The History of Marseille: From the Greeks to Today

Marseille is the oldest city in France, and it’s also the French city that people have tried to wipe off the map the most times. Greeks founded it around the year 600 BCE, Romans besieged it, Franks sacked it, Vikings raided it, Catalans burned it, a French king aimed cannons at it from two fortresses, a plague killed about half its residents, and the Germans blew up an entire district in the heart of the city. It’s still here.

The gap between what actually happened in Marseille and what people say about it is, in my opinion, one of the widest in France. Ask a traveler where the song “La Marseillaise” got its name, and chances are they’ll tell you it was written there. It wasn’t.

So before we get going, let’s talk about what you’ll find in this article. I start with a wedding where a Gallic princess chose a Greek sailor, move on to Julius Caesar’s siege, then to the four days when Catalans stole the port’s chain, to the fortress whose cannons were aimed inward, and to the ship that brought the last plague in France to the port. From there to the song that took the city’s name, to the district that was erased in February 1943, and to Marseille today. If you’re planning an actual visit, you should also read the Marseille travel guide.

600 BCE: The Wedding That Chose the Stranger

It all started because of bad land. Phocaea (Phocée), a Greek city in Asia Minor, sat on a narrow, unproductive patch of ground, and its people lived off the sea: fishing, trade and a bit of piracy too. One of their scouting expeditions reached a small, sheltered bay on the Gallic coast, a bay called the Lacydon, today’s Vieux-Port (Old Port).

From here the legend begins, and it comes down to us in two versions. The fleet’s commanders, Simos and Protis, approached Nannus, king of the Segobriges tribe, and asked permission to settle. According to tradition, Nannus happened to be holding his daughter’s wedding that very day, and by local custom the bride chose her own husband by handing a cup of water to the man she wanted. The daughter passed over all the local suitors and handed the cup to the Greek. In Aristotle (384 to 322 BCE) the bride’s name is Petta, and in the Roman historian Justin she is Gyptis. Either way, the dowry she received was the shore where the ship had landed, and on it Massalia was built.

Archaeology confirms the dating and shows that the Greeks arrived to find the land already settled, and they formed alliances there. A legend about a marriage between a Greek and a Gallic woman is exactly the kind of story that wins out when a group wants to explain to itself why it deserves to be there.

Massalia grew fast, and from the 5th century BCE it was one of the two main trading ports in the western Mediterranean, alongside Carthage. It was governed by an assembly of 600 elected citizens called timouchoi, with a board of 15 drawn from among them. The most fascinating figure of the period actually left the city: Pytheas, a Massaliote navigator and astronomer, sailed in the second half of the 4th century BCE through the Pillars of Hercules and north, described Britain, reached a latitude where the sun never sets, and reported on a “frozen sea” that no ship could sail through. His text is also the oldest one known to link the tides to the moon.

49 BCE: Marseille Picks the Losing Side

The alliance with Rome held for more than 400 years, and everything changed during the civil war. When the conflict broke out between Julius Caesar (100 to 44 BCE) and Pompey (106 to 48 BCE), Marseille sided with Pompey, a perfectly reasonable choice: in 77 BCE Pompey had granted them the Volcae territories west of the Rhône. But Caesar was on his way to Hispania and needed passage through the city. Negotiations failed, and the city shut its gates in his face.

Caesar himself continued on to Spain and left command to Caius Trebonius (died 43 BCE), with three legions, siege towers and a naval blockade. For the main naval battle, on June 27, 49 BCE, the Romans hastily built 12 ships near Arles out of green wood, which made them slow and nearly impossible to maneuver. They won anyway, and the siege continued until October 25.

What happened next says something about Caesar. He didn’t let the city be sacked, likely out of the old friendship with Rome, but he took everything from it except its honor. Massalia lost most of its territory and its colonies, kept Nice and the Stoechades islands, and remained a free city without the right to conduct an independent foreign policy. In short, under Rome, Massalia lost its practical independence. But alongside the loss of its political independence, Massalia enjoyed an intellectual flowering and became a city of teachers, known for the quality of its instruction in rhetoric, law and medicine.

415 to 1040: The Abbey, the Franks and the Vikings

At the start of the 4th century, according to tradition, a Christian officer named Victor was executed in Marseille, and around his grave, a century later, the city’s spiritual turning point arose. Jean Cassien, born around 360 on the banks of the Danube and who spent years among the hermit monks of Egypt, arrived in Marseille around 415 and founded two monasteries there, one for men and one for women. The church of Saint-Victor is dated to 440. Cassien wrote his “Institutes” and “Conferences” there, two works that shaped all of Western monasticism, died in Marseille around 435, and was buried there.

