Nice 🇫🇷 Was Italian… Then France Took It

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 32: Nice

Nice has been French for one hundred and sixty-six years. Nice was Italian-speaking and Savoyard for four hundred and seventy-two years before that. The most famous avenue in the city is named after the English, who paid for it.

Nice did not become part of France until 1860

In the early 1780s, while Louis XVI was still on the throne of France and the United States was a four-year-old republic, English aristocrats began to arrive on the coast of what was then the County of Nice — a possession of the House of Savoy, ruled from Turin, Italian-speaking, Mediterranean, and not French. They came for the climate. The Maritime Alps rise to two thousand metres immediately behind the coastline at this point, blocking the cold mistral winds that scour Provence to the west, and the Mediterranean immediately south provides thermal mass that keeps winter temperatures consistently mild. The combination produced a winter climate that English doctors had identified, by the late eighteenth century, as ideal for patients suffering from consumption — tuberculosis — which was the leading cause of death in upper-class English households throughout the nineteenth century. Wealthy English families began renting villas in Nice for the cold months. By 1822, the English winter colony was large enough that a Reverend Lewis Way — an Anglican clergyman of independent means who had himself wintered in Nice for several years — organised a charity collection to fund a public works project for the local poor during an unusually cold winter that had ruined the local fishing economy. The funds raised by Way’s collection paid for the construction of a seafront path along the entire arc of the Baie des Anges, the bay on which Nice sits. The path was completed in 1824. It was called, immediately and locally, the Chemin des Anglais — the road of the English. It was paved, extended, and rebranded the Promenade des Anglais later in the nineteenth century. The single most photographed feature of the French Riviera was built with English donations, on Savoyard land, by Niçard labourers, financed by an Anglican vicar’s parish appeal.

Nice did not become French until 1860. The County of Nice had been part of the House of Savoy from 1388 — when the city’s leading families, fed up with feuding Provençal counts, had voluntarily transferred their allegiance to the Counts of Savoy in a process known as the Dédition de Nice — for four hundred and seventy-two years. That is, by way of comparison, longer than the United States has been a country. Longer than the British monarchy has existed in its current institutional form. Almost as long as the entire history of Renaissance and modern Europe combined. Nice spoke Niçard, an Occitan dialect with heavy Ligurian-Italian influence, mutually intelligible with the coastal dialects of nearby Liguria and Provence. The city’s official administrative languages over the four and a half centuries of Savoyard rule were variously Latin, Italian, and (after 1860) French. The city was, culturally, economically, and linguistically, part of the broader Ligurian-Piedmontese world — closer in every meaningful sense to Genoa, Turin, and Cuneo than to Marseille, Lyon, or Paris. The Savoyard royal family, who became the kings of Italy in 1861, treated Nice as one of their oldest and most loyal possessions. The city’s principal church, the Cathedral of Sainte-Réparate, was rebuilt in the seventeenth century in a baroque style indistinguishable from contemporary Genoese church architecture. The old port — the Port Lympia — was the principal mediterranean port of the Kingdom of Sardinia. The city was Italian in everything but the legal nationality on its passport, which it had not yet needed.

The transfer to France was a transaction. In March 1860, in the secret Treaty of Turin, the Kingdom of Sardinia — which had become the leading power in Italian unification under Cavour — agreed to cede the County of Nice and the Duchy of Savoy to France in exchange for French military support against Austria in the unification campaigns. France had supplied this support in 1859. France now wanted payment. The Treaty of Turin was signed on the 24th of March 1860. To provide the transaction with democratic legitimacy, a plebiscite was held among the population of the County of Nice in April 1860. The official result was 25,743 votes in favour of joining France, 160 votes against. The vote was almost universally regarded by foreign observers, by Italian nationalists, and by a significant minority of Niçards themselves as having been comprehensively manipulated. Ballots were openly distributed pre-marked. Voters faced public scrutiny. Anti-annexation rallies were dispersed by the authorities. Giuseppe Garibaldi — born in Nice on 4 July 1807, the most famous Niçard of his generation, a Savoyard subject by birth — denounced the transfer as a robbery and spent the rest of his life agitating for Nice’s return to Italy. He never set foot in Nice again after 1860. He died in Caprera, Sardinia, in 1882 — twenty-two years after his birthplace had become foreign to him by treaty. The plebiscite stood. France took possession. Nice has been French ever since. As of the date of this article, the city has been French for one hundred and sixty-six years. It was Savoyard, in its previous administrative incarnation, for four hundred and seventy-two.

What France received, when it received Nice in 1860, was an English-built seafront, an Italian-speaking population, a Savoyard royal architectural inheritance, and a Mediterranean cuisine. France worked, methodically, over the following century, to absorb the cultural distinctiveness of all three. The administrative apparatus was Frenchified within a decade — French became the sole language of government, of courts, of higher education, of street signage outside Vieux Nice. The aristocratic English winter colony, which had been the city’s principal economic engine for two generations, continued to grow through the late nineteenth century as the belle époque turned Nice into one of the four or five most fashionable winter destinations in Europe. Queen Victoria visited regularly in the 1890s and stayed at the Hotel Excelsior Regina, built specifically for her in Cimiez in 1895. The English colony peaked at perhaps twenty-five thousand permanent and seasonal residents in the 1900s. The Promenade des Anglais was extended, paved with asphalt, lined with palaces, and turned into the seven-kilometre seafront the contemporary visitor walks today. The Russian aristocracy began to arrive in the 1880s, drawn by the same climate and the same English-inspired infrastructure; Czar Nicholas II’s father, Alexander III, died at the Imperial Villa in Cimiez in 1894, and the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Nicholas — the largest Russian Orthodox church outside Russia at the time of its consecration in 1912 — was built nearby. By the early twentieth century, Nice was a fully-functioning French city wearing the architectural costume of three foreign winter colonies (English, Russian, and a smaller but persistent German one).

