My Marseille, by Jonathan Meades

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Francis le Belge, Joël le Turc, Philippe le Dingue,  Jacky Le Mat are, alas, no longer with us. Tony l’Anguille, having spent 28 of his 84 years in jail, has retired to the backwoods. These caïds – mob bosses – belonged to, perhaps created, a mythic Marseille. Their less picaresque successors, Maghrebian adolescents tooled up with AK‑47s, do not share their forebears’ taste for celebrity. Nonetheless, they supply a hungry press with steeped-in-blood copy. 

The housing projects in the city’s northern quarters where today’s hoodlums live are, then, for specialists only: demographers, sociologists, investigative documentarists, justifiably nervy police. Wiser to start in the south where, lacking nostalgie de la boue, I choose to live. Marseille is an alarmingly precipitous city whose chaotic urbanism is determined by a severe topography and the struggle to defy it. The bleached massifs around it comprise unforgiving gulfs, coves, dry valleys and rocks hollowed like bad teeth. This layer cake of the aeons belongs more to the realm of the sublime than to that of beauty. 

Chapelle Saint-Joseph is a monument to banality. But the perfectly conical hill on which it stands might be a component of a picturesque artificial landscape – more Rex Whistler than Cézanne. Across a declivity beyond the chapel rises a security fortress, La Rouvière, a co-prop of 8,000 inhabitants that belongs not so much to architecture as to orthogonal geology. Here it is always 1962, when a million pieds-noirs and harkis traduced by Charles de Gaulle and sacrificed to the bloodthirsty castrators of the Algerian National Liberation Front Party fled from Algiers and Oran. This is where many of the pieds-noirs and their children’s children still live among their own sort, in perpetual fear of the eternal antagonist. That fear is one of the many foundations of my new novel, Empty Wigs.  

This layer cake of the aeons belongs to the realm of the sublime

Marseille is a city of collisions rather than elisions. La Major, the striped, approximately Byzantine cathedral, appears to rise from the sea in a clash of elements. Incense and noxious cruise ships do not accord with each other. One of La Major’s architects, Espérandieu, was also responsible for the Palais Longchamp and Notre-Dame de la Garde. The work is boorish, quintessentially Napoleon III – and thrilling. It is routinely overlooked by today’s black-clad architects and their pilgrim students gazing rapt at Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse and – less reverentially – at Fernand Pouillon’s reconstruction of the Vieux Port in a manner borrowed from fascist Italy. Le Grand Bleu (the well-named Bouches-du-Rhône headquarters designed by Will Alsop) is the only work of the past half century to match Le Corbusier’s. 

Bouillabaisse is a Provençal word that roughly translates as “you’ve been had”. The point of the dish is the fish soup, and the best fish soup is at François Coquillages, which does not offer bouillabaisse. The true vernacular dish of the city is pizza. There are dozens of pizza vans and as many restaurants. Chez Étienne and Chez Sauveur are not to be missed.

Then it’s time to tackle Roucas-Blanc, the wealthiest part of the city and, equally, the least knowable. A labyrinth of coniferous slopes and ravines constellated with white, cubistic houses, precipitous outdoor staircases and twisting alleys. High-walled lanes culminate in sheer cliffs. Concrete of the late 19th century imitates trees, logs, trunks and branches. There is an evident kinship with the art brut of Facteur Cheval and Robert Tatin. This rocaille is, however, of Italian origin, as is so much else in Marseille: cooking, dialect, screeching Vespas. Roucas-Blanc is a place to get lost in. It descends to the main coastal road, and Jules Cantini’s replica of Michelangelo’s David, whose face is blanked out on some versions of Street View, presumably to spare him posthumous shame. 

The nearby beaches are far from the rocky beauty of the Calanques. Dominated by a ferris wheel, they are all ice cream, burgers and gaudy homages to America. A more recondite homage is to be found at Armurerie Negrel et Mistral, the only shop I know that sells knuckle dusters. Even Maison Empereur just across the street doesn’t sell them, a surprise because it sells everything else. It is tiny compared with KaDeWe or Harrods, but its folksy weirdness is enchanting. A hardware store and ironmongers, it offers kitchen utensils, latches, staple guns, artist smocks, bleu de travail clothes, thingummies, Provençal this and paisley that. It’s a temple to The Art Of Living In France, that enduring fantasy of markets, plump fruit and gnarled, wisdom-rich oldsters – all just so, as prescribed by writers including Elizabeth David, Terence Conran and Peter Mayle. Quite the oddest of its many odd departments is a hidden bedsit to rent. Comforting and homely, yes. But also occluded and faintly sinister – a disguise to lie low in when you’re on the run. 

Empty Wigs by Jonathan Meades is published by Unbound from £15. His exhibition Jonathan Meades: Adieu Francis Le Belge is at Kolektiv Cité Radieuse from 25 March