of the Old Town were dynamited.

Through the eyes of Montale, readers witness the humiliation of Fabio’s father, a docker at the port, and his mother, who toiled away 14 hours a day, packing dates. They were rounded up in the middle of the night on January 24, 1943 because of an expulsion order. Fabio reflects back about that day and the Nazis’ dream of destroying part of this neighborhood as it was considered to be a den of degenerate behavior.

A mini-series based on Izzo’s books, with Alain Delon starring as Fabio Montale, was shown on French TV in 2002.

Even just 20 years ago the Panier was known as a cut-throat area and was largely avoided by those living outside the neighborhood. Its cinematic reputation didn’t help. Borsalino (1970), directed by Jacques Deray and starring Alain Delon and John-Paul Belmondo, is a famous French gangster movie taking place in 1930. La French (in English, The Connection) (2014), directed by Cédric Jimenez and starring Jean Dujardin and Gilles Lellouche, is an action film about a drug gang in the 1970s.

The City of Marseille began renovating the Panier in 1983, and little by little the neighborhood has changed. Increasingly gentrified while retaining some funk and grit, the Panier is now viewed as far safer than decades ago. It has been called Marseille’s Montmartre. Artist studios, craft shops and trendy cafes and bars have replaced brothels of the past.

Several years ago a local association and a local theater teamed up to produce as a community project a counter-version of Plus belle la vie called C’est pas joli, joli (It’s not a pretty picture). Residents of the Panier got their hand at acting, guided by professionals but bringing to the screenplay their own interpretation. Here are the first and second episodes.

Visiting the Panier

Large portions of the Panier are closed to car traffic from late morning onwards, giving the neighborhood a distinctive atmosphere of a village in Provence, in particular around the Bar des 13 Coins.

Bocce ball, which the French call boules, with pétanque being its Provencal version, is right at home here… at the Musée de la Boule, a fun mix of shop, museum and a pétanque court. And where there is pétanque in Provence there’s sure to be pastis, the anise-flavored spirit and cocktail associated with summer days in the South of France. So it’s no surprise to find the Janot Pastis Boutique next to the Boule Museum. Also nearby is Le Clan des Cigales, a restaurant serving Mediterranean cuisine based on French products. A boutique across the street sells santons, small figurines placed in traditional Provence Nativity-village scenes. From there you need only follow your nose to find nearby another product associated with this city: Marseille soap, made with vegetable oils.

The Panier is very hilly, so for less walking the district can be visited by taking the little tourist “train,” which can be gotten at the Quai du Port across from City Hall (Hôtel de Ville). The main sights will be pointed out with recorded commentary in French, English and Italian. Riders can hop off to visit La Vieille Charité, formerly a home for the poor and wayward built between 1671 and 1749, which is one of the city’s most important historical monuments. La Vieille Charité now houses museums with a permanent collection of archeology from around the world, galleries, a cultural center, a café and a small cinema. A temporary exhibit examining the travels of the American writer Jack London in the South Seas is being shown here from Sept. 8, 2017 to Jan. 7, 2018.

A bilingual (English/French) walking tour of Le Panier is available through the tourist office on Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. It sets out from the Tourist Office located at 11 La Canebière and enters the heart of the Panier district via the Port area, just as the ancient Greeks did. The tour ends at the Place de Lenche, site of the Greek agora and the Roman forum. The area, busy with cafés and restaurants, offers a spectacular view of the old Port and the Notre Dame de la Garde Church.

The tour provides the keys to understanding the development of Marseille through the centuries, including the separation between the wealthier coastal zone to the south and the poorer neighborhoods to the north, and reconstruction work that was necessary following demolition by the German occupying force in 1943.

Near the Panier: The Cathedral and the MuCEM

Just as one doesn’t go to Paris to only visit Montmartre, one doesn’t come to Marseille simply to visit the Panier, hardcore Plus belle la vie fans aside.

