I don’t think it was inevitable, but within a minute of
getting in the taxi at Nice airport the driver was referring to the events of
14 July 2016. He was explaining the
heavy security presence at the airport exit – soldiers holding sub-machine
guns. And he was also alluding to the
fact that I was arriving in the city on the last day of Carnival 2017 – the
first major public celebrations since the Bastille Day massacre of 84 revellers
by the driver of a 19 ton cargo truck last year.
We went a long way round to get to my hotel. The Promenade
des Anglais was closed for the evening and we had to skirt the city centre
via the inner ring road and come back through the port area to reach my address
on the edge of the oldest part of Nice.
We talked about the impact of last July’s events. According to the taxi driver, tourists only
kept away for a couple of months and then things returned to normal. (Although in later conversations with others
I heard anxiety about the numbers that might come for Bastille Day in 2017.) This year’s Carnival was a little smaller
than usual, and with the parade on a curtailed route, but that didn’t mean that
much. The driver went on to reflect on
the litany of attacks in the last few years – Paris, Brussels, Tunisia,
Istanbul, Berlin, Nice. (The London and
Madrid attacks in the early 2000s were perhaps too long ago to be brought into
the discussion.) “It’s become normal
now. We just have to get on with it” was
his verdict. And over the next few days
I saw Nice ‘getting on with it’ with no reduction in the level of the street
activities I have come to expect after several visits to the city. I have heard the same response elsewhere – to
stop ‘getting on with it’ would be to hand victory to the attackers. And in a way I have been part of that – as
must countless other people. I have
visited Paris, and the 11th arrondissement,
since the Bataclan attack; I have travelled on the top deck of a 134 bus
through Tavistock Square in London (it was actually the 30 that was attacked on
7/7); next time I am in Berlin I will almost certainly walk through
Breitscheidplatz; and now here I am in
Nice.
Of all provincial French cities (including Strasbourg which
I blogged about in May 2015), Nice has perhaps the greatest claim to diversity.
Nice only finally became part of France
in 1860, when it was handed over by the Kingdom of Savoy (the fledgling Kingdom
of Italy). The roll of those killed
during the first world war, displayed outside the cathedral and the churches of
the older part of the city, shows as many names from Betti and Bianchi to
Rossetti and Rossi as more typical ‘French’ names. Italian elements are very much present in the
local dialect. And I am delighted that near
my hotel (and on the Google map) the old Italian street names are given on the
signs as well as the French – and they are often not translations, thus
offering a source of some confusion.
Nice (Nissa, Nizza) still has the feeling of lying on the cusp of France
and Italy.
But it is also a gateway in other respects. Ferries from Corsica and Sardinia dock at the
port, and the market in Cours Saleya in the mornings has a stall selling
Corsican meats and sausages. There has
been a strong North African presence in the city for many decades, although
that history has not been an entirely felicitous one since many of the pieds-noirs who fled Algeria at the time
of independence ended up here, unhappily.
The prominent monument on the promenade, specifically dedicated to ‘The
French of North Africa of all Faiths’ was labelled by the local newspaper, Nice Matin, a ‘monument of discord’
before it was unveiled.
And of course Nice is one of France’s premier tourist cities
– with around 5.3 million visitors in 2015, in a city region of a little over 1
million residents. The English
aristocracy were here by the early nineteenth century, even before Nice became
French. And the Russians soon followed –
Tsar Alexander II came in 1864. Today,
spending several days in the city, I hear languages and see visitors from all
over the world. It seems to me that the
diversity is just as great as on my previous visits – before the events of July
2016: the one exception is that there seem to me to be many fewer American
voices audible.
There have been high winds during my visit, and the waves
have rattled the shingle on the beaches.
Particularly in the late evening, when the traffic has been less, the
sound has been like a roar. I have been
reminded of part of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover
Beach’:
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles
which the waves suck back, and fling,
At their
return, up the high strand,
Begin, and
cease, and then again begin,
With
tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal
note of sadness in.
Arnold was likening the ‘withdrawing roar’ of the waves on
the shingle to the ending of old certainties about faith and trust. Looking out at the dark sea near the Citadel
at the eastern end of the Nice promenade, and hearing the waves on the pebbles,
I have wondered whether we are now reaching the end of another era – an era of
tolerance of diversity, of respect for difference. Are we now, as a result of events such as
that of 14 July last year, and rising nationalist and protective populisms in
many parts of the world, retreating towards bounded societies defined by strong
symbols of inclusion (language, religion, sporting allegiances) and even
stronger markers of exclusion of ‘others’ who ‘don't fit’?
But then walking round a city where events 8 months ago
shocked the world, I find normality everywhere.
The local trains in and out of Nice-Ville station late in the afternoon
are full of college students from all of France’s diverse communities joking
together; the big department stores along Avenue Jean Médecin are busy and with
no extra security visible; children are being bought mountainous ice creams at
Fenocchio in Place Rossetti; the older residents of the city are still parading
their tiny pedigree dogs up and down the promenade (and carrying them in
baskets when the minute creatures with their spindly legs go on strike and
refuse to walk). The trams out into the
suburbs are still jammed in the rush hours, despite their 5 minute service
interval. Two old North African men are
deep in conversation in Arabic on a bench outside a social housing block to the
east of the port. And two or three mixed
groups of teenage boys are surreptitiously smoking cannabis on the steps of the
dock where the ferries to Corsica unload – in view of the works still being
carried out to extend the city’s tram network.
But best of all, on a warm Sunday afternoon, up on the headland where
the château used once to stand, there are families of every French origin
enjoying the sun, the children’s playground, and the offerings of the little
café. Three teenage girls are talking
and laughing together in excitable French – one obviously of Chinese origin,
one probably from a long-standing French family (although, here in Nice, it
could have been Italian), and one wearing the Islamic veil. That exemplifies the ‘normal’ here in
post-attack Nice. That taxi driver on my
arrival was right – Nice is just getting on with it. And that’s the way to retain and reinforce the
values of toleration that the city, and to a greater extent Europe as a whole,
has espoused for some decades.
The many tributes to those who lost their lives last July had accumulated around the bandstand on the Promenade des Anglais, but these had been removed shortly before the start of Carnival, with the intention of digitising them all for an online memorial. I could find little physical sign of the July 2016
attack, except that on the road close to
where the attacker was overpowered and killed someone has painted the old
historic motto of Nice ‘Nicaea, Civitas Fidelissima’ (Nice, the very loyal
city) and added the words ‘In Memoriam’.
I disagree. I don’t think the
spirit of Nice has been transformed for ever.
It’s still the same Nice, going about its normal business.
