In 1927, the French journalist Albert Londres travelled to Marseille to investigate the international crime and drug rings that already formed an indelible part of the city’s reputation. During his investigation, Londres asked a migrant laborer, one of the legions of itinerant workers who powered the city’s port, why he had decided to come and work in Marseille.
“Because of the many beautiful stories about Marseille,” the worker replied. “Many wonderful stories, many lies.”[1]
Picking apart the history of lies and wonderful stories that have been told about Marseille—“the mirage” of Marseille, as Londres called it—was the mission of Nicholas Hewitt, the late scholar of French literature, in his final book, Wicked City: The Many Cultures of Marseille. Rather than a history of the city itself, Hewitt offers a collective biography of the artists who have shaped popular perceptions of the city over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These artistic representations, Hewitt argues, have been more than mere reflections of life in the city. They are active agents in Marseille’s history, creating and sustaining an image of the city as dirty, dangerous, and other—an image often mobilized in cultural and political discourse to mark the edge of France, and of white European-ness more broadly.
For Hewitt, whose previous work includes a cultural history of Montmartre and a biography of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marseille might appear an odd choice of subject, given the city’s enduring reputation as a cultural backwater of the French artistic and literary world. And yet, like a number of other scholars who have also published recent books on the art and politics of modern Marseille, he insists that France’s “Second City” is deserving of more thorough attention.[2]
Hewitt argues that literary representations of Marseille—all the “wonderful stories and lies” that form the foundation of the city’s popular reputation—have coalesced over time into two fundamentally opposed visions of the city’s place in the nation. According to the first of these stereotypes, Marseille is characterized by its reputation for existing, both physically and metaphorically, on the very edge of “civilized” European society. Disparaging commentators describe the city as more Mediterranean than French as a result of its many multi-racial and multi-religious communities; as infamously crime-ridden; and as one of the most notoriously polluted cities in Europe as a result of its long industrial history. Conversely, the port city, which served as Europe’s “gateway to the Orient” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has also garnered more glowing and glamorous connotations as a place of adventure and travel, of “the exotic,” and as a “ville d’acceuil”—a city of welcome—for wave after wave of the immigrant communities that have made France their home since the late nineteenth century.[3]
This “elusive, plural nature,” alongside a pronounced tendency for political resistance to the central state, has made the city a permanent thorn in the side of French leaders. It has also made it an attractive location for artists looking to leave the beaten path of Europe’s capital cities.[4] As such, Hewitt argues, Marseille has been a site of prodigious artistic and literary production, and has played an under-appreciated role in fostering many of the avant-garde cultural movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from post-impressionism to the surrealist poetry of the interwar period.
Hewitt’s dual characterization of Marseille will not be new to those familiar with the city’s literature or history. But his insistence that the city represents a crucible of sophisticated artistic production is still fairly rare in a country that continues to privilege the cultural primacy of Paris. This narrow focus on the French capital is a tendency that has been reproduced by scholarly studies of French culture as well. Hewitt’s work therefore constitutes one of the first studies to introduce English-speaking audiences to the authors, artists, and filmmakers who have made Marseille such a significant venue for the development of cultural currents characteristic of the modern period. In highlighting these artists, Hewitt attempts to wrest the international spotlight away from Paris, at least momentarily.
To make his case, Hewitt moves chronologically through the cultural history of Marseille, beginning in the early nineteenth century. Each chapter is a snapshot of key historical moments that delves deeply into the work of a small handful of artists in its period. Some of the works he highlights will be familiar to anglophone readers. He begins, for example, with Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, perhaps the most famous literary representation of Marseille in the Western canon. But Hewitt’s most significant contribution is his discussion of lesser-known writers and artists. He moves from Victor Gelu, the acerbic working-class poet of the early nineteenth century, to the pioneer French filmmakers Marcel Pagnol and Ousmane Sembène; from journalists like Albert Londres to literary patrons like Jean Ballard, who edited Les Cahiers du Sud, one of the longest-running international literary journals of the twentieth century. Hewitt ends his story in the 1990s with the neo-noir crime novels of Jean-Claude Izzo and popular hip-hop and reggae artists including Massilia Sound System, running the gamut of cultural figures who have influenced Marseille’s historical representation.
