HISTORY ❘ FRANCE’S SEASIDE RESORTS
Enterprising Morny, who was determined to make Deauville
more attractive to high society than its modest resort neighbour, Trouville, made some shrewd decisions. From sand dunes, a few cottages and fewer than 100 townspeople, the town developed rapidly into a chic Paris-by-the Sea watering hole, with a port, a new railway station, the construction of villas and an elegant hotel. And a racecourse. However, in comparison to the devil-may-care atmosphere in the south of France, the early days of Deauville’s time in the sun were relatively calm. While the gentlemen went out for their morning ride on horseback, the ladies would head down to the beach to paddle in the sea. Long champagne lunches took up a good part of the afternoon, followed by all of society showing up at the racecourse for the rest of the day.
ENDURING APPEAL
After the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, it took nearly three decades to jump-start Deauville with sophisticated amusements and performances by renowned artists, including the dancer Nijinsky. Tango had also come into vogue and the ‘Deauvillites’, as the high society weekenders were called, took up the new dance craze with enthusiasm. The resort’s beach, rebaptised as la Plage Fleurie (the Flowered Beach), and a whirl of activities – polo, gambling, yachting, tennis, plus cocktails in between – attracted pleasure-seekers such as the Aga Khan and André Citroën. In 1913, when Gabrielle Chanel opened up her second store in Deauville, the 30-year-old designer revolutionised fashion with striped jersey and tones the colour of wet sand. By the 1930s, the town had far outshone its rival Trouville, with highly unusual innovations like the Pompeiian
because it was the favourite resort of her son, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, whose insouciant behaviour she famously found appalling.
Though the British were the pioneers and soon joined by colonies of Russians, it was the influx of well-to-do Americans who put Cannes – and neighbouring village Juan-les-Pins – on the map as a modern destination. Fast forward to the mid- 1920s, when the Prohibition soured the mood for extravagant partying. Enter the new sun-bathing craze, all-night gambling, women sporting silk pyjamas on the Croisette during the day, and champagne cocktails in front of a coppery sea at sunset. The Riviera’s bohemian atmosphere, launched early on by American painter Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara on the Cap d’Antibes, gradually evolved into a kind of celebrity circus with the arrival of wealthy New York businessman Frank Jay Gould (son of railroad magnate Jay Gould) and his patron-of-the-arts socialite wife, Florence. Gould rehabilitated Juan-les-Pins’ casino and bought the 200-room Hôtel Provençal, turning it into a glamorous landmark; Florence, who introduced water-skiing to the Côte d’Azur, hosted lavish lunches in her Cannes villa, El Patio, where she entertained the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles and Nelson Rockefeller. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the party was over for most Americans and the uproarious era of les années folles came abruptly to an end. Up on the northern French coast in Normandy, the shaping of another new resort began in the 1860s with one man’s passion for horses – or to be more precise, racehorses, which also meant stud farms, breeding stables and racing grounds. It was the Duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III, who vowed to create a racecourse that would be the star attraction of France’s first fashionable beach town, Deauville.
50 ❘ FRANCE TODAY Feb/Mar 2023
Clockwise from top left: Sea-bathing soon became all the rage in Deauville; Trouville on the Norman coast; a 1928 poster advertising holidays on the French Riviera via le Train Bleu; the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz, which was originally built for the Empress Eugénie; Villa Eugénie in Biarritz in the 1860s before it became the Hôtel du Palais; the Duc de Morny made a racecourse the star attraction of Deauville
IMAGES © GALLERIA L’IMAGE ALASSIO, DROUOT AUTHOR ACHILLE FORGÉ, SHUTTERSTOCK
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