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new left review 75

may june 2012

69

alssi dellumbria

THE SINKING OF MARSEILLE

Metropolitan Disorders8

Few conurbations in Western Europe have been as thor-

oughly rejected by their own elites as Marseille.1 Francessecond most populous commune, with 850,000 inhabitants

almost twice the size of Lyon or Toulouse, the next largestit

is today widely seen as the last great working-class city in the country;

a fact which recently acquired positive connotations, but has more

commonly been noted with nose held. More than any of the usual

stereotypes and clichs, it is the experience of contempt that defines

the citys identity. Proximity to Algiers has made Marseille too barba-

rous, wrote one delicate observer in 1647; in 1793, a member of theNational Convention delegation sent to bring the city to heel announced

that Marseille is incurable unless all its inhabitants be deported and it

receive a transfusion of men from the North. Two centuries later, little

had changed: at the end of the 1980s, a tvanchor could roll out a dubi-

ous stock joke: What is the first Arab city the ParisDakar rally passes

through? Answer: Marseille. Though the city became fashionable in the

mid-1990s, this did not mean an end to the contempt; quite the contrary.

In November 2003 Claude Valette, the mayors deputy in charge of townplanning, declared: We need people who create wealth. We need to get

rid of half the citys inhabitants.2

To the visitor, Marseille appears to be an enigma: a city founded some

2,600 years ago which seems to have little or no history. One of the

most entrenched clichs about it maintains, indeed, that Marseille has

repeatedly made a blank slate of its past. Proof of this is located in the

fact that the majority of Marseillaisare of immigrant origins, whetherrecent or distant: Italians and Greeks arrived in large numbers in the

19th century, followed by Armenians, Spaniards and Kabyles in the early

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20th and, in the postwar period, by Corsicans, Algerians, Pieds-Noirs,

Tunisians, Comorans and others; at present, an estimated 150,000

of the citys population is of North African origin. But far from being

erased, Marseilles civic culture persisted alongside these waves of immi-

gration, which assimilated that culture and enriched it in their turn. The

capacity for assimilation, however, has been markedly reduced by the

disintegration of the city, its culture, its social and urban fabric. Absence

of memory does not, of course, mean absence of history; merely that the

latter has been written by the victorsand that Marseille as a city has

been defeated.

The process of civic disintegration has been a long one. Founded by

Greek colonists from Phocaea around 600 bc, ancient Massalia becameone of the most significant ports in the western Mediterranean, under

Hellenistic and Roman auspices alike. From the 5th century ad, periodic

bouts of plague and pillage drained the city of much of its importance,

but around the year 1000 it began to regain its former prominence as a

mercantile hub. By the mid-12th century, the Arab geographer al-Idrisi

could describe medieval Marselha as a small town, but with an urban

character; it is surrounded by vineyards and cultivated fields. It is built

on the slope of a mound of earth which overlooks the sea. For a time,the city was able to secure virtual independence by balancing the suze-

rain claims of the counts of Provence and Toulouse; but by the mid-13th

century it had been absorbed by Anjou, and through a combination of

warfare and medieval dynastic statecraft was effectively incorporated

into France in the late 15th century. Annexation by Paris brought a grad-

ual shrinkage of the citys autonomy, culminating in full subordination

to the absolutist state in 1660.

Marseille remained fractious, however. Indeed, after the Revolution of

1789 its 120,000 inhabitants reclaimed their earlier civic independence

so energetically that they were accused of federalism and threaten-

ing the unity of the Republic. In 1794, a four-man delegation from the

Convention even decreed that the name of this criminal commune be

erased; the city was to be known as Without Name until it was allocated

1

This article is based on extracts from Histoire universelle de Marseille: De lan mila lan deux mille, Marseille 2006, with additional material supplied by the author;

thanks to Editions Agone for their assistance.2 Interview in Le Figaro, 18 November 2003.

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dellumbria:Marseille71

a new one.3Political pugnacity was rooted in a deep sense of local par-

ticularity. The Marseille dialect of Provenal for centuries resisted the

metropoles push for linguistic standardization; as late as the mid-1800s,

when Marseillais had to make a trip beyond Avignon they would say they

were going to France.

In medieval Marseille, as in other Western European cities, urbs and

civitas had coincided: the inhabitants of the town constituted a politi-

cal community, the city. One could say, schematically, that if the civitas

was liquidated by the French nation-statewhich required the dissolu-

tion of all existing forms of community in favour of atomized allegiance

to the statethe urbs has been dismantled by capitalism. While the

first phase took several centuries, the second has unfolded much morequickly. Today, the rupture with a thousand years of urban history seems

to have been consummated. What follows will trace the relentless pro-

gress of Marseilles destructiona process which gathered pace amid

the deindustrialization of the postwar period, with the neoliberal era

bringing a renewed assault on the urban fabric.

