MARSEILLE MIX
This extract from William Firebrace’s meandering tale of France’s second largest city explores Marseille’s many identities, from sleepy provincial town to haven for gangsters and artists, documenting its extensive array of different foods, landscapes and cultures.
La Canebière was once the city’s finest street, but today it appears in no way distinguished. Outside a now-defunct cinema at its eastern end, some teenagers hang out, drinking beer, smoking dope. A couple of thin dogs wander around occasionally whining. Some hand-painted cinema posters still hang above the cinema door: L’Attaque des Gabians with a girl sheltering from pigeons, Exil Mars with a UFO, Jonquilles Sauvages with a loving couple and flowers, Tricherie à El Paso with a moustachioed Omar Sharif waving a pistol. Horror, science-fiction, romance, western – a fair cinematic range. No one pays much attention to the drinkers on the pavement and they disturb no one.
Gibassié (Provençal: gibassié), cake, crispy pastry with anisePompe (Provençal: poumpo), folded pastry
A few houses further along is an old-fashioned café selling traditional cakes, cream-topped flans, pastries in established forms, dry biscuits. The back room, decorated in a rather fustian rococo style, has a certain faded elegance. Its clientele, old ladies drinking coffee, look up rather doubtfully as a visitor enters. Usually there is an uncomfortable silence, as if everyone had forgotten how to speak and communication were limited to signs or whispers. A few doors down there is a second-hand bookshop, now closed, its facade constructed from outsized wooden books, a comment perhaps on the city’s attitude to reading. Further down La Canebière, there are fast-food shops, superettes, some newsagents selling lottery tickets, cheap Turkish and North African cafés. The street is actually very lively but not in the expected way; it is not glamorous but occupied by a restless crowd, moving to and fro, everyone on their way to somewhere else.
Not so long ago, up until the 1950s, La Canebière was lined with hotels, luxurious cafés and grand shops, another element in a mythical Marseille. The street was described by the journalist Albert Londres in his book Marseille Port du Sud (1927) as a meeting place for the world, where if you waited long enough you would meet the people you knew, a kind of holy place in the religion of travellers, just as Mecca is the heart of the Muslim world. La Canebière was where Stendhal, Benjamin, Conrad, Flaubert and any number of other distinguished travel writers once idled, and was celebrated as the street that ran down out of what was then almost the countryside to the port, the ships, the Transporter Bridge framing the exit to the sea. The trees occupying the eastern end of the street, by the Allées de Meilhan, were compared to the masts of the ships in the harbour – at one end of the street was the small grove, fixed in place, at the other end their marine equivalent, ready to move on. But when one walks La Canebière today one realises that it can never have been very wide, or very grand, even in its heyday – perhaps it needed to be thought of as magnificent even when it was really quite unspectacular.
But ultimately who cares? Marseille was built for travellers, and until very recently never cared much about tourists. Nearby cities like Nîmes and Arles are distinguished by their impressive Roman buildings, but Marseille demolished its monuments from antiquity long ago. The city has never valued its own material history, or perhaps has deliberately sought to destroy or conceal it, to move on to the next phase which might be financially more rewarding. The monuments served no useful purpose except as quarries for building other structures. The wealthy shipowners preferred to build their bastides out in the countryside, with a park where they could hunt and enjoy the rural life, rather than enrich the town with pompous houses and palaces. A practical people mostly lacking religious fervour, the Marseillais constructed warehouses, refineries and dockside cranes rather than fine churches. The city has had its writers and painters, but has never had much of an interest in the kind of art and culture that hangs on walls or is written down. Its culture is alive in the way of life of its people. Marseille is a Mediterranean vernacular city where mass is more important than the individual.
At first one can make no sense of the different people, the variety of buildings, the collisions between different cultures and different periods. It just seems a mess, threatening, best avoided. But after a while, if one avoids making any judgements between what is acceptable versus unacceptable, certain cultural categories emerge, some clear, some hidden, some real, some invented, some growing, some in decline. These cultures reveal themselves in any number of ways. Not so much in the architecture, the buildings of the city, which require large economic forces and are for the most part controlled by those above, but at the level of what people can achieve as individuals and groups – clothing, language, sport, street life, family life, community, gangs, decoration, food. All these cultures are cross-cultures, absorbed into the city and then blended with others. A catalogue of these cross-breeds begins idly enough, but soon swells and can reach no particular end.
