Although just a few kilometres apart, Nice, Cannes and Monaco have had contrasting histories, often poised on opposing sides: Cannes as part of Provence and, later, France; Nice long an independent city state linked to Genoa and the house of Savoy; and Monaco, a tiny autocratic principality.
Beginnings
During the 4th century BC, Phocaean Greeks from Massilia (Marseille) founded trading posts named Nikaia (probably after nike for victory), roughly on the site of what is now Vieux Nice, and Monoikos (Monaco). However, traces of human settlement go back much earlier, to Terra Amata at the foot of Mont Boron, where a tribe of elephant-hunters set up camp some 400,000 years ago.
Nearby Lazaret Cave, thought to have been inhabited 170,000 years ago, is still being excavated.
Roman ruins in Fréjus
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In the 1st century BC, the Romans defeated the Vediantii tribe and took over its hill settlement, renaming it Cemenelum (now Cimiez), on the strategic Via Julia Augusta between Italy and Spain, making it capital of Alpes Maritimae province in AD 69. Cemenelum reached its peak in the 3rd century. Traces of the city, with three bathing establishments and a huge amphitheatre, can be seen at the Cimiez archaeological site.
Christianity gradually spread along the coast, and in 410 a monastery was founded on the island of Lérina (now Ile Saint-Honorat), which acquired extensive influence and territory (including Cannes) on the mainland.
With the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, the region was invaded first by Barbarians from the East, then Saracens from North Africa, but it was the Franks who triumphed, establishing the Carolingian Empire, which stretched from western Germany to northern Spain and Italy. When Charlemagne’s empire was divided in 843, Provence, nominally controlled by the Holy Roman Empire, was in effect an independent principality.
Counts Versus Consulats
In 972 Guillaume the Liberator drove the Saracens from their stronghold at La Garde Freinet in the Maures, bringing new prosperity to Provence, although the coast continued to suffer from marauding pirates. Fiercely independent Nice opposed the more centralised rule of the Provençal count and in 1144 established a Consulat, a sort of mini-republic whereby the town was administered by four elected consuls.
Count Ramon Berenger V, ruling from Aix-en-Provence since 1215, was determined to unify Provence and get rid of the consulates. In 1229 he invaded Nice, which had put itself under Genoese protection, and installed officials to administer the town. The count married all his daughters to kings or future kings: Marguerite to Louis IX of France, Eléonore to Henry III of England, Sanchia to Richard, earl of Cornwall, and Béatrice of Provence to Charles of Anjou, who thus inherited the title count of Provence in 1246, soon adding the kingdom of Sicily and Naples as well.
Meanwhile, Genoa had taken possession of Monaco and begun building a fortress. With Genoa caught up in the wars between the Guelph (pro-pope) and Ghibelline (pro-German emperor) factions, many of its noble families took refuge in eastern Provence, among them assorted branches of the Grimaldi family. In 1297, François Grimaldi, disguised as a monk, seized power as self-styled Seigneur of Monaco, establishing a new ruling dynasty (although it took the title of principality only in 1641).
The 17th-century Château Grimaldi in Antibes
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Early 13th-century Nice prospered with the growth of important monasteries, and the town began to spread below the castle hill between the River Paillon and the sea. When Jeanne, Countess of Provence and Queen of Naples, chose Louis of Anjou, brother of French king Charles V, as her heir, rather than her cousin Charles III of Duras, Provence was divided. In 1382, Jeanne was assassinated near Naples, leading to a six-year civil war between pro-Anjou Marseille and pro-Duras Nice. In 1388 Nice submitted to Savoyard protection rather than that of Anjou, under the Dédition of Nice. Henceforth, Nice’s fortunes were associated with Italy and the Holy Roman Empire, while Cannes on the western side of the River Var remained part of Provence, and Monaco – generally – sided with the French. With its sovereign conveniently far away, Nice enjoyed a new independence and prosperity from trade (essentially agricultural produce) with Italy, and an influx of Italian settlers bringing a culture distinguished by art and architecture, but the relationship also meant 400 years of on-off conflict with France.
Italians also settled elsewhere on the Riviera, brought in by landlords to cultivate land abandoned since the Black Death; while in a late flourishing of Gothic style, an artistic school grew up in Nice around the Bréa family (see box).