Urban form

The old walled city was built on a triangle of land to the north of an inlet

that forms the Vieux-Port. The layout of the streets preserved traces of

the Hellenistic city plan well into the nineteenth century, in the maze of

neighbourhoods such as Saint-Jean, Le Panier and La Blanquerie. On

the whole, the city was built in artisanal fashion, at a slow pace and on a

human scale. This was expressed architecturally by the combination of

the narrow street and the cours: the former dating from the Middle Ages,

the second Baroque in inspiration, a series of tree-lined boulevards thatwere laid down in the 1670s along the course of the old city walls. The

construction of thecours was part of a wider project of royally decreed

works known as the Aggrandissement, which pushed the citys ramparts

further inland and opened up new areas for constructionalso paving

the way for a burst of property speculation.The age of industrialization

then imposed a new definition of urbanism, which found expression

in the grands boulevards of the nineteenth century. These were built

atop the ruins of the seventeenth-century city walls, demolished under

3 A century had to pass before the song the Marseillais sang in revolutionary Paris

could safely be adopted as the countrys national anthem.

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Napoleon. The final removal of the fortifications cleared the way for the

citys expansion in all directions: to the north of the old town, workers

faubourgs spread out in more or less spontaneous fashion; to the south

and east, regular grid-lines were laid out for residential areas destined

for the grand and petty bourgeoisie.

Modern capitalism brought about an urban segregation previously

absenta spatial expression of the fracture between the bourgeoisie

and a populace on the road to proletarianization. The rich abandoned

the Vieux-Port, with its noises, smells and above all its common people;

in the 1830s and 40s, the centre of financial and commercial activity

shifted south of the Rue Canebire, as banks and shipping companies

set up offices there. The old city was left to the fishermen, the dockers,the poor, the over-exploited immigrants. Once this social separation was

complete, the bourgeoisie was free to contemplate improvements to the

old city la Haussmannprojects financed, as in Paris, by the Pereire

Marseille city centre, with arrondissements

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Brothers. Under the Second Empire, several popular quarters were razed

and boulevards sliced through them. This was an ominous novelty in

two key respects. First, it marked the beginning of a long series of works

in densely populated areas that would lead to the almost total disappear-

ance of the old town. Second, the local bourgeoisies desire to emulate

the Parisian style implanted a kind of urbanism that was totally alien to

Marseilles culture: turning thecourswith its bustling outdoor life into

a treeless thoroughfare, demolishing the narrow streets that provided

shelter from sun and mistral winds in favour of stark, exposed spaces.

Nonetheless, the nineteenth century left large parts of the citys heritage

intact. Hardly any of them would survive the twentieth, which brought an

onslaught from town planners in thrall to the idea that the slate neededto be wiped clean and everything rebuilt. In 1912, the demolition of La

Blanquerie began; interrupted by the war, it resumed in 1922at a time

of severe housing shortages. By 1937, the whole of this medieval quarter

had disappeared, leaving entire hectares of land empty; they remained so

until the 1970s. While its centre was being demolished, Marseille con-

tinued to expand, engulfing surrounding villages; its population went

from 200,000 in 1850 to more than 500,000 in 1914.

Planners in the inter-war years recommended further demolitions

notably Gaston Castel, head of a commission charged with producing a

regional development plan. In 1934, together with the writer Jean Ballard,

he called for the total destruction of the old city: it was a providential

opportunity to cast down this old citadel of insects and infamy.4The

Second World War brought a dramatic acceleration of this programme.

In 1939, Marseille was deprived of its municipal governmentthe vis-

iting President Daladier, chased from his hotel room by a fire in late1938, had been firmly unimpressed by the way the city was runand

subjected to central control until 1946. In May 1941, the Vichy govern-

ment approved a plan for Marseille devised by its chief architect, Eugne

Beaudoin, which took up many of Castels ideas; the principles behind it

were to sanitize the insalubrious quarters and reduce the population

density of the centre.

Where it had taken twenty years to expel the inhabitants of La Blanquerie,Marseilles wartime rulers could expedite the process with the aid of the

4 Gaston Castel and Jean Ballard, MarseilleMtropole, Cahiers du Sud, 1934, p. 66.

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Wehrmacht. In January 1943, the German and French authorities

Pierre Barraud, the Vichy prefect of the city; Ren Bousquet, Vichy chief

of police; General Oberg, head of the Gestapo in Franceordered all

25,000 inhabitants of Saint-Jean, Le Panier and the neighbourhood

around the Htel de Ville to leave their homes; 1,650 were then sent

to German concentration camps. At the beginning of February, the

Wehrmacht moved in and dynamited the houses, one after another.

