How the French Riviera Got Its Glitz

Even in the low season, the streets of Cannes are packed with well-off foreigners. Jolly English chatter rings out in restaurants along the beach, where British and American tourists gulp down oysters and crepes at all hours of the day, washing them down with gin and tonics and generous servings of white wine.

These days, the city is synonymous with the Cannes Film Festival—the glitzy annual event that begins Tuesday, with its usual whirlwind of red carpets, high-profile screenings, and fancy galas. But the area’s reputation long predates the festival. For nearly two centuries, Cannes and the rest of the French Riviera, or Côte d’Azur, have been a place for wealthy foreigners to flaunt their affluence, give in to temptations, and indulge in guilt-free frivolity.

Once Upon a Time World: The Dark and Sparkling Story of the French Riviera, Jonathan Miles, Atlantic Books, 464 pp., £22, May 2023

The tale of how this remote stretch of coast was discovered, began luring the rich and famous to its shores, and ultimately became legend is the subject of a new book by Jonathan Miles, Once Upon a Time World: The Dark and Sparkling Story of the French Riviera, published this month in Britain and billed as “the second volume of an informal trilogy dedicated to phenomenal places created by strangers.”

The Riviera, in Miles’s telling, owes much of its fame to outsiders, particularly rich Britons in the 19th century who fell for its sunshine and crystalline sea. Soon, their luxurious villas popped up over the hills just above the coast. The signs of this first rendezvous between the Riviera and foreign elites are still visible today. When I visited Cannes’s Grand Jas Cemetery on a quiet Sunday morning in late April, I found myself surrounded by tombs of 19th-century Englishmen who spent their final days on the Riviera, drawn to the supposed healing powers of its temperate climate.

Soon enough, the construction of various casinos, including the world-famous one in Monte Carlo, and the expansion of French railways helped transform the Riviera from a peaceful oasis for the unwell to a bustling hub of glitz and glamor. In Cannes alone, Miles writes, 11 hotels were built in the 1860s, 22 in the 1870s, and 14 in the 1890s.

After the British, it didn’t take long for the Côte d’Azur to attract others. By the turn of the century, Americans and Russians had joined the party. In the first half of the 20th century, the Riviera became a unique microcosm of global elites, who flocked to its shores to “spend and misbehave” and “enjoy and forget,” Miles writes.

In this “aristocratic clusterfuck,” as Miles puts it, excessive behavior and bizarre characters were the norm, and the author clearly had the time of his life describing them at length, from the roller-coaster lives of the famous Belle Époque courtesans La Belle Otero and Liane de Pougy to the star-studded wedding of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and Bianca Pérez-Mora in Saint-Tropez in 1971.

Perhaps Miles even enjoyed himself a little too much: The stories of romance, intrigue, gambling, and heavy drinking are so many that his nearly 400-page history can feel a little repetitive at times. Yet Once Upon a Time World is much more than a book-sized gossip column. Miles’s whirlwind of characters coalesces into a narrative of booms and busts throughout the decades: the highs of the Belle Époque, the Roaring ’20s, and the 1950s—when Hollywood stars took the area’s glamor to a new level—but also the lows of both World Wars and the Great Depression.

Indeed, the Riviera wasn’t sheltered from harsh world events. During World War II, for instance, it saw a fierce resistance movement against the Nazi occupation and was the site of a large-scale Allied landing shortly after D-Day in the summer of 1944. Still, the Riviera never failed to recover its usual joie de vivre as soon as the worst was over.

And it wasn’t just a land of frivolity. As Miles illustrates, the Côte d’Azur has long been fertile ground for Western intellectual and artistic life. Philosophers, poets, composers, and artists were among its regular guests. Whether they were looking for inspiration or simply a good time, the Riviera left its mark on their work.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Miles recounts, spent several winters in Nice, “overwhelmed by the landscape and climate” and writing part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra there. American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote much of The Great Gatsby from the coast, where his and his wife Zelda’s alcohol-fueled behavior became legendary. Half a century later, another great of American literature, James Baldwin, moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he would settle for the rest of his life. “He became part of the local community—which, in turn, became part of him,” Miles writes.

But more than anyone else, it seems, it was painters who were inspired by the region. Some of Miles’s best pages are devoted to French artist Henri Matisse and the Fauves—a group of post-impressionists who, as Miles explains, expressed “their joy in the south by using an intense range of colour and simplified, distorted or blurred forms.”

The book points out that great artists left their mark on the Riviera, too—even in its less touristy locales. As I walked around the small commune of Vallauris, just a few miles inland from Cannes, it felt a world away from its showy neighbor; lower-middle-class white people share the town with large communities from sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. (Unsurprisingly, the far right is extremely popular there.) Yet Vallauris boasts a statue by Pablo Picasso in its main square, as well as a chapel with his monumental “War and Peace” painted panels and scores of ceramic vases produced by the Spaniard during his seven-year stay in town in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Miles rightly points out that this tiny strip of land has for too long been the center of a cultural phenomenon disproportionate to its size—and is now paying the price. In recent weeks, water scarcity in the area has sparked a fierce debate in local media over whether hotels and restaurants should be spared rationing measures that may be imposed in the near future. Environmental activists have slammed the proposal as an unacceptable double standard and demanded a cap on the number of tourists instead.

Yet the fact that resources are increasingly stretched is also a sign that the appeal of the French Riviera to outsiders remains largely intact. The 2022 tourist season on the coast was “exceptional,” tourism industry representatives have said, with 6 million visitors and hotels more packed than they have been in decades. Local papers, just as in the Riviera’s heyday, continue to be filled with chronicles of exclusive mundane events—as well as sordid stories of sex and crime.

And, of course, the Cannes Film Festival works wonders to prop up the Riviera’s glitzy image, kicking off the high season when upper-class tourists arrive in droves, eager to try their luck in casinos and willing to pay through the nose for a room with a view on Cannes’s Croisette Boulevard.

To be sure, the “stupendous majesty of Nature” that burst upon French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz “with greater force than ever before” as he visited the Riviera in the 1830s has now become, at least in part, a concrete jungle. “Money—big money, dirty money—was studded into every corner and aspect of the coast,” Miles writes. “Everybody had to be here, and there were too many everybodys building on land that should have been left alone.”

But while the golden age of the French Riviera may indeed be long gone, as you stroll in its towns and on its beaches, the simple truth remains that, as Miles put it, this “sunny coast lifts the spirit.”