From here on, things get less pleasant. Between 736 and 739 the Franks of Charles Martel (died 741) captured Marseille and sacked it, and between 751 and 768 Church property was confiscated. In 838 and 848 Saracens raided the city, and in 859 so did the Vikings of Hasting, who came from Nantes and spent the winter in the Camargue. The result was an almost total collapse: in the 9th century and the first half of the 10th, Marseille nearly stopped functioning as a trading port, and Arles, which was better protected and served as the capital of Provence, took over the maritime traffic.

The recovery came from the direction least expected. In 904, Louis the Blind (king of Provence, 890 to 928) granted the Abbey of Saint-Victor the entire southern bank of the port, and that marked the beginning of a monastic empire. In 977 the first viscount of Marseille appears, and on October 15, 1040, Pope Benedict IX consecrated the abbey church in a ceremony that earned it the title “the second Rome.” In a place where barely a city remained, the great economic power of Provence arose.

The 13th to the 15th Centuries: A Republic of Merchants, Then a Lord

At the start of the 13th century, Marseille was almost a city-state. In 1212, the “Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit” (confrérie du Saint-Esprit) was formed there, an organization of merchants and craftsmen that gave the city a kind of self-government. In 1221 a podestà was installed at its head, exactly as in the Italian communes, and the city declared itself a republic.

The end came with Charles I of Anjou (ruled Provence 1246 to 1285), brother of King Louis IX, who gained the county of Provence through his marriage to Béatrice de Provence (1234 to 1267), and who found large cities in no hurry to recognize him. In August 1251 he laid siege to Marseille, and in 1252 the city surrendered. The agreement signed on July 26, 1252, was called the “Chapters of Peace” (Chapitres de Paix), and on June 6, 1257, a second, much harsher version was imposed on the city, under which Charles became the lord of the city and personally appointed the official who headed it. The residents nonetheless kept an impressive list of rights:

• The right to assemble, bear arms and elect some officials
• Taxation only with their consent
• The right not to be tried outside the city
• Exemption from tolls and transit fees throughout Provence
• The right to mint coins and appoint consuls in foreign cities

That sounds like a lot, and it really was a lot. It was also the end of independence. Three residents who had called on their city to resist the agreement, Brito, Anselme and P. Vetouli, were sentenced to exile.

November 20, 1423: Four Days, and a Chain Still in Valencia

The conflict that devastated Marseille wasn’t even about Marseille. It was about Naples. Joanna II (ruled 1414 to 1435), the childless queen of Naples, kept adopting heirs in turn: first Alfonso V of Aragon (ruled 1416 to 1458), then Louis III of Anjou (ruled Provence 1417 to 1434), who was also count of Provence. Alfonso realized he had lost and, in October 1423, decided to return to Aragon. On the way, he wanted to settle a score with his rival’s ally.

Marseille knew he was coming, since his fleet had been spotted at Nice and then at Toulon, but the city had sent much of its strength to support Louis III’s Italian campaign and remained half defenseless. On November 18, lookouts on the Marseilleveyre hill and the La Garde hill spotted the Aragonese fleet: 18 galleys and 12 ships. On November 20 a first force landed in the bay west of Saint-Victor, captured the abbey and the Saint-Nicolas chapel, and after dark seized the heavy chain that closed off the port entrance. The Maubert tower, which stood where King René’s tower stands today inside the fort Saint-Jean, held out, but the chain was broken anyway, and the galleys sailed in.

On November 22, soldiers arrived from Aix-en-Provence to help, but their flag colors were identical to those of the Aragonese, and the people of Marseille thought it was enemy reinforcements and panicked. Aix later changed its colors because of the incident. On November 23, Alfonso gathered his men, and at the end of the month he left for Aragon with his spoils: the relics of Saint Louis of Anjou, Marseillais prisoners, and the two halves of the port’s chain. The city’s troubles didn’t end with his departure, since local looters kept plundering the ruins, and order wasn’t restored until December 12.

The chain never came back. It still hangs today in the chapter hall of the cathedral of Valencia in Spain, and the people of Marseille keep demanding its return. On June 24, 1956, the diocese of Valencia made a small gesture and returned two vertebrae of the saint, which were placed in the church of Saint-Ferréol. A chain, as it turns out, is harder to divide into symbolic pieces.

1481 to 1688: The Women on the Wall, and the Fortress Aimed Inward

In 1481, Provence passed to France, and Marseille set a condition: the Chapters of Peace from 1252 and 1257 would be recognized by the kingdom. The condition was accepted without debate, and from then on, every king who visited the city had to renew the oath before entering through the porte Réale.

