Alexander Gatsby
History of the French Riviera – The War Years
In the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the Côte d’Azur, or as it is popularly known, the French Riviera, was home to the wealthy elite of both Europe and the United States, as well as to a thriving colony of writers and artists. Lying along the Mediterranean coast of the south of France, and bounded by Menton on the east and Hyères on the west, the region is known for its temperate winters and glorious, clear light.
The arrival of rail service in 1864 opened what had been a remote and impoverished region of France to travellers from all over Europe. A flood of aristocrats and royals congregated on the Riviera during the winter “season,” attracted both to the healthy climate and to the casinos in the principality of Monaco.
Tsar Alexander II, Napoleon III, Leopold II of Belgium, Queen Victoria, and the future Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, all spent time on the Côte d’Azur. The impressionist painter, Renoir, lived there and died on the Riviera in 1919. Matisse lived in Nice (the largest city in the region) until his death in 1954 and Picasso called Mougins home until his own passing in 1973.
After World War I, which ravaged both the European landscape and its royal houses, the Côte d’Azur became the summer playground for American business moguls. The writers and painters of the inter-war Lost Generation, disillusioned by the carnage of the Great War, fled their homelands to embrace the expatriate lifestyle both in Paris and on the French Riviera. It was there that Edith Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence near Hyères in 1920 and F. Scott Fitzgerald drafted the bulk of The Great Gatsby while living at Saint-Raphaël.
When Germany invaded France in the summer of 1940, the British and American expatriates went to Gibraltar or returned to the United States. Some, like the Jewish artist Marc Chagall, needed help to escape the advancing Nazis. In total, however, more than 5,000 French Jews from the French Riviera died in the death camps during the war. Saint-Tropez was badly damaged in the fighting and only restored to its original condition in the post-war years due to the efforts of the novelist Collette.
As many of the artists and novelists returned after the war, the creative energies that have long formed a vital part of life on the French Riviera coalesced into an event that now largely symbolises the region internationally, the Cannes Film Festival, founded in 1946. Consequently, as the decade of the 1940s drew to a close, the French Riviera increasingly became an international destination for a new “jet set” of celebrities and film stars from around the world, opening yet another glittering period on the fabled shoreline of the Côte d’Azur.
About the Author
Maria Mclean
Burger Davis Sotheby’s International Realty
Cannes Rental and Cannes Rental Apartment
Marketing@burger-davis.com
+ 33 (0)4 92 28 07 82
|
|
the great gatsby LP … |
|
|
Flying Against The Time Zones $8.99 … |
|
|
The Great Gatsby $3.50 Studio: A&e Home Video Release Date: 01/30/2001 Run time: 100 minutes Rating: Nr… |
|
|
The Great Gatsby (A&E) [VHS] $4.54 Boy loses girl, boy wins her back, boy loses her again and is killed in his pool. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Jazz Age tragedy once again makes a somewhat rocky transition from page to screen in this A&E production starring Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino as the feckless Daisy. This version has Paul Rudd (the stepbrother who got the girl in Clueless) doing the honors as narrator Nick, who rein… |
|
|
Cosmas 5422SN Satin Nickel Cabinet Hardware Mushroom Knob $0.88 Cosmas Hardware is the way to go when designing or fixing up your kitchen or bathroom. They do not make us charge unnecessary markups for their hardware like some of the other major brands do. Therefore, giving you great hardware at a price that you can afford. Go ahead, compare, we dare you…. |
|
|
Cosmas 5422ORB Oil Rubbed Bronze Cabinet Hardware Mushroom Knob $0.88 Cosmas Hardware is the way to go when designing or fixing up your kitchen or bathroom. They do not make us charge unnecessary markups for their hardware like some of the other major brands do. Therefore, giving you great hardware at a price that you can afford. Go ahead, compare, we dare you…. |
|
|
Jeffrey Alexander Cabinet Hardware Satin Nickel Knobs 3960-SN $1.59 Cabinet Hardware Brushed Satin Nickel Knobs – 3960SN Unlimited Lifetime Warranty… |
|
|
The Great Gatsby $15.00 In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write “something new–something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.” That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald’s finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence… |
|
|
Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less $0.01 Perhaps while reading Shakespeare you’ve asked yourself, What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince words and muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub? But if the Prince of Denmark had a Twitter account and an iPhone, he could tell his story in real time–and concisely! Hence the genius of Twitterature. Hatched in a dorm room at the brain trust that is the University … |
|
|
The Great Gatsby [GRT GATSBY 4D] … |