Marseille, Port to Port 9780231555821

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MARSEILLE PORTTOPORT

MARSEILLE PORTTOPORT W I L L I A M  KO R N B L U M

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kornblum, William, author. Title: Marseille, port to port / William Kornblum. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021046711 (print) | LCCN 2021046712 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231205061 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231205078 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231555821 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Marseille (France)—History. | Marseille (France)—Social conditions. | Marseille (France)—Civilization. Classification: LCC DC801.M36 K67 2022 (print) | LCC DC801. M36 (ebook) | DDC 944.9/12—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046711 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046712

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Frontispiece: Marseille dockers’ households, Father Jacques Loew, 1945 (see chapter 7) Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover photo: Borges Samuel / Alamy

For Didi Goldenhar, of course

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Port to Port 1

1

Alone in the Marseille Observatory

7

2 A Guide to the Ruisseau des Aygalades 3

Jean Sylva: La Visitation

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4 Introduction to the Academy 47 5

Noailles: A Scholar on the Rue d’Aubagne

6 Beats of Les Cités 7

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Dockers and Port Neighborhoods

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8 Gaston Defferre: Rebuilding the City

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CONTENTS

9 Marseille, Spring 2020: Women Take Power 10 Pink at the Bone

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123

11 Bouillabaisse in the Vallon des Auffes

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12 Marseille/New York 143 Epilogue

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Appendix: For Further Marseille Explorations Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’VE BEEN

a curious guest in other people’s neighborhoods and

communities since 1962. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I lived in a village on the outskirts of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Eventually, I earned the professional credentials one needs to sit on stoops shooting the breeze while still claiming it as work. Big-hearted Marseille came to me without work, often in the form of invitations to go for walks, attend meetings, have lunch, see a show. The city’s generous welcome never seems to run out. All of the friends and advisors I list here know how they helped me learn about their city. If I were to list the details of my gratitude to each and all, we would never get to the book. For the record then, I wish to thank the following people who made the project possible: Patrick Barraud, Alain Battegay, Patrick Boulanger, Jean-Samuel Bordreuil, Christine Breton, Samia Chabani, Claire Duport, Mario Fabre, Michèle Jolé, Jane Isay, Baptiste Lanaspeze, Anne Lovell, Eve Kornblum, Phillip

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Oberlander, Jacquelyn Oberlander, Jean-Pierre Ostende, MarieClaire Rubenstein, Carole Saturno, Gilles Susanne, Christian Tamisier, Christine Vernière, Terry Williams. Marseille folks whom the reader will meet in the book deserve special thanks for their time and their candor. It’s an honor to name them here: Quentin Ambrosino, Alex ArnouxPierre, Christine Breton, Kenneth Brown, Hubert Ceccaldi, Félicité Gaye, Vince Landry, Annette Marconi, Christiane Martinez, Jean Sylva. My 2014–2015 Marseille host institution was the Institut Méditerranéen d’études avancées de Marseille (IMéRA). IMéRA is the institute for advanced study of Aix-Marseille Université and hosts international scholars. The administrative director, Pascal Hurtado, was especially understanding and helpful with introductions. At Columbia University Press my thanks begin with the editorial director, Eric Schwartz, for his willingness to efface boundaries. I am indebted to Rob Fellman, Lowell Frye, Michael Haskell, and Meredith Howard at the press for their  editing and marketing assistance and their unflagging professionalism. My home academic institution from 1973 until 2017 was the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), where I am a proud professor emeritus. Lynn Chancer, executive officer of the Doctoral Program in Sociology, organized a public seminar with my young Marseille friends that helped enable and inspire the book’s last chapter. Invitations from my dear friends and colleagues Mitch Duneier of Princeton and Elijah Anderson of Yale built my confidence in the project. So

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

did the encouragement of our late colleague William Helmreich. Howie Becker, friend, mentor, and ardent Francophile, encouraged the project from start to finish. During the tender stages of manuscript preparation, before it had hopes of becoming a publishable book, I received invaluable editorial assistance from Peter Kornblum, Carolyn Smith, and Edith Goldenhar. The latter, better known as Didi, is fortunately my wife, to whom this book is dedicated with admiration and love.

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MARSEILLE PORTTOPORT

INTRODUCTION PORTTOPORT

MARSEILLE IS

for city lovers, especially those with a sense of

adventure and some historical imagination. In Marseille you’ll discover an ancient and joyful French seaport, bathed in Mediterranean sunshine and shaded in the ochre hues of Provence. It’s also a city that exhibits many of the social and political fault lines of contemporary French society, along with some of its very own. France’s second city in population and its largest in territory, Marseille is something of France’s urban problem child, its mauvais sujet, its Chicago. For all its charms and strengths, it can’t shake its seamy reputation for corruption and crime, a reputation that dates to well before the city featured in William Friedkin’s and John Frankenheimer’s French Connection films about the New York–Marseille heroin trade. But contrary to the outdated stereotypes, Marseille reveals many welcoming and attractive faces to the urban explorer. In Marseille

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INTRODUCTION PORTTOPORT

as in other historically significant cities, the streets and monuments tell stories of fires, plagues, wars, obsolescence, and regeneration. The neighborhoods have hosted waves of strangers. Generations have fought through their ethnic and racial differences to find lovers and friends in the city they call home. Marseille and cities like it are great because they attract ambitious projects, because they host visitors from throughout the world, and because they are centers of intellectual and scientific life. Even from a European perspective, its status as an ancient city is secure. Galleys from ancient Greece and Rome frequented this rock-enclosed refuge six hundred years before the Common Era. In the age of the Sun King, Louis XIV, Marseille was made France’s primary port on the Mediterranean and hosted the infamous galleys with thousands of slaves. In more recent history, Marseille suffered occupation and destruction during World War II. Much that we experience there today, especially in the neighborhoods of the north side of the city, is the result of largely successful postwar and postcolonial efforts to build affordable housing for waves of homeless and inadequately housed newcomers. Like my own city of New York, Marseille is a deindustrialized port. Both cities face many of the same challenges in seeking to restore and redevelop sections of their inner shorelines. Despite their great differences in scale and global influence, both cities depend increasingly on the production and consumption of “culture.” What that may mean in Marseille, especially at a time of ecological crisis, has been a guiding question for city politicians, residents, and scholars alike.

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My primary interest, however, is to introduce the reader to Marseille through some of its residents. I have been especially attentive to those whose stories highlight efforts to address past wounds to the city’s natural and social fabric. Their stories lead us into the lived world of Marseille, to some of its essential settings and scenes. Most are living; some are not. Yet all of them somehow personify the cultural particularities that make Marseille a special French city. Learning to speak French and gaining entry to the worlds of Francophone culture have been high among the great good fortunes of my life. In 1961, after graduating from college, I went to Paris on money saved from a construction job on New York’s East River. Enrolled as a student in the Sorbonne’s marvelous Cours de Civilisation Française, I ran the streets with French friends and my then girlfriend, who became my first wife and the mother of my children. We shouted slogans about Algerian independence in demonstrations that often turned extremely violent. When President Kennedy and Congress created the Peace Corps and were ready to send a group of young Americans to a French-speaking country, I joined and was sent to teach chemistry and physics, in French, at the Lycée Classique d’Abidjan, Ivory Coast. For two intense years I lived in Abidjan, taught science at the lycée, and traveled through the newly independent states of French West Africa and Ghana. These experiences and many more decades of work and adventure in France and the French-speaking world often caused me to land happily in Marseille, as many sailors have in the past. Here one finds perhaps the greatest representation of Francophone France anywhere.

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My wife, Didi Goldenhar, and I have been coming to Marseille with some regularity for the past decade. We usually stay in a different neighborhood of the city on each visit. Our visits were delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2021 but began again as soon as transatlantic travel resumed. In 2014– 2015, I had a six-month study fellowship at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research (IMéRA), a scholar’s haven where I was “in residence.” Many of the tales I have to recount began then. Most, however, are ongoing stories of friendships that continue to grow beyond the pages of this volume. I’ll never know Marseille the way I know my native city, and I can’t help looking at Marseille through a New Yorker’s eyes. In New York I’ve worked with teams of professionals on  a  variety of urban ecological restoration projects that have  included Central Park, Times Square, Forty-Second Street, and the beaches of the Rockaways, Staten Island, Jamaica Bay, and many others. I’ve analyzed human interactions in parks, beaches, city streets, neighborhoods, and subways. I often write about particular places and times where the human and natural worlds coexist or collide. My headquarters for over forty years was the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, in the center of Manhattan, but my family home is at the ocean shore of the city, in Long Beach, NY. My family and I keep an old catboat for fishing and sailing in the channels and inlets. For decades we have been exploring the city’s rivers and islands, often anchoring on the side of a local channel to fish and watch shorebirds feed in the marshes.

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In Marseille I am usually a beached sailor, surrounded by splendid water life, boats of every purpose, convivial clubs of sailors, with no end of classy yachts on display. I walk the quays, gaze out to sea from the land, or ride the little ferry boat from one side of the Old Port to another. In the sailing seasons, I yearn for my home port and my own small ship. As a New Yorker and a sailor, I’m looking at Marseille from the perspective of one changing port to another, and the influences of each port on the other stimulate my vision and imagination. “Port to port” is also how ships pass each other, observing each other’s heading, keeping to starboard, avoiding collision even in uncertain weather.

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Chapter One ALONEINTHEMARSEILLEOBSERVATORY

It was the port that seamen talked about—the marvelous, dangerous, attractive, big, wide-open port of Marseilles. And he wanted only to get there. —Claude McKay, Banjo (1929)

THE HEART

of downtown Marseille is its Old Port. The quays

that border its rectangular expanse of water on three sides are edged by a forest of masts and towering yachts. The fourth side is open to the sea through a narrow passage between two rocky cliffs at the port’s entrance, an opening in the cliffs called a calanque, a signature geologic feature of the region’s spectacular coastline. On the northern side of its old port are two blocks of identical, four-story, mid-twentieth-century apartment buildings. Their unadorned balconies overlook the inner harbor and offer a clear view of distant Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, golden and vigilant above the port. The windows behind the balconies glow in the setting sun. These long and somewhat heavylooking apartment blocks are separated by the glorious eighteenth-century Hôtel-de-Ville, spared destruction during the German occupation of World War II. It is now the city’s

ALONEINTHEMARSEILLEOBSERVATORY

political power center, from where the mayor rules. The modern apartment buildings that flank the City Hall were once the site of notorious tenement slums. Walk-ups that dated to earlier centuries leaned precariously over the narrow streets. The area hosted a thriving red-light district and every type of dive bar. This was the neighborhood known to Harlem’s Claude McKay as the Ditch (La Fosse). He also called it Boody Lane. When he landed there in the 1920s, Banjo, his alter ego, instinctively . . . drifted to the Ditch, and as naturally he found a girl there. She found a room for both of them. Banjo’s soul thrilled to the place—the whole life of it that milled around the ponderous, somber building of the Mairie, standing on the Quai du Port, where fish and vegetables and girls and youthful touts, cats, mongrels, and a thousand second-hand things were all mingled together in a churning agglomeration of stench and sliminess. His wonderful Marseilles! Even more wonderful to him than he had been told.

McKay had landed in Marseille after a few months working on a tramp steamer. Merchant seamen “on the beach,” waiting for their next ship, shared money and wine in an international brotherhood of black and brown souls, outcast itinerant workers drifting through the world’s ports. When Walter Benjamin visited Marseille in the 1920s, he knew the area as Les Bricks, “the red light district. . . . A vast agglomeration of steps, arches, turrets, and cellars . . . this  depot of worn-out alleyways is the prostitutes quarter.

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Invisible lines divide up the area into sharp, angular territories like African colonies.” But contrary to its reputation as a popular haven for whores  and criminals, the district also provided housing for dockers and their families, most of whom were French Marseillais. Nonetheless, Himmler called it “the wart of Europe,” and in 1943 at the height of the occupation, the Nazis and their Vichy French collaborators used the opportunity of counterresistance actions and the claim that the old neighborhoods were housing terrorists to reduce the entire area, with the exception of the historic City Hall, to rubble. Two thousand Jews who had lived there and in the vicinity were sent to the extermination camps. The postwar buildings and their balconies on either side of the City Hall create a long arcade of vaulted storefronts. These are the residential apartment blocks designed by Fernand Pouillon to replace the buildings that had been blown up by the Nazis in 1943. Some of these apartments remain occupied by families who had been displaced during the war. Most of the commercial ground-floor space contains busy bars and restaurants offering Provençal seafood, attracting a thriving tourist trade. Here and there among them are some local favorites, like Chez Madie and Les Galinettes. My wife, Edith Goldenhar, and I discovered Chez Madie on a formative visit to Marseille in 2012. I had been in Marseille a number of times for work, but this visit was for pleasure. For the first time I felt the city’s Mediterranean allure. With another couple, the poet and writer Karen Chase and her husband, the visual artist Paul Graubard, we rented an apartment

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in a modern building on the edge of the Panier, where we enjoyed a panoramic view of the Joliette docks, the Cathédrale de la Major, and the sea beyond. The city was in the throes of a building boom. Marseille was preparing to star as the European Capital of Culture for 2013. Cranes and construction sites were everywhere. We picked our way around workers building concrete forms and groaning cement mixers throwing up clouds of dust. We had little idea what all the new concrete would produce. When we finally reached the Quai du Port at the foot of the Panier, we were somewhat disoriented—but also hungry. The Guide du Routard recommended Chez Madie Les Galinettes as one of the more authentic Provençal kitchens. Indeed it was friendly and authentic, “sympa,” as the French would say. From the terrace of Chez Madie, at an umbrella-shaded table, our gaze was drawn up the steep hill on the south side of  the Old Port. On her perch atop a two-hundred-foot bell tower, a Golden Madonna and child were shooting bolts of reflected sunshine. The Byzantine-style Basilica Notre-Dame de la Garde, known to all as “La Bonne Mère,” rises from the ramparts of the fort, built in the mid-1500s on the order of François Premier, known as the Château Builder. Much earlier, in the eleventh century, a local priest constructed the first chapel on top of the hill known as La Garde, the lookout place. While it is easy to get a surfeit of major cathedrals in European capitals, Notre-Dame-de-La-Garde is a Marseille original. From the ramparts encircling the basilica the views of the city and of the sea beyond are extraordinary. Inside, the basilica glows; green stone and mosaics are illuminated by color

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streaming through stained glass. And it’s the mariners’ church, above all. Marseille’s special identity among French cities came to me through unexpected popular expressions of gratitude and faith. These are inscriptions on the walls and ex votos from the survivors of shipwrecks and other catastrophes. One ex voto reminded me of early boating experiences with my young family in New York Harbor that I’d rather forget. A family’s small fishing boat, a typical barquetta of the northern Med, is in peril. A fierce and sudden wind, perhaps the Mistral, turns the picnic outing à la marine into a matter of life and death. Mom is rowing through angry whitecaps. Dad stands waving a distress signal. No life preservers. It’s comforting to know that, with the grace of God, this near disaster ended in rescue. The ex votos were of a piece with the creative graffiti in the Panier and the crooked hillside neighborhoods of the city we traversed on our way up to the basilica and down the other side to the corniche that runs along the sea on the city’s south side. The twin dramas of nature and humanity played out on Marseille’s craggy shoreline and nurtured its special quality of folksiness tinged with melancholy. These aspects of its identity transcend class divisions. The proud soulfulness of its people is expressed in the city’s art and literature. It is also reflected in the tenacity of neighborhoods carved into limestone cliffs and coastal calanques. As a student of cities and coastal communities, I knew during that visit in 2012 that I would return for more exploration. Two years later, in 2014, I returned alone to Marseille. I would live there for six months. My wife would visit me for a

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week here and there, when she could leave her own work in New York. I was about to turn seventy-five, taking a last university sabbatical after over fifty years of teaching. The first two or three days of jet lag and unaccustomed solitude were difficult. To boost my spirits, I headed for the Old Port and the familiar terrace of Chez Madie. All the noisy construction Didi and I had witnessed in 2012 was finished. This deindustrialized corner of the Old Port had been entirely transformed by the MuCEM, or Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, the centerpiece of  the $7 billion European and French Euroméditerranée (EuroMed) urban renewal project. The MuCEM’s exhibition spaces and its expositions were still finding their cultural identity, but the fourth-floor roof garden with walkways overlooking the Old Port and the docks of La Joliette, blue sea beyond, was an inspired public space. Its distinct vistas reminded me of Manhattan’s High Line. I soon found my way down through the Panier to Chez Madie under the arcades, familiar territory. At the next table, a rotund man was engrossed in reading the same newspaper article in the local newspaper, La Provence, that I had open before me. It was a story about the dreary and endless negotiations over the fate of the Marseille– Corsica shipping and passenger line. In the balance were at least a thousand jobs currently held by Marseille dockers. Any decrease in their numbers would be a huge loss to a port that already had high unemployment in its blue-collar population. My neighbor and I exchanged the mandatory salutations that in France must precede any conversation. Then I asked

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him, as a foreigner to the city, what he thought of this waterfront labor situation. He shrugged and gave me a quizzical look. My question had been in French, but I seemed to be ignorant of even the rudiments of life in Marseille. This was going to be difficult to explain to someone who had just dropped out of the sky. He gave it a try nonetheless. “Eh bien, they have been pissing away money. There is pressure from the European Union to end subsidies. There are bidders who want to cut costs. But you know in Marseille, there is always another side people don’t want to talk about. Your French isn’t bad. Where are you from?” “I’m from New York. We had freighters and dockers once as well.” “Ahh, New York. But you have many other attractions.” “So do you in Marseille.” “Yes, without doubt, but we shall see.” The round man returned to his newspaper. If uncertain about Marseille’s future, he seemed pleasantly well fed and completely at home. I assumed he was the owner. I asked the waiter. He sized me up for two seconds and decided to conduct all further business in English. “No, he is not the boss, it is she over there. Madie. The fat one is father.” He pointed to a woman seated at the cash register. “Madie. La patronne.” She had a wide and pleasant face with an easy smile, without her father’s gruffness. “Today very nice moule-frites, aioli, grilled fish, fish soup. For drink?” Tourists and locals wandered past the Chez Madie terrace while I lingered over coffee in the mid-September Marseille sunshine. The time I would have to explore the city seemed to

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stretch out endlessly ahead of me. I welcomed the challenge of learning to feel at home in Marseille. But I also felt a little lost, a stranger in a city that made a student of cities feel like how a foreigner must feel just starting to settle in New York City. Here in Marseille, Arabic is the second language, just as Spanish is in New York City, or at least in my neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. I speak no Arabic, and the Marseille French accent is demanding. Eventually I would get better at it, as I spent time with friends in the northern neighborhoods of the city, but at first it was frustrating not to catch the meaning of casual speech that would have been clear to me in Paris. I began walking up the Canebière toward my apartment, passing the gleaming Bourse, the Chamber of Commerce, and the immediate commercial center in the blocks just above the Old Port. I stopped in front of the OM store, to admire the  jerseys and team photos. L’Olympique de Marseille, with its stadium in a posh south side district, is to the city what the Brooklyn Dodgers had been to me and my baseball-obsessed father. Marseille’s pride and sense of solidarity owes a huge debt to its home team. Football, with an emphasis on the foot and not the helmeted head, holds the city’s youthful population in crazed fandom. Everywhere one looks in Marseille there are children and teenagers kicking a soccer ball around. An ex-athlete can always find a bench near some players whose youth and grace demonstrate why throughout the world it’s known as the “beautiful game.” Once considered the Champs-Élysées of Marseille, the Canebière is a broad, tree-lined boulevard that bisects two largely Arab neighborhoods, Belsunce on the left and Noailles

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on the right, and ends at the cathedral of Saint-Vincent de Paul, known also as Église des Réformés. Yanks on leave in Marseille just after the war called it the “Can-a-beer,” something of an irony, since the actual name derives from the Latin word for cannabis. In the second half of the seventeenth century, when the boulevard was part of Louis IV’s vision for the city, the area beyond was still lined with hemp fields used primarily for making maritime rope and hawsers. Today the avenue retains a shabby grandeur as hopes to gentrify and attract upscale investment focus on the restoration and reopening of a luxury hotel at the foot of Noailles. During my academic residence in Marseille I was generously housed in the Cinq-Avenues neighborhood of the city, above the top of the Canebière, in the empire-style Parc Longchamp, home to the Museum of Fine Art. My one-bedroom apartment was at the top of the Maison des Astronomes (Astronomers’ House), on the grounds of an old observatory. Its four huge windows overlooked the city toward the west. Sunsets were symphonic. In my perch above the city, I was at first alone much of the time, missing my wife and family back in New York. I was feeling a bit homesick, but in Marseille that melancholy would not last for long. I was meeting with people who were eager to show me their Marseille and was making an effort to meet people who came from different sections of the city and from diverse social worlds. I was also learning about figures from the city’s past. Their Marseille stories will appear in the chapters to come. My phone rang that afternoon just as I entered my flat. An anthropologist friend, Kenneth Brown, a professor of Middle

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IMéRA, Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research, Maison des Astronomes.

FIGURE

Source: Photo by author.

ALONEINTHEMARSEILLEOBSERVATORY

Eastern studies, resident of Noailles, a man who knows how to stay fit and enjoy life, wanted me to meet him for a swim at the Plage des Catalans. There would be a stunning sunset at the beach, he promised. The water would be ideal. Inside the apartment, my couch beckoned. But gravity’s napward tug gave way to the “Marseille Effect”: a burst of energy for adventure. I grabbed a bathing suit and towel, crossed the back side of the park, and hopped on the #81 bus. In about twenty minutes the bus took me back to the Old Port and up the corniche, past the Pharo, to the welcoming patch of sandy beach at “Les Catalans.” Beyond the children playing at the water’s edge and some couples bobbing together not far from shore, I saw my friend Ken swimming easily across that beach about fifty yards out. I swam to meet him. The clear azure water was refreshing but not cold. As promised, a red ball of fire was settling into the western horizon. Shadows fell on a velvet sea.

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Chapter Two AGUIDETOTHERUISSEAU DESAYGALADES

ONEOF

my aims was to explore the ecological legacies of settle-

ment and industry in Marseille by following the course of a stream that runs through some of the historic working-class neighborhoods above the commercial port on the city’s north side. The Ruisseau des Aygalades drains the northern watershed of the Marseille region. Today it is an urbanized mountain stream with a “natural history” that speaks volumes about nature, urbanization, and the challenges of ecological restoration. Life on the hillsides above the port must withstand desertlike conditions over long summer months under intense sun. The garrigue, as this Mediterranean biome is called, thrives on karst, limestone formations where timeless flows of calcareous water carve gorges, grottos, and surreal shapes in the landscape. Like the chaparral of California, garrigue vegetation is scrubby and resinous, but wherever there is a trickle of water

AGUIDETOTHERUISSEAUDESAYGALADES

through the steep vallons (vales or dells), it becomes leafy green. Its even denser form, known as the maquis, covers much of the higher elevations and provided hideouts for bandits and resistance fighters, the latter known as Les Maquis. Karst, garrigue, maquis, vallon, calanque: these are some of the essential terms that describe the landscape of valleys and meadows leading down through the mountain streams of the city. Marseille’s garrigue scrublands bear the scars of centuries of deforestation, grazing, and mining. They are also marked by a tangled fabric of rail lines, highways, housing estates, factories, warehouses, village centers, and the occasional shopping mall. My interest in the present life and future possibilities of these tormented landscapes demands knowledge of their histories and present human ecology. This quest naturally led me into Marseille’s community of green thinkers and activists. Among them was Christine Breton, who was suggested to me by a mutual friend in Paris. A Marseille activist historian and an accomplished author, Christine had recently retired as a conservator at the city’s historical preservation agency. She took a particular interest in identifying historical sites and ecological treasures in the neighborhoods of the city’s northern districts, where outstanding features of the patrimony are often undervalued or overlooked in favor of places with more immediate tourist appeal. Christine is a compact dynamo with close-cropped gray hair and a ready laugh that softens an occasional flinty edge. The journalist Michel Samson, one of Marseille’s most astute political and cultural observers, affectionately calls her “an insatiable gossip” because of her opinionated readiness to speak

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with all comers. When Christine learned that I shared the same urban environmental interests, she was unhesitating: “Come with your wife and friends on a walk with me tomorrow in the morning. I’ll have a journalist from the Figaro with me, so I will have to leave you at some point. But come.” The Figaro reporter was writing a piece about Marseille that she hoped would feature the cooperative association she had helped organize. The Hôtel-du-Nord Cooperative creates opportunities to get to know people and neighborhoods in the housing estates of the city’s north side. “We’ll end up with a visit to a friend in the association, a militant, who lives in La Visitation. That’s one of the cités along the way. I’ll need to talk to the journalist after that. You and your friends can get home from there by bus.” I was grateful for her generous invitation. When I expressed curiosity that a journalist from the conservative Figaro would be interested, she brought me up short. “They have professional journalists who know a good story. I don’t care about their politics if they get the facts right. That’s not always the case with the left newspapers.” Voilà, Christine Breton in action: direct, no nonsense. The Hôtel-du-Nord cooperative, she explained, enlists active residents of the massive apartment blocks known here and elsewhere in France (especially when they house poor people) as “les cités.” On Marseille’s north side, scores of cités stand on the hills overlooking the container port and cruise ship docks. These apartment buildings, also known as HLMs (habitation à loyer modéré, moderate-rent housing), cluster among active and abandoned factories perched on these same hillsides. Factories and housing estates were often built within the walls of a

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nineteenth-century convent or bourgeois estate that may still feature a large (often run down or abandoned) main house known as a bastide. La Visitation, for example, was built on the grounds of a former convent. This mixed industrial and residential land use dominates the landscape, an urbanized habitat that extends to L’Estaque, the last port community within Marseille proper, made famous over a century ago by Cézanne and his friends. Today these neighborhoods, and especially their housing estates, are stereotyped as dangerously violent centers of the city’s drug trade. It’s almost needless to say they are disproportionately populated by the city’s minorities, especially North African Arabs, people of West African origin, Comorians, and Roma gypsies. As always, the negative stereotypes reflect  a tenuous truth, but they generalize to become selffulfilling prophecies that local organizers like Christine Breton seek to correct. “Through the co-op we make it possible for people to be guests in the neighborhoods or in apartments in les cités,” Madame Breton explained. Activists with the Hôtel-du-Nord Cooperative who live in the cités and nearby neighborhoods offer rooms in their homes to visitors who want to experience a different side of Marseille life. Because many of the apartments are “social housing” owned by the state, the residents cannot be paid for rentals. To avoid breaking the rules, Christine explained, the hosts in social housing are paid by the cooperative for taking visitors on informative local walks. We ended our walk with Christine Breton that day by crowding into the living room of a two-bedroom apartment in

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La Visitation, a housing estate on the avenue des Aygalades, an industrial bus and truck route that winds upward along the course of the ruisseau of the same name. Our host was Christiane Martinez, a Hôtel-du-Nord host and guide. Christiane’s family came to Marseille from Algeria after the War of Independence. Vivacious and outgoing, she is an amateur actor known to recite poems of her own composition about life in the northern neighborhoods. She made all of us feel instantly at home in the airy flat she shares with her younger son. The living room walls and surfaces were covered with African or American southwestern market art. “I adore the entire universe of Indians,” she told us. “I find they are people very close to nature, very respectful of their environment. There is also their attachment to spirituality. I  began my collection in going to the flea market. Whoa, that  pleases me, hop, I buy it. Everything in this home was bargained for at the flea market.” The flea market also sells inexpensive food, halal meat, and bargain merchandise. A twenty-minute walk downhill from Christiane’s flat, it is a vital institution for residents of the low-income housing estates of the northern neighborhoods. Christiane’s unique taste and imagination for mixing and matching comes across in her personal style of dress as well, which also depends on the nearby flea market. “I dress myself for fifty centimes, one euro. Sometimes I find fancy brands, I’m  not ashamed to say. . . . These boots, I paid one euro for them, real cowboy boots, they’re extremely expensive. . . . One time I found a Dior swimsuit, two euros, not new, but in great condition. I wore it this summer and was just too pretty in it.”