Nearby, down by the marine terminal, is the enormous Sainte Marie Majeure Cathedral, often referred to as La Major. Marseille’s recent architectural claims to fame are three stunning museum buildings: the Villa Méditerranée cultural and conference center, the Regards de Provence Museum, and the MuCEM. They were all inaugurated in 2013, the city’s year as the European Capital of Culture. (Marseille has been named European Capital of Sport for 2017, but that’s another story.)

The most popular and renowned of the three is the MuCEM, the Museum of Mediterranean Civilization and Culture. More than a museum, actually, the MuCEM is a multidisciplinary cultural institution housing the Mediterranean Gallery, major temporary exhibitions, and much more.

A panoramic view can be had from the rooftop terrace eating and drinking area, which includes four spaces—café, snack, casual, chic—collectively called Le Môle Passédat. Reservations are recommended for the most polished of these, La Table. The eateries are overseen by Gérard Passédat, chef of the 3-star Michelin restaurant Le Petit Nice located in the Marseille’s 7th arrondissement.

Meanwhile, the port remains the city’s long-time home to bouillabaisse, the centerpiece of Marseille’s sea-inspired cuisine.

Other opportunities for fine dining, shopping and artist exhibitions can be found in the beautifully renovated Docks Village, which opened in 2015, or the Terrasses du Port. These renovations and constructions were part of the ambitious Marseille-Euroméditerranée project, which was initiated in 1995 to renovate a nearly 1200-acre zone in the heart of the city, between the commercial harbor, the Old Port and the TGV station. Involving a 7-billion euro investment, it was at the time the largest urban renewal project in southern Europe.

Crime and Safety in Marseille

Marseille is often compared to my own hometown of Chicago in terms of crime and safety. Drug- and weapons-related gang and organized crime violence are not uncommon in certain quarters. As in Chicago, in Marseille I would avoid certain areas, especially at night. That goes for much of the 3rd arrondissement, one of the poorest neighborhoods in France. The centrally located St. Charles train station may have been beautifully modernized but I would not loiter around the station area. Neither would I walk around La Canebière at night. Keeping an eye on one’s luggage, not placing a purse on the ground by one’s chair in a restaurant, and not flaunting expensive-looking costume jewelry, let along the real thing, are common sense tips that don’t solely apply to Marseille but are worth keeping in mind with respect to this city.

But don’t let those warnings keep you away from discovering France’s second largest city and most multicultural port city, particularly the portions described in this article. For my recent visit, I booked accommodations in the Panier itself and walked around the neighborhood alone at night. I felt safe on the Waterfront with the MuCEM and other new museums, at the port. There’s a police station, the Commissariat de l’Evéché, a stone’s throw from the Major Cathedral at the entrance of the Panier.

(c) 2017

Wendy Dubreuil is a conference interpreter with a passion for French TV shows and films and challenging social issues.

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As the daylight dims and the cool air blows, travelers in France from late November to early January—and beyond in some areas—will find a bright and warm mix of regional, national, commercial and religious traditions throughout the holiday season.

Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day, is the privileged family time in France for presents and an abundant dinner, followed for some (relatively few) by midnight mass in some of the country’s magnificent medieval churches and cathedrals. There are then generally leftovers of fine food and drink and, hopefully, family spirit, too, to enjoy on December 25th.

Let’s take a tour of the Christmas season in France through Alsace, Champagne, Lille, Lyon, Provence, Nice and Paris.

(The dates in this article are for the holiday markets and events of 2014 however these are all annual happenings that take place about the same time, give or take a day or two.)

Alsace

One of the most recognizable features of the Christmas season is the Christmas market, rows of chalets (wooden or make-shift shopping huts) set up as early as mid-November in public squares and along major streets to sell folklore, craftsmanship, much food and drink, and Christmas or gift knick-knacks of all kinds.

The tradition of Christmas markets likely originated along the Rhine, leading Strasbourg, which dates the origin of its market to 1570, to call itself “Capital of Christmas.” While otherwise known as capital of Alsace and seat of the European Parliament, Strasbourg pulls out all the stops when it comes to the holiday season.