Three weeks later, the area north of the Vieux-Port was an immense field

of ruins. General Oberg had declared before the operation that Marseille

is a haven for international bandits. This city is Europes cancer, and

Europe cannot live until Marseille has been purified. But he was only

repeating the discourse that had been hammered home in France for

twenty years. The Greek poet Nikos Kavvadias reported walking throughthe ruins shortly after the Germans had moved out and encountering

a prostitute, who all too easily identified those responsible: These bas-

tards arent to blame, it was our lot who made them do it.5

The Defferre system

The reconstruction of the north shore of the Vieux-Port began in 1946

and was completed in 1953. It fulfilled the desires formulated in thetown plans made before the war: to turn what had been the historic heart

of Marseille into a purely residential quarter where the previous mode

of life could not possibly be reborn. The urgency of the project was only

increased by the brief radical opening after the Liberation. No sooner

had the German garrison surrendered in August 1944 than several of

the citys main enterprises were requisitioned by their workers; the

bosses, who had agreed to work for the occupiers, were either in prison

or had fled. (In August 1947, however, a law ordered the restitution ofthese factories to their previous owners.) When self-government was

returned to the city in 1946, an alliance of Socialists and Communists

brought the pcfs Jean Cristofol to the mayoralty. But the pact crum-

bled within a year, allowing the Gaullists to take the Htel de Ville in

late 1947. That autumn, working-class rebellion erupted across France.

In Marseille, the initial spark was a move by the new municipality to

increase public-transport fares; not content to merely occupy factories,

the strikers blocked strategic crossroads and halted traffic. The move-ment not only terrified the local bourgeoisie, it also caught the local

5 Nikos Kavvadias, Le Quart [1954], Paris 1992, p. 146.

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pcfleadership short: Marseille went too far, Franois Billoux told the

Partys federal bureauCe nest pas la rvolution!6

The revolt of 1947 was a decisive test of strength: its repression brought

to an end a historic moment when the working-class population of

Marseille could play the leading role in the citys public life. After

1947, the city fell once more into a political void: liberal and socialist

clientelism again insinuated itself into the pores of local life. The sfio

(Section Franaise de lInternationale Ouvrire), having dominated city

politics before the war, now became the arbitrator between the bour-

geoisie and the working class. In the elections of 1953, the Gaullist right

was thrashed, gaining only 5 per cent of the vote; the sfioscored 18 per

cent. The Socialists leader, the young Protestant lawyer Gaston Defferre,appeared to the bourgeoisie as the last bulwark against the pcf, which

had secured a plurality with 28 per cent. Support from the Gaullists and

Christian Democrats enabled Defferre to take the mayors seat. He had

been elected to ward off the threat posed by the workers of Marseille;

over the course of the next three decades, the policies of his administra-

tion would underscore the logic behind Defferrisms birth.

Defferres long reign, from 1953 to his death in 1986, was exceptionaleven by the standards of municipal politics, outdone only by the Gaullist

Chaban-Delmass staggering 48 years in charge of Bordeaux (194795);

Mauroys 24-year tenure in Lille (19772001) and Chiracs 18 running

Paris (197795) pale by comparison. The system Defferre installed has

proved yet more durable: it is still, broadly speaking, the one that obtains

today. In administrative terms, it rested on a simple political division of

labour: questions of town planning were left to the liberal bourgeoisie,

while the Socialists kept a tight grip on the management of municipalservices. On the first front, between 1953 and 1976, the post of deputy for

town planning was continuously occupied by a politician from the lib-

eral rightAlexandre Chazeaux, Tho Lombard and then Jean-Claude

Gaudin, the citys present mayor. On the second, control over the Htel

de Ville allowed Defferre and his allies to dole out municipal jobs, social

housing and benefits. In this the mayors office was aided by close rela-

tions with Force Ouvrire, the principal union for municipal employees;

established in 1947 as an anti-Stalinist spin-off from the cgt, it forgedan alliance with Defferre in the 1950s that has remained in place under

his successors.

6 Cited in Jacqueline Cristofol, Batailles pour Marseille, Paris 1997, p. 332.

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Then there was a a network of associations closely integrated with daily

life at the neighbourhood level: the Amis de linstruction laque and the

Comits dintrt de quartier (ciq), a holdover from an earlier period of

Socialist dominance in the 1920s, served as further transmission belts

for Defferrism.7Finally, there were the hundreds of sport clubs, charities

and community organizations funded by the municipality: Provenal

folkloric groups, associations of Corsicans, Italians, Armenians, Pieds-

Noirs, Jews, and so on. When one of these bodies organized an event,

the local politico would never fail to put in an appearance: the moment

at which a favour could be asked, to be repaid later with votes. A vas-

salized civil society went hand in hand with a muzzled press. After the

Liberation, Defferre and his men seized control of the presses of the

main local newspaper, Le Provenal, a situation subsequently legalized.Defferre would attend editorial meetings, deciding on what the paper

could print. The company he controlled financed both Le Provenal and Le

Mridional, an extreme-right paper whose daily rodomontades were thus

kept under financial control. Except for the pcfs daily, La Marseillaise,

the Defferriste press had a monopoly on the citys print media.

