F ew conurbations in Western Europe have been as thoroughly rejected by their own elites as Marseille. Though the city became fashionable in the mids, this did not mean an end to the contempt; quite the contrary. To the visitor, Marseille appears to be an enigma: a city founded some 2, years ago which seems to have little or no history.
The capacity for assimilation, however, has been markedly reduced by the disintegration of the city, its culture, its social and urban fabric. Absence of memory does not, of course, mean absence of history; merely that the latter has been written by the victorsβand that Marseille as a city has been defeated.
The process of civic disintegration has been a long one. Founded by Greek colonists from Phocaea around bc , ancient Massalia became one of the most significant ports in the western Mediterranean, under Hellenistic and Roman auspices alike. From the 5th century ad , periodic bouts of plague and pillage drained the city of much of its importance, but around the year it began to regain its former prominence as a mercantile hub.
It is built on the slope of a mound of earth which overlooks the sea. Marseille remained fractious, however. In medieval Marseille, as in other Western European cities, urbs and civitas had coincided: the inhabitants of the town constituted a political community, the city. One could say, schematically, that if the civitas was liquidated by the French nation-stateβwhich required the dissolution of all existing forms of community in favour of atomized allegiance to the stateβthe urbs has been dismantled by capitalism.
While the first phase took several centuries, the second has unfolded much more quickly. Today, the rupture with a thousand years of urban history seems to have been consummated. The old walled city was built on a triangle of land to the north of an inlet that forms the Vieux-Port. The layout of the streets preserved traces of the Hellenistic city plan well into the nineteenth century, in the maze of neighbourhoods such as Saint-Jean, Le Panier and La Blanquerie.