The most animated of Strasbourg’s Christmas markets surrounds its Notre-Dame Cathedral, whose tremendous steeple dominates the cityscape.

Head due south from Strasbourg and you enter Alsace’s wine route whose bare vines contrast in December with the cheery main streets of picturesque villages, such as Riquewihr and Kaysersberg, that ward off the frost with the warmth of Christmas decorations, mulled wine, gingerbread, small biscuits called bredele and a Bundt-type cake called kouglhof (spelling varies).

Eventually one reaches Colmar, another hotspot for Christmas markets, and beyond that Mulhouse. Mulhouse, a major player in the European textile industry from the mid-18th to the early 20th centuries, produces each year a new Christmas fabric (this year an adaptation of a late-19th-century motif) that decorates the city and is translated into various derivative products.

For more specifics visit the official tourist information sites of Alsace, Strasbourg, Colmar and Mulhouse.

Champagne

Champagne may call to mind the celebration of New Year’s Eve more than Christmas, but Reims, the largest city in the region and home to some of the world’s most elegant champagne houses (i.e. producers) also unfurls an extensive Christmas market along Place Douet d’Erlon, center-city’s main pedestrian drag, and neighboring streets.

The official tourist information site of the city of Reims is found here.

Lille

Lille isn’t quite the North Pole but it’s about as close as one gets while still in France. Never one to miss out on a good party (accompanied by beer rather than wine), Lille gets into the seasonal spirit at its two central square: Place Rihour, which is transformed into an 80-chalet village from Nov. 19 to Dec. 30, and Grand’Place , where a 59-foot pine stands along with a Ferris wheel offering a view over the city. The market fills the square from Nov. 19 to Dec. 30. See Lille’s official Christmas market site here.

Lyon

Lyon’s dazzling Festival of Lights (Fête des Lumières) isn’t directly related to Christmas but nothing announces the winter holiday season better than long nights brightly lit. From December 5 to 8, France’s third largest city is lit by more than 70 different major creative light installations, a brilliant event that draws the oohs and ahhs of 4 million visitors.

For more about Lyon’s Festival of Lights see here.

Provence

North Americans sometimes have trouble associating Christmas with warmer climes since our own Christmas decorative and culinary traditions are rather Alsatian-Germanic in nature. But the nativity story takes place in a bald Mediterranean landscape whose white stone hills have more in common with Provence. In fact, some of world’s must ancient Christian traditions developed in Provence.

While Americans fully enter the Christmas season the day after Thanksgiving, Provence tradition would have it last from the Feast Day of Saint Barbara (Sainte Barb) on Dec. 4 to Candlemas (Chandeleur) on Feb. 2. According to legend, if one plants a plate of wheat at home on Dec. 4 and if by Dec: 25 it grows to a healthy green tuft then abundance will follow in the next harvest. As to Feb. 2, a date Americans are more likely to think of this as Groundhog Day, that’s Candlemas on the Catholic calendar, commemorating the purification of Mary after childbirth and the presentation of Jesus in the Temple. That’s the date when crèches are taken down.

Where better to consider Christmas in Provence than in Avignon, the town that the Catholic Popes called home during through most of the 14th century, when they temporarily abandoned squabble-ridden Rome. One of southern France’s most expansive Christmas markets takes place (this year Nov. 30-Jan. 4) on Avignon’s main square, Place de l’Horloge, around the corner from the Popes’ Palace, the town’s major tourist attraction. Among the many manger scenes set up around town, one of the most outstanding typically occupies a portion of the lobby in City Hill, which is also on Place de l’Horloge.

Beginning about the third week in November, crèches begin to be set up in villages and cities throughout the region. And in those crèches you’ll find dozens of figurines called santons. Santon comes from the Provencal word santou, meaning little saint, though few of these figures are now sainted. Santons of the holy family are naturally central to the crèche, but the vast majority of them represent characters of folklore and everyday life in the ideal, traditional Provencal village. While traditionally made of clay and hand painted, other materials such cardboard, cork, or even paper are used by some santonniers, as their creators are known. These cute, naïve and/or humorous figures are typically thumb-size, so taking a dozen home in your suitcase is no problem. Doll-size and baby-thumb-size santons also exist.