The next test came in 1524. Charles III de Bourbon (1490 to 1527), the Constable of France who had defected to the side of Emperor Charles V (emperor 1519 to 1556), invaded Provence. Aix surrendered without a fight on August 7, leaving only Marseille. The siege on the city lasted from August 19 to September 29, and the residents sealed the breaches that opened in the wall, cut through the tunnels the imperial troops had dug, and repelled the assaults until the forces withdrew to Italy.

What remained from this story was mostly the women. According to tradition, they worked at night on the trenches, and in three days completed work that would normally take 15, which is why the ditch was called “the ladies’ trench.” It’s likely their part was in reinforcing the walls rather than fighting itself, and the poets who later wrote about it tended to exaggerate. The city council honored them anyway, and on August 7, 1805, the street running down from the Aix gate to the sea received the name boulevard des Dames. During those same years, the château d’If was also built, by order of Francis I (king 1515 to 1547), on a small island facing the port.

Then came Louis XIV. After a decade of unrest, a popular revolt against the consulate imposed by the king broke out in Marseille in 1658, and this time the response was crushing. On January 19, 1660, the king wrote to the duc de Mercœur, governor of Provence, and ordered him to take the city and build a fortress in it. Two days later about 7,000 soldiers entered, destroyed the porte Réale, disarmed the residents and suspended the city council.

On February 11, the cornerstone of the fort Saint-Nicolas was laid. The inscription carved into the stone deserves a slow read: “Lest loyal Marseille, which falls too often victim to the criminal unrest of individuals, lose the city and the kingdom, whether through the fire of the bold or through too great a thirst for freedom.” The engineer was Louis Nicolas de Clerville (1610 to 1677), and the work was completed in four years. The fortress’s cannons, along with those of the fort Saint-Jean facing it, were aimed at the city rather than at the sea.

On March 2, the king entered Marseille through a breach his cannon fire had opened in the wall, refused to accept the keys to the city, and stayed for five days. Vauban (1633 to 1707), who visited the site 15 years later, wrote of the fortress that it was “the most magnificent collection of everything absurd and ridiculous that has ever entered the minds of the worst engineers in the world.” Compensation came in the form of money: in 1665 the galley arsenal was established and the city’s area grew from 67 to 195 hectares, and on October 5, 1688, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Seignelay (1651 to 1690) signed a decree regulating soap production, banning animal fat and requiring pure olive oil. That’s how savon de Marseille was born as a protected brand, nearly three hundred years before the concept even existed.

May 25, 1720: The Ship That Brought the Plague

The Grand-Saint-Antoine was a three-masted trading ship owned by Marseille merchants. It left the city on July 22, 1719, on the usual Levant route: Smyrna, Larnaca in Cyprus, and Saïda in Lebanon. From there it loaded silk and cotton worth 300,000 livres, bound for the Beaucaire fair of July 1720. Ownership of the cargo was split into four quarters, one of which was held by Jean-Baptiste Estelle, the first échevin of Marseille. Another quarter belonged to the captain himself, Jean-Baptiste Chataud (1681 to 1728). In other words, the people who were supposed to decide how long quarantine should last had a direct financial interest in keeping it short.

On April 3, a Turkish passenger died on board, two days after boarding, and after him seven sailors and the ship’s surgeon died. In Livorno, Chataud declared that his men had died of “epidemic fevers,” and he nonetheless received a clean bill of health, partly because the Italians didn’t want the ship either. On May 25 it reached Marseille. Instead of anchoring at the île de Jarre, the island designated for disinfecting suspect ships, it anchored at Pomègues, and the captain declared to the health office that his men had died of spoiled food.

On June 4, it was allowed to approach the quarantine houses of Arenc and unload passengers and cargo there. The guard posted on board died. The porters who carried the bales died. Only on June 27 was the ship moved to proper quarantine at the île de Jarre, and by then it no longer mattered: on June 20, a 58-year-old laundress had collapsed in the street with a bubo, a swollen lymph node, at the corner of her mouth. On July 9 the plague was officially declared.

At the height of the outbreak, about a thousand people died per day in Marseille. At the esplanade de la Tourette, a poor district of sailors’ families, more than 1,200 bodies piled up, some lying there for three weeks. No one agreed to go in. On September 16, 1720, Nicolas Roze (1675 to 1733), known as the Chevalier Roze, did it, leading a force of about 150 soldiers and prisoners who had signed a deal: freedom in exchange for the work. In half an hour they threw the bodies into two old bastions that were opened beneath the esplanade, and covered everything with quicklime and dirt up to ground level. Almost everyone who took part died. Roze himself caught the plague, and recovered.