Major programmes of public works, requiring large injections of munic-

ipal financing, made the City an enterprise in a league of its own. TheDefferre system found its proper juridical expression in the socit

dconomie mixtea form of privatepublic partnership avant la

lettre. In 1966, a law authorized municipalities to make official use of

such entities; thereafter, the Syndicat mixte dquipement de Marseille

(smem), responsible for selling and providing infrastructure for empty

parcels of land and industrial lots, served as the parent company. For

each development programme, this organism would create another

mixed-economy company, with Defferre or another Socialist figureat its head. The municipality became the full partner of the Marseille

bourgeoisie; the Socialists had gone from the municipal collectivism of

Flaissires to open co-management of local capitalism. The motor for the

latter in the 1950s and 60s would be the construction and public-works

sectors. For the local bourgeoisie, these sectors offered two advantages:

they demanded much less capital investment than industry and, thanks

to new techniques linked with the use of concrete, they could make do

with unskilled rather than skilled workers.

7 It was under Simon Flaissires, Socialist mayor of Marseille in 18921902

and again from 191931, that party-political clientelist structures first took shape

in the city.

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Spatial contrasts

Under Defferre, Marseille grew rapidly, yet was increasingly relegated

to a peripheral role, both in economic terms and in French political and

cultural life. His administration presided over a vast wave of construc-

tion that transformed the urban landscape, refashioning the citys social

geography as well as its appearance. Politically, his reign was character-

ized by a hegemony of the petty and middle bourgeoisie. This translated

into an overwhelming emphasis on the development of the tertiary sec-

tor, and a desire to create an image of the city appropriate to that model.

It is no coincidence that Defferrism saw a shift in the social composition

of the citys population, since it actively contributed to it. In 1954, one in

four wage-earners was an employee of the State or a public service; in1975, the proportion was close to one in three.

If Marseille had forged ahead of other cities in France with regard to

urban demolitions, in the postwar era it did so too in terms of planning.

It was the first to have a modernization plan drawn up for it, in 1955; in

1959, it acquired a master plan, the Plan durbanisme directeur (pud),

which provided the framework for all public infrastructure until 1978,

when it was replaced by the Plan doccupation des sols (pos). Prominentamong the projects the pudenvisaged were a series of roadskilometre

after kilometre of concrete motorways, bypasses and tunnels. Movement

through the city was now predicated on the car; indeed, the roadworks

programme marched in tandem with a scandalous degradation of the

public-transport system. Trams and trolleycars were replaced in the mid-

50s by buses which soon drowned in the flood of increasing car traffic.

Privileged commodity of the Fordist industrial system, and object of fan-

tasy for functionalist urbanism, the automobile would serve as the maininstrument of urban disintegration: by helping along the atomization of

the working class, it would bring about a loss of civic culture; citizens

were to be turned into passive consumers.

With regard to housing, the city authorities guaranteed loans contracted

by companies to put up rent-controlled housingHabitations Loyer

Modr or hlmand offered them land at low prices; to a lesser extent,

the mayoralty also took part in construction itself, building some socialhousing through its mixed-economy companies. Thanks to his promi-

nent role in national politicshe was Guy Mollets minister for overseas

France in 195657, failed Socialist presidential candidate in 1969 and

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Mitterrands interior minister in 198184Defferre was able to exceed

the normal powers of French mayors and expedite procedures in the

housing sector.

Between 1955 and 1965, public-works programmes encouraged the mid-

dle classes to acquire property in the new developments. Priority was

given to infrastructure for areas in the south and eastBonneveine and

Sainte-Anne in the 8th arrondissement, Mazargues and Sainte-Marguerite

in the 9th, Saint-Barnab or Montolivet in the 12th. Neighbourhoods

such as these would be occupied by office workers, functionaries and

middle cadres, the social groups who formed the electoral base of

Defferrism. By contrast, working-class areas in the north and north-west

were not connected to the sewerage system till the mid-70s. Transportpolicy also favoured the southern and central areas of Marseille, where

tertiary-sector workers tended to live, to the detriment of working-class

areas in the north. The first metro line, opened in 1977, was designed to

serve the needs of the south and north-east of the city, those in the north

having to resort to cars.

The opposition between the northern and southern areas of the city took

on its present form in the 1970s. The free rein given to property specu-lation in the 1960s had brought an unprecedented spike in the cost of

land. This in turn meant that the hlm-construction programmes envis-

aged by the 1959 plan all had to be realized on the citys edges, on land

of lesser value; 90 per cent of the citys hlms were built in the 13th,

14th, 15th and 16th arrondissements. Within the space of two decades, the

land north and east of Marseille was covered with uniform constructions

designed for people of modest means. For thousands of Marseillais,

the horizon now consisted of a chaotic sprawl of high-rise blocks withcar parks at their base. The city had disappeared, to be replaced by the

agglomerationa model whose principal characteristic is its capacity to

stretch into infinity. Space was henceforth organized on a scale which

those living in it found impossible to grasp.

