The French Riviera

Written by the author of multiple popular accounts of the history of the French Riviera/Côte d’Azur, this slender book provides a quick (though detail laden) tour through the entirety of the area’s history, from the prehistoric settlement at Terra Amata through centuries of Greek and Roman colonization, religious and dynastic conflict, and modern reinvention as an international tourist Mecca. Nelson conceives the geographic area of the Côte d’Azur more liberally than most, as encompassing the span of coastline stretching from the current Italian border all the way to Marseille, and including inland Provence, in the contemporary departments of the Bouches-du-Rhône, Var and Alpes-Maritimes. The author suggests the ‘overriding characteristic’ of this area’s 3000-year history to be its ‘cosmopolitanism,’ though that is not a conclusion really borne out in the text. The book’s episodic chronological chapters depict the area as a historical crossroads of convergent peoples and competing geopolitical designs—harboured originally by empires, monarchical dynasties and aristocratic houses, and then later by consolidating and aspirant nation states. Outside actors, the book shows, have long made competing claims upon the southernmost reaches of France, with tourists only the most recent to do so. Indeed the famed ‘invention’ of the Côte d’Azur in the nineteenth century as a node of international tourism is, in the book’s broad narrative arc, made expressive of the area’s historical character as a place significantly determined by historical currents and agents originating elsewhere.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Genealogy · Geography · Geopolitics · Literature · Monarchy · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Prehistory · Riviera · Settlement (finance) · Tourism · History · Landscape and Cultural Studies · Law