How the French Riviera transformed into a glitzy getaway for the elite
Once touted as a place for the sick to restore their health, the sun-kissed coast is now a playground for the rich and famous. But how did it get that way?
A winter refuge
Although towns like Nice (pictured in 1896) had been receiving a trickle of frail, wealthy Britons since the mid-1700s—when travelers and physicians began to publish books recommending the region’s climate—it was only after the defeat of Napoleon, in 1815, that the Riviera emerged as a well-established health resort. It became fashionable among the European upper classes to head south each winter. A new system of medicine had prescribed rudimentary climatotherapy: The Mediterranean air was thought to be a balm for the nerves. The area was especially popular with sufferers of “consumption” (tuberculosis), the leading cause of death in dank, smoggy Victorian England. Even Queen Victoria made regular visits to the Riviera in her later years, and would often sally out in a carriage pulled by her rescue donkey, Jacquot.
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The original sunbathers
The Riviera was inaugurated as a summer destination by the well-heeled American couple Sara and Gerald Murphy. While working as volunteers with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in Paris, they rubbed shoulders with the international avant-garde and writers of the Lost Generation, following Cole Porter to Antibes, east of Cannes, in the spring of 1922. As Gerald later wrote, “We found that it was there we wanted to be.” Sara, an ink heiress, had grown up on the dunes of the Hamptons and was a veteran beachgoer, fond of lounging in her bathing suit and a long string of pearls. It is said that Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway both fell for her. The couple convinced the owners of the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc—which normally closed its doors on the first of May—to keep the place running. While most foreign visitors fled as soon as the temperature began to rise, the Murphys cleared La Garoupe Bay of seaweed and spent long mornings there with their three children. In 1925, the pair acquired the nearby Villa America, where they established themselves as brilliant dinner party entertainers and generous hosts. Word spread, and soon everybody who aspired to be somebody was clamoring for a ticket to the French Riviera in what had previously been the off-season.
Trying to live in heaven
The Murphys’ star-studded stream of guests included Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Dorothy Parker, and Coco Chanel. Their bohemian lifestyle involved eccentric picnics and theatrical soireés (pictured, the event known as the Mad Beach Party of 1923). Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night is based on his time with the Murphys, in which he fuses himself and Zelda with Gerald and Sara to create his charming yet troubled protagonists. The charm came from the Murphys, the trouble from the Fitzgeralds: Scott and Zelda crashed various parties and once fell asleep in their motorcar, parked on the railway tracks; the pair were wracked by alcoholism and mental illness. Of his stay with the Murphys, John Dos Passos wrote, “I could stand it for about four days. It was like trying to live in heaven. I had to get back down to Earth.” They all inevitably had to, after the crash of 1929 affected the exchange rate that had made American expats so comfortable in Europe. That same year, the Murphys’ youngest son was diagnosed with tuberculosis. When the family bid a final goodbye to the Riviera in 1933, beach huts and beachgoers dotted its coast without fail each summer.
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A sunny place for shady people
Another trailblazing sunbather, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel bought a villa near Monaco in 1928, after a Mediterranean yacht trip with her lover the Duke of Westminster. Rebuilt to her own specifications and inspired by the abbey orphanage where she spent her youth, La Pausa was a spacious, elegant, yet somewhat severe sanctuary. It was there that Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala came, a decade later, to shelter from the ravages of the Spanish Civil War. Later, in France, Dalí would paint his nightmarish The Enigma of Hitler; another conflict that would soon catch up with them. “A sunny place for shady people” was how writer W. Somerset Maugham described the Riviera, and with the onset of WWII, Chanel retired into the shadows. In Paris, she began an affair with the Nazi spy Hans Günther Von Dincklage, and she served as an agent (code name, Westminster, a nod to her connections) in the failed German mission Modellhut. When she was arrested after the liberation of Paris, it was her old friend Winston Churchill’s influence that saved her. Perhaps coincidentally, Chanel sold La Pausa to Churchill’s agent and publisher Emery Reves in 1953, and the ex-Prime Minister often visited to paint and relax among the lavender fields.
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Sand and starlets in Cannes
When Léon Blum’s Popular Front coalition instated the first ever paid vacation (at two weeks long) for French workers, in 1936, the Riviera was no longer the preserve of a leisured and mostly foreign elite. During August, a 40 percent discount on train tickets made the trip south more accessible, although mass tourism did not take off until the 1950s. After the war, French plans for national recovery relied on Marshall Plan funding from the U.S. to invest in a campaign to attract American tourists and their dollars. One popular destination was Cannes, whose film festival was beginning to wield substantial star power and serve as a symbol for the burgeoning spirit of social and moral liberation. Conceived as an alternative to Fascist Italy’s Venice Mostra, the festival originally had been scheduled to take place on September 1, 1939—the same day Germany invaded Poland. It would finally be inaugurated seven years later. Soon it was Cannes where celebrities were made, often stepping out onto the beach to promote their films. After French designers unveiled the bikini in 1946, the swimsuit—initially banned in several countries, and declared sinful by Pope Pius XII—began to make waves up and down the Riviera.