Santons are so anchored in Provence that shops sell them year-round, but to buy them in the Christmas spirit the best place may well be Marseille, where they’re said to have originated. Since 1803 Marseille has its Foire aux Santons, an annual traditional nativity fair where santons and other crèche features can be bought. This year’s fair will be held Nov. 15 to Dec. 31. Aix-en-Provence has had its own santon fair since 1934 (this season Nov. 20-Dec. 31), Arles has been celebrating all things crèche since 1958 (this season Nov. 15 to Jan. 12) and the small town of Carpentras also has a nice market for these precious figurines.

In Avignon as well as in other crèche-proud towns of France, one can follow a special route (le Chemin des crèches) to discover different animated and illuminated nativity scenes. Other regions also have crèche-routes outlined though villages, so don’t hesitate to inquire about crèche routes wherever you may travel during the holiday season. Whether travelers partake in it or not, they’re certain to hear along the way about the Provencal tradition of the 13 desserts of Christmas, which ends the Christmas Eve meal known the big supper (le gros souper). The desserts, numbering 13 in honor of Jesus and the 12 Apostles, consist of dried fruit and nuts, fresh fruit and sweets.

For further details about the above-mentioned towns and cities see the official tourist information sites of Avignon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Arles and Carpentras.

Nice

Though the Riviera holds back on its winter exuberance until the February Carnival/Mardi Gras season, Nice hosts the largest Christmas village of the coast west of Marseille. From Dec. 6 to Jan. 4, Place Massena is given over to 60 chalets, a skating rink and lights galore, while concerts and other events are held on Place Garibaldi on weekend and school holidays. See here for official tourist information about Nice.

Paris

There’s no sweeter place to hunt for Christmas pastries than Paris, where you’ll find some of the best traditional and creative yule logs or buches de Noël, feasts for the eyes as well as for the mouth. The yule log is a log-shaped cake traditionally made of sponge-type cake and chocolate buttercream and then more cream. They can be found throughout France, but their greatest expression graces the fine pastry shops and tea rooms of Paris, where now anything goes as long as it’s got the general shape of a log and a gazillion calories. Though most come in family-size versions, the solitary or coupled traveler will find single or double portions as well.

As a whole, Paris doesn’t display the same seasonal fervor as, say, New York, but its major department stores take to the holiday spirit as eagerly as anywhere. This is particularly the case at the department stores Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, behind the Garnier Opera on Boulevard Haussmann, where families and shoppers (or gawkers) of all ages come to admire the year’s display of lights and window dressings.

The City of Light itself has Christmas markets at the bottom of the Champs-Elysées near Place de la Corcorde (Nov. 15-Jan. 5), at the Montparnasse Train Station (Dec. 4-31), Trocadéro, outside Saint-Sulpice Church (Dec. 1-24) and Saint-Germain-des-Prés Church (Dec. 6-Jan. 2) and in Montmartre (Dec. 5-Jan. 4), as well as the town of Versailles (Dec. 5-26) and other near suburbs. The English version of the official Paris information site is found here.

Bonnes fêtes de fin d’année!

© 2014, Gary Lee Kraut

A slightly different version of this article also appears in the Nov.-Dec. 2014 issue of Travelworld International magazine

The post A Christmas Tour of France appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

“From the deep, narrow creeks (calanques) of Marseille to Saint Tropez,” VNP writes, “the Riviera is magical for me. The light of September, the colors, the smell of pine and eucalyptus, the ground of the coast and of the beaches.”

Des calanques de Marseille à Saint Tropez, la côte d’Azur est pour moi un enchantement. La lumière de septembre, les couleurs, les odeurs de pin et d’eucalyptus, les sols de la côte et des plages.