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I would have gladly spoken to Christiane longer, but the reporter wanted to interview me, an unexpected American university professor, about my interests in the visit. We spoke for a while before he and Madame Breton conversed privately. Christiane and I agreed we would see each other again on future visits to Marseille, and indeed we have. When I returned to Marseille for a longer residency, Christine Breton invited me to walk with her again along the ruisseau well above La Visitation, to La Viste, a large HLM cité originally designed by the Greek architect Georges Candilis, a disciple and collaborator of Le Corbusier. We would meet first for lunch at the flea market in the port neighborhood known as Les Crottes, beyond the Bougainville metro station. “My Algerian friend, Samir, has an outdoor café where we can have a nice couscous.” Over steaming bowls of stewed vegetables and couscous, we spoke of the stream and the people living in the public housing estates along its course down from the mountains. “Bill, tu arrives à Marseille à un très bon moment,” Christine said. I’d come to the city at an opportune time, she claimed, because Phase Two of the EuroMed private-public partnership had announced plans to restore the lower reaches of the stream for the public’s and nature’s benefit. As always, however, there were questions about who precisely would benefit and what would be lost, including, possibly, the flea market. To bring the stream again to the surface as a flowing and  accessible body of water, the planners and architects engaged  by  EuroMed proposed expanding the Parc Billoux. This would include the city hall of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth

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FIGURE 

Christine Breton and friend and cafe owner Samir.

Source: Photo by author.

Arrondissements, through which it runs. Advanced engineering work would have to be done to create a stream bed able to accommodate flooding from occasional mountain torrents. The plans are ambitious, and the sketches by Parisian planners and architects are quite attractive. But in this lower stretch of the Ruisseau des Aygalades, the water passes through some old

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FIGURE  Émile Loubon, Vue de Marseille prise des Aygalades un jour de marché, 1853.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

neighborhoods of Marseille’s maritime working class that are ripe for gentrification. These neighborhoods, bisected by an elevated highway, are Les Crottes, La Cabucelle, and SaintLouis, run-down areas that don’t reflect well on Marseille as an ambitious cultural capital, a “city of this century.” Until the COVID-19 pandemic stalled development, that gleaming Marseille was pushing inexorably along the edge of the waterfront. It was moving northwestward through the efforts of busy EuroMed construction crews and their giant overhead

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cranes, arriving in the midst of these old blue-collar neighborhoods at the foot of Les Aygalades. The Aygalades are the rocky but well-watered meadows that eased the traveler’s passage down from the mountain passes along the small valleys (vallons) carved in the karst by streams like the Ruisseau des Aygalades. The term derives from the Latin agua lata, “abundant water,” which Provençal speakers turned to “aygalades.” The artist Émile Lubon depicts them in his 1850s view of Marseille from the Aygalades on a market day; the painting hangs in a place of honor in the fine arts museum in the Parc Longchamps. In the foreground of this black-and-white detail view, a young cowherd and his dogs are bringing their livestock to market in the city. Marseille’s nineteenth-century industrial villages Saint-Louis and Les Cabucelle are in the middle distance, the smoke from their factories and tile-baking ovens darkening the near shore, while the higher hills of the city’s south side rise in the background. Today, this once bucolic view of the Aygalades is dominated by highways, public housing estates, rail lines, and working or abandoned industrial buildings. Christine led me along the stream bordering the Parc François Billoux. We had to ease ourselves through a small opening in a chain-link fence to follow its course behind the massive Saint-Louis sugar refinery, whose main customer I learned was the local Coca-Cola bottling company. Above the refinery, the stream appeared beneath a roadway, where it flowed deep within a concrete embankment. We arrived shortly at the Collège Rosa Parks, a public middle school attended by children from the local neighborhoods,

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including La Visitation. I was reminded how the French value liberty, equality, and fraternity wherever it thrives. Just beyond the school, however, from another overpass across the stream, we saw a recently arrived Romanian gypsy family camped on the embankment. They were working in the warm sunshine, smashing old computers, stripping tiny amounts of precious metals from the broken motherboards, and leaving a great mess of plastic and e-waste to tumble toward the stream below. Later that afternoon we reached a plateau known as La Viste (the view), which offered a stunning perspective of the port and the seacoast, although the stream was hidden in a deep and densely overgrown ravine. Christine wanted to visit a public housing estate of one thousand apartments, also known as La Viste, built in the early 1960s, when Marseille was responding to a severe housing shortage, largely caused by migration from postwar Algeria. La Viste’s designer, Georges Candilis, was part of a group of young architects who were beginning to challenge the principles of Le Corbusier and the Athens Charter planners. They thought these planners had gone too far in rejecting historical memory in favor of impersonal, “brutalist” modernism. At La Viste, two fifteen-story residential towers are surrounded by four-story walkups like those at La Visitation. They form a courtyard that features a lovely belvedere overlooking an ancient terrain de battage, where peasant women once flailed wheat sheaves to separate the grains from the stalks and chaff. “Now they call it the ‘lovers’ walk,’ ” Christine said. “In the summer evenings couples gather there to flirt and smooch.”

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Like many of the housing estates built more than a halfcentury ago, La Viste was undergoing a substantial makeover. Its original exterior color scheme and grounds were being restored. New construction would include an enlarged daycare center and a modern playground. Some of that work was ongoing. Near the site we spoke to a group of young adult men who were bitter that the contractor had not hired any of the qualified local residents. There had been some incidents in which outside laborers had been pelted with stones thrown from the roofs of apartment buildings, a protest that reminded me of similar ones in New York’s public housing projects. Christine and I struck up a conversation with a group of older Muslim men who had gathered at the benches in a small plaza near the primary school. They were manual workers with well-callused hands, some dressed in North African–style thobes and sandals. They were pleased that the authorities had made improvements in the local primary school but frustrated that a long-promised lieu de prière (place of prayer) remained stalled. Not that they were demanding a full-scale mosque, which does not exist anywhere in Marseille, but simply a space where they could come together at the designated times of the day to pray as required by the Quran. As we walked downhill in the late afternoon, Christine explained that in its early years La Viste had been largely populated by families of French origin. As the population shifted after Algerian independence in favor of Arab and Berber residents, the older French residents seemed to reach the practical limits of their fraternal feelings. Many moved into a smaller housing estate nearby, which became what New Yorkers would

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call a NORC, a naturally occurring retirement community. Relations between the two neighborhoods, given their ethnic and generational differences, were apparently not as warm as one would hope. Before we ended our walk, Christine informed me about where the Ruisseau des Aygalades fits in the larger regional environmental movement. It has become a section of a threehundred-kilometer designated walking trail in and around the Marseille metropolitan region. In anticipation of the big doings in 2013, a young local publisher, Baptiste Lanaspeze, and a geographer-urbanist, Paul-Hervé Lavessière, mobilized a group of artists and environmentalist city planners to create what National Geographic has cited as “one of the lasting legacies of Marseille’s stint as European Capital of Culture. . . . The semi-urban trail takes the shape of a giant figure-ofeight—also intended to represent the symbol for infinity— and has been designed as a work of art in its own right.” Christine Breton is an essential interpreter of this metropolitan trail, especially the section that follows the Ruisseau des Aygalades. In her literary collection Hôtel-du-Nord: Tales of Hospitality, for example, she calls attention to a unique “Aygalades Decor”: fantastic limestone formations where picturesque grottos, rapids, and waterfalls of the Quaternary were appropriated in the nineteenth century as the settings for a bastide or chateau and “for the restaurant created by the Comte de Castellane.” Elsewhere along the stream are trenches and culverts, she writes, “where the sweet water was forced down into turbines” for soap-making factories and now abandoned tile works. In these grounds archaeologists and paleontologists

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continue to make surprising finds about human prehistory in the region. Madame Breton is equally at home interpreting the contemporary social and political scenes in the many housing estates that border the stream. This ecological sensibility, relating human communities to a natural landscape in need of restoration along many dimensions, often guides contemporary Marseille thinking and politics. In 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, Marseille elected a slate of left-wing and green activists, led by Michèle Rubirola, the city’s first female mayor (see more in chapter 9). Through Christine I eventually went on walks with other inspiring Marseille environmentalists and social historians. Notable among them was Samia Chabani, who created Anchorages, an association devoted to the living history of migrations in the Marseille region, and Baptiste Lanaspeze, the co-creator of the outstanding metropolitan trail. I made it a point to meet with Baptiste during my longer residence in the city in 2014–2015. He had moved to Marseille in 2009 at the age of thirty-one, after spending some years in publishing in New York, where he’d been inspired by such American environmental writers as Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold. Once back in France, he published his first two editions: French translations of Carson’s Silent Spring and Arne Naess’s Toward a Deep Ecology (1973), a philosophical treatment of ecology drawing on Carson’s work that has inspired greenmovement activists throughout the world. “At the time,” Baptiste explained, “ecology wasn’t selling. Environmental philosophy was considered an Anglo-Saxon

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curiosity.” Ten years later, his imprint, Wildproject, has published over seventy books and counting. Among them are works that address human-ecological issues in the housing estates that dominate the streams and valleys of Marseille’s north side as well as works that consider the natural environment and ecological history of the region. But most impressive for me and many others is his role in working with partners in urban planning, ecology, and the arts to create “metropolitan trails.” The first, as we have seen, opened in Marseille in 2013, and since then others have opened in London, Paris, Athens, Tunis, Avignon, and more, no doubt, as I write this sentence. I needed no more encouragement than the work of Baptiste Lanaspeze and Christine Breton to validate my own further explorations in the Aygalades. I began by returning to La Visitation, the housing estate where, thanks to Christine, I had some contacts and where I could speak to young people and see some of these ecological issues from their eyes.

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Chapter Three JEANSYLVA LAVISITATION

I FIRST

spotted Jean Sylva on a dusty football pitch. Lean and

long, impossibly light on his feet, he seemed to float above the crowd of teenagers who darted around his legs. When we were later introduced, he gave me a wide, welcoming smile. I wasn’t surprised to learn from Christine Breton that Jean was the chief organizer of many of the better things that went on in the neighborhood, including the Local, a storefront that served as an informal youth and cultural center. This was a social hub at La Visitation, the housing project of four-story walk-ups on the avenue des Aygalades, above the Parc François Billoux and across from the Saint-Louis sugar refinery. Almost a quarter of Marseille’s entire population, over two hundred thousand people, live in apartment complexes like La Visitation that crenellate the ridges above the city’s north side. Bisected everywhere by highways and railroad tracks, Marseille’s northern housing blocks seem almost to tumble through

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narrow valleys into the deindustrialized commercial port, which extends for miles along the city’s northern seacoast to the large shoreline neighborhood of L’Estaque. La Visitation is a midsize housing estate, with about six hundred residents living in four-story walk-up apartments. Built on what was originally Catholic Church property, it is far less densely populated than La Castellane and other more massive apartment blocks, but it is also one of the more isolated estates, as it is surrounded by factory sites, many abandoned. The #31 bus from the Bougainville subway station stops directly at the entrance road. Running every fifteen or twenty minutes, it is a lifeline of the cité. A stately corridor of London plane trees at the entrance offers a sun-dappled welcome to a new visitor. The Local was an informal social center in La Visitation’s small central courtyard. It included two ground-floor rooms in the same building that housed the convenience store, the single commercial outpost in the complex. The nearest other stores were a twenty-minute walk away. During my extended stay in Marseille (2014–2015), Jean welcomed me and helped me feel at home in the neighborhood. I began to make regular visits to the Local to see Jean and his young neighbors at La Visitation. Much of what I have learned about life in Marseille’s housing projects comes from hanging out there and going with Jean and others from the neighborhood into other housing estates on the north side. I have visited some of the larger housing estates, like La Viste, La Busserine, and La Castellane, which have far more developed, professionally staffed community centers that sponsor programs for young and old. But smaller and more isolated estates, of which there are many,

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tend to be less well endowed with social resources. In Marseille and throughout France, the public housing estates are managed by local leaseholders in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, according to rules established at the national level. However, just as the leaseholders vary from one cité to another, so does the quality of management, the level of resources, and the depth of commitment to social programs. The scene Jean and the active neighbors created at the Local, with modest support from the regional government and Logirem, the cité ’s socially aware leaseholder and property manager, had quickly become a safe indoor haven for the neighborhood’s children and some of its teenagers. It was indeed a welcoming place, although somewhat ad hoc and institutionally tentative, similar to so many neighborhood initiatives in the lower ranks of the urban world. The Local had been furnished with donations, particularly with the help of Christiane Martinez, who had donated a TV console, some battered couches, and a table and chairs. The drab walls were enlivened by powerful hip hop–influenced art painted by CROS2, a local artist and designer otherwise known as Vincent Landry. During the time I lived in Marseille at the Maison des Astronomes, I tried to come to the Local every Saturday. Sometimes I made sandwiches for the kids and always contributed some snacks to add to what others had brought. On a typical brisk late autumn Saturday morning, I found the Local filled with children. Ten or twelve boys and girls ranging from eight to twelve years of age were writing thoughtful responses in spiral notebooks regarding a question Jean had put to them before I entered. At the center of the group were two adorable

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African boys, identical twin brothers of about eight or nine. Today they are star students at the nearby Collège Rosa Parks, or perhaps as you read this they are entering the university, but when I first met them at the Local, they were attending the primary school at La Visitation. Shy, studious boys who loved to read and write, they appeared for these Saturday workshops as soon as the doors opened. Four girls whose beaming faces shaded from mahogany to pink, each a grade or two younger than the African boys, were also writing in their notebooks at the central table. On a couch, three Roma boys from households recently settled at La Visitation were fiddling with CDs and a boom box, thus avoiding the writing workshop. In another corner of the room, three preadolescent girls were reciting and memorizing the words to a popular rap number about a boyfriend who comes to see the singer, on a motorcycle: “avec une grosse moto, une moto . . .” On the edges of the room, a few adult neighbors, relatives of the children, sipped coffee and chatted with Jean and Christiane Martinez. As it turned out, this was still the France of Descartes: the kids were absorbed in writing on a philosophical question. Before my arrival that day, Jean had led them in a discussion of the slang term crao, and they talked about some examples. He asked them to write some thoughts about the subject as they experienced it. I had never heard the term. Laughing, Jean explained that it was pronounced cra au, two syllables, stretched out. It was local slang for all sorts of intentional and unintentional fabrications, fibs, white lies, bigger lies. It could apply to

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systems of fabrication and the artful distribution of untruth and exaggeration, including merchandising, advertising, and, of course, politics. At La Visitation, the expression “C’est du crao” could characterize discussions about trivia or momentous events. The ubiquity of crao made for compelling and lively discussion. It struck me as a somewhat cynical subject for children to be writing about, but I couldn’t deny that it was holding their attention. One of the African twins was shy but obviously eager to read his piece. For him, the story of Santa Claus was an example of crao in action. When very small, he wrote, your parents tell you the story, and you believe them, but when older, if you still believe the story, other kids “ils se moquent de toi” (they tease you). You quickly learn to say you don’t believe in Santa

FIGURE 

Proud of his essay at La Visitation’s writing workshop.

Source: Photo by author.

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Claus, but at home you might pretend that you believe in the story. That way you can ask your parents if they think Santa Claus will bring a certain toy you really want. That’s crao too, he concluded, but it helps keep everyone in the family happy. A slim teenager named Hisham who normally preferred to sketch and draw in his notebook had written a piece he was willing to share. It was a brief meditation on crao in politics. A candidate, he understood, has to make promises about what he or she wants to do for the voters. In fact, these can be candidates one admires and supports. But they really don’t know for sure if they can actually deliver on their promises. Often it will turn out they can’t. So it seemed to Hisham that crao in politics was unavoidable. It also led to people being let down and distrustful of politicians. And that, he concluded, was not even getting to the subject of people and groups being bought by politicians—or, he continued, of constituents buying politicians. Hisham had been working at a smaller table where Jean and two other boys were also seated, one of whom was the oldest of the three Roma boys. They were setting up a CD player that would play rap beats. The next workshop would be about writing to beats, with a rap artist named Gino, who came from the Panier. Hisham’s short political essay started a discussion of local politics, which I may have pushed a bit with a naive question about local political leadership. A right-wing candidate, Stéphane Ravier, had recently been elected mayor of the neighboring Seventh Sector, which included the Fourteenth and Thirteenth Arrondissements. Many had been shocked. How could a former socialist stronghold where there were some large housing estates turn to the right? Jean was not so

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surprised. Aside from deep political disillusionment among the young, he explained, there were all kinds of animosities to exploit. “Ravier and his people use the latest arrivals, especially the Comorians, as scapegoats [bouc émissaire]. They’ll blame them for whatever issues upset the other groups. ‘They’re coming and taking your privileges.’ All crao.” Jean talked about Samia Ghali, the socialist mayor of the Eighth Sector, as an exception and a local hero. She represents the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Arrondissements, which contain many of the oldest and most decrepit industrial working-class neighborhoods extending northward from Les Crottes to L’Estaque, clinging to the hills and cliffs just above the commercial port. The sector includes some of the largest housing estates, including La Castellane and La Viste, and many smaller ones, including La Visitation and Cité Bassens, the nearby estate where Samia Ghali was raised by her Algerian grandparents. It’s a “world,” she has said to reporters, “that people did not want to see. That politicians did not want to see.” Samia Ghali is a public voice of that world. As a socialist in the national senate, she often spoke to the needs of France’s housing estates and their residents. More recently, in 2019 she positioned herself to run (unsuccessfully, or, rather, semisuccessfully, as we shall see) for mayor by quitting the Socialist Party to form a local party of her own. She has been criticized for engaging in patronage politics in the grand Marseille tradition, but she is a progressive who stands in stark contrast to Stéphane Ravier. He has said, for example, that Algeria never should have been granted independence and that the legalization of cannabis is not any different from the legalization of

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rape, among other outrageous and attention-grabbing utterances. Nonetheless, Ravier became one of the leading contenders in the 2020 citywide mayoral election, which helps explain the political apathy and disillusionment voiced in Jean’s workshop and in the youngsters’ essays about the meaning of crao. By noon, most of the younger boys were outside, whirling around on scooters or chasing one another through the shaded courtyards of the housing estate. The girls had returned to their apartments to help their mothers. Soon, a couturier workshop would begin. Led by a vivacious clothing designer, it would attract some of the young women and mothers from the buildings. The boys and men needed to be somewhere else. A brilliant blue sky beckoned, and we had been inside almost all morning. Jean suggested that we explore the area around the estate because his group had plans to put in community gardens and expand on the outside murals that were enlivening the halls and walls of the buildings. La Visitation is located alongside the Ruisseau des Aygalades. Its green vallons account for much of the remaining open, nonbuildable space in this part of the city’s northern districts and in the immediate vicinity of La Visitation, but in fact, most residents of the neighborhood would have difficulty identifying the creek in their midst, as it is hidden in ravines, culverts, and drainage ditches. Across the street from La Visitation, the stream extends and winds out of sight behind a huge slag heap. The great heap rises higher than the nearby apartment buildings, a solid remnant of the alumina industry that once flourished in the region. Alumina is the first phase in aluminum production. Its slag is called boue rouge, or red mud, and it

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contains toxic heavy metal compounds along with sand and gravel. As the mega EuroMed project plans its next phase of development along the avenue des Aygalades, just below La Visitation, the future of the acres of land containing the heap and bordering on the creek remains unknown. I’m told that Roma have camped there, but none were visible on my visits. From time to time, Jean and other activists at La Visitation help curious visitors clamber up to the heap’s broad summit to see what it’s all about. The view of all the surrounding northern neighborhoods and out to the sea beyond is one of the more spectacular perspectives to experience from the city’s northern districts. A young man named Omar helped me make the climb up the steep sides of the heap. In his early twenties with olive skin, dark eyes, and a wan smile, I had first met him in the home of Christiane Martinez on that early walk with Christine Breton. Omar was a school dropout and semi-homeless. Christiane said he often stayed with one of her sons, a close friend, also not working at that time. He had talked to me then about how much he wanted to find a job. At that point, before COVID, he was working as a barista in one of the chic coffee shops in Les Terrasses du Port. This is the grand shopping center, a jewel of the EuroMed project, where many people, not just shoppers, gather to relax and watch the cruise ships and trans-Mediterranean ferries maneuver through the breakwaters of the commercial port. We would see all that as well from the heights of the slag heap. After a steep climb, we stopped to catch our breath at the  top. We found ourselves on a lush green plateau covered with wild arugula. Our footsteps released its tangy odor. What

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Boue rouge adjacent to La Visitation.

Source: Photo by author.

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must have been more recently dumped slag rose from the plateau to form a high mound, an exposed side showing the infamous red mud. The slag plateau must have been at least seven acres in surface area. Beyond it, green open space extended north along the stream’s steep and wooded banks. On another walk along this part of the stream, with Christine Breton, I learned that there were venerable community gardens, organized by trade unions, and much wild land along the steep banks of the creek. Omar pointed out some of the larger housing estates: La Castellane, La Viste, La Busserine, and many others. Far to our northwest on the high horizon were housing estates clinging to steep hillsides. Those too, he said, would have local football teams and groups of would-be musicians and rappers. “See that low-rise cité one,” he said, pointing to one nearby, similar to La Visitation in size and density but older. It was Cité Bassens, where Mayor Ghalia grew up. The drug market there, Omar claimed, was as lively as you could find anywhere in the city, but according to Omar there were many other hot spots on the horizon. In fact, La Visitation had been or still was, I was not sure, an active retail drive-in for “shit,” as cannabis was usually called. Indeed, support from the leaseholder and from the state for Jean’s organizing efforts was part of a larger policy of helping local civic groups make their estates safer and more livable. I was not very impressed with the drug situation I found in  Marseille’s housing estates. This was because with my research partner, Terry Williams of the New School for Social Research, I had studied kids growing up in New York City

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public housing in the 1980s and 1990s, which formed the basis for our book Uptown Kids (1994). Many of the same (or far worse) conditions had prevailed. In Marseille and other major French metro regions where there is extensive public housing, there had never been a full-blown crack epidemic; nor, with a few exceptions, are there violent youth gangs. Aggressive turf defense and warring gangs are more an American story. Marseille is still the town with the scruffy joie de vivre and spirit of tolerance that Claude McKay discovered and loved in the 1920s. Young people from housing estates like La Visitation circulate through most parts of the city without fear—if they have the carfare. I was more interested in understanding the history of the slag heap and in exploring green possibilities along the wooded stream banks of the Ruisseau des Aygalades than in hearing about local drug markets. But it was impossible to escape the subject. Much of what I had heard and read about the housing estates in Marseille dealt with drugs, crime, and violence. The stereotypes and one-sided accounts were much like those that often depicted life in New York’s public housing. When I arrived there in 2014, the Marseille journalist Philippe Pujol had just won a major literary prize for French Disconnection (published by Baptiste Lanaspeze), a searing account of drug dealing, score settling, and political corruption in the housing estates. A brilliant young social scientist, Claire Duport, an expert on the traffic of heroin and the fate of its addicts, took me on an extensive tour of the larger estates, where she pointed out the teenage runners standing in the parking lots, waiting to steer French guys in nice cars to their source of

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goods. The boss of the family operation, the local caïd, with his source of “weight” coming in from Morocco or Spain, would of course be nowhere in sight. Day and night a stream of cars arrived at the designated spots, and young boys ran to fill their orders. Generally it was regarded as just another business. Residents lived with it as they do in other cities because they didn’t have much choice. Television news featured the most sensational busts and vendettas. Editorials lamented the failure of political leaders to find solutions, but one would have to seek out veteran Marseille social scientists like Duport or her mentor, Michel Peraldi, to hear a discussion of the rising popularity of recreational drugs in the larger French population. The consumer demand that shaped the cannabis market seemed a taboo subject in typical public discourse. Notions of harm reduction or decriminalization, not to mention legalization, usually met with rather outworn, panicky talk of toxicomania. Despite the drug scenes he describes, Philippe Pujol celebrates the lack of racial and ethnic tension in Marseille, its spirit of egalitarianism, and its embrace of polyethnicity. Samia Ghali would agree: “Maghrebin, French, white, brown, Chinese—we don’t give a damn. We’re Marseillais first and then the rest.” That identity includes the local propensity to verbalize that Marcel Pagnol made famous. “The capacity of blah-blah-blah,” Pujol writes, further calms things. He points out a murder rate that is nothing next to comparable American cities: Marseille had a record thirty-four drug-related killings in 2014, but the overall murder rate in 2012–2015 was 2.7 per 100,000. Baltimore’s, by comparison is close to 50 per 100,000.

