Emmanuel Macron is back in Marseille from this Monday, June 26 for a three-day trip. In September 2021, he announced several measures there to respond to the difficulties of one of the “poorest and most vibrant cities in France”. The coming decade will transform Marseille and make it a capital of the Mediterranean. Five billion euros have been devolved to the city, to which must be added funding from local authorities to the tune of 10 billion euros.
Security, transport, education, housing, culture… The Head of State wants to look at the advantages and weaknesses of a city with a contrasting face. It is said to be marked by crime and violence, but popular with tourists; praised for the sweetness of life on its seaside, some of its neighborhoods are nevertheless burdened by poverty. The clichés are piling up to talk about Marseille, a sign of an image that is still very ambivalent. Analysis of this double reputation with Céline Regnard, lecturer authorized to direct research in contemporary history at Aix-Marseille University, author of Good and bad reputation. Evolution of the ambivalent image of Marseille, 19th-20th century.
L’Express: Marseille is often presented as a city with “two faces”: one violent, the other very touristy. How old is this ambivalence?
Celine Regnard: In many countries, there is the capital and its mirror city. In France, it is Marseilles. It is a city with a turbulent political history, especially under Louis XIV. At the time, in the 17th century, he built two fortifications in order to bring the city to heel. During the French Revolution, a federalist movement in the provinces tended to want to break away from state supervision. Marseille is one of its high places. She acquired this reputation for independence, this habit of turning her back on Paris and never toeing the line. It’s a story that has been built up gradually and is quite ambivalent: the French anthem is called The Marseillaise because it was a battalion from Marseilles which carried the text of Rouget de Lisle at the time of the Revolution. Today, the image we have of Marseille stems from that of the end of the 19th and 20th centuries. First a rather poor city. Its city center has some of the poorest neighborhoods in France. It’s a working-class town, with a lot of immigration.
Finally, there are the news items, which mean that, from time to time, the city is on the front page of the national press. Its status as a port has led to a particularly marked development of crime in terms of drug trafficking since the 1920s and 1930s and that of the famous “French connection” until 1970. This is not enough to sum up the city, but c has become a reality. When you think of Marseille, you immediately think of violence, drugs, football. Reality ended up being amplified by these clichés.
However, Marseille enjoys great popularity. For example, the city recently had to limit access to its Calanques to reduce attendance…
This data is quite recent. The revival of tourism in Marseille dates back about ten years. For a very long time, it was completely neglected by visitors. The birth of tourism at the end of the 19th century took place on the Côte d’Azur, not at all in Marseille.
As Albert Londres writes, it is more a city of work than of vacation. People don’t stop in Marseille for fun. Things changed with the classification of the Calanques as a national park in 2012. But two other elements explain this arrival of tourists: previously, the creation of the Paris-Marseille TGV line in 2001 began this work. Above all, in 2013, it was named European Capital of Culture. Huge urban developments took place at that time, with a rehabilitation of the docks on the seafront, or even the construction of the MuCem. The city has changed and has become attractive for tourists. To the point of posing a problem: to the container ships of Marseilles is now added a cruise part, which leads to pollution problems.
Marseille has therefore gradually forged this reputation as a cultural city.
There are the national museums, such as the Museum of African Oceanic and Native American Arts, an extremely important festival offer. You also have the Friche de la Belle de Mai, in a former working-class district, an industrial wasteland that has become a cultural center. It is an extremely dynamic city in this regard. But this aspect is quite recent. This is accompanied by a process of gentrification: higher categories settle in working-class neighborhoods and drive up property prices. International tourism has also contributed to this increase, as Marseille has become popular with the film industry.
Luc Besson’s series of films, Taxi, kicked things off a bit, before being followed by films by Cédric Jimenez, or even Stillwater, a blockbuster released in 2021 starring Matt Damon. Marseille has once again become the city of cinema it was in the last century when Marcel Pagnol directed them. Nowadays, however, it is better equipped than before, which has allowed it to capitalize on its image and become trendy.
In an article that you wrote on Marseille, you quote Pagnol, precisely, but also the influence of Fernandel. The two men largely contributed to building the stereotypical image of the “Marseillais” as we know it today.
In reality, it is a cultural construction that dates from the second half of the 19th century. To be exact, the first to stage a Marseillais of this type was Eugène Labiche, in a play called The pearl of the Canebière. He describes the arrival of provincials in Paris and depicts their discrepancy, their lack of culture, and… they are Marseillais. This makes the Second Empire laugh a lot and dozens of characters develop in this vein. Marcel Pagnol, who is from Aubagne, near Marseille, will reclaim this stereotype.
It was really during the inter-war period that the caricature of the Marseillais took shape. The Marseillais becomes a joker, not very serious, always exaggerates everything… This characteristic is illustrated by Pagnol in the famous card game of his play Marius. The invention becomes a reality in the eyes of the general public.
Marseille changed its face again in 1980-1990, becoming a city claiming its “cosmopolitan” side. Is this still the case today?
Once again, Marseille’s image is very mixed. There is that of the city as a violent and criminal metropolis, and then that of joy, of the mixture of populations, of cosmopolitanism. It is deeply rooted in the political discourse on the image of the city. To understand the appeal of this argument, we must return to the myth of the foundation of Marseilles, which would have been founded by Greek sailors from Turkey. These sailors were already from Greek colonies in Asia Minor. They settle in this harbour, and a sailor marries the daughter of a local chief. From the writings of Antiquity, Marseille is therefore perceived as a land of mixing of peoples. Added to this heritage is the fact that Marseille is an industrial port where there is a lot of immigration. It is not only a city where one settles, but also a place where one passes. A gateway to France to go elsewhere. Marseille is therefore a land of mixing that follows the different waves of immigration, with Italians, Orientals, Turks, Armenians, Lebanese, Algerians, Comorians…
This reality is put forward as a feature of the city’s identity, whether seen positively or negatively. People against immigration are going to say that it’s a cosmopolitan city, that it’s terrible, and people who are going to be in the opposite position are going to find that wonderful. When a politician wants to fight against racism in Marseille, he says that it goes against the identity of the city, which is essentially cosmopolitan. This political discourse was set up in the 1980s with Gaston Defferre, but it was above all his successor, Robert Vigouroux, who promoted this type of discourse. For example, he favored Marseille Espérance, an inter-confessional association of friendship between peoples. The 26th Centenary park, opened under Jean-Luc Gaudin, has a tree of hope which symbolizes friendship between peoples… Today these speeches are still taken up by elected officials.
You mentioned the impact of tourism on the downtown districts. So is Marseille in the process, like other cities on the coast, of gentrifying?
It’s been twenty years that I hear that there is a gentrification of the center of Marseille! That said, Marseille is still the only city in France where you have a popular city center. You will have very gentrified neighborhoods with old, renovated housing, where the price goes up and, two streets further, it will remain very popular. The city is still very mixed, even if certain districts, such as the 7th arrondissement, have completed their transformation.
But this phenomenon is neither uniform nor complete. Firstly because Marseille is very large – over 22,000 hectares – made up of old villages swallowed up by the urban area. Its large complexes are not on the outskirts, but directly in the city. Besides, she has no device. The highway arrives directly in the city, which remains very congested. The metro is very small, the transport services are not very efficient… All this contributes to the fact that the phenomenon of gentrification is very slow there, and perhaps more difficult to see evolve than elsewhere.