Analysing the effects of Defferres reign, the sociologist Andr Donzel

concluded that it is difficult to speak of a sanitization or harmoniza-

tion of the conditions of urban life. On the contrary, the exacerbationof social, functional and spatial contrasts was his real legacy.8 The

8 Andr Donzel, Politique urbaine et socit locale, sociology thesis, 1982, p. 156.

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deportation of the working-class population was the most visible result

of the citys postwar development. The spatial segregation foreseen by

the functionalist plans of the interwar years thus became a reality, as the

Marseillais working class began increasingly to be concentrated in the

northern arrondissements. Here far from the world, read one eloquentpiece of graffiti on the walls of a northern hlmin the late 70s. The very

form of the apartment-block ensemblesisolated buildings surrounded

by a voidenvisaged no through-traffic; it generated ghettoes.9 This

was something Marseille had precisely managed to avoid until then,

despite a hundred years of large-scale immigration. Moreover, since a

significant portion of the working-class population consisted of immi-

grants, the working-class ghetto and immigrant ghetto were now one

and the same.

In 1955, the citys immigrant population had reached a low of 40,000

people, in the wake of the 1930s crisis and the war. Starting at the end

of the 1950s, however, the Fifth Republics agricultural policies began

to empty the countryside, and rural residents from Provence, Corsica

and elsewhere went into urban exile in Marseille. At the same time a

new wave of immigration arrived from southern Italy, Spain and above

all North Africa. In 1962, they were joined by large numbers of Pieds-Noirs100,000 disembarked in June alone, prompting Defferre to

suggest in July that these new arrivals should go and readapt else-

where. Communities ranged against each other by the war in Algeria

found themselves living side by side on the Mediterraneans opposite

shore. In the 1960s, Algerian immigrationnow regulated by inter-

governmental agreementsincreased systematically to compensate for

the reduced flow of migrants from Italy, who had shifted to Switzerland,

Belgium and Germany, where wages were higher. By 1975, the NorthAfrican presence in Marseille had increased to 45,000.

Two types of immigration, thenone interior and one exterior

provided the population of deracinated workers for the suburbs then

9 Le Corbusiers Cit radieuse, built on the boulevard Michelet in 194752, was

the founding statement of this approach. Within five years of its completion, Lewis

Mumford was describing the building as a hollow monument: like the GreatPyramid, it might as well be in the desert for all the positive use its makes of the

natural environment. See Mumford, The Marseille Folly (1957), in The Highway

and the City, London 1964, pp. 79, 74. The building was known to locals as la mai-son du fadathe crackpots house.

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being built. The two would not overlap, however: those from the interior

would often take skilled or public-sector jobs, while those from the exte-

rior would take the unskilled. Within one or two generations, the divide

was generally closed: as in other French industrial regions, the children

of immigrants tended to follow the same trajectory as the autochthonous

population, joining the skilled industrial or the public-sector workforce.

But starting in the 1970s, the possibilities for gaining professional

qualifications began to disappear, while public-sector employment con-

tracted. At this point many young Marseillais of North African origin,

who had seen their parents ruin their health in back-breaking work, real-

ized that social mobility had ground to a halt. Thirty years later, this

remains the case.

Expansion and decline

The two decades of most rapid urbanization, 196080, coincided with

the collapse of Marseilles port and industries. In 1954, industrynot

including construction and public worksemployed 27 per cent of the

workforce; by 1975 this figure had fallen to 19 per cent. Having been the

privileged port of the colonial empire in the interwar years, Marseille

was now, within little more than a decade, shorn of the markets thathad been secured for it by protectionist policies. The first to go was the

lipid-processing sector: more than a dozen oil and thirty soap factories.

Then another pillar of the trading system centred on the port went: food-

processing. In the 1960s, nearly all the emblematic names disappeared,

as local companies were purchased by multinationals which more often

than not simply closed the plants in question. The overall decline of the

port was paradoxically apparent in the growth of the gross tonnage pass-

ing through it. Hydrocarbons took on an increasingly important role,while that of local industries continued to decline. By the mid 70s, crude

oil arriving from the Middle East, to be pumped northwards along pipe-

lines, accounted for 90 per cent of all imports. The authorities boasted

that Marseille was the leading port on the Mediterranean, but once

petroleum products were excluded, it was clear that the ports industrial

function was vanishing. Today, the port handles a fifth as much traffic

as Rotterdam and half as much as Antwerp, in terms of total tonnage;

but in terms of containers, the proportion is far smallerindeed here,Marseille falls behind Barcelona, Genoa, Valencia and Le Havre.10

10Figures from Cour des Comptes, Le grand port maritime de Marseille: blocage

social et dclin, February 2011.

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The decline of Marseilles industries and port was all the more devastat-

ing in its effects in that it coincided with a period of explosive expansion.