Hewitt successfully demonstrates Marseille’s importance as a source of inspiration and, critically, as a site of interaction and encounter for artists, particularly those from Europe and the Mediterranean. His chapter on the interwar period and Les Cahiers du Sud is particularly compelling in this regard. Hewitt shows that that the journal’s editor, Jean Ballard, maintained a strong commitment to the French surrealist poets, to the folklore of Occitanie, and to the literature of the Jewish and Islamic Mediterranean, bringing together artists from cultural movements which he understood to form a broad-based “Mediterranean humanism.”[5]
One could make a similarly persuasive case for the importance of Marseille as an extension of the Black Atlantic or as a key site of the Black Mediterranean, given Hewitt’s characterization of the work of Claude McKay and Ousmane Sembène, though, regrettably, he does not explicitly take up either idea.[6] Hewitt’s interests are biographical rather than theoretical and, as a scholar of French literature, he emphasizes the role of Marseille in French discourse specifically. But Hewitt’s exclusive focus on French (and English) literature necessarily presents a Eurocentric vision of Marseille, even as he insists that North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean have been crucial cultural reference points for the city’s artists. We are left without any discussion of Arabic-language literature, for example, or of the ways in which Marseille has been culturally important for artists and intellectuals from the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean.[7]
This focus neglects the most exciting avenue of research on the modern Mediterranean: a renewed appreciation of the sea as a transnational space of cultural flow. As recent work has shown, the Mediterranean is perhaps best understood as a constellation of port cities that face one another, rather than a place defined by the nation-state. Its cities’ relationships with one another are equally, if not more, important than the relationship between each of those cities and their respective national capitals.[8] Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marseille was among the brightest stars in that Mediterranean constellation. And yet, by marking Marseille as the defining boundary of French culture—by treating Marseille as the hinterland of Paris rather than a Mediterranean metropolis—Hewitt reinforces a nationally defined conception of Marseille’s cultural importance. In doing so, he necessarily privileges the voices of (mostly white) European and American cultural figures, even while he emphasizes the racial and religious diversity of the city.
Hewitt is ultimately least convincing in his historicization of popular stereotypes about Marseille. He tells a compelling story about the ways in which negative stereotypes about the city have been mobilized to marginalize both the city itself and the minority communities that have called Marseille home. But without deep historical contextualization, readers are left without substantial understanding of where and how those stereotypes first emerged or how they have evolved over time, though they form the very foundation of Hewitt’s study. As he argues throughout his work, Marseille’s internationally seedy reputation is based in part on the fact that it has long been decried as a particularly filthy city. For Hewitt, the city’s inability, or unwillingness, to adequately manage its own sanitation has led to a persistent problem of trash and waste accumulating in the streets—trash which consistently appeared in literary representations of the city. While these sanitation problems had historical roots, Hewitt argues, the widely held belief that Marseille was a city drowning beneath its own filth was primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon, one he dates specifically to the 1920s.[9] The city’s reputation for grime was ironic, Hewitt notes, since the largest and most lucrative industry in Marseille throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, in fact, the soap industry.
However, Hewitt spends very little time examining the infrastructural causes of Marseille’s sanitation challenges, focusing instead on discourse—on the ways those stereotypes of filthiness have been deployed to brand Marseille as marginal to “true” French culture. Hewitt alludes to the irony that a city built on the soap industry could be so dirty, for example, but he does not emphasize that, by the nineteenth century, industrial pollution from the soap factories themselves was the primary cause of waste and odor in the streets—that such was the cost of producing soap, and thus “cleanliness,” for the rest of Europe.[10]
Hewitt’s emphasis on the modern period and on literary sources also creates occasional blind spots concerning the longue durée of Marseille’s reputation for grime. It is clear that, contrary to Hewitt’s focus on the 1920s, the polluted reputation of Marseille goes back much further than the twentieth century: it had been festering for much of the city’s history. Throughout the nineteenth century, for example, the city was buffeted by a series of well-documented public health crises. These included the massive proliferation of industrial waste, a string of cholera epidemics, and droughts, exacerbated by the city’s lack of access to fresh water. But, Hewitt argues, these issues “[do] not surface significantly in nineteenth-century literary or visual accounts.”[11]
In dismissing the early history of Marseille’s sanitation challenges, Hewitt misses the ways that images of urban filth have long provided fodder for thinly veiled arguments about the city’s inability to meet certain cultural standards, standards that have been intimately connected to ideas of racial and religious purity. For example, the French sociologist André Donzel, whom Hewitt himself cites, has argued that the city’s sanitation problems date back to Antiquity, when the ancient city of Marseille was heavily criticized by Roman administrators for having invested heavily in ramparts, but not in sewers or aqueducts, and thus having failed to meet the hygienic or architectural standards of a “proper” Roman city.[12] Things had hardly improved by the Early Modern period, when the city became notoriously associated with disease. By this time, Marseille, now dominated by Paris instead of Rome, served as the primary port of entry for all French trade with the Middle East and, consequently, became the site where the bubonic plague was re-introduced into France in 1720, unleashing the last and most devastating outbreak in the city’s history. The city’s failure to meet a certain standard of cleanliness, or to uphold proper quarantine procedures, resulted in an epidemic that left half the city’s population dead and cemented the idea that Marseille represented a threat on the outer periphery of French society—a place of ‘contagion,’ both physical and spiritual, due to its frequent interaction with the Islamic world.[13]