Ludovico Bréa
Louis or Ludovico Bréa was the leading figure of an artistic school that flourished in the Comté de Nice during the late 15th and early 16th century. Born in Nice in around 1450 to a family of barrel-makers who lived in rue Barillerie, he was soon carrying out commissions for churches and religious confraternities across the region. His powerful paintings mix the emotion of late Provençal Gothic with the discovery of perspective of the Italian Renaissance. You can see altarpieces by him (as well as works by his family and followers, including Antoine Bréa, François Bréa, Giovanni Balaisin and Giovanni Canevesio) in several churches in Nice, Monaco, the southern Alpine valleys and across the Italian border.
Good King René ruled from 1434–80
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Power struggles intensified after 1481 when Provence was absorbed into the French kingdom. In the early 16th century, Nice thwarted the ambitions of François I, who hoped that he, rather than Charles I of Spain (future Emperor Charles V) would be elected Holy Roman Emperor. In 1538 Pope Paul III initiated negotiations between the French king, who stayed in the fortress at Villeneuve-Loubet, and Emperor Charles V, who resided at Villefranche-sur-Mer. The Treaty of Nice brought short-lived peace, but in 1543 the allied troops of François I and Turkish Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the city. According to local legend, on 15 August washerwoman Catherine Ségurane grabbed a Turkish standard and pushed back the invaders. Although the lower town was sacked, the castle hill held out until relieved by Charles V’s forces. Ségurane has gone down in local memory as a symbol of Niçois courage and feisty independence – although it is not certain that she ever existed.
Wars and Revolution
The expansion of Nice accelerated in the 17th century, when Emmanuel Philibert I converted the hilltop town into a bastioned citadel, and forced the population to move below, endowing Vieux Nice with Italianate Baroque style, with richly decorated churches and imposing Genoese-style palaces.
France besieged Nice again in 1691 and in 1705 during the War of Spanish Succession, when Savoyard Nice sided with the Habsburgs against French claims to the Spanish throne; in 1706 the citadel was razed, on the orders of Louis XIV, and this time not rebuilt. With Savoyard rule re-established, in 1782–92 King Victor-Amédée III of Sardinia laid out a grandiose arcaded square, the Piazza Vittoria (now place Garibaldi), at the entrance to town on the new route from his capital Turin, and began digging the new Port Lympia.
With the peasantry and bourgeoisie submerged by taxes to finance wars, and poor harvests leading to bread shortages, the people of Provence were active participants in the French Revolution; many of the aristocracy fled across the Var to take refuge in Nice. In 1792, the revolutionary Armée du Midi invaded Nice and Monaco, which remained under French rule until 1814, when the Treaty of Paris returned Nice to Sardinia-Piedmont and restored the Prince of Monaco to his throne.
Winter Visitors
The 18th century saw the beginning of winter visitors from northern Europe. Lord and Lady Cavendish stayed in Nice in 1731, followed by other British aristocrats, among them the Duke of York in 1764, and by novelist Tobias Smollett, who described the town and its people in his Travels Through France and Italy (1766), admiring the remains of Cemenelum, treating Nice’s ‘slovenly’ maids, ‘greedy’ shopkeepers and ‘lazy’ artisans with characteristic condescension and advocating the benefits of sea air for the lungs. By the 1780s some 300 British visitors wintered in Nice, settling to the west of town in a district they dubbed Newborough. In 1822, Reverend Lewis Way opened a public subscription for building a new seafront footpath, actually an employment exercise after a harsh winter, soon called the chemin des Anglais (renamed promenade des Anglais in 1844).
In 1834 British Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham was forced to overnight in Cannes because an outbreak of cholera prevented him crossing the border. He liked it so much he stayed, buying a plot of land and building the Villa Eléonore (named after his daughter) with gardens down to the sea. Cannes was transformed from a fishing village into an aristocratic watering hole for the English, who built elegant villas, mainly on the western side of town in the Quartier de la Croix des Gardes – fresh air and fine views being more important than proximity to the sea. Hotels were built for visitors and a veritable property market developed: Sir Thomas Woolfield was known for building extravagant residences, then selling them on, while in 1864 his former gardener, John Taylor, founded an estate agency that still exists today.
