This coastline was one of the first modern resort areas. It began as a winter health resort for the British upper class at the end of the 18th century. With the arrival of the railway in the mid-19th century, it became the playground and vacation spot of British, Russian, and other aristocrats, such as Queen Victoria and King Edward VII, when he was Prince of Wales. In the summer, it also played home to many members of the Rothschild family. In the first half of the 20th century it was frequented by artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham and Aldous Huxley, as well as wealthy Americans and Europeans. After World War II it became a popular tourist destination and convention site. Many celebrities, such as Elton John and Brigitte Bardot, have homes in the region. Officially, the Côte d'Azur is home to 163 nationalities with 83,962 foreign residents, although estimates of the number of non-French nationals living in the area are often much higher. Its largest city is Nice,
which has a population of 347,060 (2006). The city is the center of a
communauté urbaine – Nice-Côte d'Azur – bringing together 24 communes
and over 500,000 inhabitants and 933 080 in the urban area.. The French Riviera surrounds the principality of Monaco with a total population of over two million. It also contains the seaside resorts of Cap-d'Ail, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Antibes, Juan-les-Pins, Cannes, Saint-Raphaël, Fréjus, Sainte Maxime and Saint-Tropez, It is also home to a high-tech/science park or technopole at Sophia-Antipolis (north of Antibes) and a research and technology center at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis. The region has 35,000 students, of whom 25% are working towards a doctorate. The French Riviera is a major yachting and cruising area with several marinas along its coast. According to the Côte d'Azur Economic Development Agency, each year the Riviera hosts 50% of the world's super-yacht fleet, with 90% of all super-yachts visiting the region's coast at least once in their lifetime. As a tourist center, it benefits from 300 days of sunshine per year, 71 miles of coastline and beaches, 18 golf courses, 14 ski resorts and 3,000 restaurants. Origin of Name The name was given to the coast by the writer Stéphen Liégeard in his book, La Côte d’azur, published in December 1887. Liégeard was born in Dijon, in the French department of Côte-d'Or, and adapted that name by substituting the azure blue colour of the Mediterranean for the gold of Côte-d'Or. The term French Riviera is typical of English use. It was built by analogy with the term Italian Riviera, which extends east of the French Riviera (from Ventimiglia to La Spezia). As early as the 19th century, the British referred to the region as the Riviera or the French Riviera, usually referring to the eastern part of the coast, between Monaco and the Italian border. Originally, riviera is an Italian common name which means "coastline". In Occitan (Niçard and Provençal) and French, the only usual names are Còsta d'Azur in Occitan and Côte d'Azur in French. A name like "French Riviera" (Ribiera Francesa in Occitan, Riviera Française in French) is unusual and sounds odd; it could only work as a word-to-word translation of the British point of view. For instance, in French, "Riviera Française" is found in the online Larousse encyclopedia to refer to the holidays of a group of English workers (moreover, in Occitan, the word ribiera "coastline" mostly works as a common name, whereas in French, the old-fashioned term Rivière de Gênes was used to refer to the Italian Riviera around Genoa). 19th Century In 1864, five years after Nice became part of France following the Second Italian War of Independence the first railway was completed, making Nice and the Riviera accessible to visitors from all over Europe. One hundred thousand visitors arrived in 1865. By 1874, residents of foreign enclaves in Nice, most of whom were British, numbered 25,000.
The French Riviera soon became a popular destination for European royalty. Just days after the railway reached Nice in 1864, Tsar Alexander II of Russia visited on a private train, followed soon afterwards by Napoleon III and then Leopold II, the King of the Belgians.