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“It’s too many,” Pujol says. “But for a port city with a tradition of gangsters, it’s not that many.” True, but when a drug murder takes place in your courtyard, in the areas where your children play after school, you have a far more personal take on your local drug market than more distant observers like me. As we clambered down from the slag heap that afternoon, I vowed to come back and explore the area again. I wanted to know more about the community gardens and the old graveyards, the limestone grottos, the waterfall, and the restoration possibilities for the deindustrialized and toxic sections of Les Aygalades. Back at the Local, I joined Jean, Christiane Martinez, my friend the organizer Quentin Ambrosino, young Omar, and the muralist Vince Landry for coffee. We talked about how much could be done to upgrade the buildings and the surrounding areas. However, the slag heap’s destiny seemed too much for them to contemplate. Toxic red mud had a bad reputation. I stared out the window toward where the slag heap loomed above the buildings, but my reverie was shattered. A teenage boy I had never seen ran past the window. He was carrying what was unmistakably a Kalashnikov. No one had seen him but me. I was rattled but tried to keep my cool. Maybe it was a toy, I thought. “Jean, I just saw a kid with a machine gun. Was it real?” He looked at me with something of a sorrowful shrug. “Maybe yes, maybe no.” I took that to mean most likely yes. We parted on that blue note. Jean accompanied me as I waited for the bus to arrive to take me to the subway at Bougainville. Despite his warm companionship, I felt the chill of life’s fragility.

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Chapter Four INTRODUCTIONTOTHEACADEMY

WITHINTHE

first week of my 2014–2015 residence in Marseille, an

amiable stranger of my generation approached me after a brief lecture I had presented to a small public audience. He introduced himself as Hubert Ceccaldi, a retired oceanographer. He often attended lectures at the Maison des Astronomes. His voice was gentle, and a smile wrinkled his eyes while he spoke the precise French of universities and laboratories. I gathered he enjoyed being helpful to visiting scholars and was eager to fill in some of the many blanks in my knowledge about his city. I had just spoken about wanting to know how Marseille was adapting to changes in the port and related industries. There were many similarities to transformations occurring in my own port city. More specifically, I talked about environmental issues and about tracing the natural and human ecology of urban streams like the Bronx River or the Ruisseau des Aygalades. Its fate reminded me of the Los Angeles River and

INTRODUCTIONTOTHEACADEMY

so many other moribund urban streams. I even offered my own clumsy translation of some lines from Robert Frost’s poem “A Brook in the City”: No one would know except for ancient maps That such a brook ran water. But I wonder If from its being kept forever under, The thoughts may not have risen that so keep This new-built city from both work and sleep.

I said that the Ruisseau des Aygalades is also an axis along which development and speculation in Marseille is occurring. The stream and its surrounding natural and manmade landscapes had something to teach us about the city’s present and future. “I enjoyed your talk and the slides you showed,” he said, as the small audience filed out of the lecture room. “There is a lot I would enjoy discussing with you.” We agreed to have lunch and made a date. He suggested we meet at the café in the Centre Bourse, the popular downtown shopping mall at the foot of Belsunce, just off the Canebière and across from the Alcazar. As we were parting, M. Ceccaldi had a new idea. “Have you been yet to the Chamber of Commerce?” I had not even thought of doing so, never having been to one in my own country. “They have archives that go back to the sixteenth century. I’ll introduce you to Patrick Boulanger, the chief curator. Let’s meet there at eleven. Then we can go for lunch at the Palais de la Bourse shopping center. And oh yes, there is the Roman-era port excavation there we can visit after lunch

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if  you have time.” Archives? The sky was still far too blue for  archival work. Nor did I think I had historical questions worthy of the chief archivist. And a Roman ruins in back of the shopping center? Was I in M. Ceccaldi’s kind hands or his tender clutches? In fact, that meeting and lunch was the beginning of a lasting friendship. Through Hubert Ceccaldi and people he introduced me to, I saw a side of Marseille life familiar to me in New York: cosmopolitans concerned with the appreciation and preservation of the city’s heritage, of which the Marseille Chamber of Commerce building is a truly grand example. With vaulted ceilings, ornate marble everywhere, columns supporting an encircling mezzanine, and a small but powerful art collection, one can visit it at most times of the working day. It evokes the mid-nineteenth-century grandiosity of the Napoleons and the excesses of empire. Marseille claims to have invented the chamber of commerce. In 1599, the city’s business people worked with the backing of the city council to establish an organization that would represent the commercial interests of the city. The oldest chambers in the British Isles are those of Glasgow (1783), Edinburgh (1785), and Manchester (1794). M. Boulanger, the curator in chief, greeted us in his office and offered a tour of the building. I explained that I was not doing original historical research but was trying to know the major turning points of the city’s story. He understood perfectly and suggested we look at the art in the gallery, which represented those eras quite well. An unexpected part of the tour took us up and down a set of curved stairways whose walls

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held portraits of past presidents of the chamber. It may take a special kind of imagination to get excited by a parade of successful big shots, but any viewer would find it a captivating study in the changing ideas of male adornment and selfpresentation. Quite a few of the past chamber presidents are draped in velvets and festooned in wigs like characters from The Count of Monte Cristo. Others, of the early decades of the twentieth century, the Pagnol era, when Marseille was a port of global stature, are dressed in the somber browns and greys of business rectitude. M. Boulanger pointed out the chamber president who served during the German Occupation and was accused of collaboration. He had himself portrayed in olive drab, with a downcast mood, suggesting he had been held prisoner in his home. The most commanding poses are struck by Marseille’s colonial shipping magnates, especially the Fabres and the Fraissinets. Their ships established Marseille as the home port of the French empire in North and sub-Saharan Africa. They transported thousands of immigrants from Europe to New York (until the gates closed in 1924), Buenos Aires, and many other ports of North and South America. The Fabre family, originally from the adjacent port of La Ciotat, had been in merchant commerce around the Mediterranean since the 1500s. The family reached the zenith of its influence under Cyprian Fabre, who built a string of trading outposts in West Africa into a shipping empire with global reach. Cyprian was elected to the presidency of the Marseille chamber in 1881 and served for ten years, during Marseille’s Gilded Age. Flying the banner of free trade and free labor, the

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chamber became the dominant force on the city’s waterfront but also managed to gain the respect and admiration of the dockers unions. When Paul Cyprian Fabre took charge after his father’s death in 1896, the company was running four different lines, with a total of seventeen ships. Marseille was their home port. Fabre Line posters were familiar sights in world ports. New York and the ports of the North Atlantic coast were no exception. Fabre Line ships carried most of the Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Henri Fabre, a scion of the family, was the inventor in 1910 of the seaplane. An engineer and pioneering aviator, this Fabre for me embodies the madly inventive and somewhat antic French sensibility of Eiffel, Montgolfier, and characters immortalized in the novels of Jules Verne. That spirit was represented in turn-of-the-century Marseille by the spidery iron of a fantastic moving roadway bridge, le pont transbordeur, that the Germans destroyed during the occupation. Henri Fabre died long after the second war, at the age of 102. His grandson, Mario Fabre, an ancien combattant of the Marseille political left, whom I came to know in Marseille, gave me a whimsical photo of his grandfather sailing across the Old Port in his seventies. Dressed correctly in bowler hat, tie, and jacket, he’s seen navigating a small sailing dingy of his design that he could fold up and put in his Citroën 2CV “deux chevaux.” The Fabre Line and its competitor Fraissinet eventually merged under the leadership of Jean Alfred Fraissinet, a decorated pilot in World War I, the owner of two right-wing

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FIGURE 

Henri Fabre in his foldable sailing dingy.

Source: Gift of Mario Fabre.

INTRODUCTIONTOTHEACADEMY

newspapers serving the Marseille region, and an ardent defender of French colonial rule in Africa and Indo-China. But the two world wars, decolonization, and air travel took their toll. By the 1970s the companies had few ships and were merged into a larger conglomerate, Chargeurs Réunis, which in the 1980s became Chargeurs, a conglomerate mainly invested in textiles. Today the basins of the huge commercial port are largely devoted to the comings and goings of snowy white floating hotels and overnight ferries to Corsica and North Africa. Container ships and bulk cargos like oil are routed to the northwest, to the highly automated industrial port of Fos, around a promontory that puts them out of sight of the gleaming Marseille harbor. After our tour of the chamber’s presidential portraits gallery, Patrick Boulanger brought us out to the front balcony, which looks over the Canebière, beyond an ornate carousel, to the plaza beyond (first known as the Royal Plaza, then the Place de la République, and currently the Place du Général-deGaulle). Hubert Ceccaldi called my attention to the huge niches situated at both ends of the balcony at the building’s front corners. They shelter two imposing statues of Massilia’s founders, who arrived early in 600 BCE from the Greek settlement of Phoacaia on what is now the Anatolian seacoast. Euthymènes (on the left) explored the Nile delta and the North African coast, and Pythéas (on the right), the foremost of the Massiliot explorers, sailed as far as the Arctic and circumnavigated the

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British Isles. Massilia was the major seaport for the Mediterranean coast of Gaul under the Greek and Roman empires. All this history, Hubert enjoyed remarking, “occurred centuries before there was any notable urban settlement in what became Paris.” The nearby Centre Bourse, where Hubert and I went for lunch, brought us from the contemplation of empire to the uniformity of global shopping. This is still France, however, and the café, situated on its own mezzanine, was relaxed and conducive to conversation, with traditional café fare that was, according to my host, “correct.” Courtly Hubert greeted the waiter, who returned his warmth. “Here is an American colleague who has come to visit us in Marseille. I know you will be sure to take good care of him.” At Hubert’s suggestion, we agreed to continue addressing each other in the formal vous form, old school, but more dignified at our age. Hubert and his wife had spent years living in Tokyo, where he directed a Franco-Japanese scientific center and where formality is assumed. “I think you would enjoy meeting members of the Académie des Sciences, Lettres et Arts de Marseille,” he offered. He and Patrick Boulanger were long-standing members. Among its forty elected members were scientists, humanities scholars, and others with expertise in historic preservation. Everyone had different aspects of Marseille and its history at heart. A goodly number were associated with the university. We made a date to meet at the Palais du Pharo the following week for the academy’s annual awards presentation. The palais is also the home of the university and is located in a park

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on a promontory overlooking the north side of the entrance to the Old Port. My wife and I had walked the exterior gardens, but this was an occasion to see the interior spaces as they are actually used in French public life. That turned out to be more or less exactly how such spaces are used in American cities and universities. French academicians may sport more ermine trim on their gowns, but, as my wife pointed out, sprinklings of male dandruff are equal on both sides of the Atlantic. M. Ceccaldi introduced me to many distinguished members whose names I immediately forgot and who immediately forgot mine. Most memorable for me was the moving acceptance speech from the former director of a school that the academy and the Chamber of Commerce helped sponsor. The Second Chance Academy is devoted to helping young men and women restart their academic and vocational careers after dropping out of school or having been in trouble. It’s a notable involvement because in Marseille as in New York, academic second chances for young people like those in Jean Sylva’s Local at La Visitation are often in short supply. Shortly after the Pharo event, Hubert invited me to formally introduce myself, briefly, at the end of a business meeting of the academy, which would take place in their official headquarters at the Maison Thiers. It seemed that I was on my way to becoming an “associate member,” or perhaps it was “corresponding member.” I heard both titles mentioned but was unsure which was intended for me. I read on the internet that the Académie des Sciences, Lettres et Arts de Marseille had been founded by Louis XV in 1726 and was devoted to “transmitting a message of scientific,

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literary, and artistic culture.” The academy remains profoundly committed to its mission: defend the French language and promote the image of Marseille and Provence. Among the 571 elected members of the academy since its founding have been “doctors, merchants, aldermen, religious leaders, mayors, prefects, deans, professors, writers, military officers, lawyers, captains, architects, artists,” and “many of the streets of Marseille bear their names.” Voltaire had been a corresponding member. Duly impressed, I wrote a page in French about my work in New York and my interest, as a New York writer/ecologist, in their city of Marseille. The Maison Thiers, headquarters of the academy, is on the rue Thiers, which mounts a hill just below the Église des Réformés. Almost directly across the street is the storefront headquarters of Manifesten, an anarchist association that we can safely assume has far less concern for the historic patrimony of France than do members of the Marseille Academy. In fact, the name Thiers is anathema to anarchists and socialists. Adolphe Thiers, who grew up in the Maison Thiers, eventually became the head of the French government, presiding in Versailles—a government that collaborated with the Prussian invaders and called in troops to crush the Paris Commune of 1871. Thousands of anarchists, socialists, Proudhonists, and common folk were lined up for the firing squads. Hundreds of others were exiled. Thiers ordered the Basilica of SacréCoeur in Paris built on Montmartre to commemorate the event. In my Parisian student days, French friends told me never to set foot in the Sacré-Coeur. When Hubert Ceccaldi first explained to me that the academy had been gifted

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FIGURE  Académie de Marseille, Maison Thiers. M. Hubert Ceccaldi is seated third on the left.

Source: Nicolas Vaccaro, Vaccaro Studio, Marseille.

the house early in the twentieth century by Thiers’s descendants, I brought up the Commune of 1871. “Well, one must understand,” he answered in his most diplomatic tone, “Thiers was president of the republic at the time.” We let the subject drop. Shortly before my turn in the spotlight that evening, Hubert asked to look at the page I had prepared about my background and work in Marseille. Somewhat sheepishly, he suggested I shorten it to five lines, which I gladly did.

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Academy members received me cordially, and I began attending meetings hosted by the association. They often met in classy Marseille locations, like the Palais du Pharo or the beautiful baroque-style City Hall of the Sixth Arrondissement in the Parc Bagatelle, on Marseille’s chic south side. Their private meetings were held in a notably elegant conference room in the Alcazar Library, a public library with a considerable research collection and the venue for innumerable conferences and expositions. Located in the Cours Belsunce, the site had been a famous Belle Époque music hall until it was closed in the 1960s. With the help of the chamber and the academy it has become a central hub of the city’s cultural life. I still enjoy their sessions when I am in Marseille for other business. Sadly for a lifelong amateur of the French language, the meetings I attend now in Paris typically include international participants and are conducted in perfectly adequate but bland European English. In Marseille, I revel in the flourishes of formal French I hear during exchanges among the members  of the academy. I look forward to my chance to interject  a  (mostly) grammatical French sentence or two in the conversation. However, not all my interventions were equally well conceived on my part. I got a bit carried away when the political situation in the United States and New York turned darkly surreal in 2016. What, if anything, could I do about it? I remembered that Voltaire had been a corresponding member of the academy before the French Revolution, during which, by the way, the royalist Academy of Marseille had been suspended.

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What would Voltaire have done? Wasn’t I honor bound to correspond? In the first innings of Trump’s first campaign, it didn’t take much, especially for a New Yorker, to be snarky and overconfident. I seized my oracular moment in a carefully crafted, one-page correspondence, in formal French, to the members of the Marseille Academy. I wrote: In New York, where we welcome people from all over the world, the spectacle of one of our great political parties veering so brutally toward intolerance is at once historic and stunning. It’s still worse for New Yorkers of my generation who for forty years have been forced to witness the hypernarcissism of Donald Trump (or “the Donald,” as he is called in New York). To imagine this supreme crook at the head of a reactionary national movement, and so close to the presidency, is frightening, even if it is improbable that he will be elected.

I pledged to work to prevent his election. My correspondence was addressed to members of the academy, but I sent it only to M. Ceccaldi. He responded in his usual measured and sympathetic style,  noting that “specialists in agitation who will use any means possible to gain power are not limited to one nation or  one time period.” He thought members of the academy would agree and sent the message along to the corresponding secretary for entry into the formal records. Thankfully, it was  never  published. My naively confident prediction did not  become a  humiliating matter of record at the venerable

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academy. The results of the election were humiliating enough. At a later encounter, Patrick Boulanger, then serving a term as academy president, assured me that I was indeed an “associate member.” I was relieved to learn that I needn’t feel the epistolary responsibilities of a contemporary Voltaire.

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Chapter Five NOAILLES ASCHOLARONTHERUED’AUBAGNE

ON THE

day he came home to Marseille, after a month of

research in the libraries of New York City, my anthropologist friend and swimming companion Ken Brown found that his street in Noailles had become an urban disaster zone and a national scandal. Emergency vehicles and television crews blocked Ken’s reentry. His apartment building was intact, but on the next block a group of dilapidated buildings had collapsed. At least eight people were missing and feared to be buried in the collapsed rubble. They had been living in condemned slum buildings where the city had typically never enforced either their renovation or demolition. The authorities were still frantically searching for victims. The street in front of Ken’s building was blocked. He was obliged to pass through a checkpoint and show proof he was a local resident. Ken’s building is 47 rue d’Aubagne. The buildings that crumbled were numbers 63 and 65, after which number 67 fell

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partly because of the work of first responders. Among the three condemned properties only number 65 was inhabited; the other two had been blocked off and kept officially empty. Marseille’s chief prosecutor, Xavier Tarabeux, announced two days after the events that “at this stage the precise cause of the collapse has not been established. We don’t know which of the buildings led the collapse.” He noted that they dated back to the late 1700s and had been built such that “they leaned against each other.” Noailles is an old district in an ancient city, but no one I know in Marseille considers that an excuse for allowing the type of urban decay that buried eight people alive. I called Ken some weeks after the event and his return to Marseille from New York, to ask how he was doing. “Kind of let down,” he said. “I still can’t get up to the stairway to the Cours Julien. People are very disrupted.” It was a down time, cold in early January 2019, never a great month in Marseille. Fluent in Arabic, Ken is a scholar of Islamic cities and an expert on the Islamic world past and present. He has spent considerable time in Israel, reads Hebrew, and was raised Jewish, although he is not religious. His neighborhood of Noailles has representatives of people who come from all the cities he has studied. Arabic is the language heard most in his neighborhood, but in fact his street hosts a culturally rich mixture of households living in old but solid four-story walk-up apartment buildings (like the ones a professor could have afforded to rent or buy on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the middle of the last century). His neighbors in the building own their flats and see to it that the building is well maintained. But the situation varies greatly from one block to another. Some of

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Ken Brown in Noailles.

Source: Photo by author.

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the  neighborhood’s male migrants live in shared rooms and may pay less than five hundred euros a month for rent. Much of the housing was built in the nineteenth century, but there are many buildings that date into the seventeenth century. In 1679, Jean-Baptiste Chabert, the master builder of the galleys, constructed a mansion there that he then rented to a lieutenant in the galley service, Jacques de Noailles. Noailles houses an astounding mélange of people from the Mediterranean basin. Ken’s neighbors from the Islamic world include Lebanese, Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, Libyans, Comorians, Egyptians, Turks, Syrians, and others as well as  a  sizeable population of native-born Marseillais who may be  of immigrant backgrounds themselves. As Jean-Claude Izzo  claims, “Marseille proudly proclaims its experience of the world . . . its Mediterranean experience.” Street life in the neighborhood today radiates out from the Capucines market, a daily food market whose many stalls feature fresh foods and delicious North African cooked specialties, chickens roasting on every corner, and bakeries featuring the breads and desserts of the Mediterranean world, as well as the mandatory French baguettes and croissants. Small restaurants and takeout counters abound in Noailles. So do shops selling exotic fabrics and cheap household goods. Noailles’s streets mount toward the Cours Julien and La Plaine, where there are art galleries, larger restaurants, and hip clothing stores. At its base, as one enters from the Canebière, is the Maison Empereur. This emporium, made up of conjoined storefronts, is a sprawling dreamworld containing every

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conceivable cunning gadget or traditional household item one might ever encounter in a French kitchen or household. The selection of pocket knives alone is staggering. One block up the Canebière from L’Empereur, also on the edge of Noailles, is the new four-star Hôtel Mercure Marseille Canebière. The hotel also boasts an upscale restaurant, Le Capucin, which features all the delights of provincial cuisine. No one doubts that the hotel is a wedge of gentrification that can only enliven that section of the Canebière, but some see it as a threat to Noailles’s stature as a quartier populaire (people’s neighborhood). Renovation to transform a nineteenth-century building into the luxury hotel took years and had strong support from the city’s political leadership. But the hotel finally opened in August 2019, not long after the disaster on the rue d’Aubagne had revealed what the years of neglect had done to lower-cost housing in the city. My personal wish for Noailles and Marseille is for many guests to come to the new hotel. May they appreciate what Noailles has to offer, and may they stroll through its streets, make purchases in its shops, have some couscous in any number of friendly, inexpensive kitchens. My friend Ken Brown, or someone very like him, will be part of the local color. Ken is gray and storklike, with a handsome face and a penetrating gaze. He is long divorced and lives alone, and I picture him laboring up the incline of the rue d’Aubagne, his long legs splaying sideways a bit with each determined step. In his Los Angeles youth he went to Hollywood High, played serious basketball, and lolled in the Pacific surf. Now in the warm

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weather he swims in the late afternoons at the Catalans, where he is a regular at the outdoor café around the bend from the main beach. The winter in Marseille is a different story. For many years Ken was the editor in chief and publisher of Mediterraneans/Méditerranéens, a remarkable journal of essays by accomplished authors, including Orhan Pamuk, Marcel Roncayolo, and Jean-Claude Izzo, and famous and lessfamous locals and experts who write about their home cities. Easily available online from the archives of Aix-Marseille University, each issue is devoted to a particular city of the Mediterranean basin, including an outstanding one on Marseille. Upon returning from New York, Ken was eager to sort all the scholarly papers he had collected and excited to resume working on the big book that always filled his mind. But now it seemed the city was exacting its price. As the new year of 2019 dawned, Marseille was, as the locals say, morne (dreary). To make matters worse, Ken had just learned that his building’s roof needed repair, with a stiff assessment for all the apartment owners. And then with the collapse of the buildings on his street, he had unwillingly become part of a noir drama where unceasing sirens, street protests, and makeshift memorials to the dead revealed the macabre local contours of France’s social fissures. For Ken, the apartment on rue d’Aubagne is normally a sanctuary and a scholar’s lair. There’s usually some Marseille music playing, often the haunting Judeo-Islamic-inspired jazz of the pianist Maurice El Médioni. The walls are lined with books, memorabilia, and art from his many voyages. Here and there in his ample living room that doubles as his study, piles of

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books wait to be consulted or sorted. They stand in wobbly piles near his chair and computer workstation. The piles make it difficult to believe that just a few years ago Ken sold his immense private collection of books on the Middle East to the University of Arkansas when they were starting a department of Middle Eastern affairs. Some of Ken’s essential books, those he did not sell off, or has since replaced, also reside on shelves in the second bedroom, where he often hosts visiting friends and scholars. In the evenings they may gather for dinner around a huge table in the living/dining room overlooking the rue d’Aubagne, or, if the evening is pleasant, they may remain outdoors on the  large balcony patio in the rear of the apartment off the kitchen. Though an excellent cook, he’ll also lavish his guests with dishes prepared by local Noailles women who for a modest fee will cater Middle Eastern dishes that require a full day of preparation and surveillance. With all the assets of our hyperconnected world at his disposal, Ken Brown is a contemporary version of the Mediterranean scholars of the early modern era, like Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), who traded gossip and wisdom with their peers in the seaport capitals and created a global “republic of letters.” Marseille merchants in the preEnlightenment decades of the seventeenth century looked to scholars and polymaths such as Peiresc for trustworthy intelligence and connections along their trading routes in the Mediterranean. It’s difficult to imagine the breadth of their curiosity or the seeming randomness of their collecting: a rare lizard skin in one arriving packet ship, navigation data in another,

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tales of court conspiracies brought by personal emissaries, reliable contacts for ransoming galley slaves, stuffed exotic birds, medicinal plants, and much more. Even bland statistics could be highly valuable. The historian Peter Miller tells us in his study of Peiresc, for example, that one valuable manuscript in the vast Peiresc archive is a census of the city of Algiers in the mid-1600s, which offered valuable knowledge about the ethnic origins of the city’s two hundred thousand residents (“10,000 Turks, 97,000 Moors, 10,000 Jews, and about 20,000 slaves”) and offers valuable insights for merchants seeking to enter into commerce there. Pieresc’s ghost would feel at home in Ken Brown’s Noailles apartment. There is no end of data available to the public on the internet about the Islamic cities Ken Brown studies, but that only makes the job of the modern savant more important. Information drives knowledge out of circulation, warned the historian Daniel Boorstein. As the globe shrinks and oceanic distances are effaced, need (if not always demand) for nuanced knowledge about the Islamic world and its cities increases. The republic of letters has much expanded in our time; its scholarly princes rise and fall quickly. Ken Brown is a steady hand, an independent scholar based in an Arab-speaking community in Marseille, with the requisite linguistic skills and street smarts. Admittedly somewhat long in the tooth, Professor Brown is still building on his years of reading and working by staying in touch with intellectual peers across the globe. In a recent statement about his research, he writes: For some years I have been working on a book-length interpretive narrative about five cities of the southern coastal Q

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Mediterranean, the majority of whose inhabitants are Muslims, viz., Tangier of Morocco, Oran of Algeria, Tunis of Tunisia, Tripoli of Libya and Alexandria of Egypt . . . in some ways, these cities are “case studies” about larger issues, of tolerance and intolerance, of coexistence and conflict among urban dwellers, and ways in which the past may or may not bear influence on the present. Given the general interest in and hunger to understand “The Middle East and North Africa,” “Islam,” “Arabism,” I believe that it is necessary to demonstrate what life on the ground looks and feels like, rather, or before, painting bigger pictures.