Paradoxically, Marseille continued to grow while deindustrialization

marched on and unemployment climbed. The 1954 census gave the

population as 661,000, and that of 1968 put it at 890,000; the figure

peaked at 961,000 in 1975. All of the communessurrounding Marseille

grew tremendously at its expense during the late 60s and early 70s: from

196875, the population of Vitrolles grew by 166 per cent, Septmes by

85, Cabris by 58, while Marseille itself grew by only 2 per cent. Then

the latter, which had increased continuously in size until its inhabitants

numbered almost a million, began to shrink: by 1982 its population was

down to 870,000, by 1990 it stood at 800,000.

From the 1970s onwards, the image of Marseille as a city in the grip of

unemployment, poverty, urban blight and corruption became increas-

ingly entrenched in the national media, as encapsulated in the clich

describing it as the Chicago of France. The sense of crisis deepened in

the 1980s, as the far right made inroads in the working-class districts of

the north and east, capitalizing on the malaise of late Defferrism to win

over the electorate of a rapidly waning pcf. In the municipal elections

of 1983, a far-right slate of candidates scored a notable success by cam-paigning against immigration, and in the legislative elections held three

years later, Jean-Marie Le Pens Front Nationaltill then no more than

a groupusculeemerged as a serious force in the region, posting scores

here twice as high as its national average. ProvenceAlpesCte dAzur

was to prove an important base for the fns later advance: in the 1995

presidential vote, Le Pen finished first, ahead of Jospin, in the Bouches-

du-Rhne dpartement. The same year, three municipalities in Provence

fell into the hands of the fn; in 1997, they gained control of Vitrolles,and secured 25 per cent of the popular vote in Bouches-du-Rhne in the

national legislative elections.

In 1986, with the death of Defferre, the Socialists had found them-

selves adrift. Unable to agree on his replacement, they opted for Robert

Vigouroux, a taciturn surgeon who was expected to make way for a bet-

ter official candidate when the mayoralty was finally put to the vote in

1989. Unexpectedly, Vigouroux decided to stand for election, and wasexpelled from the ps as a result; even more unexpectedly, he won a

thumping victory, beating his Gaullist rival by 20 percentage points and

pushing the pscandidate into third place. Vigourouxs administration

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thus seemed to mark a political rupture in the life of the city. But in

crucial respects it represented continuity with Defferrism: he preserved

the alliance between city hall and Force Ouvrire, and undertook further

roadworks and grand projects which refined the neo-urban, car-based

consumerist system established by Defferre. Yet more concrete bypasses

were built, along with sports complexes and stadiums; the shopping

mall at La Valentine was expanded and work begun on a vast new

one, Grand Littoral, which opened in 1997 claiming to be the largest

shopping centre in Europe. The proliferation of shopping malls and

bypasses presupposed, logically enough, more parking spaces. All of the

squares in the centre of the city were methodically disfigured in order

to build underground car parks, awarded to private companies which

could now charge for the right to visit the area. The citys administratorsrealized soon enough that car parks could also serve as an instrument

of social selection: in 1991, when the municipality decided to carve one

out beneath La Plaineofficially named Place Jean Jaursthe local

Socialist councillor noted that this would permit them to raise the social

level of those frequenting the area.

The avowed priority of the Vigouroux administration was to make the

middle classes come back to Marseille. This was echoed by his succes-sor Jean-Claude Gaudin, who characterized his policies thus: I make

people who pay taxes come back to the city.11 A wily former school

teacher, Gaudin had been a city councillor for the centre-right since

1965thus serving his political apprenticeship under Defferre. In 1995,

when Gaudin won the mayoralty at the third attempt, the municipality

formally passed to the centre-right for the first time in forty years; but in

practice, the modus operandifor managing Marseille remained the same

as under the ps, Gaudin soon tacking left to make a rapprochementwiththe municipal employees and Force Ouvrire.

By the time Gaudins mandate began, the image of Marseille had started

to recover from the taint of crisis attached to it in the 1980s. This was

especially true in the realm of culture, where the national media began

to speak of a Marseillais movida, in reference to Spains post-Franco

effervescence: the crime novels of Jean-Claude Izzo, the films of Robert

Gudiguian, the music of local groups such as iamand Massilia SoundSystem, the footballing success of Olympique de Marseille and celebrity of

11La Tribune, 5 December 2001.

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Zinedine Zidaneall contributed to the citys new allure. Parts of the city

formerly devoted to productive activity began to be refurbished instead

for cultural consumption: the cigarette factory in the La Belle de Mai area,

closed in 1989, was after 1992 turned into a space for research, produc-

tion and diffusion dedicated to contemporary creativity in all its forms.

Likewise the Fiesta des Suds, a music festival drawing performers from

around the world, has been held on the old docks since 1992, and the

Festival de Marseillecombining dance, theatre, cinema and music

has occupied various premises around the city since 1996.