The Prince of Wales was a
regular visitor to Cannes, starting in 1872. He frequented the Club
Nautique, a private club on the Croisette, the fashionable seafront
boulevard of Cannes. He visited there each spring for a three-week
period, observing yacht races from shore while the royal yacht,
Britannia, was sailed by professional crewmen. After he became King in
1901, he never again visited the French Riviera. By the end of the 19th century the Côte d'Azur began to attract artistic painters, who appreciated the climate, the bright colors and clear light. Among them were Auguste Renoir, who settled in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The First World War brought down many of the royal houses of Europe and altered the nature and the calendar of the French Riviera. Following the war, greater numbers of Americans began arriving, with business moguls and celebrities eventually outnumbering aristocrats. The 'High Society' scene moved from a winter season to a summer season. Americans began coming to the south of France in the 19th century. Henry James set part of his novel, The Ambassadors, on the Riviera. James Gordon Bennett Jr., the son and heir of the founder of the New York Herald, had a villa in Beaulieu. Industrialist John Pierpont Morgan gambled at Monte Carlo and bought 18th century paintings by Fragonard in Grasse – shipping them to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Riviera in the first half of the 20th Century
While Europe was still
recovering from the war and the American dollar was strong, American
writers and artists started arriving on the Côte d'Azur. Edith Wharton
wrote The Age of Innocence (1920) at a villa near Hyères, winning
the Pulitzer Prize for the novel (the first woman to do so). Dancer
Isadora Duncan frequented Cannes and Nice, but died in 1927 when her
scarf caught in a wheel of the Amilcar motor car in which she was a
passenger and strangled her. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald first
visited with his wife Zelda in 1924, stopping at Hyères, Cannes and
Monte Carlo – eventually staying at Saint-Raphaël, where he wrote much
of The Great Gatsby and began Tender is the Night. While Americans were largely responsible for making summer the high season, a French fashion designer, Coco Chanel, made sunbathing fashionable. She acquired a striking tan during the summer of 1923, and tans then became the fashion in Paris. During the abdication crisis of the British Monarchy in 1936, Wallis Simpson, the intended bride of King Edward VIII, was staying at the Villa Lou Vieie in Cannes, talking with the King by telephone each day. After his abdication, the Duke of Windsor (as he became) and his new wife stayed at the Villa La Croe near Antibes. The English playwright and
novelist Somerset Maugham also became a resident in 1926, buying the
Villa Mauresque toward the tip of Cap Ferrat, near Nice. When Germany invaded France in June 1940, the remaining British colony was evacuated to Gibraltar and eventually to Britain. American Jewish groups helped some of the Jewish artists living in the south of France, such as Marc Chagall, to escape to the United States. In August 1942, 600 Jews from Nice were rounded up by French police and sent to Drancy, and eventually to death camps. In all about 5,000 French Jews from Nice perished during the war. On August 15, 1944, American parachute troops landed near Fréjus, and a fleet landed 60,000 troops of the American Seventh Army and French First Army between Cavalaire and Agay, east of Saint-Raphaël. German resistance crumbled in days. Saint-Tropez was badly damaged by German mines at the time of the liberation. The novelist Colette organized an effort to assure the town was rebuilt in its original style. When the war ended, artists Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso returned to live and work. Riviera since 1946 The Cannes Film Festival was launched in September 1946, marking the return of French cinema to world screens. The Festival Palace was built in 1949 on the site of the old Cercle Nautique, where the Prince of Wales had met his mistresses in the late 19th century. The release of the French film Et Dieu… créa la femme (And God Created Woman) in November 1956 was a major event for the Riviera, making an international star of Brigitte Bardot, and making an international tourist destination of Saint-Tropez, particularly for the new class of wealthy international travelers called the 'jet set.' The marriage of American film actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco on 18 April 1956, attracted world attention once again. It was viewed on television by 30 million people. During the 1960s, the Mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, decided to reduce the dependence of the Riviera on ordinary tourism, and to make it a destination for international congresses and conventions. He built the Palais des Congrès at the Acropolis in Nice, and founded a Chagall Museum and a Matisse Museum at Cimiez. High-rise apartment buildings and real estate developments began to spread. At the end of August, 1997, Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed spent their last days together on his father's yacht off Pampelonne Beach near Saint-Tropez, shortly before they were killed in a traffic accident in the Alma Tunnel in Paris. Travelogue from the 1930's: Riviera today:
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