From his seventeenth-century headquarters in Aix and on his frequent journeys to Marseille, Peiresc developed a global network of sea captains, traders, merchants, missionaries, and the occasional philosopher, poet, or alchemist. They relied on the faster letter service that the swift Marseille sailing ships offered. Peiresc juggled hundreds of epistolatory missions at a time, aided by a collection of paid couriers and trusted frequent travelers who  plied the trade routes and spoke the diverse languages. Communication exchanges were measured in months, sometimes years. Deadly mishaps or aggressions at sea were routine, but since Peiresc kept hundreds of inquiries going all over the Mediterranean world at any given time, some piece of enlightening news must have come into his hands every day. News comes to Professor Brown instantly and incessantly. But rarely has it ever been as enlightening and disturbing for a scholar of cities as on the day the buildings collapsed in his own neighborhood. Many more teachable moments about Marseille culture and politics were to come in the weeks of Q

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recriminations, investigations, and protests as angry crowds shouted for the mayor’s resignation. “Now is not the time for polémiques,” announced Marseille’s venerable mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin. “Thousands of apartments have been rehabilitated or demolished since 2005,” he said. On rue d’Aubagne the names of the dead appeared in makeshift memorials. There was genuine public grieving for the lost lives. Soon, however, national attention was riveted on Les Gilets Jaunes, the Yellow Vest movement, and a young president’s initially stumbling efforts to address a grassroots protest movement that claimed to have no leadership and often acted accordingly. In Marseille, meanwhile, the authorities began a hurried crackdown on dangerous condemned buildings throughout the city. Another two hundred were demolished or bricked in. With almost 1,600 new evictions, these actions produced a surge in the homeless population. Yet much more remained to be done. The mayor admitted, “It’s an area that involves a large number of public and private actors and calls upon procedures that are terribly long, complicated, and costly.” During his twenty-three years in office, the estimated number of unsafe apartments in Marseille had reached forty thousand units, housing about one hundred thousand people. Marseille’s population is about 860,000. Le Monde reported that Mayor Gaudin refused to take any responsibility at all for the events. In fact, at one point he tried to claim the tragedy as a “natural disaster” and suggested that a prolonged period of rain bore some of the blame. A popular street poster saw it otherwise.

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Mayor Gaudin wall poster, Noailles, 2019.

Source: Photo by author.

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When Gaudin finally convened a meeting of the city council, forty-five days after the initial events, he was pilloried by his opponents on the left and the right. The leader of the council’s communists, Jean-Marc Coppola, read the names of the eight who had perished in the buildings and said that their deaths had been anything but a coincidence. Rather, “they were the result of years of political choices.” Senator Samia Ghali, an essential voice of Marseille’s north side grassroots politics, was incredulous that the mayor could have attempted to cast the collapse as a “natural catastrophe,” in an effort to request federal funds. “This denies entirely what has happened in Marseille,” she thundered. Then the president of the socialist group accused Gaudin of having “preferred speculation on housing rather than habitable housing.” Speaking for the far right, Stéphane Ravier, the Marseillais delegate to the Rassemblement National (RN, formerly the Front National), and one of the mayoral candidates in the 2020 municipal elections, took the opportunity to spread the blame to his potential rivals, especially those of the center right, now in power and attached to Mayor Gaudin: “He would like us to believe they are the incarnation of innocence in this global disaster, but if the captain has steered badly, none of his lieutenants were at the alert.” One hears endless versions of these accusations in Marseille. Rather than investing in rehabilitation, the landlords in the historic industrial neighborhoods or in the center city are allowed by lax enforcement to let their buildings decay while awaiting real estate speculation that will produce demand for land assemblages. How to clear out decrepit buildings has of

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course marked Marseille’s history and is a story whose harmful episodes keep appearing. On the larger scale, Noailles figures prominently in developers’ dreams of a tamed central city. Restoration of the hotel on the Canebière at the foot of Noailles arrives with the hope that it will attract more investment in the neighborhood. But as the veteran Marseille sociologist Michel Peraldi wrote in an essay Ken published in that Marseille special edition a few years ago: It is a war of staking out positions all the more bitter because there is no victory: the war to retake the centre is carried out by a Swiss army with enormous fire-power but no troops. Police headquarters, museums, university buildings replace snack bars, old movie houses, or night clubs but nothing changes; the crusaders create a desert and the fête continues elsewhere.

The “troops” to which Peraldi refers are people with the means to afford housing in Marseille’s old historic neighborhoods not for speculation but because they want to live there. Just before the pandemic of 2020, the average twobedroom, two-bath apartment listed for $750,000 in Paris and $300,000 in Marseille. There is a great deal of glorious middleand upper-income housing available in Marseille, awaiting troops of buyers who have yet to appear. Just beyond Ken Brown’s apartment on rue d’Aubagne is a shabby little square where a bust of Homer poses improbably on a high marble column. It’s a neighborhood with many new immigrants from West Africa. When young African men

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gather there in the evenings, there’s usually a hint of cannabis in the air, and the square becomes a relaxed and hospitable place. Ken and I and friends or family who may be in town like to meet at one of the popular African restaurants there, especially the one owned by my Ivorian friend Félicité Gaye, also known as Mama Africa. She and her daughter and another female relative work their culinary magic in a kitchen the size of a telephone booth, but their diverse clientele doesn’t mind waiting, and Félicité, true to her name, creates a most friendly ambiance. Ken, his daughter, her two daughters, and my wife and I had last met there for dinner the evening when the 2016 French presidential results were being announced. We watched the celebrations in Paris’s streets for Macron and breathed a sigh of relief that it seemed France and Europe had been spared the torment of yet another right-wing government. Félicité’s charming restaurant was in an old building even closer to the disaster than Ken’s. To my relief, she had posted this notice on her web page: Nov 8, 2018 Very Dear Clients, First we bow our heads once more in memory of all the victims. After inspection by the authorities, we announce the re-opening of your restaurant at 57 rue d’Aubagne, Marseille. Come enjoy our special dishes, which are: yassa poisson, yassa poulet, la sauce graine, le maffé, l’attieké au

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poisson à la braise, le kedjenou, la sauce claire, la sauce gombo, le foutu.

Sitting at my computer in New York, I learned that my indomitable Ivorian friend in Noailles was back in business. In 2020, during the COVID lockdown, she did a healthy takeout trade and kept her business going. With luck, Ken and I and our significant others will be meeting there soon.

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Chapter Six BEATSOFLESCITÉS

INSIDE THE

Local at La Visitation, six or seven teenagers and

young adults were seated around the big table listening to a recorded rhythm section’s driving beat. Heads nodded. Lips whispered possible lines. Here and there someone would pause to write down thoughts that seemed to work in the syncopated intervals. Gino, a professional rapper, tough looking with dark hair and a few days’ growth of beard, also wrote lines in his notebook. Soon they would go around the room and try to rap out what they’d written. For most, it would be humbling but hilarious. Gino was giving up his Saturday to come from the Panier, the ancient neighborhood on the steep hill that rises above the north side of the old port, to run a rap workshop at La Visitation. His gentle hints and encouragements to the young participants belied his macho, rap-artist demeanor. We-Records, Jean Sylva’s record label, had just released a new CD featuring Gino

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and his crew, some of whom were kids from La Visitation. They invited me to join them for a radio show where a popular local DJ would interview Gino and play a number of cuts from their new record. They would meet at 11 p.m., at La Friche la Belle de Mai, a cultural center, at a show hosted by a popular disk jockey. It was late for me, so I resorted to a bit of crao: “Sure, I’ll try to make it.” Around the table, Omar held the mic. He uttered some hiphop lines that I couldn’t altogether catch. I understood that he was singing about looking for work. Omar had been out of work for some weeks after an injury sustained at his last restaurant job. Blessed with a sweet disposition and winning good looks, he would soon find work as a barista in one of the fancy new coffee shops in La Joliette. But that day at the rap workshop, Omar’s words were about frustrated hopes. His first couplets hit on and in between the beats perfectly. Loud cheers erupted around the table. But after a few couplets that fit the beats, he came to the ones he hadn’t fully worked out. But the beats were relentless. Omar’s performance broke down in blushes and laughter.  Later I asked Jean about We-Records and his hope for the label. I gathered that Jean did a good deal of organizing of all kinds, including events and soirees. He knew musicians, rappers, artists, and promoters throughout the city, including in the hipper neighborhoods of the center city, particularly up in the Cours Julien. He met there with a group of artists and designers affiliated with a gallery. In fact, one of the young men at the table with Omar was an artist named Vince Landry (CROS2).

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FIGURE  

Vince and Jean.

Source: Photo by Edith Goldenhar.

Vince was a leader of the artists’ cooperative Seize Galerie (16 Gallery), in the Cours Julien. He was designing CD covers for We-Records and many local labels, as well as taking on other commissions. These included a powerful, full-size portrait of Gino that had been used for his last album cover and hung proudly on the wall at the Local. Vince had already recruited the young and talented Hisham from La Visitation as an apprentice designer. That would turn out to be this young

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man’s route from the housing estate into adulthood in the greater Marseille. Early in our acquaintance, Jean and I had a conversation about why he has never had a regular job. Although unemployment among the young was extremely high in these housing estates, there were jobs around. “But I’m not going to sweat my life away on construction sites,” he said defiantly. He would find ways to support himself through organizing parties and events in the neighborhood and in the popular arts communities. Although he had more or less left school after the equivalent of the sixth grade, in the worlds he frequented, his athletic grace and natural talents, combined with a charismatic authenticity, went far. For the first years of our friendship he was still living in the apartment at La Visitation where he had grown up, and of course he had access to the medical care and other public benefits French citizens enjoy. These had helped sustain him as he developed We-Records and the Local at La Visitation. While Omar, Hisham, and the others worked with Gino on fitting their hooks and verses to the beats, Christiane Martinez was talking near the door with the oldest of the three Roma gypsy boys in attendance at the Local that day. The teenager and the two younger boys were living in the same building as Christiane. They were recent arrivals from Spain and had trouble adjusting to life in the cité. She often gave advice and help to the women of the household and was friendly with the children. This oldest boy of about fourteen had been about to leave the Local when Christiane stopped him to ask whether he might want to go to a special school where he could “catch up.”

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The boy explained to Christiane that he did not want go to school at all. He had not done so for a long time. “Not good at writing,” he admitted in fractured French and with some embarrassment. All of which helped explain why he had not joined the others at the rap workshop. He said he didn’t go to school because he “worked in the family,” which most likely meant that he foraged for scrap metals in and around the area’s abandoned industrial buildings. Christiane said his family had only recently moved into an apartment at La Visitation. It was difficult for them, but the women were friendly. They needed help with the kids, who were rather wild. Gypsies are more numerous and far more visible in Europe than they are in the United States, where they barely register with most other Americans, occasionally appearing in films like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. In French cities and towns, however, their seminomadic presence can strain the limits of republican mixité. French Roma have been citizens for generations and are largely like any other ethnic group that assimilates while attempting to practice intragroup marriage and hold on to its culture. They are associated with the brilliant jazz of guitarist Django Reinhardt, the colorful pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, and with their attempts to escape the Final Solution during the Occupation. But in Marseille, bands of rougher-living gypsy newcomers from Romania, Macedonia, and Spain often squat in small camps on the margins of the old working-class neighborhoods. Since these lower-density villages are themselves hemmed in by the tower blocks and walkups of the cités, intergroup conflict is almost inevitable.

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The history of fraught relations between Romani nomads and their neighbors extends for centuries. They are the iconic “other” in European life and remain the most disliked people in Europe. According to opinion polls, they rank far below Jews, the second lowest in esteem. The racism directed against the Roma in Eastern Europe is increasingly frightening, but such animus is also present in France. When I lived for an extended period in Marseille in 2014–2015, I learned about several vigilante-style attacks on the camps. But sincere efforts of individuals and groups to help Roma families settle into the social housing estates are not unusual either. I often heard French progressives advocate passionately, and with perfect reason, for integration. Working-class French citizens in the HLMs, like Christiane Martinez, however, were the only ones I encountered who actually lived as neighbors with the Roma.

RADIOGALÈRE

The night that Jean and his friends from La Visitation were to meet Gino at Radio Galère, I surprised myself by staying up late enough to attend the event. The radio station is one of the many community organizations and arts groups housed at the Friche la Belle de Mai, about a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment. The Friche is a large plot of industrial land on the north side of the rail yards that lead into the Gare SaintCharles. A once-abandoned tobacco warehouse, its surrounding truck bays and parking areas allow for a great many outdoor and indoor facilities and installations. My sociologist

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friend Sam Bordreuil was especially proud to introduce me to this hub of Marseille community groups and performance spaces. With spacious covered seating areas and a bar and cafeteria, the Friche is usually jumping with activity and public events. To get there from my apartment requires traversing a long and rather dark tunnel under the tracks. When I arrived that night to meet Jean, there was no one in sight. The cavernous hallways carried only the sound of my footsteps. All the offices of environmental groups and community organizations were dark. The offices of Radio Galère were also empty, but the door was open. I took a seat on a convenient bench and waited. A brochure announced that Radio Galère “met en place les conditions pour que se fassent entendre les contestations et les luttes émancipatrices; pour que soient dénoncées toutes les injustices et discriminations présentes à tous les niveaux de notre société; pour débattre, discuter, élaborer des idées et des pratiques” (sets up the conditions that allow struggles and emancipatory movements to be heard, so that all the injustice and discrimination at every level of society can be denounced, and promotes debate, discussion, and elaboration of ideas and practices). Within a few minutes the DJ, dark and handsome Sammy Sam, and his crew appeared amid a burst of jivey expletives. No one seemed to notice me, but everything blurred somewhat as I tried to figure out what was going on and who the players were— and how come they weren’t worried about who I was. In fact, as Sammy Sam opened the studio doors to his crew, he nodded to me to come along. I tried to introduce myself as a friend of Jean Sylva, but he was in his “show mode” already and distracted.

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There were men who would be in the show now entering the studio, and they all needed to be introduced and oriented. I found a primo seat across the room from Sammy Sam, who was busy improvising at the microphone. In that room I was colorless, old, and invisible, not even a fly on the wall. The first crew to show up was Mohammad MOH and his retinue of men in their late twenties and thirties. Later, Jean explained to me that they came from an isolated cité up in the hills at the end of a bus line at the very edge of the city. MOH and Sammy Sam laughed and joked with the mike open. There were hoots, cheers, high-fives, and fist bumps. MOH had an endearing smile but wore a watch cap with the word HAINE (hate) in large letters. Maybe it was a reference to the classic Kassovitz film La Haine, about les cités, but more likely it was just that generally being gangsta and bad was still the preferred persona. In a hit IAM rap tune Marseille is said to be “Mars,” inhabited by “bad boys.” Scoundrels, scoundrels, bad boys, Scoundrels, scoundrels, bad boys This is Mars, red surface, the population is panicking Tragic stories, tight atmosphere, volcanic clothes hanging out, dirty walls, mob bosses, smuggling Hits the heart of the automatic music of my crew (Ici, c’est Mars, surface rouge, la population panique Histoires tragiques, atmosphère tendue, volcanique linges pendus, murs salis, Boss, trafic Tapent au cœur de la zique automatique de ma clique)

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Gino, Jean, and a group of teenagers from La Visitation burst into the room just as MOH and his crew were leaving. Some of the young boys were doing their best to look like voyous, mauvais garçons (badass hoodlums). Others were just clueless. Sammy Sam was glowing in his on-the-air welcome praise of Gino and We-Records and all the crew in the room. There were videographers filming and publicists looking on. Everyone was in high spirits and doing their moves. But it was clearly serious business, showing off group effort, not just what Gino had recorded. Others had moments at the mike, and the younger boys had opportunities to come in on some beats with improvised hoots and toots. As with MOH, there was a good deal of anger and violence in the words Gino rapped, but the

FIGURE  

Radio Galère, Sammy Sam rap session.

Source: Photo by author.

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feeling in the room was warm and strangely affectionate— can we say bromantic? Marseille is noted for its pioneering hip-hop scene, which looked to North Africa and the greater Islamic world for some of its inspiration. In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, two groups, IAM and Massilia Sound Systems, achieved global reputations. The IAM nine-minute cut “Demain, c’est déjà loin,” from their hit album The School of the Silver Microphone, was too long to be played on the radio, yet it is often regarded as the best rap tune ever made in France. The group had traveled to perform in New York and were influenced by the WuTang Clan. The video of “Tomorrow Is Far” has almost six million hits, and in Marseille and other French cities one will find lovers of rap who know all the words, like this angry stanza: Nailed. Nailed on a bench, nothing else to do, we drink beer And whistle at the chicks that have no brothers. Walls stick and hold us like flypaper. We’re here, we’ll never get out of it, Satan takes us for a ride

When they accepted the French equivalent of the Grammys in 1998, IAM’s leader, Akhenaton (Philippe Fragione), gave a moving shout out to all the groups in the French housing projects who were working in obscurity on their material. He was referring to local aspiring rap artists like those Sammy Sam hosts at Radio Galère. MOH and Gino and their crews were

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the bards of their cités, rapping out the dreams of stardom, yearning to escape their hated yet beloved housing estates. Gino and his crew were rapping and improvising with Sammy Sam. Jean Sylva leaned gracefully against a studio wall and smiled with immense satisfaction. When he looked over to me, I gave him a wave. I realized it was one in the morning. Unless I could find a cab, I still had to walk home through the tunnel under the railroad tracks. There were no cabs to be found outside the Friche. The neighborhood of Belle de Mai is poor, not prime for cabbies. But it’s a busy area, and there were cars passing. The tunnel felt longer than it was. It’s long and lit but shadowy in spots. A formless person was coming in my direction from the other end. I made myself think about someone who would feel more anxiety than me, my wife, for example. But then I know many women so fit they could defend themselves far better than I could, despite my size. And what a heavily male scene it had been at Radio Galère . . . The person coming toward me, a younger man, passed without a glance. Then I was out of the tunnel, under the sky on an old Marseille street bathed in moonlight.

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Chapter Seven DOCKERSANDPORTNEIGHBORHOODS

The farther we emerge from the inner city, the more political the atmosphere becomes. We reach the docks, the inland harbors, the  warehouses, the poor neighborhoods, the scattered refuges of wretchedness, the outskirts. —Walter Benjamin, “Rue de Lyon” (1928)

THE RUE

de Lyon runs parallel to the commercial port toward

the northwest. It originates within today’s EuroMed Marseille and continues past the old blue-collar neighborhoods that were once dominated by the dockers and related waterfront occupations. They include the nineteenth- and twentieth-century neighborhoods behind the commercial port that extend out to L’Estaque. This deindustrialized swath of the city above the old rue de  Lyon remains decrepit, a section of Marseille that speaks to  vanishing urban worlds. Before these old neighborhoods are  razed and gentrified, their stories beg to be told. Like the  neighborhoods of dockside London or New York, which were crowded as near to the waterfront places of work as possible, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century workingclass neighborhoods above the commercial port were not only tenements and slums. There were also solid private homes and

DOCKERSANDPORTNEIGHBORHOODS

ample apartment walk-ups, churches, and village squares, although even throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of households were rudimentary, often with outdoor toilets, lacking gas and running water. The communities above the docks housed, however poorly, an ethnically diverse working-class population that often figured in the world news. They arose during the era of French empire and reached their peak of influence as left-wing political strongholds in the first half of the twentieth century, culminating with the world wars and the Cold War. They were the heart of radical Marseille. Just at the end of the war they elected the city’s first communist mayor and shocked the  Western world, especially the Americans, in ways that have marked Marseille politics ever since. Today’s dockers of the Marseille-Fos port remain militant. They have refused, for example, to move military materials to Saudi Arabia, just as their Cold War comrades refused to move arms to Algeria and Vietnam in support of colonial wars. Longshoremen were not the only sizable population of workers in the area. In and around the neighborhoods were also numerous vegetable oil extraction plants—Marseille soap had become a global export centuries ago—and tile works where clay was shaped and baked into the roof tiles that covered entire Latin American regions with orange “Spanish” tile roofs. Today, almost all these soap and tile works are gone, and so is the manual labor longshoremen performed here for centuries before automation. Before the rapid industrialization of the mid-nineteenth century, the occupation of docker did not exist as a word in the

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FIGURE 

Joseph Vernet, Intérieur du port de Marseille, 1754.

Source: Wikimedia.

French vocabulary. Before waterfront industrialization, in the age of sail, the work of longshoremen, or dockers, was done by les portefaix (porters). Since the 1300s, the porters and numerous related occupations had been represented by guild associations that controlled their work and employment conditions. To be a portefaix in Marseille by the time of the French Revolution was to be a respected member of the urban community, well paid and well regarded. To understand why this was so, one only need look at a painting of the port at the time. One of the best examples is Joseph Vernet’s 1754 masterpiece, Interior of the Port of Marseille, his huge painting of the Marseille waterfront viewed from the foot of the old port, the Quai des Belges.

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The original is one of a monumental series of French ports by Vernet found in the Musée national de la Marine in Paris (but easily available on the internet). In the painting, people and goods crowd the foreground of the Quai des Belges. Scores of men and women in large and small groups, dressed in the uniforms of all the social classes and cultures of the Mediterranean world, play their parts. Workers are rolling barrels toward a waiting ship, its loading ramp fully extended; others cart heavy chests, while still others rest on their burdens while waiting for a signal to move. Some keep watchful eyes on their goods, but others gaze out into the port, waiting for a ship or a cargo boat. In the black-and-white detail reproduced in figure 7.1, morning light catches the white robes of a tall, imperious woman speaking to her companions in the foreground. Our eyes are drawn to her. She happens to be looking in our direction. Behind her, a group of men with turbans seem to await her instructions. At the water’s edge, groups of portefaix load goods into small vessels that will take them to the ocean-sailing vessels moored out in the port. The trunks, crates, and bales are heavy. Many must contain cargo of highly personal value. Nothing in the scene is moving very quickly, except for some children playing over the piles of grain sacks. There are no motorized cranes or forklifts, no barcode readers, no sure way to keep track of items that have left their owner’s possession, to be moved over the port into the holds of vessels far out in the haze of the distant harbor. Vernet shows us that fancy people often came down to the port to watch over their

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goods in transit, but eventually they had to trust the shipping agents to hire porters from the guild who would be professional and responsible. No wonder these portefaix were well paid and proud of their profession. By the mid-nineteenth century, their guilds had been broken by the shippers and dock owners and by the sheer numbers of those seeking work. Their working and living conditions— and their status in the community—were for the most part much degraded. Two careful observers who witnessed life in Marseille’s back-of-the-docks neighborhoods at a critical moment in the twentieth century were the pioneering African novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène and Father Jacques Loew, the founding leader of the Catholic worker-priest movement. Sembène and Loew created memorable works about the working-class areas behind the port as it was at midcentury. Sembène’s powerful and bitter first novel, The Black Docker (1956), is set in the neighborhoods where he had worked as a docker and hung out with other immigrant workers in a café in Belsunce, below the Gare Saint-Charles. Father Loew’s story is particularly close to my heart for its human and political passion and its influence on subsequent social thought. His study The Dockers of Marseille was published at the end of the war, in 1945, based on data he began to gather in 1939. But studying the dockers’ lives was only the beginning. His idea was that priests needed to live with the poor and the working classes to know their lives intimately, to understand how they could be reached spiritually as well as aided in the betterment of their lives.