Meanwhile the city authorities were dreaming of a neo-city centre,

dubbed Euromditerrane, slated to rise from the docks stretching north

from La Joliette to Arenc. Launched in 1994, with the support of thenprime minister Balladur as well as a gallery of stars including Charles

Aznavour, the project received 374m in funding between 1996 and

2006, around half from the central state and a quarter from the munici-

pality. It does not lack ambition: it aims to house 10,000 residents, create

1520,000 jobs in 15 years, and deliver 1.2 million square metres of floor

space, half to be used for offices and the rest for apartments, shops and

amenities. It also envisages a Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and

the Mediterranean (mucem), due to open after many delays in spring2013; as well as a cinema, restaurants, an underground car park, and

a prestige quay at which cruise-liners will dock. The flagship project,

though, is the 33-storey cma tower, a shining slab of glass and steel

designed by superstar architect Zaha Hadid to house the headquarters of

Frances main shipping company. Completed in 2010, it gave Marseille

its first skyscraper, symbol of strength and dynamism. Four residential

towers were supposed to follow, giving the city the skyline of a cut-price

Manhattan. Thanks to the bursting of the world property bubble in 2008,construction has been suspended, but it is likely this puerile dream will

come true: in every city in the world, after all, the elite is obsessed with

inscribing its domination on the landscape in vertical form.

The official goal of Euromditerrane was to attract logistics and

commercial-services firms linked to the activity of the port. In reality,

the project boils down to a vast exercise in property speculation target-

ing the tertiary sector, with the port serving as an alibi. A study from1999 cast early doubts: The weak prospects for the development of the

port of Marseille, the lack of involvement of the port in the project, and

the exclusively public character of the operation make Euromditerrane

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seem much more like a grand development project of the city [authori-

ties] than the outline for a port.12Indeed, far from constituting a basis

for the revival of local industry, the project marks a new stage in the

attachment of the city to the centre of the Hexagone: the only transport

corridor to which Euromditerrane is truly connected is the tgvrun-

ning from Paris to Marseille.

The city as merchandise

The promotion of the city as a fashionable destination went in tandem

with the advance of property speculation, creating a wave of gentrifica-

tion that has now finally begun to realize the elite project, announced

in the 1990s, of a reconquest of the city centre. The whole shoreline ofthe citys medieval core has been pedestrianized and reconfigured as a

promenade for tourists; the sailors and dockers, fishermen and children

diving into the waters of the Vieux-Portrebranded le New Port by its

boosterswill now have to go somewhere else. The sea-front has been

turned into a non-place, transformed into a marketing product which

consists of spaces one cannot live in, but which can be visited.

The ascendancy of commercial image over lived reality is exemplifiedby the renovation of Le Panier. This neighbourhood, on a hill north

of the Vieux-Port, had somehow escaped the demolition of 1943; but

after 1955, it featured constantly in City Halls plans for refurbishment.

As a result, many of the areas homeowners stopped maintaining their

premises, and amid the increasing dilapidation, families began to leave:

between 1968 and 75, the neighbourhood lost a quarter of its population.

Renovation works began in 1972, and accelerated the exodus. Once the

speculative wave began in the 1990s, the refurbished apartments wererented out at rates the majority of locals found unaffordable; as per the

municipalitys plans to turn the area into a Marseillais Montmartre,

the new residents were drawn from among artists, actors, academ-

ics, students and so on, who generally arrived from elsewhere. Shops

were replaced by art galleries, cafs by trendy restaurants. Estate agents

actively sought out buyers and tenants in the capital. By 1999, a Parisian

daily could devote a supplement to Marseille: Revival of the Property

Sector, explaining how to invest in Le Panier.

12Danille Schirmann-Duclos and Frdric Laforge, La France et la mer, Paris 1999,

p. 282.

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In 2004, a soap opera called Plus belle la vie went on air, set in the

fictional Marseille neighbourhood of Le Mistralclearly modelled

on Le Panier. Over 2,000 episodes have been broadcast since, mak-

ing it the countrys most popular and long-lived soap opera. Actors

speaking in flat, characterless voices wander through a string of pic-

turesque, typical Marseille backdrops made of cardboard. Despite its

numbing artificiality, the show has encouraged tourists to flock to Le

Panier, where a shop dedicated to merchandise relating to the series

recently opened. The quartiers old bars have been turned into ice-cream

parlours, its faades repainted in bright colours. The cardboard neigh-

bourhood of the soap has begun to obscure the real neighbourhood it

was supposed to portray.

Marseille is probably the last city in France to fall under the steamroller

of neoliberal development. For a time one could imagine that, in the

state of semi-consciousness brought on by the long postwar decline, it

would escape the fate of other West European cities. But that interval has

ended: ten years of media campaigns touting a city rescued from its bad

reputation by a cultural ferment have provided the glossy packaging

for a vast programme of gentrification. Tourists excited by its exoticism,

but discouraged by the dirtiness of its streets, can now find themselvesat home in an environment that has finally been cleaned up and made

secure. It took the dismantling of the industrial and port system, the

expulsion of tens of thousands of Marseillais to the citys outskirts, and

a long hiatus in which the city was continually disparaged and margin-

alized, before it could once more be made attractive to a well-heeled

clientele. In other words, the city had first to be broken.

