The French Dispatch, Vol. III
Over the years, I had heard that the French seaside city of Marseilles was know to be a bit ‘dodgy’. Much of this comes from the zeitgeist, such as the film “The French Connection” which was based on a real heroin smuggling operation that ran from the 1930s through the 70s. Unione Corse, the Corsican mafia that makes the Italian mob look like a bunch of cupcakes, ran copious amount of heroin from Southeast Asia to the United States and Canada via the port city of Marseilles.
Are these characterizations of Marseilles being a “Gotham City” of Europe valid in 2024? Well, like all stereotypes, there is an ounce (or two) of truth in them…
I arrived in Marseilles via train from Avignon. Full disclosure, Avignon is a very clean and quiet city (they have four homeless people and all of them are quite charming in their way); so that certainly influenced my opinion of Marseilles. When I arrived, the train station was packed with young people on holiday, something very common in the south of France in summer.
Leaving the station was when things got a bit…concerning. I was staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, a five star hotel in Marseilles, and as it was so close (20 minutes) to the station that I decided to walk. In retrospect, a questionable decision.
First off, to paint this picture, I am wearing my “hot-boy summer” short shorts with designer sunglasses and a salmon coloured buttoned up shirt…I look fabulous, but not “hard”. As soon as I turned the corner from the station exit I knew I had made a miscalculation.
Every single building from the train station to the hotel was covered to the inch in graffiti. The amount of rubbish on the street was truly extraordinary; I have only seen similar in the big cities of India. And I am going to say it, everybody there was clearly from North Africa.
I want to nip this right in the bud: a few months before I was in Morocco, a North African Muslim country, and the people there were kind, clean, decent, outgoing, and upstanding. Truly the salts of the earth. That is not who I saw in Marseilles. I have a theory that the immigrants who are surreptitiously entering Europe are not the “best” of their homelands (the successful, middle class people tend to stay), and unfortunately this leads to negative and unfair stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs in general.
Having said all of this, nothing bad happened to me on my walk to my hotel. Nobody approached me, threatened me, or did anything untoward. However, I wonder what would have happened if I had been a woman in a skimpy outfit…
The point is, this part of Marseilles (which is 75% of it) didn’t feel like France. Frankly, it was a dump.
There are some wonderful parts of Marseilles, though. The Old Port, Chateau D’If, and Notre Dame de la Garde are fantastic and beautiful. The problem is, you have to go through the shit to get there.
I think the best analogy for Marseilles for an American would be New Orleans. There are some absolutely wonderful parts of the city, but you cannot unsee the dregs of society you wish weren’t there. The problem Marseilles has is that a massive portion of the people there are the problem, and how do you deal with a problem when the people ARE the problem? That line of thinking goes down a very dark rabbit hole very quickly.
Comments
Post a Comment