The Riviera, Exposed

An Ecohistory of Postwar Tourism and North African Labor

Stephen L. Harp

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781501763014
• eBook ISBN: 9781501763038
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

A sweeping social and environmental history, The Riviera, Exposed illuminates the profound changes to the physical space that we know as the quintessential European tourist destination. Stephen L. Harp uncovers the behind-the-scenes impact of tourism following World War II, both on the environment and on the people living and working on the Riviera, particularly North African laborers, who not only did much of the literal rebuilding of the Riviera but also suffered in that process.

Outside of Paris, the Riviera has been the most visited region in France, depending almost exclusively on tourism as its economic lifeline. Until recently, we knew a great deal about the tourists but much less about the social and environmental impacts of their activities or about the life stories of the North African workers upon whom the Riviera's prosperity rests. The technologies embedded in roads, airports, hotels, water lines, sewers, beaches, and marinas all required human intervention—and travelers were encouraged to disregard this intervention. Harp's sharp analysis explores the impacts of massive construction and public works projects, revealing the invisible infrastructure of tourism, its environmental effects, and the immigrants who built the Riviera.

The Riviera, Exposed unearths a gritty history, one of human labor and ecological degradation that forms the true foundation of the glamorous Riviera of tourist mythology.

CHAPTER 1

Building Hotels and Housing for the Rich and the Rest

In 1930 Jean Vigo’s À Propos de Nice appeared. It is a low-budget silent documentary. The film is brilliant, as Vigo manages to juxtapose the wealthy tourists who arrived on the Riviera to stroll on the promenade des Anglais, gamble, and dine with the workers who served them, cleaned up after them, and built Carnival floats for them. À Propos de Nice begins with an aerial view of the city, and Vigo shows the villas west of the Paillon River, often built and occupied by foreigners in Nice, as well as the huge palace hotels in which many stayed the winter. The visual record of how Nice looked from on high is reason enough to watch the film. Almost none of those villas still exists. Blocks of apartments and high rises now stand in their place. Yet, though just twenty minutes long, À Propos de Nice offers more. An anarchist, Vigo challenges us to go beyond the platitudes about this supposed paradise invented by well-off foreign visitors by focusing on workers as well as tourists.1 Following in the footsteps of Vigo, this chapter explores how changes in tourism influenced housing for both tourists and residents of the Riviera.

After World War II, the arrival of unprecedented numbers of tourists did much to deepen a severe housing crisis on the Riviera, a shortage that took most of the trente glorieuses to resolve. Postwar expectations on the part of tourists led to two developments. On the one hand, tourists who wanted to spend some time increasingly rented apartments, avoiding hotels entirely. On the other hand, tourists who stayed in hotels only did so for a few days. Demand from tourists simultaneously undercut the traditional hotel industry and put considerable price pressure on the housing market. Elsewhere in France, housing for locals and for tourists were normally separate issues. On the Riviera, due to the economic dominance of tourism, they were inseparable. The old palace hotels and grand hotels became apartments for the wealthy, renovated to include new bathrooms for second homeowners accustomed to amenities in their principal residences. Strong demand for these apartments and for new construction pushed up housing prices for everyone else. In a period when the Fourth Republic worked to guarantee French citizens the “right to comfort,” interpreted as a right to decent housing with modern conveniences, many locals on the Riviera waited several years for that comfort, in large part because tourists and second homeowners got it first.2 Even though most postwar tourists came in summer, their numbers and their preferences nevertheless affected the housing market for the rest of the year.

The Summer Season

After World War II, the summer tourist season, concentrated in July and August, definitively replaced the long winter season of the Belle Époque. Although popular histories like to credit Gerald and Sara Murphy or Coco Chanel with that shift, the reality is more complicated. Summertime tanning and swimming were coming into vogue generally in interwar France.3 Hotels on the Riviera began opening for the summer season in the late 1920s and 1930s. Then in 1936, the Popular Front not only granted French employees two weeks of paid vacation but also subsidized trainloads of tourists to take their first trip to the Mediterranean. After the war, in the midst of the French postwar baby boom, increasing numbers of French salaried employees—though not most workers or even most French in the 1950s—went on vacation in the summer during the school break.4 Factories and most shops closed for these annual vacations. July and August became the high tourist season across France.5

The change had long-term implications for the Riviera. Postwar tourists sought the beach. In Cannes luxury hotels already lined the Croisette and did well in the summer. In Nice some long-established hotels had excellent locations next to the sea; the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, which had hosted Henri Matisse in the 1910s and a drunken F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, sat on the quai des États-Unis just across from the beach. The Hôtel Ruhl, the Hôtel Negresco, the Palais de la Méditerranée, and a host of lesser-known hotels were on the promenade des Anglais. However, hotels far from the beach suffered, particularly during the Depression. On the Cimiez hill, 3.5 kilometers from the beach, the Hôtel Regina had already become a luxury apartment building in the late 1930s. The Hôtel Majestic, 1.3 kilometers from the beach, also closed before the war and became an upscale apartment house in the late 1940s.