Occitan-Mediterranean-NostalgicRap-Frenetic-IntellectualNorth African-CommercialLevantine-BusinessParisian-RetiredGreek-ClassicSun-Sea-BeachFrench Connection-DocklandCinematic-AmericanFree Republic-SouthernEgyptian-CopticBourgeois-Hidden-VillaArmenian-Nationalist-Soviet-ExileEast Asian-BudgetCommercialNeapolitan-Sicilian-SardinianGlobal Business-FuturistNorthern-Industrial-CollapseBouillabaisse-TouristicSex for Sale-StreetlifeByzantine-Saccharine-ImperialCorsican-Chicago-GangsterVillage-HomeSweet HomeAffluent-Brazilian-CurvaceousRationalist-RectangularSleepy-SuburbanFascist Italian-Neo-modernistSenegalese-DigitalCalifornian-FreewayUnlocatedUniversalUnknown
These terms may be assorted in other ways, other mixes, other multiple additions: Armenian-Cinematic-Islamic-Industrial-Senegalese-Universal-Bourgeois.
It would be useful to try to draw the lines between these cultural categories more precisely, in the same way that zoologists or botanists distinguish precisely between genera or species. But while their origins can somehow be rationally traced, the categories themselves are not so easily defined – one drifts easily enough into another, crosses over into and dissolves with a category to which it seems opposed. The result, however, is never a mushy indistinct grey or the result of everything being mixed up together. Instead, the cultures of Marseille appear more like a shifting mosaic, or a screen of pixels, where each piece has a different colour and position, each reacting against its neighbours. This pattern is in a constant state of change, as new, sometimes antagonistic, cultures are gradually assimilated. When it was proclaimed in 2009 that Marseille would be European City of Culture, along Rue des Récolettes, just beyond the corner building with a mosque, the wall was fly-posted with cheap posters: quelles cultures pour quelle ville de la culture?
These various cultures are associated with the mix of people in the city, a mix which has been continuously revised, as one group succeeds another, being perceived first as immigrants and then muddling in before becoming inhabitants. It is in part this mix which gives the city its feel of not quite belonging, and which causes such considerable controversy over its nature.
No one knows exactly when the first people arrived in Marseille. Its timeline predates the recording of stories or the existence of history. But there is, as always, a myth of the founding of the city, an invented origin. This origin shifts depending on just who is telling the tale, and its importance lies not so much in the truth of the story as in the way the choice of myth reflects on the present. In Marseille, the accepted myth is based on the story of Greek settlers arriving from the city of Phocea, in the Levant, and founding a trading city. This myth is so popular that today the French refer to Marseille as La Ville Phocéenne, the Phocean city, and to its population (and football team) as the Phocéens. According to the story, the Greek sailor Procis – an outsider arriving by ship from Phocea – was chosen in marriage by the Ligurian princess Glyptis – the insider from the people cultivating the land – thus conveniently initiating the city with a mix of the people of the sea and of the land, the male and the female, the settled and the wandering, the royal and the commoner. Procis was given some land beside the harbour, and set out the boundaries of the city.
Like all myths, this is a comfortable invention, for it places Marseille in safe hands, with the civilised Greeks, the so-called founders of Western civilisation. If the Greeks founded Marseille then it must be respectable. The Ligurians were a people of uncertain origins, possibly Celtic, whose language is unknown, and who are therefore identified solely by what others have said about them. Since their language perished and they left behind no stories of their own, they have little part in the history of the city. And if it were the barbaric Ligurians – clearly here before the Greeks – who lie at the origin of the city, then the beginning would hardly be so fine, and the whole subsequent enterprise would be in doubt. According to this myth, Provence as a whole is still seen as a zone relating first to classical Greece, and then to Rome, uninfluenced by the diverse Mediterranean cultures to the south. In the mid-20th century, however, this legend was developed in a way that defined those who did not emerge from this limited set of origins as outsiders. In Marseille quart nord (2009), Benito Pelegrín – who came to Marseille as a boy with his family, Republican refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War – tells of how the poor immigrants of different nationalities were encouraged at one moment during an election in the 1950s to consider themselves Greeks because the Greeks had invented democracy and were therefore superior to the ignorant Spaniards and Italians.
All images © William Firebrace, courtesy the MIT Press