NICE LETTER:Once a glamorous playground, France's fifth city is today one of the country's most forward-looking places
AS THE commemorative flags billowing along the sweeping curve of the Baie des Anges in Nice proclaim, it’s 150 years since the Mediterranean city was ceded to France as a reward for French help in the second Italian war of independence against Austria. The locally born Italian hero Giuseppe Garibaldi was irate about the handover, knowing well – as generations of film stars, millionaires, princes, mafiosi and tourists would later come to realise – that France had quite a trophy on its hands.
But being reminded of Nice’s itinerant pedigree brings to mind not just how quickly it has been absorbed by the métropole, but how much it has remained a place apart. The modern city is steeped in legends of its own singularity, the standard-issue airs and graces of a cosmopolitan and wealthy border town combined with a recent history that owes almost as much to the imaginations of outsiders as to the centralising zeal of the French state.
Every one of Nice’s most celebrated buildings tells its own version of the modern city’s story, but few capture the essence of the place quite like the Palais de la Méditerranée, an imposing art deco landmark that looks out over the sea. Financed by American billionaire Frank Jay Gould and inaugurated as a casino in January 1929, for a long time the Palais’s great limestone facade symbolised the decadent luxury of the interwar years.
Monied English tourists and Russian royalty had been coming to the Riviera since the mid-19th century, but it was during the belle époque that it really flourished, becoming by the roaring twenties the most glamorous playground in the world – a hedonistic sanctuary for American millionaires, film stars, barons and royals, artists and intellectuals.
F Scott Fitzgerald and Aldous Huxley visited. Matisse and Chagall were drawn by the quality of the light and the clarity of the sky. And when they came, celebrities such as Coco Chanel and Charlie Chaplin would make straight for the ballrooms and salons of the Palais.
The casino’s turbulent story was to mirror the city’s. Though both survived the second World War, the Palais and its city were shadows of their former selves by 1945 (Nice had been occupied by the Nazis and was heavily bombarded by US forces in preparation for the Allied landing in Provence). The Palais fell into a long decline, and although air travel and the motor car brought popular tourism to Nice in the 1960s, its reputation as a realm of rarefied glamour faded into memory. High-rise apartments rose higher, and the traffic grew louder. In 1978, the Palais, by then a symbol of wider decrepitude, was finally closed.
Last week, I asked around in Nice for a book about the history of the Palais de la Méditerranée. Nobody could find one, but even if it existed, people would surely be tempted to keep it quiet. That’s because, for many locals, the Palais is remembered above all for its link to one of France’s murkiest murder mysteries, involving an irresistible cocktail of intrigue, passion and money.
Just three years ago, the country watched rapt as 69-year-old Jean-Maurice Agnelet was convicted for the murder of Agnès Le Roux, a young woman who vanished in 1977 while her mother was running the Palais.
Agnelet, who was in a relationship with Agnès Le Roux at the time of her disappearance, was a long-time suspect, but it took 30 years of legal procedures, botched investigations and – ultimately – the collapse of his alibi for the case to be resolved. The prosecution said Agnelet turned Le Roux against her mother and persuaded her to sell her shares in the Palais to rival casino-owner Jean-Dominique Fratoni, who was suspected of links to the criminal underworld. Le Roux’s body has never been found.
And yet the Palais still stands. The building was gutted and lay half in ruins by the late 1970s, but thanks to its listed facade a new group of financiers was able to restore the structure and reopen it as a hotel-casino in 2004. Its new interior subtly evokes the charm of the 1930s, but its mood is thoroughly modern. Much like Nice, in fact.
Sometimes written off as staid and sleepy, France’s fifth city is today one of the country’s most self-consciously forward-looking places. Half of the population is under 40, its university is growing, and cultural life is thriving. As many Irish people know, tourism remains big business in Nice, but the city also boasts one of Europe’s biggest technology parks, hosting 1,200 international companies, and prides itself on its hi-tech savvy.
If Garibaldi was with us, he’d still be fuming over the city that got away.