And then the painters arrived. Auguste Renoir moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer, immediately west of Nice, in 1907, when his arthritis made the colder climates of Paris and Burgundy impossible. He lived in his villa at Les Collettes for the last twelve years of his life and died there in 1919. Henri Matisse arrived in Nice in 1917, intending to spend a winter season for his health. He stayed for thirty-seven years. He lived in the Hôtel Beau Rivage on the Promenade, then in the Hôtel de la Méditerranée, then in a small apartment in the Place Charles-Félix in Vieux Nice for nearly twenty years, then in a villa at Cimiez until his death in November 1954. He is buried at the Cimiez cemetery on the hill above the city, in a grave covered in flowers from the local gardens. The Matisse Museum, in a 17th-century villa at Cimiez, holds the largest single collection of his work in the world — over six hundred paintings, drawings, sculptures, and the cut-paper gouaches découpées from his final years. Marc Chagall moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence — twenty kilometres inland from Nice, at the foot of the Maritime Alps — in 1949, after his return from exile in the United States, and lived in the village until his death in March 1985 at the age of ninety-seven. He is buried in the small village cemetery there. The Marc Chagall National Museum in Nice — designed in collaboration with the artist himself in his late seventies — opened in 1973 with Chagall present at the inauguration, and houses his Biblical Message cycle, seventeen large canvases the painter regarded as his most important religious work. Pablo Picasso lived in Antibes in 1946, painting at the Château Grimaldi (now the Picasso Museum). Pierre Bonnard was based at Le Cannet. Raoul Dufy painted along the entire coast for decades. Yves Klein was born in Nice in 1928 and developed his signature International Klein Blue partly from the colour of the Niçard sky. Nicolas de Staël lived and worked at Antibes in his final months, dying there in 1955. The cluster of School of Paris painters who spent their final decades on the Côte d’Azur is, even by the standards of art history, dense — denser than any other late-career artistic colony in the twentieth century. The reason was the same one the English doctors had identified in the 1780s: the light, the climate, and the particular quality of the Mediterranean Sun against the limestone walls of Vieux Nice and the white facades of the Promenade buildings.

Underneath all of this — the French administration, the English seafront, the Russian church, the Italian architecture, the painters’ studios — the Niçard city is still detectable. Vieux Nice, the old town, remains a tangle of narrow streets, ochre and rose-coloured houses, baroque churches, hanging laundry, and Italian-feeling courtyards. The local market in the Cours Saleya sells flowers, vegetables, and Provençal-Ligurian produce six mornings a week, in the same square where the Niçard fish market has operated since the seventeenth century. The street food is what gives the older identity away most clearly. Socca — a thin chickpea-flour pancake baked on a copper plate over a wood fire, served piping hot in folded newspaper — is the city’s signature street food. It is also essentially identical to Ligurian farinata, the same dish that has been eaten in Genoa, La Spezia, and the small towns of the Italian coast for centuries. Pissaladière — the city’s anchovy and caramelised onion flatbread — is the local version of Genoese pissalandiera. Pan bagnat — Niçard pan banhat, “wet bread” — is a sandwich of pain de campagne soaked in olive oil and stuffed with the ingredients of a salade niçoise. The famous salade niçoise itself is a peasant recipe of olives, anchovies, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and (in the orthodox version) raw vegetables only — never cooked potatoes or green beans, regardless of what most French restaurants put on the plate. None of this is French in any historical sense. All of it is Niçard, which is Mediterranean, which is Ligurian-Provençal — a regional cuisine that the political map redrew in 1860 and that the kitchens of the old town have continued cooking exactly as they always cooked it. The Niçard language is still spoken by perhaps a few thousand older residents and is taught in some bilingual schools as a regional language. Street signs in Vieux Nice are bilingual, French above and Niçard below. The carnival songs are in Niçard. The local football club’s older fan chants are in Niçard. The receipt under the paint is still legible if you know where to look.

This is the deeper character of Nice. Not the Casino. Not the Carnival. Not the celebrities at the Hotel Negresco. The city was Italian-speaking for almost five centuries, was bought from a small Italian kingdom in a treaty signed under questionable democratic terms in 1860, was developed primarily by English winter tourists for the half-century before and after the transfer, was chosen as the final address by half a dozen of the twentieth century’s greatest painters because of the light, and continues to eat a cuisine that crossed an arbitrary border one hundred and sixty-six years ago and never noticed. Nice is the French city that the English built, the Italians used to own, and the painters came to die in. The French inherited the receipts and have been keeping the books ever since.

Some cities were always what they appear to be. This one is several things underneath the surface, all of them still in operation.

Nine regions. One hundred and twenty destinations. Three hundred and twenty-nine weeks remaining.

The journey continues west. The next stop is a region whose perfume the rest of the world has been buying for four centuries.

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