Sun/Soleil

“Shooting pictures in the south of France in black-and-white is a challenge when everything here is golden, blue and green, reflection and transparency…”

C’est une gageure de photographier le Midi en noir et blanc quand ici tout est doré, bleu et vert, de reflets et de transparences…

Rocks/Rochers

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Water/Eau

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– Photos and text (c) VNP, September 2011

For more of Va-nu-pieds’ photographs on France Revisited click here.
For Va-nu-pieds’ photographs on his own blog click here.

The post Barefoot by the Mediterranean: Sun, Rocks, Water appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

I recently returned to Marseille for the first time in over four decades, and came away wondering how I could have waited so long to go back.

My first visit was an odd stroke of luck. When I was a socially dysfunctional, meagerly put-together high school student, I won an essay contest sponsored by the executive club of American Export Lines. Today any thought of my juvenile take on “American Shipping in Today’s World” makes me wince, but in 1962 my composition satisfied judges who awarded me a summer aboard a freighter bound for ten European ports of call.

The Export Buyer‘s first and final stops in the Mediterranean, a month apart, were Marseille. This was my introduction to France.  Arriving there by sea was to me an amazing event. Marseille unfolded in layers like a pop-up book as we passed the Iles de Frioul and the outer breakwater—first the shipyards, then Fort St. Louis and Fort St. Nicolas bracketing the inner harbor, the Vieux Port clogged with boats, low-rise buildings massed in the center, high-rise buildings looming behind them, the backdrop of low gray mountains, and Notre Dame de la Garde on its massive limestone perch, its belfry touching the sky.

I was so impatient to go ashore that if I’d known how to swim I might have dived off the bow and headed for the Quai des Belges. When the ship docked in the warehouse area north of Cathédrale de la Major, I headed for the gangplank. A ship’s officer headed me off, however, and said I was expected to remain on board to meet the press. Since no one had explained the PR aspects of my trip, this caught me by surprise.

The press release that preceded me built me up as a teen prodigy obsessed with maritime history and commerce. In the captain’s cabin, half a dozen French reporters fired questions at me through an interpreter about my nonexistent interest in oceangoing cargo ships. Asked about my future in shipping, I said that although I might consider such a career (a lie), I’d rather be an archaeologist   Asked where I thought the worldwide shipping industry was headed, I said I didn’t know, but hoped there wouldn’t be any more collisions like the one that had sunk the Andrea Doria.  My interrogators were polite except for a few quick snickers. The American Export Lines official who was present probably wanted to have me shot. My first shipping-industry press conference would as a result be my last. (One of my mother’s old scrapbooks nevertheless contains two or three boilerplate articles, one of which calls me, with tact or possibly sarcasm, “un jeune homme sympathique.”)

My eagerness to go ashore didn’t stem from any special knowledge of Marseille. My main impressions of France’s second city had come from the 1961 American movie Fanny, Joshua Logan’s sentimental pastiche of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy. I also knew about Château d’If, the island prison, having read The Count of Monte Cristo. Beyond that, I knew Marseille was famed for crime and bouillabaisse.

I wasn’t quite sure what bouillabaisse was, but when I finally made it ashore I found out. I was taken to a seafood restaurant near the Vieux Port and put through a program of intimidation by disdainful, white-aproned, black-suited waiters with scary filleting skills. I wasn’t sure what I thought of bouillabaisse itself, except that it contained a lot of garlic, but the service felt like French revenge for my performance with the press. The only crime I would ever encounter in Marseille was my own unpremeditated fraudulence.

My first forays into the city involved sightseeing under the supervision of corporate keepers, but during the ship’s second, longer sojourn in Marseille I managed a half-day off my leash. The French American Export Lines employee who’d taken me to lunch, tired of babysitting after his second digestif, suggested I strike out on my own, which I gratefully did.

Marseille was, then as much as now, a city whose people lived outdoors, but at siesta time in summer, the streets were not crowded. Because I’d been told not to go there alone, I made a point of wandering up and down the half-deserted, slightly seedy Canebière—the “Can o’ Beer” to the Export Buyer‘s crew—where I had no adventures worth mentioning. I poked around the narrow streets of the Panier district, the site of ancient Massalia, where sounds and smells carried hints of North Africa. Doubling back past the Vieux Port, I headed toward Notre-Dame de la Garde.

