Everyday life in small strokes

Written by Reporter, Sept 2007

Everyday life in small strokes

A different kind of history is presented by two local journalists François Rosso and Philippe Jérôme in their Guide des faits divers de la Côte d'Azur: De la Préhistoire au Net (France: le Cherche Midi). The phrase "fait divers" has no exact translation in English. It's applied to the kind of events, often quite trivial, though sometimes spectacular, that fill the columns of local newspapers. So the compilers of this book have trawled the coastal press over many decades to bring together a fascinating collection of accounts of murders, suicides, robberies and accidents. I noted that Nice's old tramway, closed down half a century ago, seems to have been especially lethal (happily the technology is now much improved). Some of the characters here were very obscure, some much better known (Isadora Duncan, Mobutu Sese Seko, Michel Mouillot). In his introduction Nice prosecutor Eric de Montgolfier says, rightly enough, that the reports gathered here, "portray our everyday life in the small strokes of an impressionist painting".

Expats crop up throughout these pages, sometimes as criminals (the Texan fugitive killer Joy Davis) or as victims (Brit Patricia Green, found shot dead in her Théoule home). The American Navy comes out badly: in 1934 sailors from the USS Arkansas went on the rampage in Nice and totally trashed a bar on rue Deloye; in 1945 another gang of Navy men beat up the Mayor of Nice (this was Jacques Cotta, occupying City Hall entre deux Médecins); over forty years on, I've been told, older people in Cannes still remember the emotion provoked when in the Sixties two sailors from a Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier brutally raped the ouvreuse of the Olympic cinema on her way home.

Monaco gets a section to itself, of course. According to a police report of the time, between 1877 and 1885 despairing gamblers killed themselves at the rate of four a week (if this is really true, it's easy to understand Queen Victoria's deep distaste for the casino). And another statistic that merits reflection: at Christmas 1907 a Monegasque doctor calculated that over a year 5000 m3 of horse shit was deposited on the streets of the Principality. Finally, the most troubling report in the whole book: despite Prince Louis II's undisguised Nazi sympathies and admiration for Hitler (which disgusted the young Rainier) the official line is that the Principality's Jews were protected. That's largely true, but not entirely. In August 1942, at about the same time as the notorious rafle du Vel'd'Hiv in Paris, Monegasque police, along with their French colleagues, raided the Hotel de Paris and arrested 66 foreign Jews. Only two survived the war. The date is significant: that took place over a year before there was an effective official German presence in Monaco. In other words, it seems very likely that Louis II colluded in this crime.

Titles reviewed here can be obtained at local English bookshops