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When Father Loew came to Marseille in the late 1930s, his goal was to know intimately the conditions of life for the city’s dockers and their families. Many had become alienated from the church and attracted to the revolutionary ideas of Marxism and communism. In La Cabucelle, one of the dingy neighborhoods perched above the rue de Lyon, where dockers and their families lived in material poverty and political anger, Father Loew became a spiritual leader and a beloved neighbor. Born in the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand and trained as a lawyer, he practiced the law briefly in Nice, but after a bout with tuberculosis and during a long stay in a Swiss sanitarium, he had a powerful conversion experience and discovered his calling to follow Christ. He became an ordained priest of the Dominican order in 1939. With his legal background, he was always intrigued by institutional frameworks, like the dockside shape-up and the discriminatory hiring practices that governed workers’ lives and often blocked their material and spiritual progress. He rejected Marxian materialism for not addressing the communitarian and spiritual yearnings of the working classes. Determined to close the distance between the church and the proletariat, Father Loew became a docker and worked on the docks for fourteen years while he ministered to a parish in La Cabucelle. As he began the exhausting work of the dockers, carrying baskets of heavy coal all day, he soon became an expert on the occupation’s harsh inequalities. He experienced the daily shape-up: workers had to show up at the docks at 6 a.m. in the hopes of securing a work shift that would not begin until 7:30.

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In the following passage, Father Loew recounts one of his very first days working as a docker: Finally things were arranged and we were hired to load bunker coal on board a ship. A team of Spaniards, Arabs, some French; the foreman S. and the team leader G. without doubt Spanish and one or two others who seem to be his friends are content to lend a hand from time to time, but  they don’t seem like workers. Are they team bosses? It would seem not since they gave up work tickets like the rest of us. No doubt they are touts, and it is certain that this morning we have four supervisors between S., G., and the others.

As the work progresses that day, Father Loew notices the way the experienced men prevent any waiting around for empty baskets. “If the foremen see them waiting, they will make sure the baskets get there more rapidly. That way the workers seek to control the pace of the heavy work.” The work ends early that day because the ship’s bunkers were filled by 3:30, but then their crew chief finds them a couple of hours more of the backbreaking work. Finally, after a twenty-fiveminute walk to the pay station, on their time, they pick up their day’s pay. “But that’s not the end,” Father Loew explains. If after a day of hauling dusty coal baskets the blackened docker wanted to clean up properly, it would take another hour to an hour and a quarter. “First he had to brush himself thoroughly with a dry cloth and then bathe thoroughly with soap.

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Almost impossible on a daily basis, so we can understand why most of the dockers remained dark with coal dust most of the week, if not all year.” The workday began with the fear of finding no work at all, or work carrying endless baskets of coal or heavy sacks of grain or fertilizer. Men with good connections at the stevedoring company that controlled a given dock could more often count on steady work, and often in easier cargos. Those of more recent immigrant background or more marginal abilities had to pray their number would be called at all, promising them a shift, or at least half, and a pay chit at day’s end. The majority of Marseille longshoremen, especially those more recent arrivals from Spain, North Africa, and Turkey, worked six days a week. At home, the conditions of life could be extremely rough as well. In his extraordinarily thorough household survey, Father Loew and those assisting him visited the foyers of over five thousand Marseille dockers between 1939 and 1940. His maps meticulously noted the ethnic composition of each docker household and documented the city’s class and citizenship divides just as Marseille was about to be invaded by the German forces (see the frontispiece). Father Loew’s map showed that the older working-class neighborhoods along the old port, the Panier and the Joliette areas, were largely populated by French dockers (including many of Corsican origin), with some representation of Italians and other Europeans. As one moved northward, parallel to the more recently constructed piers, the populations became more predominantly North African, Spanish, and Turkish. Beyond

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La Cabucelle along the rue de Lyon, Saint-Louis was home to an enclave of Armenian immigrant dockers and their families, where they remain a more affluent ethnic presence to this day. The housing was of more recent construction and often was essentially a patchwork landscape of shacks and older blocks of two- or three-story single-family attached dwellings. Elsewhere in this waterfront swath of working-class neighborhoods, according to Father Loew, the squatter shacks that dominated the more northerly settlements beyond La Cabucelle had the advantage of exposure to the sun and ocean breezes, and more local solidarity. Neighbors would help one another tend to their roaming children. But life in these shantytown neighborhoods was no picnic. Often living with no running water or gas, later he wrote that to make a meagre soup or to peel some vegetables it was necessary to fetch water from a distant fountain, return over slippery walks if it was raining, haul the water over a steep wooden ramp to the shack, start a fire with green wood, blow on it, try some more, getting everything smelling of smoke, and finally ending up after an hour of hard work at exactly the point a housekeeper would be who could turn a faucet or light the stove.

Father Loew ends his study with a chapter on the heady and entirely chaotic liberation of Marseille in 1945. For over a year before the Allied invasion of the city in August 1944, the port had been entirely closed to commercial traffic. Dockers and their families were scrounging for food and drink like so many

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other Marseillais. There were thousands of homeless people living in shanty towns (Bidonvilles), but his narrative does not go into detail on the occupation. He does describe the American presence, the liberty ships, and the disruption of shipping in the port, first by the Germans and then by American bombers. After the liberation, the immediate need was to reopen the port to serve the war needs farther north. At the port, demand for manpower rose exponentially; anyone with two hands and two legs seemed able to get work on the waterfront, especially with the Americans. The Yanks were almost an occupying force in the early months after liberation. They commandeered work on an emergency basis and completely screwed up whatever reliability there had been in the hiring system. The Americans worked

FIGURE 

Father Jacques Loew.

Source: Mission Ouvrière Saints Pierre-et-Paul.

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like demons, but they also enjoyed playing around on the job. It bothered Father Jacques’s sense of occupational purpose and pride. Of course, for the most part, the Americans were kids just out of high school, half the world away from home, on the adventure of their lives. Father Loew had been living for years with the privation and poverty of his parishioners. He was impatient for the new order to begin. If the Marseille dockers were ever to make significant gains for themselves and their communities, Father Jacques believed, their union, the CGT, was essential to their success. While he lamented the leadership’s communist disdain for the individual soul and for the church, he valued their unity and conviction. This eventually got him in hot water during the Cold War. By the mid-1950s, the worker-priest movement he had helped start was banned by Pope Pius XII. Father Loew protested the decision, and the following year he established the Saints Peter and Paul Mission to Workers. This mission continued outreach to the working classes and devoted itself to training priests from among their number. He eventually chose to take on missions that would have him leave La Cabucelle and Marseille and spend years among the working poor in Brazil. Before he died in 1999, he had been taken back into the bosom of the church by another pope, John Paul II, in 1971. One visitor to Marseilles in the desperate years immediately after the war was a young Polish priest destined to become leader of the Roman Catholic faith. In 1947, Father Karol Wojtyla sought out Loew and was inspired by his new approach to ministry. “Father Loew,” he wrote, “came to the conclusion  that the [Dominican] white habit by itself does not say

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anything any more today,” the future Pope John Paul II wrote on his return. “Living among workers he decided to become one of them.” Wojtyla was certain that this “apostolic work” was the only correct way for the French church “to reach its nonbelievers.” While Father Loew was living in La Cabucelle and writing about dire conditions in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, elsewhere the city was jammed with refugees desperate to get away and across an ocean or two. The German radical novelist Anna Seghers, the beloved philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, the American rescuer Varian Frye, and the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil were only some of the thousands caught in the racist maelstrom of World War II. There were dissident intellectuals, German Social Democrats, homosexuals, and Roma, all desperate to find their way in the city and get help getting out. They spent exhausting days on lines in front of offices, avoiding police cordons and identity stops, meeting with anxious friends in cafés behind the quais. Heroes like Varian Frye and Lisa Fittco, the smuggling of refugees over the Spanish border, the death of Walter Benjamin at the border, the roundup of two thousand Jewish individuals and families, the dynamiting of the old neighborhood of the port, fugitives hidden in backcountry villages, the resistance: these essential stories, like tales from the age of the galley slaves and the Bourbon Kings, became facets of Marseille’s identity as a city that has seen more than its share of misery and brave struggle. Life under the watchful eyes of French fascist police and Nazi occupiers was mostly tense and miserable, but at moments

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Marseille could offer the fleeting solace of a new pleasure. “Pizza is really a remarkable baked item,” Anna Seghers writes in her novel Transit. “It’s round and colorful like an open-face fruit pie. But bite into it and you get a mouthful of pepper. Looking at the thing more closely, you realize that those aren’t cherries and raisins on top but peppers and olives. You get used to it. But unfortunately they now require bread coupons for pizza, too.” It’s difficult to imagine a time when pizza had not yet become a universal street food, to say nothing of using war coupons to buy it. It’s far more difficult to imagine the physical and moral state of Marseille when the Germans were finally chased out and when the collaborators, or some of them, too many of them women, were shamed in the streets and the city shed its shackles. Liberation in Marseille inaugurated a time of profound political struggles and emergency rebuilding. In 1946, only 37 percent of all French homes had running water, and only 5 percent had a private bathroom (in cities of fifty thousand residents or more, the figures rose to 83  percent and 11  percent, respectively). Marseille and its dockers faced a port in ruins and a starving population. Hundreds of sunken and twisted vessels clogged the commercial port. Thousands of families were living in shantytown shacks. Marseille’s legendary resilience was tested as much as it ever had been in bygone eras of barbarian invasion, galley slavery, and plague. The city needed a tough leader who could tame its wild political and criminal factions while cracking the whip on local developers. He would need to have credibility and some clout at the national level. Above all, he would

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have to win power through the vicious political in-fighting of the city’s electoral politics. Marseille found that city rebuilder in a socialist lawyer and resistance hero named Gaston Defferre, the subject of the following chapter. In today’s Marseille, the old working-class neighborhoods bounded by the rue de Lyon and Ruisseau des Aygalades remain on the outskirts in the sense that they are marginal to the EuroMed-projected future of the area. They are being gradually emptied of residents, speculated on, and razed, all while awaiting the chimerical arrival of people with means. But descendants of the dockers and warehouse workers, of the tile makers and the metal fabricators, still inhabit the streets and alleys of the old villages. They are even more numerous in the nearby housing estates like La Visitation. One wonders if the awaited newcomers will eventually send their children to the nearby Rosa Parks Middle School with the great-grandchildren of dockers who once heard Father Jacques Loew preach the social gospel in La Cabucelle. I want to believe that in Republican France it is most likely that they will.

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Chapter Eight GASTONDEFFERRE REBUILDINGTHECITY

GASTONDEFFERRE

was the public face of Marseille during France’s

three “glorious” decades of postwar recovery and growth. He led a severely wounded city through its rebuilding after 1945 and steered the city through another crisis at the end of the Algerian war of independence in 1962. During that time, in less than a month, more than two hundred thousand French citizens from Algeria who were fleeing the former colony debarked in Marseille seeking shelter and sustenance. In the 1970s and early 1980s, while serving in national ministerial positions beyond Marseille, Defferre guided the modernization and cultural development of the ancient port. Hero of the resistance, staunch socialist, power broker and city builder, ruthless Cold Warrior, hot-tempered authoritarian, much that is commendable in the infrastructure of the city bears the stamp of his modernizing leadership. Yet much that confirms Marseille’s enduring negative images, its patronage

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politics, and its corruption are opposing facets of Defferre’s political legacy and the particular alliances he forged. In 1947, in the bitter aftermath of the war, a massive wave of  strikes and transit boycotts paralyzed France. They had originated in the communist and socialist strongholds of Marseille, where they were led by contingents of metalworkers and dockers. The nation was still desperately struggling with the ravages of war, although industrial production had almost attained prewar levels. In Marseille, the situation was worse than elsewhere. Food, fuel, and housing were in short supply, and shacks and shantytowns housed thousands. Marseille’s Communist Party was at its historic peak, able to rally over a hundred thousand activists and supporters to a mass meeting to hear from François Billoux, the party’s chief and the minister of national reconstruction. Factories that had belonged to collaborators or had been abandoned by their owners were being run as collective worker enterprises. Visions of an empowered proletariat fired imaginations in “Red Marseille.” Communists were represented in all the city’s significant institutions, including the police and the municipal offices. Indeed, the first mayor elected after the war, in a full popular election in 1946, was the immensely popular Jean Cristofol, a communist, resistance fighter, and former German prisoner. “For the bourgeois society of Marseille,” Georges Marion, Defferre’s biographer, writes, “Cristofol’s election was seen as a catastrophe. ‘When I was a young girl I had to cross myself if I passed a portrait of Cristofol,’ ” a wealthy Marseille matron remembered forty years later. Yet despite their overwhelming strength in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, like those described by Father Q

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Loew, the communists could not muster a majority in the 1947  municipal elections. With about 35  percent of the city’s electorate behind them, but without the support of the socialists, who could win about 25 percent, the left could not consolidate electoral power in the city. Lacking a majority on the city council, Mayor Cristofol had to yield local authority to a proGaullist mayor. In its first decision after taking office, Marseille’s newly elected, more conservative municipal council infuriated the city’s poor and working classes when it agreed to impose a fare increase on the tram. This brought out huge demonstrations, led by the metalworkers from the Aciéries du Nord. They had been running their factories for a while as autonomous managers and were fiercely militant. They marched at the head of what became a massive demonstration down the Canebière to the old port, where four of their comrades were arrested. A few days later, the four were sentenced to prison terms, which generated more massive protests and violence. The police were overwhelmed. A hastily convened court decided to reverse the earlier sentences. The demonstrators proclaimed their victory. But before they could celebrate, word came that a huge brawl had broken out in the city council chamber: communist delegates had been attacked by thugs enlisted by their political opponents. In the melee that followed, communist demonstrators clashed with police and gangster thugs in front of City Hall and elsewhere. As the worker-demonstrators swarmed into the nightlife district near the Opéra, they drew gunfire from a club known to be a hangout of the notorious Guérini brothers’ criminal organization. A young demonstrator, one of the steelworker militants, was shot by the racketeers and killed. Q

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There was no relief in the city from the violence and the demonstrations. The strike and transit boycott quickly spread to all the industrial centers of France. The national government and authorities throughout France led a ruthless crackdown on the communists. The New York Times of November  13, 1947, reported that authorities in Marseille had banned street rallies and demonstrations. The reporter noted as well that “the Gaullist Mayor Michel Carlini and Deputy Mayor Pierre Marquand-Gairard, were still in the hospital after beatings they received when a mob stormed the City Hall after demonstrations against the tram fare rise. Neither is said to be in serious condition.” The same edition of the Times featured articles on communist-inspired rioting in Naples, another on the French government’s expulsion of communists from police and other governmental institutions, and a third on France’s dire need of foreign aid. The Americans were certainly paying attention. They saw radical dockers unions in Marseille, Le Havre, Naples, and Bremen seemingly taking their orders directly from Stalin. The longshoremen were threatening not to work on ships carrying Marshall Plan materials or weapons destined to be used against the independence movements in French North Africa and French Indochina. Fearful of communist influence in Western Europe, and with the Iron Curtin descending across Mitteleuropa, many American Cold Warriors viewed the strong communist-led unions of the European labor movement as the advance guard of Soviet domination. The AFL-CIO’s powerful leader, the Catholic conservative George Meany, agreed. Before seeking any help from official

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American sources, he hired Jay Lovestone, a former American Communist Party leader who had become an ardent anticommunist, to direct underground efforts to prevent the European communists from controlling labor unions in Marseille, Naples, and the major ports of the continent. Lovestone sent a savvy French-speaking agent, Irving Brown, to Marseille to help battle the communists. He funneled AFL-CIO money (soon to become CIA funds) to local French anticommunist labor leaders who had created an anticommunist union representing workers in the city’s public sector and some segments of the dockworkers. That union, Force Ouvrière, still represents Marseille’s public sector workers, especially its sanitation workers, transit workers, and janitorial employees. From the tumultuous time of its creation until now, it has served as a wedge separating Marseille’s socialist and communist trade unions and as a font of patronage. During the hot battles of the Cold War in Marseille, Force Ouvrière and its allies in the Marseille underworld played a decisive role in the defeat of communist hopes and ambitions. In the fall of 1947, after a month of bloody street fighting,  electoral reverses, and the clandestine intervention of Lovestone’s agents, the Communist Party was toppled from power. When the strikes and rioting finally came to an end, the socialists, under the leadership of Gaston Defferre, had defeated the communists. They did so by splitting the labor movement, as we have seen, and by forging alliances with some of the city’s more conservative political factions and with key members of local organized crime families, especially those that had been supportive of the wartime resistance.

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In a classic devil’s bargain of urban politics, the Guérini brothers would rule the Marseille underworld and the socialists would keep control of City Hall for at least the next two decades. The battle between communists and socialists, and efforts to divide the left, would mark Marseille’s politics for much of the twentieth century and into the present. So would alliances between figures in the city’s underworld and those in elected office. The socialist leader and resistance hero Gaston Defferre is the figure on whom “official” history lays much of the credit and blame for Marseille’s postwar political culture. To know Defferre is to know something of his extraordinary attachment to his adopted city of Marseille and his determination to rebuild the city after the occupation and bombing at the end of the war. Born into a Protestant family near the small city of Nîmes in the Cévennes region of southern France, Gaston’s father was a lawyer with a gambling problem. After squandering his earnings at Riviera gaming tables during the summer, in the early fall he would leave the family in France to manage his law office in Dakar, Senegal, in French colonial Africa. His son followed in his career path. At the age of eighteen, Gaston went to Dakar to work as an apprentice in his father’s legal practice. Every spring, he returned to France to take law courses and examinations at the faculty in Aix-en-Provence. Shortly after landing as an eighteen-year-old beau garçon in  colonial Senegal, young Defferre met Andrée Aboulker, a  brilliant and vivacious Jewish Algerian from a prominent left-wing family of physicians. She was seventeen but already

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married. Andrée was passionately interested in radical politics and avant-garde ideas, but her luftmensch husband generally ignored her. While he traveled alone to Moscow to witness the workers’ revolution for himself, Andrée and Gaston had a passionate affair. But after the feckless spouse returned, and as Gaston realized that working for his father was as untenable  as  his adulterous love for Andrée, in 1932, at the age of twenty-three, he abruptly quit Dakar. Intent on establishing his own law practice, Gaston headed to Marseille, where colonial routes and personal relationships so often converged. Three years later, Gaston was walking at midday along Marseille’s rue Paradis, enjoying the spring sunshine and feeling expansive. He had recently finished his legal apprenticeships and was emerging as an independent local attorney with a burgeoning Marseille practice. He had also become active in the Socialist Party, where some of his best friends were already engaged. Nearing the Old Port, he was stunned to encounter Andrée, whom he had not heard from since leaving Africa. She was as beautiful as ever and had divorced her husband. The two entered a café to talk things over and came out reunited, knowing they were beginning a new chapter as lovers. Although she was in medical school and wanted to finish her studies, the Protestant Gaston could not live with her out of wedlock. They were married in 1935. In the early years of their marriage, each seems to have been more concerned with establishing a professional career than in arguing about class struggle and revolution. Andrée was an ardent communist, Defferre a pragmatic socialist, but these differences did not become important until war drove them apart.

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War changed everything. After the debacle of defeat and occupation, Marseille remained in the Zone Libre, soon becoming, as we have seen, the port of hope for thousands of refugees from the German occupation. But the city remained under a leadership of local socialists who had been in office for over ten years and enjoyed their perks. Like most of the city’s elites, they were solidly in the corner of Marshal Pétain, and the most corrupt among them were willing collaborators as the Nazis exerted their control over the local authorities. Defferre, however, was aligned with the international socialist movement and was decidedly opposed to the corrupt local socialist leaders. His opposition did not harm his growing law practice. Defferre’s firm eventually did legal work for the American rescuer Varian Frey and for hundreds of refugees who had flocked to Marseille in the hope of escape from Europe and the pursuing Nazis. Determined to fight fascism and regain the honor of France, Gaston and Andrée each joined resistance cells. Gaston’s first efforts at resistance in the city were typical of his courage and impetuosity. With a few others he risked his life in a brief campaign against a viciously anti-Semitic propaganda film, The Jew Zuss, which was being shown in numerous local movie houses. Defferre’s group pasted stickers on all the posters for the film they could locate, calling it a Film Bosch. The local Vichy police were frightened by what seemed to them to be a well-organized campaign of unknown origin. Before too long, however, apprehension about informants made it clear that Gaston would have to leave Marseille and join the Maquis in the mountains beyond the city. Andrée joined a Resistance group in Algeria. Q

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Both performed heroically in the Resistance, but they were never to live together again as man and wife. Andrée fell in love with her dashing physician first cousin, or perhaps realized that she had always loved him, while serving with him in the Resistance. The news broke Gaston’s heart. He struggled to shake bitter thoughts of suicide. Not a man to grieve and sulk for very long without taking action, Gaston threw himself even more fiercely into the bruising politics of his deeply wounded city. After the liberation of Marseille in August  1944, he and some of his Resistance comrades took over one of the city’s defunct newspapers, Le Provençal, whose previous owners had collaborated with the Nazis. As the paper’s publisher, Defferre took his anger out on political foes, especially those of the Communist Party, and on anyone else who used his underworld associations to accuse him of personal corruption, as occurred in the notorious “wine scandal” of 1947. The year 1947 saw hunger in France and much of Europe. Production in war-ravaged regions had not fully rebounded, distribution was uncertain, and rationing of many commodities remained in effect. In France, the wine supply had not met demand, even with shipments from Algeria. Families were limited to two liters per adult household member per month. In Marseille, some of Defferre’s associates were exposed as having been involved in a theft on the high seas of many barrels of the vital juice, which they intended to sell on the black market. While the scandal was still being prosecuted, a rival newspaper, L’Aurore, published a cartoon showing Defferre and a close socialist comrade paddling in a barrel of black market wine. Wounded by the public ridicule, Defferre burned for Q

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revenge. He became obsessed with the idea that only a duel, a grand, if outdated, gesture, would restore his honor. As Defferre’s biographer Georges Marion tells the story, a few days later, Defferre confronted L’Aurore’s political editor, Paul Bastide, in the crowded chambers of the National Assembly in Paris: “Is that you Bastide,” he hissed. “Yes, why?” Defferre slapped him. “That will teach you to be the political director of a rag.” “I will send you my witnesses,” Bastide gasped. “I’ll count on it,” said Defferre.

He had recently remarried, to Paly Swaters, a hero of the Resistance and an heiress from a local manufacturing family. In the tense run-up to the duel, which would be held outside Paris, many friends urged her to intervene, to persuade her new husband not to risk his life. “It’s normal that he should fight,” she said. “He was insulted.” The friends were horrified. But Paly knew her man, his brash impetuosity and hot temper, his unfailing physical courage. She would not intervene. In fact, when his opponent chose to fight with antique dueling pistols, she helped find a brace of the rare weapons for sale in Brussels. Bastide fired first, into the dirt at Defferre’s feet. Defferre’s shot whizzed past Bastide’s ear. In consultation with their seconds, the opponents claimed their honor was restored and quit the field intact.

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The duel was merely an extreme version of Defferre’s political persona in action. Marseille was a tough and violent town. To be its leader, to rebuild the desperate city, he believed he had to be ruthless and never let a slight go unanswered. Over a thirty-three year career in Marseille and as a national political figure, the mayor held grudges and took revenge. In fact, twenty years later, Defferre and an opponent fought the last actual duel to be held in France, this time with sabers. (Readers can find this story easily on the internet.) Gaston Defferre’s dedication to his adopted city was unquestioned. In France, it is not uncommon for mayors to serve as cabinet ministers. Defferre served in the Mitterrand government as interior minister, led the drafting of decolonization legislation after the war, and fought through a major law decentralizing French urban planning, but his true calling was as Marseille’s mayor. The city’s tunnels, trams, and subways; housing estates; and many of its major cultural institutions owe their existence to his leadership. Defferre’s third spouse, Edmonde Charles-Roux, was a transplanted Parisian who became the city’s cultural doyenne. While her husband was living, and for years after his death, she cut ceremonial ribbons and protected his reputation. Her hand on the city deserves a chapter of its own. An American with a history as dramatic as Defferre’s would unquestionably have more than one biopic and adventure film to his name. Defferre has none. A Netflix series on Marseille, in French, stars the ubiquitous Gérard Depardieu as a tough Marseille mayor, but the series was a lost opportunity. Termed an “industrial accident” by the Le Monde reviewer, the series

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Gaston Defferre and Edmonde Charles-Roux, Saint-Malo,

1978. Source: Corbis/VCG via Getty Images.

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labored through two seasons without ever coming close to capturing the intensity of political combat that marked the Defferre years. Cities often owe their leaps in development to authoritarian “power brokers” or autocratic agents of kings and queens. Baron Haussmann in Paris stands out in the latter case; New York City’s unelected “master builder” Robert Moses is the former. Moses changed the face of the city and its vast metropolitan region in favor of twentieth century “automobility.” The Bronx was eviscerated by Moses’s expressway, “but you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs,” he famously said. Gaston Defferre was Marseille’s power broker and modernizer, but he gained his strength through electoral campaigns conducted in the streets and neighborhoods of the city. In this sense, he was closer to Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley, master of machine patronage politics. Modern Marseille required the great projects accomplished under Defferre and his successors. But as revealed in the tragedy on the rue d’Aubagne in 2018, the city also suffers from a legacy of patronage and political corruption that challenges its future.