The basilica commands the top of a 160-meter hill rising just behind the south side of the inner harbor. Completed in 1864, “la bonne mère” became an instant symbol of Marseille. A walk up the hillside in the stunning heat of July might be offered as a penitential gesture, but when I started climbing I had no such conscious intent. By the time I’d made it to the Jardin Pierre Puget, more than halfway up, I was panting and sweating and starting to get dizzy.

In the gardens below the basilica I ran into an elderly groundskeeper, the first local resident I’d encountered who wasn’t a reporter, a shipping executive, or a waiter. He shouted something too complex for me to grasp, although I could make out the words “chaleur” and “imbécile.”   I spoke to him in grisly American high school French, and he turned friendly. “Prenez un peu d’eau,” he said, handing me a bottle.

Notre-Dame de la Garde itself, with its assertive gilt Virgin and dingy interior, impressed me less than the view from the esplanade around it. From there, the city looks like an amphitheatre built for gazing at the sea. No other French port embraces the sea as fully as Marseille.

On subsequent trips to France, my focal point was Paris. I always meant to return to Marseille, but somehow bypassed it even on forays into Provence.

When I finally came back, my partner Bob and I pulled into the Gare St. Charles on a train from Montpellier. Arriving by land felt disorienting to me, and somehow wrong.

The city was founded by sailors, Ionians who occupied the site in 600 BCE, over three hundred years before the inception of Paris. The Marseillais coastline now covers 26 miles of Mediterranean littoral from L’Estaque to the southeastern cliffs. With more than 1.6 million inhabitants, the city is, after Paris, the second most populous metropolitan district in France. Marseille is the departmental capital of Bouches du Rhône and the regional seat of Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur, but it has a cultural reach beyond provincial borders.  It seems fitting (though the song itself came from Strasbourg) that the French national anthem should be called La Marseillaise.

Historically, Marseille has absorbed—at times reluctantly—swarms of Greeks, Gauls, Romans, Spaniards, Arabs, Italians, Turks, Armenians, Comoro Islanders, and more. The town has sustained itself through conquest, revolution, and disaster. For a time in the early 18th century it was hemmed in by a wall intended to contain an outbreak of plague that wiped out half its population.  During World War II, Nazi occupiers destroyed the warrens of the hostile and subversive poor. Allied bombings pulverized much of the Vieux Port. Since then, urban renewal has erased or reconfigured additional neighborhoods.

Through it all, by some miracle, Marseille has stayed essentially the same. As the American writer M.F.K. Fisher noted in the late 1970s, in her Marseille memoir A Considerable Town, “Most people who describe it… write the same things…. [A] typically modern opinion could have been written in 1550 as well as 1977.”

Negative judgments on Marseille are nothing new. “Apparently people like to glance one more time at the same old words,” complained Fisher, “—evil, filthy, dangerous.”  While online travelers’ reviews of Marseille tend to be positive, some reflect their authors’ xenophobia. Others bring up seemingly legitimate safety questions.

The city has been tidied up since 1962, equipped with a modern two-line subway system and infrastructural improvements. The scruffy Marseille depicted by resident Marseillais filmmaker Robert Guédiguian (La ville est tranquille) still exists, but Bob and I wandered off the beaten tourist path, often at night, and never felt any more threatened than in other major European or North American city—including Boston, our reputedly staid hometown.

The Quartier du Panier is now as gentrified as the Parisian Marais. Administrative offices dominate parts of the Canebière. Notre-Dame de la Garde, which we reached this time by bus, seems cleaner and brighter. Fishmongers still hawk their wares every morning along the Quai des Belges, but the Vieux Port seems more tourist-friendly than ever.