Hewitt is perhaps correct in his assertion that such stereotypes reached a crescendo in the mid-twentieth century, and his chapters on the interwar period and Second World War offer particularly striking examples of the ways that the rhetoric of filthiness could be deployed to deadly effect. By the 1920s, Marseille’s central port neighborhoods, which had become increasingly dilapidated due to overcrowding and municipal neglect, were now also home to a cluster of gangs and organized crime rings that helped give rise to the city’s unofficial designation as the Chicago of France.[14] During the Second World War, the same dank and twisted streets that had provided safe haven for the dens of the criminal underworld became a desperate hideout for resistance fighters and for Jewish and political refugees seeking to flee Europe through the city’s port. A parade of European artists and intellectuals came through the city during this period, including Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
This flood of refugees became explicitly associated with the infamous filth of Marseille. Hewitt points, for example, to the German novelist Anna Seghers who, having herself fled from the city, described this great exodus in her 1940 novel Transit, writing,
The last few months I’d been wondering where all this was going to end up—the trickles, the streams of people from the camps, the dispersed soldiers, the army mercenaries, the defilers of all races, the deserters of all nations. This, then, is where the detritus was flowing, along this channel, this gutter. . . and via this gutter into the sea[15]
If Seghers felt herself to be part of the “human refuse” flowing through Marseille, the city’s German occupiers relied on nearly identical imagery, repeatedly referring to the “detritus” and “vermin” who occupied Marseille’s central neighborhoods and describing the city itself as “the canker of Europe.”[16] As Hewitt recounts, this rhetoric reached its culmination in January 1943 when German soldiers, in cooperation with French police, systematically dynamited the streets off the northern bank of the port in a final effort to purge the city of refugees and resistance forces. In doing so, they arrested and deported 2,000 Jews and refugees for the death camps of Eastern Europe. Through this process of “cleansing,” it seemed that Marseille—that dirty city on the edge of Europe—had finally and violently been brought to heel by “Nazi Germany,…the self-styled embodiment of Nordic principles of order.”[17]
The dramatic and tragic manifestation of such rhetoric during the Second World War should not, however, obscure the deep roots of Marseille’s reputation for urban filth and the ways that rhetoric was mobilized against othered communities well before the twentieth century. And, as Hewitt points out, stereotypes about Marseille’s filthiness have persisted long into the postwar era, though they are now employed most often to make racist allusions to the largely Muslim West and North African communities who have moved into the port-side neighborhoods.
Layer after layer of these historical stereotypes have continued to accumulate, creating a dynamic in which ‘Marseille,’ Hewitt argues, is now perhaps best understood as an idea rather than a reality. It is an idea which nonetheless remains essential to French (and, one might argue, European) identity. The imagined city of “Marseille,” he argues, has served as “‘a sort of safety valve to release the dangerous pressure of the repressed problems of France as a whole.’”[18] It has been a screen on which observers of the European and Mediterranean worlds have projected their deepest anxieties about modern life—increasingly interconnected, multi-racial, and forced, now, to face the ramifications of an industrial past. As Hewitt convincingly demonstrates, those projections deserve further study. But so too does the historical reality of the city itself. Only then will the mirage of lies and wonderful stories begin to fade so that Marseille, a city which encapsulated all the “problems” and “aspirations” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, might finally offer us clear and pragmatic lessons for urban life in the future.[19]
[1] “‘À cause beaucoup belles histoires sur le Marseille. Beaucoup magnifiques, beaucoup mensonges.’ Le mirage!” Albert Londres, Marseille: porte du sud (Paris: Les Éditions de France, 1927), 347. My translation.
[2] See Claire Launchbury and Megan C. MacDonald, Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s): Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021); Minayo Nasiali, Native to the Republic: empire, social citizenship, and everyday life in Marseille since 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016); Sheila Crane, Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern architecture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
[3] Marcel Roncayolo, L’imaginaire de Marseille: port, ville, pôle (Marseille: Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Marseille, 1990).
[4] Nicholas Hewitt, Wicked City: The Many Cultures of Marseille (London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2019), 6.
[5] Hewitt, Wicked City, 76.
[6] SA Smythe, “The Black Mediterranean and the Politics of the Imagination,” Middle East Report 286 (2018), https://merip.org/2018/10/the-black-mediterranean-and-the-politics-of-the-imagination/; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 2007).
[7] For a volume that takes up these issues in greater detail, see Claire Launchbury and Megan C. MacDonald, Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s): Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021).
[8] Meltem Toksöz and Biray Kolluoglu, Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present Day (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014)
[9] Hewitt, Wicked City, 10, 114–115.
[10] Hewitt, Wicked City, 115; for more on soap pollution, see Daniel Faget, “Une cite sous les cendres: les territoires de la pollution savonnière à Marseille (1750-1850) in Débordements industriels: environnement, territoire et conflit XVIIIe-XXIe siècle, eds. Michel Letté and Thomas Le Roux (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), accessed October 13, 2021, https://books.openedition.org/pur/111365?lang=en.
[11] Hewitt, Wicked City, 114-115.
[12] André Donzel, “Marseille: conjurer le stigmate de la ville sale,” in Vie d’ordures – de l’économie des déchets, eds. Denis Chevalier and Yann-Philippe Tastevin (Marseille: Artlys; Mucem, 2017), 124-129.
[13] Junko Thérèse Takeda, “Plague, Commerce, and Centralized Disease Control in Early Modern France,” in Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 106-130.
[14] Hewitt, Wicked City, 102.
[15] Quoted in Hewitt, Wicked City, 165-166.
[16] Quoted in Hewitt, Wicked City, 172.
[17] Quoted in Hewitt, Wicked City, 174.
[18] Quoted in Hewitt, Wicked City, 11.
[19] Hewitt, Wicked City, 11.