For most of the 20th century, Marseille was ill-thought of in Francebecause of its mtissage, its ethno-cultural mixing. More recently it

became fashionable for the same reasonthere has even been talk of a

melting-pot la marseillaise. In both cases, ideological mirages got the

better of reality. In 2005, for example, the youth revolt in the banlieues

seemed to stop at the gates of Marseille. In fact, several autumn nights

were lit up by fires here: Molotov cocktails thrown at police, schools van-

dalized, a bus set alight, a supermarket in Le Merlan almost wrecked

by a gang from the surrounding hlms, etc. The official strategy seemsto have been to keep such incidents quiet, lest their example spark a

wider conflagration. Nevertheless, it is true that very few cars were

burned. Perhaps it is significant that in Marseille, the word banlieue

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is not usedlocals speak of northern quartiers or eastern quartiers;

the banlieuesare still part of the city. Astonishingly, the fragmented and

sprawling territory of Marseille is still a place to which its inhabitants

feel they belong; the young population relegated to the northern fringes

still see themselves as Marseillais, not banlieusards.

This sense of belonging, however, is confronted by a harsh reality:

Marseille is not immune to the tendencies at work in French society as

a whole. The Front National continues to score significantly more than

the national average in the region; in the 2012 presidential election,

Marine Le Pen won 21 per cent of the popular vote in Marseille itself, to

Hollandes 28 and Sarkozys 27, finishing first in two electoral districts

and running Hollande a close second in another. Among the citys NorthAfrican population, meanwhile, the end of the 20th century saw a visible

turn towards a more marked, aggressive adherence to Islam. Between

French nationalism on the one hand and Muslim fundamentalism on

the other, a mutual closing-off seems to be at work in the city. Will it have

the resilience to overcome this narrow-minded antagonism?

For now, the horizon is dominated by preparations for the citys role as

European Capital of Culture for 2013, the crowning moment of Gaudinsthird mayoral term. Previous examplesLille and Genoa in 2004,

Liverpool in 2008, Essen in 2010suggest the nightmare scenario of

a sterilized, tightly policed city; but naturally, one that would be so fun.

Pseudo-events such as these are further catalysts for the citys transfor-

mation into a commodity. Renaud Muselier, first deputy to the mayor

and known as Monsieur 2013, declared that we have to show whats

going on in Marseille, to change its image and break with the caricature

of a city of strikers.13

The business and political elite openly see Marseille2013 as a means of giving renewed impetus to the Euromditerrane

project: in March 2009, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, Claude

Gontard, called it an instrument of war, allowing the city to gain ten

years; Gaudin has spoken of an acceleration of the citys development.

A second phase of Euromditerrane, stretching northwards from Arenc

to Saint-Louis, has duly been announced, in the hope of drawing private

investors; their arrival will then justify the demolition of pockets of the

old city and the expulsion of people living there.

13 See Marseille 2013 naura pas lieu, and other texts on the activist website

marseille-en-guerre.org.

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The build-up to Marseille 2013 has brought a mushrooming of video sur-

veillance: in 2012, Marseille is being covered with cameras. Historically,

surveillance began in the 1970s in department stores, and then spread

to the shopping malls with which the municipality has covered the ter-

ritory. The idea now is that the hygiene and security provided by the

malls should be extended to all exterior spaces. The first public space to

have them installed was in Noailles in 2002, an area where the poor and

immigrants would shop at the open-air market (Gaudin once declared

it inadmissible that such a souk could exist in Marseille). During the

winter of 2012, posters appeared in the city centre with the legend

Compulsory Casting, indicating the future placement of the cameras.

Video imaging has become the central axis for the maintenance of order:

at one extreme, Plus belle la viedraws millions of viewers every evening,while at the other, surveillance cameras monitor the centre of Marseille.

Whether the purpose is to amuse tvviewers against a Marseillais back-

drop or to keep a beady eye on potential plebeian delinquents, the city is

increasingly becoming little more than the physical support for audio-

visual systems of surveillance or entertainment.

Meanwhile, Marseilles inhabitants are supposed to become spectators

of what used to be their city. There are, however, a few indications thatthe populace is not yet resigned to this fate. In May 2009, ship repair

workers at the Union Nautique Marseillaise threatened with unemploy-

ment refused to let the Festival de Marseille use Hangar 15: There will

be no dancing on a cemetery, they declared. On Bastille Day in July

2007, youths from the hlms near Cayolle, a southern district where a

cluster of villas was being built in the middle of a pine forest, set fire to

a show-apartment, saying: We dont want any bourgeois here. Since

winter 2012, there has been constant agitation against video surveillancein the city centre. From day to day, there are still signs that the city is

inhabited, that it has not yet disappeared behind the glass of shop win-

dows and museum displays.

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