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Chapter Nine MARSEILLE SPRING WOMENTAKEPOWER

AFTER TWENTY- SIX

centuries of male leadership, Marseille’s citi-

zens chose a woman to guide the city’s future. In July  2020, while Americans were banned from European travel, Marseille had the coronavirus pandemic temporarily under control. The city’s voters went to the polls in the runoff round of the municipal elections and favored Printemps Marseillais (Spring), a left coalition led by Michèle Rubirola, sixty-three, a local physician and ecologist who was relatively unknown beyond her circle of green activists. Throughout France, the Greens rode a wave of support in municipal elections, taking Lyon, Strasbourg, and Bordeaux and running strong in most regions. Rubirola’s win was particularly notable both because of the coalition she forged and because she replaces the conservative Jean-Claude Gaudin, who had been in office for twentyfive increasingly corporatist and corrupt years. If the green left and political ecology are to keep gaining European hearts and

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minds, their experience governing in challenging cities like Marseille will merit close attention. Since she ran against Martine Vassal, the chosen successor of the conservative Mayor Gaudin, ancient Marseille would have had its first woman mayor one way or another. More consequential is the number of women, starting with Rubirola herself, who commanded the front stage during the city’s tumultuous political year. Rubirola built a coalition on the left that stunned French political pundits and the Marseille political establishment. A lifetime Marseille native from a family of left militants, a former basketball player for the city’s major sports club, and a respected family doctor in a rather centrist French middleclass and working-class sector of the city, Rubirola bet heavily on forming a citywide left coalition. “I am a candidate for mayor of Marseille, for the rallying together of the left, of ecologists, and citizens.” By “the left,” she refers primarily to parties of the communists and socialists, historic opponents in Marseille, who eventually joined Rubirola’s Marseille Spring. In this historic fusion she was much aided by Benoît Payan, the head of the socialist opposition in the city council and an early supporter of Marseille Spring. But Marseille Spring’s coalition was lacking in essential voter support in the social housing estates like La Visitation that dominate the hills north of the city center. The eventual winner would need a majority of the city council members, who are elected from the geographic sectors of the city. A second round of voting gave Marseille Spring an edge over the opposition but not a clear path to victory. That path

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would of necessity go through the city’s northern neighborhoods, where Samia Ghali, the veteran political leader and city council force, could cast the deciding vote. Ghali has national standing, since she was a senator in the federal government and the leading elected official of North African Arab descent in Marseille. She has long represented two arrondissements on the north side of the city, where, as we have seen, innumerable large public housing estates perch on steep hills overlooking the city’s commercial harbor. A former stalwart of the Socialist Party, Ghali has more recently stood as an independent voice of the north side’s diverse and largely Arabic and African population. In the end, her vote in the city council was essential to Rubirola’s victory, for which she extracted an influential position as second deputy in the Rubirola administration. To the south, across the Old Port and its gleaming yacht haven, the city’s population is far more affluent and traditionally conservative. But analysis from the Jean Jaurès Foundation about the left’s historic win in Marseille shows that the influence of educated newcomers, local artists, intellectuals, and activists throughout the neighborhoods in the city center and along its winding corniches was decisive. The left’s victory in this part of the city was embodied in the person of a Parisian producer who recently burst onto Marseille’s political scene. Olivia Fortin, forty-three, came to Marseille three years ago along with the company she owns, Organik, an events agency with glitzy Hollywood connections. No outsider to Marseille, however, her family of origin, the Rastoins, has deep roots in the city’s grand bourgeoisie. A woman of the left with upper-class cred, Fortin spent her first

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two years in Marseille getting to know locals from all walks of life. She organized endless gatherings at her home in Endoume, the charming neighborhood of small houses and cabanons that sit on the rocks along the corniche at the sea’s edge. As her network expanded and her knowledge of local politics deepened, Fortin became one of the organizers of Mad Mars, a mobile political discussion forum. Mad Mars soon became so successful in drawing crowds eager for political discussion that by the time the municipal elections neared, it was the talk of the town. Olivia Fortin rode on its success and her own newfound political skills to run for city council in the chic Sixth and Eighth Arrondissements (Secteur 4) of the city. She defeated Martine Vassal in what had been a bastion of the old guard of Marseille politics. Le Monde deemed it the most stunning aspect of the political turnover in Marseille leadership. Marseille Spring and Mad Mars are the result of intense deliberation among leaders of the Marseille left in the two or more years before the municipal elections. Their ecologically grounded idea is that in addition to coalitions of the left parties, there must be renewed mobilization of the civil society and far more dedicated and granular efforts to reach the politically alienated. In this regard, Rubirola promises to expand bus service, especially to the underserved housing estates of the city’s north side, where a more generalized sense of exclusion runs deepest. Mad Mars was a brilliant political “appellation.” It appealed to the city’s artistic and activist population, so influential in  hip neighborhoods of the central city like Cours Julien,

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FIGURE 

Wall poster, Noailles collective.

Source: Photo by author.

La Plaine, and Notre-Dame-du-Mont. Mad Mars was also a call to public discourse and action. Following the example of the very successful Fifth of November Collective in Noailles, it also offered a constructive way to channel the anger that gripped the city when the three slum buildings collapsed on the rue d’Aubagne in Noailles, killing eight people. With anger and discontent mounting against the city’s sclerotic leadership, one might think that a left turn in the municipal elections would have been almost assured, but Marseille has a large center-right population and a historically disunited left, all of which made Rubirola’s success in forging the Marseille Spring coalition so noteworthy.

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Rubirola and her allies face daunting tasks. Over two hundred thousand people, a quarter of the city’s population, live in relative poverty, especially in the old central city neighborhoods of Belsunce and Belle de Mai and in the far-flung public housing estates of the northern neighborhoods. The schools and public transportation are in poor condition. As a new mayor, she will have to bargain with adversaries on the right, especially Martine Vassal, who was reelected head of the metropolitan government, which controls a large share of the regional purse strings. Yet there is long-awaited change in the ethos of Marseille politics. The city’s new women of power bring a more thoughtful and inclusive approach to politics and to governance. As France’s second city, its Chicago, Marseille needed to lose some of its macho, “bad boy” reputation. In her first speech as mayor, Dr. Rubirola said: As many of you know, [in the campaign] I preferred to confront ideas, rather than opposing people. And in this chamber, as outside it, I will continue to do the same. That is why I would like future debates to stay respectful, and finally deal with deep problems, [such as] cronyism and nepotism, which have had their day. This is a project for a greener, fairer, and more democratic city.

Although I don’t know Michèle Rubirola, to see her in action is to recognize the tenacity and good-humored endurance that I’ve come to know in some less-celebrated Marseille women I’d like to introduce in the next chapters.

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Chapter Ten PINKATTHEBONE

WE MET

for lunch at Chez Bataille, on the square near Notre-

Dame-du-Mont, not far from her apartment. Annette Marconi, eighty-four at this first meeting, had lived almost seven decades in Marseille. She was not born in the city, nor is that a requirement in claiming Marseille citizenship. Like New York or most great cities I know, Marseille draws much of its energy and creativity from the talents of women and men who have come from elsewhere. In this immigrant city one does not have to go back generations to feel one is a Marseillais. The original Marseillaise was not a native but a warrior angel who spurred the revolutionary volunteers on their journey from Marseille to join the insurgents in Paris. You’ll see her, for example, in a great frieze on the Arc de Triomphe. The Marseillaises I’m thinking about are not nearly so terrifying or warlike, but neither are they pushovers. Annette Marconi is a charming example.

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Like many Marseille women I have met, Annette greets the male newcomer with a mixture of worldly reserve and direct interest. I had asked my Parisian friend and academic colleague Michèle Jolé to introduce us because I was already familiar with her life’s outline. Annette was the widow of a master mechanic with the Fabre Shipping Lines. She had come to the city in the late 1940s from the industrial north of France to enter “enservice” in the home of a bourgeois family, and she had spent the prime decades of her life raising her family in Marseille. These were les Trente Glorieuses, three heady decades of post–World War II reconstruction and growth, the Marseille of musicals and risqué night life, of the gangs and the French Connection. Pagnol’s Fanny never married her sailor, but Annette did. They lived for many years together with his mother while Annette raised two children and he was away at sea. The invitation to Annette and her cousin Michèle was mine, but the choice of restaurants was hers. I caught the tram from my flat and transferred to the metro in Noailles for NotreDame-du-Mont. A long escalator lifted me from the deep subway cavern into the sudden sunshine of a tree-lined square. Chez Bataille was a high-end café and catering establishment, with a gleaming expanse of windows displaying the bounty of the region’s terroirs. Annette and Michèle were already seated at a convenient inside table, as it was a brisk day in early spring. Annette had dressed for the occasion, and I was glad to have thought to wear a sports jacket. Michèle made the introductions smooth, and we were in high sprits. But they were anxious to order quickly: there was only one more portion of the special of the day. If I wanted it,

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a fillet of sea bass, I needed to claim it now. Yes why not, local, caught this morning, easier than having to take the time to go through the menu, especially since they seemed to have everything one could think of, a bit like a New York diner, except everything would be genuine, seasonal, and perfectly delicious. Annette had ordered another fish, whole and grilled, but she also had high praise for the day’s special. I explained that I had heard a lot from Michèle about her older cousin Annette in Marseille. During Michèle’s summer visits, they explored the city together. Michèle had explained to Annette that I would want to ask her about how she came to Marseille and what her life in the city had been like. She seemed flattered by the opportunity. We lived in the Lorraine when I was an infant in a little town five miles from Sarrebourg. We had a small apartment over the garage at the owner’s château. My uncle was the patron’s chauffeur, and my father worked in the factory. But my mother died when I was only five. My father soon remarried, to a woman with her own children who was not fond of me. Louise, she could do everything well, but she was horrible, and her two children were as well. I spent much of my early childhood in the home of my grandmother. As a teenager I came often to visit Michèle’s mother, my maternal aunt in Sarrebourg.

As she says this, she and Michèle begin to laugh at the times it evokes, when Michèle, the younger girl, looked up to her more mature, blond, and worldly cousin. They exchanged knowing

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and warm glances. Both are attractive, confident, at ease. It was easy to imagine them as budding young women sharing priceless coming-of-age adventures. The manager, Paul, a round man with a gracious smile, had come over to our table to greet “Madame Marconi.” Obviously a regular patron, Annette made introductions all around that included a bit of extra emphasis on my presence, a visitor to the city, a New Yorker. For a moment the unstated suggestion that I awaited the meal with critical anticipation hung in the air. The owner was unfazed but ever smiling and gracious, even mentioning that he had successfully fed many New Yorkers in the past. I almost imagined he could tell I had been embarrassed in my childhood by a mother, a restaurant tyrant. In reaction, I had grown up to be a pusillanimous diner, never able to give anyone in my service a hard time. But the tables were beginning to fill up. M. Bataille had moved on, certainly unaware that I had been with my own mother for a recollective instant. In his stead a lovely young waitress hovered over our table, making sure glasses were filled and needs anticipated. We returned to our conversation. “Yes, when I was fifteen and sixteen,” Annette continued, I came to Michèle’s mother every weekend. I was in school but with a grant from a religious order and at Catholic school. But I didn’t like that. I had no intention of becoming a religious, avec un croix aux orielles, as they say. When I was seventeen, in 1949, I left the north and went to Marseille in the service of a bourgeois family. The elder dame of the family was ill. That took extra work and care, but after a

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while I could do everything in the household. Yes, including the cooking, which is why to this day I prefer my own cooking, although I do enjoy going out.

I had to think about that for a moment, about how many perfect and diverse French acts of cuisine Annette must have dished out in her adult lifetime. When the Marseille family lost its ailing matriarch, Annette tried moving back to the Lorraine. She took a job working in a local glass factory that used the high-quality sands of the area to produce expensive crystal goblets. “It was very hot in the factory. I carried racks of glasses from the ovens. I was living with my grandmother, but my father would see me and tease me about having to change my drawers [les culottes] so often because of the sweat.” Seated across the table, I was struck by Annette’s fluffy angora sweater and her classy wide-rimmed eyeglasses. The sweater reminded me of the ones American high-school girls wore in the 1950s and accentuated the girlish indomitability of a woman who had lost her mother at the age of five. As she glossed over the events of her passage to independent young womanhood in Marseille, it seemed inevitable that Annette would have soon left the hot factory in gray industrial Lorraine for Marseille and the sun. I was still not twenty-one when I returned to Marseille. My mother had another sister who came to Marseille with me and helped me get placed in another family as a bonne-àtout-faire. I wanted to live on my own and found a room in a

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woman’s house who would later become my mother-in-law. She was une vraie Italienne, from Nice, but an immigrant. Her husband was a Tuscan. Her son, my future husband, was away at sea. He was a merchant seaman. He worked for the Fabre lines, marin de commerce, marin tout court, he would say, “I am a worker of the sea.”

I knew from Michèle that he was a true sailor, his torso covered with tattoos, devoted to his trade, away at sea a good deal of the time. They had two children, a boy and a girl, but Annette was not destined to spend all her youthful womanhood at home pining for Jean to return. She went out on the town and was active in a high-level card game in the city, where she got to know “a lot of people,” including the owner of Chez Bataille. Our food arrived with warm dishes of parsley-steamed potatoes, golden filets, fresh green garnishes, a crusty baguette, and of course Annette’s whole grilled fish, intact from head to crispy tail. We were ready to eat and exchanged “bon appetits,” meaning that it’s fine to stop talking and concentrate on the tastes and aromas of the food. I watched Annette filet her fish with practiced skill. Then I heard a slight groan and caught her look of discontent. She nudged her plate away in a gesture of rejection. “Non, non. Je voulais que ça soit rosé à l’arête.” Meaning, she explained for my benefit, that the fish needed to be grilled, yes, but pink at the bone. Indeed, along the spine, the flesh was cooked too well. It had to be pink just at the vertebrae to be prepared perfectly. By the time I’d had this lesson, Paul had rushed over to our table to apologize, not waiting for an explanation, which he got anyway, that the fish was not pink at the bone. Q

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He assured her that another was being prepared à l’instant. As we spoke. Annette took a sip of wine, managed to regain her good cheer, and urged us to begin eating. We nibbled politely. I asked her how her husband had found his work on the sea. “He learned his trade as a marine engine mechanic in the military. His close friend was Roger. They had gone to school together in Marseille and were like brothers. They did their military service together in the army.” During the war they were in the army but were aboard two different transport ships when the war was declared. Roger’s boat went to the United States, where he learned to speak English and eventually married a Canadian—the families have remained close friends and have often visited and traveled together—but Jean landed in Argentina. “He was repatriated to London under the protection of général de Gaulle. Of course he remained a fervent Gaullist for the remainder of his life. During the years with the Free French in London he began serving on ships and learned his trade as a mechanic.” During the war, men rose quickly, often to the level of their incompetence and beyond, but young Jean Marconi was a particularly bright subordinate. By the time of the Normandy invasion he was serving as chief mechanic on a French warship. He experienced the invasion of the Normandy beachheads, much of it deep inside the engine room of the corvette Rosalys. Annette’s remedial fish arrived. She deftly slit it open, looked up at everyone with a wide smile, and pronounced it “correct.” We relaxed and let ourselves enjoy the meal for some moments of visceral pleasure. I found myself thinking ahead to dessert but suppressed the thought in favor of staying in the culinary moment, where the question arose as to how a simple Q

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plate of grilled local fish, with steamed potatoes, and salad could be so memorable. Surely it’s a matter of terroir and preparation, but it was also a sad reminder that the same dish can so often be forgettable. And how memorable it must have been for Chief Mechanic Jean Marconi, a war hero in Marseille after the armistice, to return again to his mother’s fun-loving tenant. They were married, and during the decades of postwar rebuilding they raised two children. “Jean was at sea many months of the year,” Annette emphasizes. “He worked for Fabre and sailed for many years on the Mermoz . . .” “Wait a second,” I stumble into the recollections with one of my own. I remembered a ship, the Jean Mermoz, that plied the West African coast, putting in at Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, when I was teaching at the Lycée in Cocody. I boarded it from the old colonial port of Sassandra, where passengers were brought by a smaller launch to the ship, anchored out in the ocean near a long breakwater. The trip was no more than a few hours to Abidjan. But in 1963, I might have seen Jean coming off his watch. Yes—Annette confirms—it was called the Jean Mermoz before a full refitting in Genoa in the late 1960s. “I went to meet Jean in Genoa in 1969 when it was there in the yards and Jean had to stay with it. Olivier Prunete was the captain, and Jean was his chief mechanic. We had a nice vacation staying in his cabin on the ship.” With its graceful white hull encircled by a band of blue and red, the Mermoz was again in demand for cruises beyond the old colonial ports of the vanished French empire. Far below the sparkling burnished cabins and social areas, Jean kept the

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Annette Marconi, Marseille.

Source: Photo by author.

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ship’s engines running on cruises throughout the world. Princess Grace and Prince Rainer of Monaco were aboard for a cruise to Norway shortly after the ship’s lavish refit in Genoa. When the dessert menu was offered to us, I set a bad or good example by ordering a baba au rhum. Annette was happy to follow my lead. Her eyes sparkled as we laughed about the sweet sins of life. Some minutes later, almost tipsy from the rum and sugar, I settled the bill, and we paid our respects to Maître Paul, who escorted us to the wide glass doors of the restaurant. Annette invited us to see her house on rue Eydoux, a few blocks from the restaurant and close as well to Seize Galerie, where Vince, Jean, and friends from La Visitation hang out. Annette’s home, a cozy three-story house she inherited from her husband’s family and has lived in for almost seventy years, is much changed from the time she and Jean were raising their children. Annette rents out the first floor as an apartment and lives mostly on the second floor, where her compact kitchen opens out to a small balcony. Michèle and I admired her flowers and pots of cooking herbs and imagined the saveur of the dishes she would make with them. I’ll remember Annette on her balcony in the afternoon sun, taking delight in naming the different herbs and laughing at Michèle’s gentle teasing about their girlhoods. I heard more recently from Michèle that Annette’s only son had died of an illness. I wrote to her to express my sadness at her loss. When I then saw Michèle in Paris, she said of course Annette was grieving but has rebounded, meeting life again with her usual joyful force. “Still pink at the bone,” I thought.

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Chapter Eleven BOUILLABAISSEINTHE VALLONDESAUFFES

MUCH OF

Marseille’s life on its south shore takes place on the

beachward buses that rumble along the corniche John Fitzgerald Kennedy, well above the blue sea. The roadway skirts cliffs dense with buildings jammed at all angles into the craggy landscape. Each narrow valley (vallon) or small cove (anse) has its own bus stop. There’s l’Anse des Catalans, le Vallon des Auffes, l’Anse de Malmousque, Pointe d’Endoume, l’Anse de Maldormé, and, most mysterious of all, l’Anse de la Fausse Monnaie (counterfeit money). The main destination in good weather is the large and very popular Plages du Prado, which is also at the bottom of the leafy and wide avenue du Prado. My friend from the Marseille Academy, Hubert Ceccaldi, and his spouse live in the nearby neighborhood of Saint-Giniez in a lovely duplex apartment. The top floor has a garden terrace overlooking that part of the city.

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Each of the coves along the corniche is now a charming neighborhood, often with a romantic history of dissidence and rebellion, as in the case of the Cove of Counterfeit Money. Nearest the water, many of the buildings are colorfully decorated cottages known as cabanons. Pagnol’s Monsieur Panisse, the successful ship’s chandler, had a cabanon on the corniche as well as a bastide in the hills. Jean Claude Izzo’s melancholy detective Fabio Montale has a cabanon hideaway in a calanque in the direction of Cassis. A version of the French Dream is a cabanon in Endoume, Malmousque, or almost anywhere along this bright seacoast where people gather to sun themselves on rock ledges and dive into the azure sea. Each of the coves has its complement of small fishing boats and the fishermen who go to sea before dawn to supply the local restaurants. During my solo residence in Marseille, I needed to see this gleaming shoreline from the water. That meant getting off the bus and onto a boat. The perfect vessel would be a traditional wooden pointu, or barquette Marseillaise, the sturdy, doubleended, all-purpose sailing and motoring watercraft of the region. I saw many living specimens in different slips along the Old Port being cherished by wooden-boat traditionalists like me. Bork and Company, a serious wooden boatyard in the Old Port, restores barquettes and rebuilds old ones. Their website explains that: Often a family boat, it is handed down from father to son in patrimonial fashion. The names of the barquettes capture the strong relationship between the Marseille family and its

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boat. Fanny, Antoine, Manon, Guy, or even Marie-Rose, the barquettes are often given the first name of the last-born, of a mother, a dearly departed, or a beloved spouse.

I didn’t know any local families with a pointu, but I had spotted a friendly voluntary association at the foot of the Old Port called Boud’mer. They had at least two of these traditional boats tied up at the south corner of the Quai des Belges in the Old Port. You had to be a member to take part in their activities. For a nominal fee, I gladly joined. They were hosting an afternoon cruise that would end with swimming in a calanque on the Îles du Frioul. Since the October weather was still warm, the event seemed perfect. Or it would be perfect if I could be sure of being able to climb back into the boat. We gathered that afternoon at the Boud’mer slip in the Old Port. The captain, I think his name was Bernard, fired up the engine of a well-used and beamy barquette. The boat was not rigged for sailing, so there was plenty of room on its broad decks. He waved for us to come aboard. We were five passengers: three young women in their mid-twenties, cheery friends from work in the city; an older woman somewhere in middle age; and me. I admitted to Captain Bernard my concern about climbing back on the boat during the swim later that afternoon. He had proposed a rope-ladder system that would hang from a vertical cleat; I worried it could be difficult to surmount. I was only somewhat assured. In fact, when we finally did anchor in the sunny calanque and leaped into the clear blue water, I was

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nervous enough about climbing back aboard that I didn’t swim for long. I did manage the climb, however, and this story turns soon in a different direction. When we introduced ourselves before spreading out on the barquette’s wide decks, I noticed that the older woman was, may I say, truly noticeable. Her looks and demeanor reminded me of Melina Mercuri in Zorba the Greek, but she also seemed aloof and distant. As we motored toward the port entrance, I sat near the captain at the helm to observe his maneuvers through the main channel while exiting the Old Port. I wanted a sense of how a barquette handles, at least under engine power. Someday in Marseille, or La Ciotat, or Cassis, or some anse in a calanque, perhaps I’d have the opportunity to sail in one with its full rig and feel the power of her huge lateen sail filling with an ocean breeze. We put-putted through the narrow cliffs of the Old Port, leaving the Pharo to port and the MuCEM to starboard. Suddenly the harbor opened in out every direction. To the right was the enormous ship basin of La Joliette. To the left were the anses and vallons of the corniche. Sunbeams in the middle distance danced on the Îsles du Frioul and Château d’If. Beyond them was the open ocean. At sea on the blue-green Mediterranean, I let my mind drift and remembered Maupassant’s bittersweet account in Sur l’eau (Afloat) of his flâneurs’ cruise. I enviously pictured him at the helm in his yacht Bel-Ami. The Riviera still offers no end of sailing escapes to convivial ports and isolated coves. I took out my cell phone to take some photos, in futile hope of capturing the moment. Q

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“You’re not planning to take pictures of us swimming?” Melina Mercuri said to me in a sudden huff. I was speechless for a moment or two. “No, I have no intention of taking pictures like that. I plan to go swimming myself.” She turned her face away and looked down at the water. The barquette carved its way through the gentle seas, leaving hardly any wake. After a while she turned to look at me directly in the face. “You’re not from around here,” she said. “Do you see where we’re heading?” I saw that we had passed the beach at Les Catalans, where I often swam with my anthropologist friend Ken Brown. Captain Bernard was pointing the boat toward the shore, where a high viaduct crossed over a cove. “I do, but I really don’t,” I said. “We’re going into the Vallons des Auffes; it’s that little port dead ahead. My husband and I used to take our boat there all the time. It was a barquette, smaller than this one, in fiberglass. He died last year. I had to give up the boat.” She turned away again. I had also put in time as a widower. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “It must be very hard for you to come in here.” We had passed under the viaduct and were in the little gem of a port. She had regained her composure enough to offer a sad smile. “That restaurant over there, Chez Fonfon,” she pointed to a large restaurant nestled into the side of a cliff, “that was our favorite.” It was easy to see why. Le Vallon des Auffes casts a romantic spell. My grieving shipmate seemed to be returning there almost against her will. I vowed to return with my spouse while there was still time. We would go to Chez Fonfon for bouillabaisse. Q

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During a brief visit to Marseille a year or two after my personal discovery of the Vallon des Auffes, Didi and I rented a sweet cabanon there for a week. The bus along the corniche would deposit us at one end of the viaduct. We would turn down a narrow stairway built into the steep walls that came down to a charming port at the water’s edge. The viaduct arched high above us. Our cabanon had a terrace from which we looked across the cove to the comings and goings at Chez Fonfon. By the time we were having a second morning cup on the terrace, the fishermen who supplied the restaurant would be returning to the slips in front of the restaurant to deliver their catch. Obviously, in the present ecosystem of the vallon, where the fibers of dried auffes that, like hemp, were once woven into ropes for oceangoing barquettes, it was our contemporary purpose to book a reservation for dinner at Chez Fonfon. Bouillabaisse has always fascinated and somewhat intimidated me. It’s a luxury meal with working-class origins, like the Spanish paella or the pot-au-feu. The authentic version demands an ugly fish called the rascasse (Scorpaena scrofa), a venomous scorpion fish. In my New York waters its nasty cousins are croaking sea robins. We curse and step on them with our feet to get them off our flounder hooks before we throw them back in the drink. It’s confusing and perhaps a bit intimidating then, to be warned, as M. F. K. Fisher was always sure to do, that the authentic Marseille bouillabaisse must be made with the red rascasse and certain other fish. It is usually only available in the most expensive restaurants— or, even more authentically, at the dinner table of a three-generation Marseille family.

