Written: November 3 2008
As I type this, we’re on the slow train back to Lyon. We opted to take an earlier, but slower train, instead of braving the rain here in Marseille. It’s been raining on and off here for the last couple days, as was the same in Corsica. But overall, we had a great first vacation — after having only worked a couple of weeks! (God bless the French!) And we’re very much looking forward to getting back to our temporary French home. After all, we’ve spent less than a week in the apartment, as we were in Paris the weekend before we left on vacation.
On Friday, October 24, we took an early morning TGV from Lyon down to Marseille — it’s a quick two-hour jaunt (versus 3.5 hours on the slow train). This was our first stop en route to Corsica. We got off the train, with a crude map drawn in my notebook to get us to Joanna‘s house, the couchsurfer girl who generously offered to host us. After asking a couple of people to point us in the right direction, we finally did find it, just adjacent to the Veille Charité cathedral and art museum. We were greeted by Kim, one of Joanna’s two roommates (she’s also from Belgium) and Kim’s boyfriend François, from Annecy.
After taking a breather (Becks took a quick nap, while I did my blogging for Salon), we headed out to visit the city.
Although I’ve been in the vicinity of Marseille before — my parents did a house exchange in Martigues when I was a kid — I haven’t spent any time at all in the city itself. From there, I had done day trips to Arles, Nîmes, Aix-en-Provence and even Cassis. But Marseille, to me, remained a big urban unknown. Getting off the train, and having to walk down a hill near some construction site fencing and braving traffic careening around Marseille’s own Arc de Triomphe, it seems pretty easy to understand Marseille in terms of gritty, work-a-day, “real” city.
After all, it’s the second largest city in France and it’s, in many ways, the antithesis to Paris. Marseille is the city of Ousmane Sembène, of IAM and Akenaton. It’s the city of one of my favorite French movies, Taxi. It’s a city of immigrants, of dockworkers, of free-flowing pastis and an accent that I can’t help but smile at every time I hear it.
The Lonely Planet France guidebook will tell you that Marseille doesn’t have much in the way of monuments or museums — there’s a couple cathedrals, a fashion museum, a santon museum, and another museum on the history of Marseille itself — and it seems that Marseillais take pride in that. You don’t come to Marseille to see stuff, you come to Marseille to live, to take in the sea air, to buy seafood by the kilo, to eat real bouillabaisse, and to drink more pastis. Heck, you can take ferrys from here to Algeria! It’s France’s periphery, it’s gateway to the Mediterranean, for better or worse.
We headed out for the Vieux Port, which I assume was, at one time, the central location for maritime activity in Marseille, with ferrys and fisherman navigating around one another. Before we rounded the corner off of Rue de la République, this Santa Monican could smell the sea water from a block away. There wasn’t much going on that Friday around lunchtime, save a few lingering fishmongers and tourists like us, who came down to the water’s edge, unsure of what exactly we expected to find.
Like most ports that have since changed location, Marseille’s Vieux Port less resembles a functioning port — say, the Port of Oakland — than it does San Francisco’s Marina district. It’s full of fancy boats tied up, and the waterfront cafés are full of folks who’ve got too much time on their hands, tourists, or both. It’s pretty, sure, but I’m sure that it’s not at all like the port where Sembène once worked as a dockworker. The ferry terminal has since moved out of the bay, perhaps a 20-30 minute walk away. The Algeria, Corsica and Italy-bound ferries loom large poised to head over the horizon. The functioning commercial port has moved north, and the dock cranes all well out of view of the tourists like us.
After tiptoeing around fancy seafood restaurants, we settled for lunch at a decent Lebanese restaurant for a quick bite, and made our way up into the hills south of the Vieux Port — walking around, of all things, a mini-festival sponsored by the Pages Jaunes, the French yellow pages. After passing by a Corsican restaurant, we stopped for a quick coffee served on a plate of slate (only one euro per coffee before 16h00!) at Les Pêcheurs, a semi-trendy café near the water.
A short walk further down the Vieux Port, we climbed up the hill atop which Fort St. Nicolas sits, one of two forts that used to guard the city against all invaders. There’s not tons to see in the fort, except the great view of the city and the port and the adjacent ferry terminal across the water below. From here, it’s easy to see the beauty in what’s left of this increasingly touristic and gentrified part of the city, even in an autumn haze. After the fort, we hit the waterside park nearby where we took it easy, overlooking the Mediterranean.
It was here that I actually bothered to read about Corsica, courtesy of our Lonely Planet book. So before I read the few pages that LP has to offer, I’d never met anyone who’d been to Corsica — a few of my students in Lyon described Corsicans as “terrorists” and as an “aggresive” people — largely based on incidents of terrorism that happened in the 20th century (they’re long over now, thanks to an autonomy deal struck with Paris in the 1990s) and the proud sense of Corsican independence and identity. So what’s their deal?
Well, you can learn a lot simply by looking at the Corsican flag: the head of a black man (a Moor, to be specific) in profile, with a white headband looking longingly to the sea, or possibly to the future. The story goes that the headband used to be covering his eyes, but with Corsican enlightenment and independence, he now can see. The Moors, of course, at one point, were neighbors to the Corsicans, and at some point, likely tried to raid or invade this mountainous island that only houses 200,000 people today. In other words, the head now says: stay the fuck out.
You can see this symbol in lots of places — Corsica Ferries has it proudly painted, writ large, on the side of its boats, while many cars use it as a symbol of Corsican pride on the back of their cars. My favorite though, is how some cars in Corsica use a small sticker of the Moor’s head to replace the “F” for France on their license plate.
Corsicans don’t really consider themselves French, much in the same way that Quebecois have allegiance to the province first, and the country second. In Corsica, people refer to the mainland as “the continent,” giving it another degree of remoteness — even though Nice and Bastia are linked by a mere five-hour ferry ride (Livorno, Italy is even closer, at two hours). Better yet, a lot of the road signs in the mountainous interior, which point to town names in both Corsican and French, often have the French (always written above) scratched out in large black marker.
The Moor’s Head flag first appeared in Corsica way back in 1297, but wasn’t adopted as an official symbol until 1755. That was when Pasquale Paoli, the founder of modern Corsica, led a movement to formally establish independence from the Genoese crown, which had controlled the island since the 13th century. Before that, the city-state of Pisa had run the island’s affairs.
Paoli is considered to be the enlightened father of Corsica, as he outlawed blood vendettas, wrote a constitution (the most democratic in all of Europe at the time), established schools and a university in the new inland capital city, Corte — a university that still bears his name and remains the seat of Corsican language education. However, I guess the Genoese didn’t really recognize the independence of the island, as they ended up ceding the island to the French, after being defeated by King Louis XV in 1769. (I wonder though, why after the French Revolution, twenty years later, the Corsican independence movement didn’t come back stronger.) Corsica has, as Lonely Planet puts it, “remained part of France’s rich mix of cultures ever since.” That is to say, it’s been forcibly incorporated as a part of France, and had its language and culture suppressed for about two centuries, until the late 20th century when Paris realized that letting local regions speak their own language (Breton, Occitan, Provençal, or Corsican) isn’t such a disastrous thing to national unity after all. But whatever.
The more I read about Corsica, the more I wanted to figure out what made this island “nation” actually tick. And about 30 hours later, we stepped off the boat, having taken a 2.5 hour train ride from Marseille to Nice, and then a five-hour ferry ride to Bastia.
