Postcards from France’s second city, a fascinating mix of immigration, rebellion and football.
“When my friends from Paris and Bordeaux take the bus here, they start crying. C’est la force! It’s drama, it’s magnificent theatre. And it’s free. In that sharp light, you understand nothing, but you’re dazzled by everything.”
Oh that city of fever and blue. I remember a spring sunset over an azure sea, harsh rocks shadowed and dazzling in that light. Warm beer-fuddled evenings in squares and sitting outside alleyway bars. The streets feverish with an edge but friendly with an open warmth.
I remember the blue skies and the blue of the badge on the shirt. There are not many like Marseille. It’s frenetic and wild. Gritty and cosmopolitan. Grand and dilapidated. As the northern autumn dark closes in, those few days in the city still cast a spell.
It’s a city of several continents where you can say shukran as much as merci. There are French-Lebanese bakeries, African spice stalls and cafes serving Tunisian tea. Down at the docks near the cathedral, the huge Mediterranean ferries hum with a beguiling call, beckoning you to journey onwards to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. You stand there dreaming of journeys to the next continent, to where the swallows migrate.
There’s a restless energy and the streets are turned up a notch. A cat stalks a pigeon with murderous intent. Flea stalls pop up and disappear. Someone sets up a table at a roundabout to sell a few slices of watermelon. Rows of French-Arab men sit drinking tea at cafes (an uneasy sight for where are all the women?). Teenagers fly through the traffic with swagger on e-scooters, nimbly zipping across the paths of oncoming trams.
Meanwhile, down at the Old Port, weather-beaten women are selling fish. A hustler wanders up and down his chess games, watching the moves made by tourists crouched over the boards with furrowed brows. Young men are break dancing and back-flipping. The tourists gasp and applaud as they leap and twist and twirl. Impressive for sure, but I prefer it when they break into nifty African dance-shuffles. In the late evenings, street dance parties sway to Arabic dance – young and old having a great time.
Let’s not cast too romantic a tourist spell. This city can be bleak, it will bite. There’s a phone snatch on the subway. A malnourished-looking teenager times the snatch perfectly and exits through the closing doors. The owner hammers on the window with furious impotence as the train moves away. Midnight on La Canebiere and a family sleeps on a mattress. A beggar with wrecked bare feet hawks the pavement.
The ticket seller for the boat to Chateau d’If laboriously checks every banknote under a counterfeit scanner. When I ask, she smiles and replies: “This is Marseille”.
It’s always been like this. It’s the renegade outsider city, challenging France. After a city rebellion, Louis XIV built forts on the port in the 1660s. Legend has it the guns were pointed inland to keep the locals quiet. Skip to the modern day and when Macron, the French President, visited the notorious quartiers nord for a political stunt, he needed a police army to get him in and out safely. Everyone knew it.
Joseph Downing, a senior lecturer who grew up in a London council estate and lives in Marseille says that it’s impossible for Britons to grasp the brutality of poverty, the drug wars and unemployment in some areas of Marseille. “In terms of the disrepair of the housing stock, the absence of the state – the absence of anybody – we can’t comprehend it’s possible. The police are even scared to go there. For us, this is unthinkable. These places are literally outside the state.”
We head down to the stadium for the game.
A building site for tram lines has been commandeered as an outdoor terrace by a local bar. The landlord waves a pipe around to dispense pastis into people’s water bottles. We sit drinking with the fans amongst the mounds of building debris, bathed in the warm golden glow of early evening sunshine. Walking towards the stadium, someone sets off some firecrackers and no-one flinches apart from the British tourists. But it’s all surprisingly mellow so far.
Mellow until we are inside the stadium. The atmosphere is intense and insane. The history of the club is like, the city, fascinating, challenging and rebellious. So of course the fans are no different. The ultra groups call and respond to each other. Huge banners are unfolded. Mass blue and white displays unfold. Flares glow red and smoke rises from the banks of the undulating, chanting, bare-chested, frenzied support who never stop, for the whole game. Oh and Marseille win with two late goals but that was the secondary entertainment.
Cities, past and present, can fascinate by posing awkward questions about their lifeforce – us and the state of where we are. Athens with anarchists and refugees. London and surveillance. Kolkatta and empire. Detroit with its decline and rebirth. Naples for death and religion. The curse of Akkad for climate catastrophe and Pot-au-Prince for collapse into a gang nightmare.
Marseille asks all kinds of difficult questions about identity and integration, poverty, abandonment and police brutality. But it will also fold you into its multi-cultural vibrancy, a fever of streets and history that only cities can offer as captivating, and occasionally dangerous, theatre. In that sharp light, you understand nothing, but you’re dazzled by everything.
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