Reunification and Regeneration
In return for Napoleon III’s support against Austria in the unification of Italy, King Victor Emmanuel II agreed to hand back Savoie and the Comté de Nice, confirmed by a vast majority in a referendum in April 1860. The population of the city nearly tripled between 1861 and 1911, boosted by the arrival of the railway in 1864, with people drawn in by the booming economy of Second Empire France. The expansion of the New Town continued in the Quartier des Musiciens, Les Baumettes and Cimiez, where the visit of Queen Victoria confirmed Nice as a fashionable destination. English aristocrats were joined by pleasure-seeking Russians, who built fairytale villas and the Russian Orthodox cathedral.
The Casino on the pier at Nice
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A treaty in 1861 also confirmed the attachment of Menton and Roquebrune, which had broken off from Monaco in the 1848 revolution. In search of new revenue, Prince Charles III turned to gambling, awarding the concession to run the Casino (banned in both neighbouring France and Italy) to businessman François Blanc, founder of the Société des Bains de Mer de Monaco. Blanc soon added the Hôtel de Paris to accommodate the gamblers and called in Parisian architect Charles Garnier to design an opera house, adjoining the Casino, giving rise to a whole new district, Monte Carlo.
Royal patronage
In 1897 and 1899, Queen Victoria spent several months at the Hôtel Excelsior Régina in Cimiez, built in her honour, where she occupied the entire west wing. Travelling as Lady Balmoral, the queen socialised with European aristocracy (many of them her relations) and visited the town in a cart drawn by a donkey.
In the early 20th century, grand hotels went up along the seafront promenade in Cannes, and from 1922 the Calais Méditerranée Express, better known as the Train Bleu, bought British visitors direct from Calais to the Côte d’Azur. Americans introduced the new pleasures of sunbathing and water-skiing, and in 1931 the summer season was born when the grand hotels of Juan-les-Pins and Cannes stayed open in summer for the first time.
Avant-garde artists, musicians and writers – including Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and Gertrude Stein – also colonised the south, drawn by the southern light and the attractions of the new Mediterranean society.
War and Post-War
During World War II, the Alpes-Maritimes was part of so-called Unoccupied France under the Vichy regime, until occupied by Italian troops in November 1942. They were replaced in September 1943 by German troops after the fall of Mussolini, and liberated in August 1944 by Allied troops from North Africa. The first Cannes Film Festival (for more information, click here) – originally planned for 1939 but postponed due to the war – took place in 1946, heralding a glamorous new image for Cannes – and for Monaco, when film star Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III in 1956, with Alfred Hitchcock as their witness.
A poster advertising the winter season in 1890s Nice
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The post-war period saw all three cities expand enormously, especially Nice, with immigration from North Africa and the return of the pieds-noirs (the white colonial population) in the 1960s, following Algerian independence. At the same time there was a change in the type of tourism, already augmented when working people first received paid holidays in 1936, and holidays in the southern sun were no longer the preserve of aristocrats and artists. The birth of mass tourism led to widescale construction all along the coast.
Twentieth-century Nice was also marked by the long reign of mayor Jean Médecin, elected 1928–43 and re-elected from 1947–65, at which point his son, Jacques, succeeded him. Under Jacques Médecin, Nice gained its modern art museum, new theatre, casinos, and the Arenas business district; the town also became the creative centre of a dynamic artistic movement, the Ecole de Nice (for more information, click here). Adored by many Niçois, Médecin veered close to extreme right politics and was suspected of financial embezzlement, before escaping to Uruguay in 1990 to avoid corruption charges. There (after extradition to France and a brief spell in jail) he died in 1998. In the 21st century, Nice has many environmental and cultural projects in progress and will be a host city in the UEFA Euro 2016 Football Championship.
Under Prince Rainier III, Monaco began to take on its present form, with a booming banking sector, skyscrapers replacing 19th-century villas, and an entire district, Fontvieille, constructed on land reclaimed from the sea. Amid suspicions of money laundering, the tax haven’s relationship with France and the European Union is not always easy, and Prince Albert II, who succeeded in 2005, has promised greater transparency. In 2011 the principality had plenty to celebrate when Albert II married South African former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock, and again in 2014 when she gave birth to twins Gabriella and Jacques, the heir apparent to the Monegasque throne.
Posing on the red carpet at the Palais des Festivals, Cannes
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