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Chez Fonfon would only have the real thing. It would be expensive, but that’s life at the top of the food chain. After all, on their days off, every person involved in its production must, in turn, have the cash to take the family out for pizza or couscous, the most popular local dishes. Bouillabaisse, however, is a genuine seafood event and a foodie ritual. It’s best shared with good friends and family and made into an occasion. Didi and I decided to invite the Ceccaldis and another couple, our close friends Sam Bordreuil and Anne Lovell. Sam and Anne are social scientists who have hosted us many times in their home on the slope leading to the Bibémus plateau, just outside Aix. Hubert, whom the reader has met earlier, and Madame Ceccaldi are an oceanographer and math professor couple. They lived for many years in Japan, where eating queer species from the sea is routine. Chez Fonfon is elegant but understated, with spare, muted decor and large tables set rather far apart. No one feels crowded or hurried. Old-school waiters who do not introduce themselves direct a team of assistants. The Ceccaldis, to my surprise, had not been to this restaurant before, though Madame Ceccaldi admitted that she had always wanted to eat there. They ordered the bouillabaisse, as did Didi and I, although Didi had hesitations. She feels the soup’s taste rings some slightly venomous notes. Anne agreed with her and ordered a grilled daurade (sea bream, or Sparus aurata), another local specialty. The maître d’hôtel’s presentation of the essential fish, after orders were taken and drinks served, was a quick ichthyologic tour of the local fishery. He carefully parsed a huge platter that

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Bouillabaisse, Chez Fonfon.

Source: Photo by Edith Goldenhar.

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included vive (weever), a small, eel-like creature with poisonous spines; galinette (gurnard); grondin rouge (red gurnard); congre (conger eel); rouget (red mullet); and both red and lean white varieties of the famous rascasse. My question for Hubert Ceccaldi about this bounty of the sea was intended to get us talking more generally about resilience and the culture of cities like Marseille. The origin story of bouillabaisse traces it to a Greek fish soup with similar venomous qualities brought to the very old port of Massalia in the 600s BCE. How is it, I asked, that after centuries of fishing for the precious red rascasse and the others, the fishermen who bring these scary species to Chez Fonfon can arrive with certainty in the late morning with the required catch? What about overfishing? Hubert explained that this was indeed a proud Marseille story of adaptation and resilience. By the end of the last century, the fertile sea grass meadows of Posidonia oceanus that had supported such a diverse coastal ecosystem here and throughout the northern Med were rapidly declining because of climate change and pollution. Over a period of about twenty years of intense study and close underwater observation of fish behavior, Marseille’s coastal fishing community worked together with the scientists to spearhead the creation of a 23,700-cubic-meter, six-million-euro artificial reef off shore from the Prado beach. It is the largest artificial fishing reef in the Mediterranean and has assured a sustainable yield of the ugly fish needed for the true Marseille bouillabaisse. Sam and Anne had done extensive research in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, funded by the French Agence Nationale

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de la Recherche (ANR, the equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the United States). Anne writes about the role of local community activists in helping New Orleans and surrounding parishes arrive at a more resilient future. The French are strongly committed to encouraging their scientists to learn from the experiences of events in other parts of the world. Some years ago Didi and I had attended a conference Anne had organized in New Orleans, where we heard some of the city’s most inspiring local leaders draw lessons from their experiences after Hurricane Katrina. Our table conversation was off and running. We began teasing out some of the comparative specifics between the two cities, Marseille and New Orleans, which have such distinct places in Francophone culture. When the soup course arrived, we were already deep in discussion about resilience and adaptation. Diderot writes somewhere to the effect that the natural subjective mood of the intelligent person is melancholy. I write this at a moment in 2020 when melancholy threatens to turn to despair for our species and all the others we are devouring or threatening. But that night, Chez Fonfon, an earthy, dry white wine, and the sumptuous experience of sharing a bouillabaisse turned our thoughts away from climate change and the rise of antiscientific, antidemocratic reaction, at least while the dinner and the hopeful conversation lasted.

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Chapter Twelve MARSEILLE/NEWYORK

INTHE

fall of 2019, a few months before the pandemic struck, I

invited my young Marseille friends to come for a New York visit: Jean Sylva of We-Records and La Visitation; Vince Landry the artist; and Alexander Arnoux-Pierre, an inspiring Montreal community organizer often with Jean and the crew in Marseille. I looked forward to showing my young friends the city of my birth in exchange for all they had done to help me know their Marseille. But I also had a more specific agenda: I wanted to make a pitch for ecological restoration. I hoped to bring our conversation back to the slag heap along the Ruisseau des Aygalades, across from the La Visitation. It had been seven years since I had begun to try to decipher the neighborhoods on Marseille’s north side, seven years since Christine Breton had introduced me to Jean Sylva and Christiane Martinez and the folks at La Visitation. In that time, the group of artists and activists Jean attracted around We-Records

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had worked closely with allies in government to expand their activities. They had produced some exciting public art in and around the buildings at La Visitation. They were working on using converted containers as outdoor classrooms to expand on the space available beyond the Local. I hoped to sell them on the idea that the slag heap could be turned into a public park that would be a benefit to local residents and others. My plan was to show them some examples in and around New York. My friends were staying with us in Long Beach, a beach town on the Atlantic Ocean beyond Kennedy Airport. The morning after their arrival came up chilly with bright sun. Of course they were eager to get into Manhattan, but first we headed for a park near the neighboring town of Freeport, Long Island. These towns on the extreme southern shore of Nassau County are within an ecosystem of wetlands and barrier islands that covers much of the South Shore of Long Island, including the Atlantic coasts of Brooklyn and Queens, as well as the entire seaward-sloping East Coast of the United States below Cape Cod. In my particular tidal flats and marshes, their preservation depends on the parks and parkways created in the 1930s by Robert Moses, the region’s “master builder.” The park we were headed for, however, was a far more modest achievement than Jones Beach State Park but perhaps no less inspiring. “It’s a park recycled from an old garbage dump,” I said. We parked the car at the entrance, on what are the Merrick, Long Island, sanitation grounds. Merrick and Freeport are suburban

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towns on either side of the Meadowbrook Parkway—about twenty minutes of driving through scenic wetlands from where we were in Long Beach. “I never thought about New York this way,” Vince Landry commented through his jetlag, “that there was so much water everywhere.” Nor did I, as a newcomer, have an image of Marseille that included the complicated northern neighborhoods with their diverse cités and industrial-age village centers built along roads and streams descending over aygalades and through vallons. “Cities are much more than what goes on in the center,” I said, squelching the lecture reflex. Jean was just taking it all in, not saying much but listening intently. My friends would not have known they were walking on a former refuse heap had I not explained where we were. Walkers, joggers, and the occasional runner passed by on the  wide crushed-shell path that mounted gradually up the side of the fully reforested mound. Through the trees we made out a brackish creek lined with phragmites and cattails that runs along the base of the mound. Eventually it dives through a culvert under the parkway into a larger channel in the wetlands. The walk up the sides of the former heap is about two miles. My boyhood friend Philip Oberlander had come along to meet the young men, and since he grew up in Montreal, he speaks French. Phil and I set a slow place up to the summit. Norman J. Levy Park is named after a state legislator and dedicated environmentalist from the area who was instrumental in obtaining funds from the state to build the park. But the unsung hero of this park was a local resident, Mr.  Jay Pitti.

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A gardener and landscaper, he often drove his truck to the top to dump debris and cuttings. Over the years the mound grew, and the view became ever more compelling. “Merrick disappears. Freeport disappears. Now, you see the greater dimension, the planet, nature. Hopefully, people will be able to visit this site and enjoy nature, at its visual best, and hopefully contemplate the need to respect that nature,” said Mr. Pitti to a local reporter in 2000 at the park’s opening, when he was sixty-seven. When it was closed as a dump in 1986, it had reached a height of 120 feet above sea level, the highest point on the southern shore of Long Island. (Most other places, including our house in Long Beach, are an average of six feet above sea level.) Mr.  Pitti formed a committee of about twenty other locals, and for about sixteen years they developed a vision of the park and lobbied elected officials for its creation. And here we were reaching its top. Suddenly there were 360 degrees of dizzying geography: South to the Jones Beach tower and the ocean whitecaps, east across the wetlands with their meandering channels, west across the plains of suburbia to the skyline of Manhattan on the horizon. My friends were impressed. I argued that it was not a lot different in many ways from the view of Marseille and the ocean shores from atop the slag heap on the boulevard des Aygalades. Nor is it only the view that matters in this “nature” preserve. The top of the park is a plateau with two sizeable freshwater ponds circled by the broad walking path. A tall windmill pumps water from the stream below and creates a welcoming

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landmark for the cars speeding by on the Meadowbrook Parkway. A herd of friendly black goats, about twenty in all, trim weeds and attract children. The goats sleep at night in a barn at the park’s entrance because red foxes have lately moved into the neighborhood. Of course there are birds galore, mostly ducks and geese, drinking and feeding in the ponds. Below the surface of the park mound there is still a lot of decomposition going on. Methane exhaust pipes with tin hats stand like slim sentinels at regular intervals behind the paths. My friends saw immediately what I was getting at. I don’t think they were prepared to become environmentalists in a more abstract sense, but that did not matter. “You know, Jean,” I said, “You don’t have to be committed to years of organizing like Mr. Pitti. I’m showing you this because I think the slag heap on Les Aygalades is an important issue. It could be something new for your neighborhood. If you guys put it out there on the public agenda, call attention to it, create your artistic vision of what it could be, you might be surprised at what happens.” Indeed, that is exactly what they did, with results that were surprising to everyone. But that took place when they returned to Marseille, and it is one of those ongoing stories of our two ports. At that moment, they still had a lot of New York City to explore. Jean Sylva had recently lost his mother and was grieving over her loss. He was most interested in going to a church service in Harlem. On the Sunday of their visit, my friend Jacquelyn Oberlander graciously invited them to a service at

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her church in Harlem. They sat in her regular pew among her Harlem neighbors, not in the tourist section in the balcony, and were treated to an inspiring sermon by the new female pastor. Vince wanted to see some contemporary art at the Whitney and walk the High Line, another recycled park. Alexander was familiar with the city, as he had relatives there, but he was taking a lot of pleasure in showing his friends some of the city’s nighttime sights. I had set up a public meeting for them about Marseille in my former institution, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, on Thirty-Fourth Street, right across from the Empire State Building. They spoke there to a friendly academic audience about their Marseille community projects. Coincidentally, Professor Ken Brown, of Noailles fame, happened to be working for a few weeks again in the city and joined us for the discussion of Marseille politics. Another Manhattan day we visited the studios of Rock Paper Scissors, a bicoastal video and film production company managed in New York by my daughter Eve. Her offices are on Twenty-Eighth and Fifth, overlooking the Flatiron Building, which Vince knew as an early gratte-ciel, a skyscraper. Large photo portraits of the Brooklyn rapper Biggie Smalls hung near the elevator that opens on the floor. Biggie made them feel they had come to the right place. Earlier, in 2015 Eve had helped me create a YouTube video about La Visitation and Jean’s Local that had drawn some favorable attention to their We-Records work in Marseille. On one of those brilliantly bright New York fall days, when the freighters anchored five miles out in the ocean off

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Long Beach are visible in high definition, I took my Marseille friends on a car ride along the Belt Parkway. We would ultimately stop in Dumbo, the neighborhood underneath the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge. We’d stroll along the East River at sunset, across the water from the Statue of Liberty, one of the quintessential New York photo ops. As we crossed the Atlantic Beach Bridge into Far Rockaway, the mood in the car was subdued. There was classical music on the car radio. I switched the playlist to some classic rap from the Wu-Tang Clan and Biggie Smalls. Instantly the  car was jumping. My young French friends knew most of the English lyrics. They began coming in on the beats with the tribal hoots and toots of the hip-hop world. Rap tunes became the day’s soundtrack. It didn’t matter if we were driving through the public housing estates of the Rockaways or cruising under the Verrazzano Bridge, the hip-hop beats seemed the perfect soundtrack for every locale. My first stop was with the birds at the famous wildlife preserve on Broad Channel Island, where the avian world congregates under the flight pattern of incoming jumbo jets. Managed by the National Park Service as part of Gateway National Recreation Area, it’s another citizen-initiated recycled park. Two large freshwater ponds created by reforested landfill berms sit on what were once much-abused wetlands. The freshwater attracts birds of all species and birdwatchers with every kind of lens one can imagine. Ducks seem not to be able to stay away in all seasons. Thousands of New York school kids by the busloads are taken here to learn about the natural

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habitats of the city they inhabit. I’m proud to have worked on this first urban national park with many of my students at its creation, in 1973. Again, this was an unexpected visit for my friends. Vince Landry’s vision of the city had been far more vertical and hard-edged. Jean Sylva was taking it all in as always. He had already caught on to what I was after. Looking across a prairie of spartina marshes and expanses of bay, I showed them Floyd Bennett Field, the recycled naval airport, now another public part of the Gateway park system. In the far distance, the Manhattan skyline glimmered as only it can. We were getting hungry. The obvious solution was to hop in the car and head for Nathan’s in Coney Island. My mother’s family lived in Coney Island during much of the 1920s. My father played sandlot baseball in nearby Marine Park and at Manhattan Beach. They met through mutual friends and courted on the rides and in Feltman’s, the German beer garden, before the great fire in 1932. Among my earliest memories is the terror I felt when first going down the giant indoor slide at Steeplechase Park. It’s a fabled part of the city, and the original Nathan’s, home of the Coney Island hot dog, remains its most celebrated eating arena. After lunch at Nathan’s, the endless boardwalk had a strong hip-hop vibe, with murals galore and zooming skateboarders. “Le Brooklyn” is hot in France lately, as young French visitors venture outside Manhattan to find what’s happening in the city’s (somewhat) more affordable communities. But it’s a vast borough: our windshield survey that day covered the ethnically dizzying length of Flatbush Avenue, with stops at the leafy

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campus of Brooklyn College, a peek into Prospect Park, and coffee in Williamsburg. By the time we reached the Brooklyn Bridge, the sun was getting low in the western sky. We ambled along the river through the new park areas that have replaced the old Port Authority commercial docks. Vince took some selfies. I rested and did stretches on a bench while Vince and Jean took more photos. Jean had to crouch almost to the ground to find a proper angle when an Asian couple asked them to take their photo with the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River in the background.

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Bill, Jean, Vince, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Source: Photo by author.

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Across the river in Manhattan, it was full rush hour. Red sunbeams flashed on the buildings and on the green copper tower of the Municipal Building, where my father had worked and where, as a boy, I looked down into the river at the tugs towing barges of coal and cement under the bridges. “It will be part of your monument,” my father had said to me with a wink, a few years before his death in 1979. We were walking on a runway at Floyd Bennett Field, in Jamaica Bay, talking about what it might be used for in its future as an urban national park. “What kind of monument do you mean? I work on teams inside bureaucracies. I’ll never be on any monument.” “Neither will I,” he said. “Neither will anybody we know. The city is our monument.” Sure enough, when my friends returned to Marseille they organized a press conference about the possibilities of ecological restoration at the slag heap. The 2020 mayoral elections were heating up. Elected officials took notice. Their meeting was attended by some of the candidates, including Samia Ghali. Jean Sylva’s monument to the city he loves may be a park on that slag heap across the avenue des Aygalades, in the neighborhood of his Marseille childhood. We’ll try to get back there as often as possible to help things along.

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SHORTLYAFTER

Jean and Vince returned to Marseille from their

trip to New York City in October 2020, they went into COVID shutdown, as we all did for much of the year. Nevertheless, Jean took a job in one of the businesses his uncles run in the city. Vince was busy keeping his Seize Galerie afloat on the Cours Julien. But with advice from their Montreal organizer friend Alex, they still had time to start addressing the slag heap at La Visitation. They soon learned about other groups and individuals who had become active in the restoration of the Ruisseau des Aygalades. Their toxic heap of red mud was only one of many issues along the stream to think about. But it was also a very important one, now being thrust forward by residents most at risk. They teamed up with a friendly women’s environmental collective, Les Gammares, who are seeking to unify all the different groups that are advocating for the stream’s restoration.

EPILOGUE

Jean discovered for himself that participatory democracy can be taxing. “I won’t try to hide it, but all the people and their crao can give me a headache sometimes,” he wrote. But in 2021 they produced a series of radio programs that began getting the slag heap into the public discourse. Samia Ghalia, the leading progressive political voice of the northern neighborhoods, has joined them in support. Jean and friends are feeling encouraged. Marseille city hall politics, never simple or clear cut, took an unexpected turn at the end of 2020. The recently elected Michèle Rubirola decided she would yield the mayoralty to her socialist coalitionist and second-in-command Benoît Payan. This parliamentary shift came as surprise to the public but not to political insiders. Rubirola had an unspecified illness that required surgery and convalescence at the very beginning of her term. And as a doctor devoted to her hospital and facing a grave pandemic, her sense of responsibility was sharply divided. Her critics accused her of bad faith and duplicity. More objective analysis in the press suggested that Le Printemps Marseillais could not have had a socialist front the ticket because of the party’s history of corruption. As a consensus candidate, she led the left to a victory that put an end to twenty-five years of leadership from the right. As a candidate coming from civil society, with limited experience in governing and not a comfortable presence before the cameras, she often let Benoît Payan take the spotlight. Coming years will see how well Mayor Payan and his first deputy Michèle Rubirola manage to hold their coalition

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together and make good on promises of environmental equity. The fight for a greener and more just city, Payan writes on the coalition’s official site, requires that we “support the most fragile among us, renovate our schools, demand new housing policies, protect our environment and our way of life.” If ever in the past half-century of Marseille history there was a hope that a slag heap in a marginal neighborhood could gain remediation, this would seem to be it. In 2021, while we couldn’t visit Marseille in person, I did find Hubert Ceccaldi, my oceanographer friend, on the internet doing good work for the Marseille Academy. He appeared at a prize ceremony beaming in the middle, back row of the

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Award ceremony, Second Chance Academy, 2021.

Source: Photo by C. Dureuil, Académie de Marseille.

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photo, included here. The academy was awarding one of its annual prizes for scholarly achievement to three students from the Marseille Second Chance School for their writing project about growing up in their northside neighborhood. The laureates, who stand in front of the photo holding their certificates and medals, are Mlle. Gamzé Kumludere, M. Guled Nasser Moindji, M. Irchadi Madi Said, and Mlle. Samantha Muti. They are surrounded by the proud principal and teachers from the school. It’s a rather banal photo, one familiar enough to anyone active in a New York City borough, but it says a good deal about French social aspirations. As I write these paragraphs during the summer of 2021, Marseille, like our own city of New York, is open and bursting with energy. We plan to visit our friends and pick up the threads of our common adventures. In a few months, we’ll take Jean-Claude Izzo’s advice and find a flat in the Panier with a view of the harbor and the azure bay. There we’ll “feel the old heart of Marseilles throbbing. A heart that speaks the languages of the world, the languages of exile.”

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INOVER

ten years of exploring, reading, and viewing films about

a city and its people, one accumulates a great many debts to authors and artists, living and dead. I gratefully acknowledge some of them here. There is not time or space for me to be comprehensive or balanced in this sketch of my appreciations. Where I cite work in French, it means that no English translations were currently available.

SOMEMARSEILLECLASSICS

Edmond Dantès, Alexandre Dumas’s fictional Count of Monte Cristo, suffered fourteen years in the infamous dungeon under the Château d’If. How many millions of readers have suffered with him there ever since? Today, this former prison, on the smallest of the three Îles du Frioul, is a first-order

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tourist attraction, like New York’s Ellis Island or San Francisco’s Alcatraz. Dumas knew Marseille and Corsica, from which hail many Marseillais. His father, the first black general in French history, fought colonial battles for the French empire during the Napoleonic decades. He told stories that Dumas fils  would later craft into enduring classics. The first chapters  of  The Count of Monte Cristo portray the world of Marseille’s nineteenth-century sea captains, merchant bankers, and outlaw pirates. A complete set of the first English edition (1846) sells for about $12,000. The paperback is much cheaper, and it’s always a great read, especially for fans of revenge served cold. Marcel Pagnol is an essential voice of Marseille and Provence, just as Walt Whitman’s is for the New York archipelago. In another American port, the San Francisco Bay Area’s master chef, Alice Waters, affirmed Pagnol’s universal appeal. Her celebrated Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse was inspired by the widower Panisse, “a compassionate, placid, and slightly ridiculous marine outfitter in Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy.” Panisse evokes for Waters “the sunny good feelings of another world that contained so much that was missing or incomplete in our own—the simple wholesome good food of Provence, the atmosphere of tolerant camaraderie and great lifelong friendships, and a respect for both the old folks and their pleasures and for the young and their passions.” Add to Pagnol’s virtues a profound knowledge of the craggy and dense landscapes of Provence and the ways of its folk, urban and rural. How well does Pagnol’s tolerant and warm pre–World War II Marseille play in the cités of the northern neighborhoods or the  immigrant central city neighborhoods of Belsunce,

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Noailles, and Belle de Mai? Perhaps not so well, but these neighborhoods have their own twenty-first-century voices, as we have seen. They may speak in French slang and don’t always sound friendly or tolerant, yet they also give voice to a distinct brand of Marseille camaraderie. Pagnol brought the local idioms and the soul of the city to life on stage and film. But they were not his invention, nor have they ever disappeared. Pagnol, Marcel. Memories of Childhood, My Father’s Glory; My Mother’s Castle. Foreword by Alice Waters. San Francisco: North Point, 1986. Pagnol, Marcel. The Marseille Trilogy: Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), César (1936). Criterion Collection. The film versions are landmarks of world cinema.

Jean-Claude Izzo (1945–2000) may be the contemporary Marseille author most French readers would know, as would many reading in English. His Marseille trilogy, featuring the burned-out detective Fabio Montale, is considered a classic of the genre and a treat for Marseille fans. I especially treasure his short memoir Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil for its deep appreciation of Marseille’s local culture. “Marseille proudly proclaims its experience of the world,” he writes. “We might add: this Mediterranean experience . . . this Mediterranean of ours, on which my eyes, my heart and my thoughts are focused—remains the only place where I feel that I exist.” Izzo, Jean-Claude. Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil. 2003. New York: Europa Editions, 2020.

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In Claude McKay’s lyrical 1929 novel Banjo, a Black American seaman tells of being down but not out on the Marseille waterfront. The book helped put Marseille on the map in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. McKay’s newly published (2020) Marseille novel, Romance in Marseille, was originally written in 1933. “A Book So Far Ahead of Its Time, It Took 87 Years to Find a Publisher,” wrote the New York Times reviewer. “Claude McKay’s novel . . . deals with queer love, postcolonialism and the legacy of slavery. It also complicates ideas about the Harlem Renaissance.” McKay, Claude. Banjo. 1929. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2016. Benjamin, Walter. “Rue de Lyon” and “Hashish in Marseille.” In One Way Street. Reprint ed. Boston: Mariner, 2019.

M. F. K. Fisher, the renowned American pioneer of culinary travel writing, adored Marseille and Provence. Marseille: A Considerable Town (New York: Random House, 1978) and Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964) capture what it was like to be a sympathetic outsider, with exquisite taste in food and people, roaming through neighborhoods and villages of Provence, with emphasis on Marseille and Aix, in the mid-twentieth century.

ARCHITECTURE

The modernist poet Blaise Cendrars never lived for long in Marseille, but the city “caught his heart” as “the only ancient capital Q

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that doesn’t crush us with its monuments to its past.” Which is not to say that there is any lack of stunning and historic architecture to explore. A prime example, among many, of the forts and cathedrals, is La Vieille Charité, atop the Panier. Now a museum and cultural center, it was constructed as an alms house for the indigent between 1671 and 1749 to the Baroque designs of Pierre Puget. Marseille may be best known in architecture circles for some examples of postwar housing in the brutalist style. Cendrars, Blaise. Selected Writings of Blaise Cendrars. New York: New Directions, 1962.