Marseille’s African flavor has grown more assertive. Along with ethnic Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans whose families have lived there for generations, recent immigrants from the Maghreb and points south are dispersed all over the inner city—in contrast to Paris, where racial and ethnic minorities tend to be pushed into outlying suburbs. Some Marseille neighborhoods are startlingly North African. As the Rue d’Aix approaches the Arc de Triomphe de Marseille, it seems to morph into a street in Tunis, full of Arabic-speaking men and women in chechias and safsaris. Around the Marché de Noailles, aromas of henna, mint, filfil, and cumin evoke the souks.

A newly visible part of the Marseillais cultural mélange is a lively gay community whose Pride events draw tens of thousands of participants every July. Gay businesses have entered the mainstream and prospered. One of the better restaurants we discovered was the gay-owned-and-operated Casa No Name, whose eclectic menu fuses Asian, North African, and French cuisine.

Throughout the city there’s a fresh profusion of restaurants, hotels, tour options, and visitor amenities. Some are small and operated by a new breed of proprietor such as Jean-Laurent Colleter and Phillipe Bénard who, drawn by the Mediterranean ambiance, relocated to Marseille from Paris in 2001. The pair has run the B&B Les Amis de Marseille in their spacious apartment near the Place Castellane for nearly four years. (“We love living in Marseille,” says Colleter. “We want to share it with everyone else.”)   The hosts’ graciousness, managerial competence, impeccable guest rooms, and spectacular garden terrace facing Notre-Dame de la Garde—not to mention the bread they bake on the premises daily—make Les Amis perhaps the best establishment of its kind I’ve found anywhere.

In Marseille, it’s wise to stay at a central location. The local calendar of events brims over with dance, opera, theatre, music. Visitors can devote a week to museums alone and not take everything in. For football fanatics, there are matches at the Stade Vélodrome (capacity 60,000), home of the Olympiques de Marseille soccer team. But in this maritime city, outdoor recreation is almost synonymous with the sea. America’s Cup preliminaries and parts of the Sailing Tour de France take place in the Bay of Marseille. Recreational boats bring thousands of passengers daily to the Frioul Archipelago, to Château d’If, and to the Calanques, the chain of cliff-rimmed, fjord-like inlets that serrates the coast from Marseille to Cassis. Within the city limits, the Corniche runs past sandy stretches of public beach.

Returning to Marseille as an adult meant making my peace with bouillabaisse. This milestone was brought about through lunch at Chez Fonfon, a local institution hidden away in Vallon des Auffes, a pocket fishing port below the Corniche. The restaurant is upscale but casual. With proprietor Alexandre Pinna and staff turning in a bravura ensemble performance, the service was precise but humane. Before we knew quite what we were doing, we’d overindulged in the main course—rounds of bread, a peppery rouille, and immaculately fresh rascasse, grondin, John Dory, monkfish, and conger eel accompanied by fragrant, saffron-accented broth.

On close inspection, Marseille itself is an unexpectedly subtle mix of flavors. The precise quality that has drawn so many people there is hard to sort out. M.F.K. Fisher thought the most appropriate French adjective for Marseille was insolite—unique, with a hint of mystery. She wrote of the city’s “phoenixlike vitality, its implacably realistic beauty and brutality.”  Today vitality and beauty seem to be keeping the brutality at bay. The feisty old port has mellowed into a place I find harder than ever to leave.

Businesses noted in this article

Restaurant: Chez Fonfon, 140 Vallon des Auffes, 13007 Marseille. Tel. 04 91 52 14 38. www.chez-fonfon.com

Restaurant: Casa No Name, 7 rue André Poggioli, 13006 Marseille. Tel. 04 91 45 75 82. www.casanoname.com

B & B: Les Amis de Marseille, Parc Castellane, 84 rue de Lodi, Bat F, 13006 Marseille. Tel. 06 74 89 66 26 or 06 63 76 88 49. (Editor’s note. In 2014 this B&B was closed and the owners opened the B&B Bleu Calanques by the sea.)

James d’Entremont is a journalist, playwright, and civil liberties activist.

© 2009, James d’Entremont

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