The order to burn the ship was given by the regent Philippe d’Orléans (regent 1715 to 1723) on July 28, and carried out on September 25 and 26, nearly two months later. By January 1723, between 30,000 and 40,000 people had died in Marseille out of a population of 80,000 to 90,000, and about a hundred thousand died across Provence as a whole. In the hills of the Vaucluse, a dry stone wall 27 kilometers long was built against the plague.

The question of who was to blame remained. Chataud was imprisoned in the château d’If on September 8, 1720, later transferred to the Admiralty prison, and then forgotten. On July 8, 1723, the verdict was handed down: “We, the lieutenant governor in council, following the complaint of the royal prosecutor, dismiss the aforementioned Chataud from any further hearing or trial,” and on August 3 his release was signed. He had served two years and eleven months, even though just two weeks after his arrest that same lieutenant governor had already stopped believing in his guilt. One version holds that Estelle, the échevin, was the one who ordered the captain to sail to Livorno to obtain a clearance that would spare the long quarantine and prevent damage to the cargo. That claim was never proven.

The case has a sequel underwater. In June 1978, the remains of the burned ship were located north of the île de Jarre, at a depth of 10 to 18 meters. The anchor, weighing about a ton and 3.80 meters long, was restored in 2012 and is now displayed at the entrance of the Marseille History Museum. In 2016, a study by the Max Planck Institute determined that the plague was a renewed outbreak of the same strain behind the 14th-century Black Death, not a new strain arriving from Asia. Every May 28, three hundred years later, a candle bearing the city’s emblem is still lit in a ceremony called “the échevins’ vow.”

1792 to 1794: The Song That Took the City’s Name, and the City That Lost Its Own

On the night of April 25 to 26, 1792, an engineering officer named Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760 to 1836) sat in Strasbourg and wrote a song. The mayor, Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich (1748 to 1793), had asked him for a piece that would rally the soldiers heading off to war, and the result was called “War Song for the Army of the Rhine” (Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin). Marseille had nothing to do with it at all.

A copy of the song reached Montpellier, and from there it made its way to François Mireur (1770 to 1798), a young doctor sent to Marseille to organize the departure of volunteers to Paris. On June 22, 1792, at the end of a dinner of the Society of Friends of the Constitution in a hall on the rue Thubaneau, he sang the song, and the crowd adopted it as a marching anthem. By the end of the month the city had recruited about 500 volunteers, and they marched to Paris with the song on their lips. On July 30 they entered the city, and the Parisian crowd, which never bothered to find out its real title, simply called it “La Marseillaise.” On August 10 it was sung during the assault on the Tuileries Palace, and on July 14, 1795, it was declared the national anthem of the Republic.

This was Marseille’s great moment in the Revolution. The next moment was less successful. In 1793 the city joined the Federalist camp against the Jacobin Convention, and on August 25 General Carteaux (1751 to 1813) entered the city without a fight. The punishment was symbolic, and precisely for that reason it stung: on January 6, 1794, Marseille was stripped of the right to be called by its own name, and it was officially registered as “the city without a name.” The name was restored on February 12, five and a half weeks later. For a city that had given the Republic its anthem, that counts as something of a victory.

The 19th century: La Joliette, Suez, and the Bonne Mère

In 1830 France set out to conquer Algiers, and Marseille became its gateway. Port traffic, which stood at 1,374,067 tons in 1830, jumped to 2,932,005 by 1847, and the Vieux-Port, which had served the city for two thousand years, was choking.

A law of August 5, 1844 ordered the construction of a new basin to its north, the Joliette basin (la Joliette), with a budget of 18 million francs. To protect it from wind and sea, a concrete-block breakwater was built, using a technique the engineers of Marseille had learned from the port of Algiers. It was first used in 1847, the work was completed in 1853, and then it turned out the basin was already too small. By 1914, 77 more hectares of new basins had been added to the 48 hectares of the Vieux-Port and La Joliette combined, and the opening of the Suez Canal in August 1869 made Marseille, once and for all, the “Gateway to the East”.

The money pouring in did what money does. The hill above the city had received a small chapel in 1214, became a fortress in the 16th century, and in 1853 the bishop Eugène de Mazenod (1782-1861) decided it needed a basilica. The cornerstone was laid on September 11, 1853, and the plans were handed to Henri-Jacques Espérandieu (1829-1874), a 23-year-old Protestant architect. The dedication took place in June 1864 before 43 bishops, and the gilded statue of the Virgin, 11.2 meters tall, was placed on the spire in 1870. The people of Marseille have called her la Bonne Mère ever since, the Good Mother. At the same time, the city became the capital of soap, with 90 factories in the 19th century and a peak of 180,000 tons in 1913, and it absorbed waves of Italian immigration that shaped the local accent, the cuisine and the neighborhoods around the port.