Le Corbusier’s La Cité Radieuse is the most famous of his unité d’habitation housing ensembles. Built between 1947 and 1952, on a sunny southern hill, it has shops, ample communal spaces, a hotel, and amenities that never made it into most of the cités built during the postwar housing crisis in France and Europe— or the United States, for that matter. It’s still utopian and well worth a visit. A visit to the Bauhaus Église Saint-Louis is a trip into the world of Father Jacques Loew and the Catholic worker-priest movement. The interior offers striking murals in the socialrealist style that will make one remember the idealism and hope embodied in Father Loew’s mission, rather than the more authoritarian tendencies of the secular Communist Party. Marseille suffered severe damage during the last days of the German occupation and Allied bombing. Rebuilding the Old Port after the war is a saga of planning and architecture  well told by Sheila Crane in Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture (Minneapolis: University of Q

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Minnesota Press, 2014). Her thorough account of the bombing and rebuilding of the old port after World War II shows how visions for replacing the notorious blocks along the Quai du Port had begun to evolve well before the old tenements were erased by the German occupiers. Fernand Pouillon was the architect most responsible for the rebuilding of La Tourette and other acclaimed housing blocks above the Quai du Port. He surely deserves some of the attention often reserved for Le Corbusier and his disciples in discussions of postwar planning and architecture in the city. He designed and supervised the construction of successful public housing in France and Algeria, in a career succinctly summarized in Fernand Pouillon, Le fil à soie, 2017, a film generously shared with me by Marie-Claire Rubenstein. Pouillon wrote an autobiography (untranslated) and a celebrated novel, Les pierres sauvages, the latter during a term in prison on dubious charges. After the eventual rehabilitation of his reputation, he spent his last years living in a medieval castle he had restored in the Aveyron. See https://www.chateaubel castel.com /suite-1. Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity, edited by Marc Angélil and Charlotte MalterreBarthes (Ruby Press, 2020), offers detailed case studies of space and social life in some of the famous Marseille cités, from Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse to La Castellane, the massive north side public housing project that is the birthplace of the football star and illustrious coach Zinedine Zidane: “Every day I think about where I come from, and I am still proud to be who I am: first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman.” Q

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GENERALHISTORYANDSPECIFIC HISTORICALPERIODS

Marcel Roncayolo (1926–2018) was the polymath geographer, urbanist, and historian whom Christine Breton and many other Marseille intellectuals I know read and recommend. His extensive writing on the port’s commercial and spatial evolution hinges on ecological and environmental dimensions specific to Marseille and its region. Roncayolo’s  L’imaginaire de Marseille. Port, ville, pôle (Imagining Marseille: port, city, pole) examines the history of the city’s commerce and industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with intellectual parallels to the Annales school and Fernand Braudel’s work on more global Mediterranean history. Roncayolo, Marcel. L’imaginaire de Marseille. Port, ville, pôle. Histoire du commerce et de l’industrie de Marseille XIXe–XXe siècles. Marseille: Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Marseille, 1990.

For the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries viewed through the archives of a Marseille savant, Peter Miller’s Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) is a monumental work of scholarship and historical imagination. Marseille was a global city when Rome ruled the Mediterranean. Marseille’s Chamber of Commerce, created in 1599, became a central player in developing and promoting the city’s cultural institutions. For example, the chamber works closely with the city in supporting publication since 1936 of Marseille, Revue Culturelle de la Ville. How many cities can boast an Q

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entertaining yet serious house organ? The quarterly is an invaluable trove of written and visual explorations of the city’s endlessly fascinating history. The archivist, historian, folklorist, and raconteur Pierre Échinard edited the magazine for over twenty years. His volume, Marseille au quotidien, Chroniques du XIXe (Aix-enProvence: EDISUD, 1991), is a bouquet of historic vignettes featuring daily life in the city during its historic apogee. The current editor is the historian and curator Patrick Boulanger, whom we encountered at the beautiful Bourse on the Canebière.

THEAGEOFGALLEYSANDGALLEYSLAVES

Marseille and world ports that have known slavery are also places where freedom is especially cherished. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, long lines of prisoners, as many as four hundred men, trudged in chains across France to Marseille and Toulon, where they would become galley slaves. Some among them were guilty only of being Protestants. At sea the galleys were not particularly able vessels. They remained in port for much of the year, especially in bad weather. This meant that the slaves often experienced considerable down time. Typically their masters allowed them to work for hire and kept a significant portion of their earnings. This was also a frequent setup in Dutch New Amsterdam and helped engender, in both cities, as in many other ports, peer and class solidarities in resistance to oppressive authority. The Marseille bourgeoisie, independent-minded merchants and ship owners, also resisted the Bourbon galleys for their

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own reasons. After all, Louis XVI’s royal base of operations, essentially a huge prison workhouse, was inserted, largely against their will, onto prime waterfront property on the south side of their precious calanque. Bamford, Paul W., Fighting Ships and Prisons: The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis XIV. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973. Abulafia, David, ed. The Mediterranean in History. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003. Zysberg, André, and René Burlet. Gloire et misère des galères. Paris: Découvertes Gallimard, 1987.

PLAGUEANDPUBLICHEALTH

The COVID-19 pandemic delayed Marseille’s 2020 municipal elections by three months, but overall, the city fared relatively well and was opening up rapidly by the spring of 2021. It had not been so fortunate in its earlier history as a global port exposed to disease. In 1720, Marseille experienced Europe’s last outbreak of the bubonic plague. Outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever also contributed adversely to the city’s image elsewhere in France and Europe. In fact, its long experience defending itself against communicable diseases made the city a world leader in finding common action to save lives, as Camus insisted must occur in biological or political plague situations. Marseille developed innovative systems of quarantine and treatment. It created treatment facilities, lazarets, where patients were isolated from

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the general population. The first lazaret in Marseille was created in 1526 on the island of Pomègues. The city’s hard-won reputation as a center of medical science was not enhanced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Marseille microbiologist Didier Raoult insisted that one of Donald Trump’s highly touted remedies, hydroxychloroquine, could help cure the disease. Subsequent trials have proven that it cannot. Barbieri, R., and M. Drancourt. “Two Thousand Years of Epidemics in Marseille and the Mediterranean Basin.” New Microbes New Infections 26 (2018): S4–S9.

WARANDPOSTWARMARSEILLE

From the beginning of the Second World War to the dissolution of the French colonial empire in the 1960s, Marseille was France’s Shock City on the Mediterranean. From 1940 to 1943, it was a city of last hope for refugees of all descriptions who jammed the hotels and safe houses. Vichy officials and bureaucrats collaborated with German wishes or orders to identify and transport Jews, political dissidents, and many others. The American journalist Varian Fry developed a network that helped more than two thousand people escape to Spain, among them the artists Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp and the political theorist Hannah Arendt. Father Marie-Benoît directed his efforts to saving Jewish refugees who were not also notables. Marseille became a city of quotidian heroism and official cruelty. The

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figures who command the literature truly won their fame or infamy. Those who are best known, like Varian Fry, Walter Benjamin, or Anna Seghers, figure in popular literature and  film. The villains have largely receded into the scholarly literature. An excellent website from the Alliance Française, UK, offers succinct bios of some of the Marseille heroes of resistance and refugee rescue. See https://www.alliancefrancaise.london/Marseille-First- Capital- of-the-Resistance. php. Donna Ryan’s extremely thorough account of how Jews were hunted in Marseille is a seminal study of villainy but difficult not to put down in shame and horror. Fry, Varian. 1947. Assignment: Rescue. Foreword by Albert O. Hirschman. 1st ed. Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, October 22, 2013. Isenberg, Sheila. A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry. Plunkett Lake, 2017. Parrini, Jay. Benjamin’s Crossing: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. Ryan, Donna F. The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille: The Enforcement of Anti-Semitic Policies in Vichy France. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Segher, Anna. Transit. New York: NYRB, 2013. Zuccotti, Susan. Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands During the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

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ALGERIANIMMIGRATION

Marseille has a diverse Moslem population composed of people from all the nations of the Maghreb, but residents of Algerian origin are the most numerous. The late Abdelmalek Sayad is widely recognized as the finest scholar of Algerian migration. His interdisciplinary work, including sociology, anthropology, and oral history, is of great relevance to historians of colonial and postcolonial migration. The English translation by David Macy of Sayad’s La double absence (Paris, 1999)—The Suffering of the Immigrant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)—has a moving tribute to the author by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The French term l’immigration Algérienne has a double meaning: it can refer to immigration from Algeria to France or to the population of Algerians in France. As Sayad’s translator David Macy explains, “Standard English usage would of course speak of the ‘Algerian community in France.’ The term ‘community’ offends, however, the classic French notion of a secular and universalist republic [which] simply does not recognize the existence of ‘communities’ defined by ethnicity, culture, language or even gender.” It would be  difficult to overestimate the rancor and confusion this insistence creates in  French debates over integration and assimilation. Peraldi, Michel. “Algerian Routes: Emancipation, Deterritorialisation, and Transnationalism Through Suitcase Trade.” History & Anthropology 16, no. 1 (2005): 47–61.

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Silverstein, Paul A. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation. New Anthropologies of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

LABORANDCOLDWARPOLITICS

As we have seen in the epilogue, the vexed story of socialism and labor politics in Marseille continues to surprise, gratify, and dismay, depending where one stands on the city’s left-right political continuum. But the old anticommunist coalitions that brought a rump labor union, Force Ouvrière, to power in the city’s public sector working class will continue to bedevil wider reforms. Strikes by garbage collectors and street sweepers will continue to besmirch the city’s reputation. They will be sullen reminders of the Cold War and U.S. involvement in local Marseille politics. Freund, Andreas. “The Worker-Priest Movement in France Has Received New Papal Encouragement.” New York Times, May 27, 1979. Godard, Pierre, André Donzel, et al. Éboueurs de Marseille. Entre luttes syndicales et pratiques municipales. Éditions Syllepse, 2014. Loew, Father Jacques. Les Dockers de Marseille. Économie et Humanisme. Rhône: Arbresle, 1945. Marion, Georges. Gaston Defferre. Paris: Albin Michel, 1989. Morgan, Ted. A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone— Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1999.

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Nasiali, Minayo. Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship and Everyday Life in Marseille Since 1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Peraldi, Michel, and Michel Samson. Gouverner Marseille. Enquête sur les Mondes Politiques Marseillais. Paris: Éditions La Decouverte, 2005. Sembène, Ousmane. 1956. The Black Docker. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989.

ECOLOGYANDENVIRONMENT

Everywhere one turns in Marseille there are neighbors, labor union groups, and activists in organized collectives working plots, nourishing habitats, tending gardens, and otherwise taking local steps to address the global ecological crisis. The specifics of where they work have much to do with the history of settlement and industry along mountain streams like the Ruisseau des Aygalades or in the wild places that grow between highways and deserted factory lots. As the author and publisher Baptiste Lanaspeze observes about the hills that surround the city to the north and south, “one never knows too well where the city ends and nature begins.” His book Ville Sauvage (Actes Sud, 2011) offers an excellent overview of ecological thought and action in Marseilles. Wildproject, under Lanaspeze, has published an indispensable green guide to the city and its natural ecology: Petit atlas d’une villenature (Marseille: Wildproject, 2017). A more comprehensive treatment of the northern Mediterranean basin is A. T. Grove

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and Oliver Rackham, eds., The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). For the ecology of the Ruisseau des Aygalades I was fortunate to draw on the extensive analyses, often in the form of prose poetry, in Christine Breton’s collection Le livre du Ruisseau, Hôtel-du-Nord, Récits d’Hospitalité (Éd. Commune, 2011). I also greatly benefited from the immense slide collection the ecologist and urban planner Christian Tamisier kindly shared with me. My dear friend and colleague Samuel Bordreuil introduced me to the karst and the garrigue and took me on a tour of the Étang de Berre and the fiery industrial port of Fos.

SOCIALSCIENCEINMARSEILLE

Contemporary social scientists and journalists whose work focuses on Marseille have produced numerous in-depth studies of the city’s growth, its immigration, and its social problems. Among these scholars, I draw most heavily on the work of Michel Peraldi, Samuel Bordreuil, Gilles Suzanne, Claire Duport, Samia Chabani, and the late Michel Anselme. Their work offers close-up views of the enduring and changing features of the city’s social fabric. Their research contains a great deal of evidence on the vitality of local associations and the engagement of community activists and social workers in the  cités. Peraldi and Samson’s latest work explores the postNoailles political landscape, with emphasis on the emergence of grassroots collective action. For an understanding of music

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and social movements among Moslem youth, the Columbia University scholar Hishamn Aidi is an invaluable guide. Aidi, Hisham. Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture. New York: Vintage, 2014. Anselme, Michel. 2000. Du bruit à la parole. La scène politique des cités. La Tour d’Aigues: Aube. Bordreuil, Samuel. “De la densité habitante aux densités mouvantes: l’hyperurbanité. Développement périphérique et mobilité.” Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine 67 (1995): 5–14. Bordreuil, Samuel. “Plan de campagne, la ville résurgente.” In La ville émergente. Paris: Éditions du Puca, 2003. Peraldi, M., C. Duport, and M. Samson. Sociologie de Marseille. Paris: La Découverte, 2015. Peraldi, M., and M. Samson. Marseille en Marseille en résistances. Paris: La Découverte, 2020. Pujol, Phillipe. French déconnexion. Marseille: Wildproject, 2014. Samson, Michel, and Gilles Suzanne. À fond de cale, un siècle de jazz à Marseille (1920–2010). 1st ed. Marseille: Wildproject, 2005.

MARSEILLEINFILM

Beyond Marius, Fanny, and César, the films of the Pagnol trilogy, or the French Connection dramas, the wealth of film and

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photography featuring aspects of life in Marseille is daunting. I will only cite those I have drawn inspiration from for this book. Two films by the Marseille native, theater director, and cineaste René Allio (1924–1995) count among those in my “must-see” category. La vieille dame indigne (The shameless old lady, 1965) is based on an ironic tale of family life by Bertolt Brecht. Allio’s version is set in postwar Marseille. Madame Bertini, “Berth,” the heroine of this black-and-white cinema gem, is played by an extraordinary French actor, Louise Pauline Mainguené, known as Sylvie (1883–1970). Her Berth was a Marseillaise who would find a kindred spirit in my friend Annette Marconi. Both lived through the rebuilding of the city, and both were free spirits. As Allio’s narrator concludes at the film’s end: To see things rightly, she lived successively two lives: the first as a girl, a woman, and mother, and the second as Madame Berthe, a single person, without obligations, of modest means. The first lasted sixty years, the second about eighteen months. She had well savored [elle avait bien savouré] the long years of servitude and the brief months of liberty, and ate the bread of life up to the last crumbs.

Allio’s lyrical documentary L’ heure exquise takes the viewer through the Marseille of his childhood and a maze of walls, gates, and passages that continue to structure the city’s human and natural ecology. Allio’s 1991 version of the Seghers novel Transit captures the desperate tension of refugee Marseille.

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The Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy’s Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929), an impressionist tour around the Old Port and nearby areas at the end of the 1920s, is easily available on YouTube. I am captivated early in the film by the appearance of a band of Boyash gypsies and their young bear. Moholy-Nagy was struck by the city’s signature ferry bridge that spanned the entrance to the Old Port: The famous transbordeur bridge shines in the middle of the landscape. It comes and goes tirelessly from one bank to the  other. Foreigners admire its beauty. This suspended bridge is really a technical miracle of exceptional precision and finesse. The elegant construction, with steel bars supporting the movable bridge, offers an attractive show every time we have the pleasure of seeing the platform filled with men leaving for the other side, above the water, balancing and swaying softly.

Destroyed by the Germans in 1944, motorists now zip under the same narrows in a Defferre-era tunnel. No one feels nostalgia for the old moving platform. Voilà Marseille (1947), directed by Georges Baze, also on YouTube, is a propaganda film produced for the Marseille Mayoralty. It has exceptional footage of pre- and postwar Marseille, including the Liberation; coverage of the port’s destruction; and heroic sequences about rebuilding the city. It features a handsome, radical Mayor Carlino rolling up his sleeves.

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Robert Guédiguian’s Marius et Jeannette (1997) is among the best of this Marseille filmmaker’s strong feature films. He presents the harsh realities of working-class life in Marseille, but the love stories that feature his spouse, the actor Ariane Ascaride, make up for much of the pain. Elisabeth Leuvrey’s La traversée (2013) is about life on the ferry between Marseille and Algiers. On my “must-see” list, it is a powerful treatment of the transnational experiences of people with families and business on both sides of the Mediterranean. Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), his first feature film, is an intimate portrait of race and colonialism. A French family brings a young African woman to southern France to be their servant. She yearns to join life in the metropole but finds herself excluded and depressed. Denis Gheerbrant’s La république Marseille (2009) is a collection of documentaries featuring portraits of Marseille citizens: Rolf, a docker from L’Estaque confronts gentrification; a brilliant student of African origin talks about growing up in Les Rosiers, one of the large north side housing estates; retired dockers at their social club reflect on what could have been; women from the Cité Saint-Louis tend to their gardens. These masterful documentaries venture into some key Marseille social milieus. Unfortunately, they are not subtitled.

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INDEX

Aboulker, Andrée, 108–11 Académie des Sciences, Lettres et Arts de Marseille, 55– 60, 57 Akhenaton (Philippe Fragione), 86 alumina, 40–43; as boue rouge, 42, 46 Ambrosino, Quentin, 46 Anchorages (organization), 31 Arnoux-Pierre, Alexander, 143, 148, 153 Aygalades (meadows), 27 barquettes (boats), 134– 37 Basilica Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (cathedral), 10–11 Bastide, Paul, 112 Bataille, Paul, 126, 128– 29, 132 Benjamin, Walter, 8– 9, 89, 100 Biggie Smalls, 148 Billoux, François, 104 Boorstein, Daniel, 68 Bordreuil, Sam, 83, 139, 141–42

Bork and Company (boatyard), 134– 35 Boud’mer (organization), 135 boue rouge (alumina), 40–43, 42, 46 bouillabaisse, 138–41, 140 Boulanger, Patrick, 48–50, 53, 60 Breton, Christine, 20– 22, 24, 25, 29– 32; on Omar, 41; on Sylva, 33 Broad Channel Island, 149–50 Brooklyn, 150–51 Brooklyn Bridge, 151, 151 Brown, Irving, 107 Brown, Kenneth, 15–17, 63, 65– 69, 74; at collapse of buildings, 61– 62; in New York, 148 Candilis, Georges, 24, 28 Canebière (street), 14–15 cannabis market, 44–45 Carlini, Michèle, 106

INDEX

cathedral of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul (Église des Réformés), 15 Ceccaldi, Hubert, 47–49, 53–57, 59, 133; at Chez Fonfon, 139, 141 Chabani, Samia, 31 Chabert, Jean-Baptiste, 64 Chamber of Commerce (Marseille), 48–54 Chargeurs (firm), 53 Chargeurs Réunis (firm), 53 Charles-Roux, Edmonde, 113, 114 Chase, Karen, 9 Chez Bataille (restaurant), 124– 26, 128– 30, 132 Chez Fonfon (restaurant), 137–42, 140 Chez Madie Les Galinettes (restaurant), 10 Chez Madie (restaurant), 9, 10, 12–13 Cité Bassens (housing project), 43 Collège Rosa Parks (school), 27– 28 Communist Party (France), 104– 7, 111 Coney Island (Brooklyn), 150 Coppola, Jean-Marc, 72 COVID-19 pandemic, 26, 153 crao, 36– 38 Cristofol, Jean, 104, 105 CROS2 (Vincent Landry), see Landry, Vincent

drug market, 43–46 Duport, Claire, 44 Église des Réformés (cathedral of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul), 15 El Médioni, Maurice, 66 EuroMed (European and French Euroméditerranée) urban renewal project, 41; Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations in, 12; Ruisseau des Aygalades restoration in, 24– 27 Euthymènes, 53 Fabre, Cyprian, 50 Fabre, Henri, 51, 52 Fabre, Mario, 51 Fabre, Paul Cyprian, 51 Fabre family, 50–51 Fabre Line (firm), 51 Fifth of November Collective, 121, 121 Fisher, M. F. K., 138 Fittco, Lisa, 100 Force Ouvrière (French union), 107 Fortin, Olivia, 119– 20 Fragione, Philippe (Akhenaton), 86 Fraissinet, Jean Alfred, 51–53 François Premier, 10 Frankenheimer, John, 1 Freeport (New York), 144–45 French (language), 3, 14, 58; Académie des Sciences’s defense of, 56 Frey, Varian, 110 Friche la Belle de Mai, 82 Friedkin, William, 1 Frost, Robert, 48 Frye, Varian, 100

Defferre, Gaston, 102, 103–4, 107–15, 114 Dépardieu, Gerard, 113 Diderot, Denis, 142 dockers (longshoremen), 90– 91, 93– 99

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gangs, 44 garrigue, 19– 20 Gaudin, Jean-Claude, 70– 72; in election of 2020, 117; poster of, 71 Gaye, Félicité (Mama Africa), 74– 75 Ghali, Samia, 43, 45, 152; on collapse of Noailles buildings, 72; in election of 2020, 39, 119; on slag heap restoration, 154 Gino, 38, 77–80, 85–87 goats, 147 Goldenhar, Edith (Didi), 4, 9, 139 Grace (princess of Monaco; Grace Kelly), 132 Graubard, Paul, 9 Greens (party, France), 117 Guérini brothers, 105, 108

Jews: unpopularity of, 82; during World War II occupation, 9 John Paul II (pope; Karol Wojtyla), 99–100 Jolé, Michèle, 124– 26, 132 Kornblum, Eve, 148 Lanaspeze, Baptiste, 30– 32 Landry, Vincent (CROS2), 35, 78– 79, 79; in New York, 143, 145, 148, 150, 151, 151; after New York trip, 153 Lavessière, Paul-Hervé, 30 La Visitation (housing project), 22, 23, 32 La Viste (housing project), 24, 28– 31 Le Capucin (restaurant), 65 Les Gammares (organization), 153 Le Vallon des Auffes, 137– 38 Local (storefront), 33– 37, 77, 80 Loew, Jacques (Father), 93–100, 98 Logirem (firm), 35 Long Beach (New York), 144 longshoremen (dockers), 90– 91, 93– 99 Loubon, Émile, 26 Lovell, Anne, 139, 141–42 Lovestone, Jay, 107

Haussmann, Georges-Eugène (Baron), 115 Himmler, Heinrich, 9 Hisham, 38, 79–80 Hôtel-de-Ville (Marseille), 7–8 Hôtel-du-Nord Cooperative, 21, 22 Hôtel Mercure Marseille Canebière, 65 IAM (music group), 86 IMéRA (Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research), 4, 16 Intérieur du port de Marseille (painting, Vernet), 91, 91– 93 Ivory Coast, 3 Izzo, Jean-Claude, 64, 134, 156

Macron, Emmanuel, 74 Mad Mars (organization), 120– 21 Maison Thiers (Académie des Sciences headquarters), 56 Maison Empereur, 64– 65 Manhattan, 152 Manifesten (organization), 56 Marconi, Annette, 123– 32, 131 Marconi, Jean, 128– 32

Jean Jaurés Foundation, 119 Jean Mermoz (ship), 130– 32

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Marion, Georges, 104, 112 Marquand-Gaiard, Pierre, 106 Marseille Chamber of Commerce, 48–54 Martinez, Christiane, 23– 24, 35, 80–82 Massilia Sound Systems (music group), 86 Maupassant, Guy de, 136 McKay, Claude, 7, 8, 44 Meany, George, 106– 7 Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research (IMéRA), 4, 16 Merrick (New York), 144–45 Miller, Peter, 68 MOH, Mohammad, 84–87 Moses, Robert, 115, 144 murders, 45–46 Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM), 12

Oberlander, Jacquelyn, 147–48 Oberlander, Philip, 145 Old Port (Marseille), 7 Olympique Marseille, 14 Omar, 41, 43, 78, 80

Naess, Arne, 31 Nathan’s (restaurant, New York), 150 New Orleans (Louisiana), 142 New York, 2, 4; development under Robert Moses of, 115; Marseille reunion in, 143– 52, 151 Noailles, Jacques de, 64 Noailles (Marseille), 62– 65; collapse of buildings in, 61– 62, 70– 73; Fifth of November Collective in, 121, 121 Norman J. Levy Park (Merrick, New York), 145–47

Q

Pagnol, Marcel, 45–46 Parc Billoux, 24 Paris Commune (1871), 56–57 Payan, Benoît, 118, 154–55 Peace Corps, 3 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de, 67– 69 Peraldi, Michel, 45, 73 Pétain, Marshal, 110 Pitti, Jay, 145–46 Pius XII (pope), 99 pizza, 101 Pouillon, Fernand, 9 Printemps Marseillais (political coalition), 117–20, 154 Prunete, Olivier, 130 public housing, 35; drug dealing in, 44–45 Pujol, Philippe, 44, 45 Pythéas, 53–54 Radio Galère (radio station), 82–87, 85 Rainer (prince, Monaco), 132 Ravier, Stéphane, 38–40, 72 Reinhardt, Django, 81 Resistance (France, during WW II), 110–11 Rock Paper Scissors (video and film production company), 148 Roma (gypsies), 81–82

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Rubirola, Michèle, 31, 117–18, 120– 22, 154–55 rue de Lyon, 89 Ruisseau des Aygalades (stream), 19– 20, 24– 27, 30, 40, 48; restoration of, 153

unions, 106– 7 United States, France occupied by, 98– 99 Vassal, Martine, 118, 120, 122 Vernet, Joseph, 91, 91– 93 Voltaire, 56, 58–59 Vue de Marseille prise des Aygalades un jour de marché (painting, Loubon), 26

Saints Peter and Paul Mission to Workers, 99 Sammy Sam, 83–87, 85 Samson, Michel, 20– 21 Santa Claus, 37– 38 Second Chance Academy, 155 Seghers, Anna, 100, 101 Sembène, Ousmane, 93 Socialist Party (France), 109 Swaters, Paly, 112 Sylva, Jean, 33– 39, 43, 46, 79, 80; in New York, 143–45, 147, 150, 151, 151; after New York trip, 152, 153, 154; on Radio Galère, 85, 87; on Radio Galère musicians, 84; record company of, 77– 78

Weil, Simone, 100 Wildproject (publishing imprint), 32 Williams, Terry, 43 wine scandal, 111–12 Wojtyla, Karol (Pope John Paul II), 99–100 women, in Marseille politics, 118, 122 World War II; Jean Marconi during, 129; Marseille during, 97– 98; Nazi occupation of France during, 9, 100–101; Resistance during, 110–11

Tarabeux, Xavier, 62 Thiers, Adolphe, 56–57 Trump, Donald, 58–59

Yellow Vest movement (Les Gilets Jaunes), 70

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