History Of The French Riviera - The War Years
In the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century
, the Cte d'Azur, or as it is popularly known, the French Riviera, was home to the wealthy elite of both Europe and the United States, as well as to a thriving colony of writers and artists. Lying along the Mediterranean coast of the south of France, and bounded by Menton on the east and Hyres on the west, the region is known for its temperate winters and glorious, clear light.The arrival of rail service in 1864 opened what had been a remote and impoverished region of France to travellers from all over Europe. A flood of aristocrats and royals congregated on the Riviera during the winter "season," attracted both to the healthy climate and to the casinos in the principality of Monaco.
Tsar Alexander II, Napoleon III, Leopold II of Belgium, Queen Victoria, and the future Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, all spent time on the Cte d'Azur. The impressionist painter, Renoir, lived there and died on the Riviera in 1919. Matisse lived in Nice (the largest city in the region) until his death in 1954 and Picasso called Mougins home until his own passing in 1973.
After World War I, which ravaged both the European landscape and its royal houses, the Cte d'Azur became the summer playground for American business moguls. The writers and painters of the inter-war Lost Generation, disillusioned by the carnage of the Great War, fled their homelands to embrace the expatriate lifestyle both in Paris and on the French Riviera. It was there that Edith Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence near Hyres in 1920 and F. Scott Fitzgerald drafted the bulk of The Great Gatsby while living at Saint-Raphal.
When Germany invaded France in the summer of 1940, the British and American expatriates went to Gibraltar or returned to the United States. Some, like the Jewish artist Marc Chagall, needed help to escape the advancing Nazis. In total, however, more than 5,000 French Jews from the French Riviera died in the death camps during the war. Saint-Tropez was badly damaged in the fighting and only restored to its original condition in the post-war years due to the efforts of the novelist Collette.
As many of the artists and novelists returned after the war, the creative energies that have long formed a vital part of life on the French Riviera coalesced into an event that now largely symbolises the region internationally, the Cannes Film Festival, founded in 1946. Consequently, as the decade of the 1940s drew to a close, the French Riviera increasingly became an international destination for a new "jet set" of celebrities and film stars from around the world, opening yet another glittering period on the fabled shoreline of the Cte d'Azur.
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