After World War II, hotels had overcapacity in the winter and under-capacity in the summer. About one-half ran permanent deficits after the war, despite the summer crowds. For about 270 days per year, hotels could not cover their costs. But for about ninety days a year, there were too few rooms. In 1951 there were so many tourists in Nice during August that on any given day two to three hundred people could not find rooms, sleeping instead on park benches and the beach. There was so much demand in August 1955 that people were sleeping in bathtubs, cars, and outside, in parks and on the beach. In August 1957 there were twelve thousand hotel rooms with eighteen thousand beds in Nice, and there were no vacancies. In the 1950s and early 1960s, makeshift dormitories appeared in public spaces, a seminary and a convent rented out beds, and a private school even rented benches. The tourist office sent visitors needing rooms as far inland as Digne-les-Bains, 130 kilometers away. The few campgrounds in the region had three times the number of visitors that they were authorized to accept. Henri Tschann, the head of the Syndicat d’initiative, the association charged with promoting tourism in Nice, called the rush of tourists an “asphyxiation” of the region.6

The relatively short but intense summer season put pressure on the local tourist industry. How many times would visitors be willing to sleep on benches as alternative destinations emerged? As the sea, sun, and sand displaced the social scene, the Riviera increasingly faced competition from several quarters. Accessibility by train had opened the Riviera to northern Europeans in the nineteenth century when there was no other viable alternative just an overnight train ride from Paris. After the war, air travel changed everything. Nice got a civilian airport after the war, but the flight time from London to Mallorca was only five minutes longer. Costs were lower in Italy and Spain, and Mallorca became an especially popular destination with budget travelers. As British charter companies packaged airfare and hotels, they brought the cost down to half that of a trip to Nice. Since Britons long constituted the most numerous foreigners on the Riviera, the impact was considerable. In the early 1960s Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey were also competing destinations. Meanwhile, Italy, unlike France, used Marshall Plan monies for hotel renovations, giving Italian hotel owners an edge in attracting tourists to new hotels with amenities such as bathrooms.7 Among national leaders, concern that too many French and other northern Europeans were taking the train or their cars to Spain, bypassing France, led to the massive development of the Languedocian coast.8 Hotel owners felt the need to adapt as quickly as possible.

Hotels, Old and New

In myriad ways, hotels on the Riviera were ill suited to postwar demand. Postwar tourists did not stay long in hotels. Before World War I, visitors spent several weeks to six months in a single hotel, with the full pension (that is, taking their meals in the hotel dining room). Although the duration was already shorter in the interwar years, it got worse after the war. As the head of the hotel, café, and restaurant employees union explained in 1952, “in the day, tourists arrived from England, Paris, and beyond, with trunks for a stay of several weeks. Today they arrive with a suitcase for two or three days.” In the mid-1950s receipts from the taxe de séjour, the room tax paid for each night for each visitor, indicated an average stay in Nice of 4.1 days. However, couples often filled out only one form, and Americans often neglected to fill it out at all. The average stay was actually two to three days. The Hôtel Beau Rivage is the sole hotel for which we still have the logs of visitors; they confirm that many tourists stayed only a night or two, balancing out those who stayed a bit longer. By contrast, when Henri Matisse avoided Paris during the last year of World War I, he stayed at the hotel from 25 December 1917 to 4 April 1918.9

On the axis from Paris to Rome, French and foreigners saw the Riviera en route to other places. Americans and Britons in particular opted for whirlwind European tours by the mid-1950s, and Paris and Nice were usually on the itinerary, as were Italian and German locales. By 1960, 90 percent of Americans and Britons came on organized tours, which often did eight countries in eight days. For South Americans, the Riviera was a regular stopover between important Catholic sites, notably Lourdes and Rome.10

Short stays had serious implications for hotels. Henri Tschann’s experience as manager of the Splendid stressed just how thoroughly hotel keeping changed on the Riviera. “If, in the old days, certain hotels that I know could prosper with 600 clients per year who stayed from one to six months, [today] I am obliged to find 17,000 travelers each year. Each day we have to clean 500 sheets and 2,000–3,000 towels. We’ve already made commitments for next year, and we foresee 225 groups.” The scale was enormous. “While just a few years prior, group size consisted of thirty to thirty-five people, now it is often fifty, and sometimes when they come by airplane, one hundred.”11

The very architecture of the old palace hotels and grand hotels posed a problem for short-term tourists interested in quickly experiencing the city rather than being walled off with other tourists. Upstairs, floors had room for Belle Époque travelers with domestic staff. Large suites faced south, with gorgeous views of the sea. Servants had tiny rooms to the north. Of the 110 rooms of the Hôtel Luxembourg, only eighty could serve as hotel rooms by the 1950s; the others were miniscule servants’ quarters. Downstairs, the grand hotels from the Belle Époque separated foreign travelers from the locals, as visitors had comprised an expatriate community closed in on itself. Iron grillwork separated the building from the street. Huge staircases, cathedral-like ceilings in dining rooms, enormous lobbies, and other common spaces took up much square footage. Postwar tourists often avoided them entirely in favor of time alone in their rooms and time outside the hotel.12

Postwar visitors took their meals in restaurants, rubbing shoulders with locals in pursuit of regional cuisine. Joseph Mora, vice president of the local Syndicat de l’hôtellerie, insisted in 1956 that tourists were becoming much more individualistic. With the exception of some Britons and French, post-war tourists did not want the full pension (Russians, so numerous among those taking the full pension in the Belle Époque, were rare during the Cold War).13 Grand hotels carried the considerable expense of the kitchen and dining room without using them to capacity. There were no easy options for owners of the grand old palace hotels. Forcing tourists to eat in the hotel would drive away some customers. Closing the restaurant could hurt business by not having a restaurant, or room service, desired by customers at least some of the time. One frequent solution in new construction was to advertise the establishment as a hotel-restaurant with the dining room near the street entrance. Customers could patronize either the hotel or the restaurant and ignore the other.14

Hotel employees felt the pinch as existing hotels adapted to changes after the Second World War. As late as the 1920s, many hotels closed for the summer, but hotel directors sometimes moved employees to their northern hotels, as in the mountains, open for summer months and closed during the winter. Some hotel employees had year-round or nearly year-round employment. The summer openings on the Riviera theoretically promised, in the 1930s, year-round employment on the Riviera itself. However, in practice, the advent of the summer season, especially when combined with many customers’ disdain for full pensions in grand hotels, led to unprecedented unemployment for hotel employees. Official unemployment figures in the hotel industry essentially doubled between February 1946 and February 1952, which was a likely undercount as it included only those employees who filed for unemployment benefits. Now hotels closed for the winter months. In 1950 even well-known Cannes hotels, such as the Martinez, the Carlton, and the Grand Hôtel, closed during the winter for periods ranging from two to five months. In Nice only the huge hotels, such as the Ruhl and the Splendid (buoyed by visitors to the famed Carnival in Nice), remained open all year. The head of the hotel, café, and restaurant employees’ union estimated that there had been fifteen thousand employees working year-round in the hotel sector in Alpes-Maritimes before World War II, already a period of economic depression, but there were only about ten thousand in 1951, and fully 60 percent of those worked fewer than six months during the calendar year 1951. He argued that the situation was even worse than it appeared, as widespread unemployment made it possible for hotel owners to limit wage increases during the inflationary postwar years. Moreover, unemployment hit hotel employees harder than other workers, as many lived on the hotel premises when it was open and ate hotel food without having to pay.15

Nice in particular became a less upscale destination than it had been in the early twentieth century, welcoming more French travelers, even if foreigners were better represented here than in France as a whole. In 1958, when about two-thirds of visitors were French, Tschann bemoaned that there was “now an enormous preponderance of French clientele, which is explained by the fact that we have now become essentially a city of budget vacations [for the French].” Despite the rapid increase in the number of tourists to Nice after World War II, they spent less on hotels. To use Tschann’s acute awareness of social class, “the clientele in Nice has doubled in the past ten years, but its quality declines more and more.” Tschann noted that between 1927 and 1958, the number of luxury hotels declined by 60 percent, while the number of hotels of the lowest category, the equivalent of one-star hotels, grew by 10 percent. Meanwhile, mostly foreigners stayed in the remaining luxury hotels. For every two French people staying in a luxury hotel there were nine foreigners. Foreign visitors were, on average, much better heeled than French ones; in 1961 the average American tourist spent 1,300 francs during a trip to the Riviera while the average French tourist spent only 600.16

Hotel owners actively sought American tourists. They were less likely to be the wealthy of the Belle Époque, as the favorable exchange rate made it possible for larger numbers of middle-class Americans to see the Riviera. After World War II, the majority of Americans came in tour groups. The scale was such that a single Amer...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Privacy
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Hidden Riviera
• 1. Building Hotels and Housing for the Rich and the Rest
• 2. Reconstructing the Riviera, Sleeping in Squats and Shantytowns
• 3. Providing Potable Water and WCs
• 4. Fattening Up Beaches and Polluting the Mediterranean
• 5. Erecting an Airport and Living with Jet Planes
• 6. Remaking Roads and Disciplining Drivers
• Epilogue: The More Things Change
• Notes
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index