The 20th century: murder on the Canebière, and a neighborhood wiped off the map

On October 9, 1934, King Alexander I of Yugoslavia (Alexandre Ier, reigned 1921-1934) disembarked at the Vieux-Port from a cruiser named Dubrovnik, and was greeted by the French foreign minister Louis Barthou (1862-1934). The two men got into an open car and the motorcade began making its way up La Canebière. A man named Vlado Tchernozemski, 37 years old, broke through the thin security line, jumped onto the car’s running board and opened fire. The king died on the spot. Barthou was hit in the arm, apparently by a bullet fired by the police, and bled to death. It was the first political assassination in history captured on film, and the international reaction gave rise to the Geneva Convention of 1937 and the first legal treaties against political terrorism.

Nine years later came the great disaster. The Germans occupied Marseille on November 12, 1942, and on January 3, 1943, Resistance actions killed German officers and soldiers in the city. Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) ordered reprisals, and René Bousquet (1909-1993), head of the Vichy police, received his instructions from Carl Oberg (1897-1965), who came especially from Paris.

Between January 22 and 24, 1943, about 6,000 people were arrested, and 1,642 of them were deported, including 782 Jews. At the same time, around 20,000 residents of the Saint-Jean quarter (quartier Saint-Jean), the city’s oldest neighborhood, on the north bank of the Vieux-Port, were forced from their homes, and about 12,000 of them were transported in cattle cars to a transit camp in Fréjus. On February 1 the demolitions began: over more than two weeks, 1,500 buildings were blown up, 14 hectares of the old city were reduced to rubble, and 50 streets were erased from the map. Of the 600 people deported to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, about a hundred returned. The episode was nearly forgotten for decades, and only in 2019 did the French justice system recognize it as a crime against humanity.

Marseille was liberated on August 28, 1944, and the debate over what to do with the gaping hole began immediately. The northern quay was rebuilt by Fernand Pouillon (1912-1986), and at the same time, the minister Raoul Dautry (1880-1951) commissioned Le Corbusier (1887-1965) to design an experimental apartment building. The “Unité d’habitation”, about 340 apartments in a single concrete block on stilts, was inaugurated on October 14, 1952, and the people of Marseille immediately nicknamed it “the madman’s house” (la Maison du fada). Today it is a World Heritage site. In 1962, the city absorbed the wave of repatriates from Algeria, and Gaston Defferre (1910-1986), mayor from 1953 until his death, spoke out publicly against taking them in and yet still built the northern neighborhoods for them.

Marseille today: Euroméditerranée, the MuCEM, and Rue d’Aubagne

In 1995, the Euroméditerranée urban renewal project was launched, covering 480 hectares, the largest of its kind in southern Europe, which turned the strip between the port and the city center from a neglected harbor zone into a district of businesses and homes.

The high point came in 2013, when Marseille was named European Capital of Culture. The Vieux-Port was redesigned under a plan by Norman Foster (born 1935) and turned into a pedestrian plaza, and at the end of the pier, on June 7, the MuCEM (Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée) was inaugurated, designed by Rudy Ricciotti (born 1952). It was the first national museum to open outside the Paris region, and it drew 1,920,210 visitors in its first year of operation. The footbridge connecting it to Fort Saint-Jean is one of the most beautiful ways a city can admit that the fortress built to control it has become a museum.

Marseille today hasn’t finished with its troubles. On November 5, 2018, on Rue d’Aubagne, in the Noailles quarter, two buildings collapsed and killed eight people, and in the weeks that followed, about 4,500 residents were evacuated from at least 578 buildings deemed unsafe. On September 2, 2021, the “Marseille en grand” plan was announced at the Palais du Pharo, one of whose goals is to address 10,000 housing units within 15 years.

2,600 years after Nannus gave the Greeks a stretch of coastline, Marseille still does exactly what it did on day one: it takes in people arriving from the sea, argues with the central government, and gets by. Next time you stand on the quay facing the basilica, ask yourself how many cities in the world you can say that about.

Frequently asked questions about the history of Marseille

When was Marseille founded, and who founded it?

Around 600 BCE, by Greeks from the city of Phocaea in Asia Minor. The dating is supported by archaeological evidence, which makes Marseille the oldest city in present-day France.

What is the connection between “La Marseillaise” and the city of Marseille?

The song was written in Strasbourg in April 1792 and was originally called “War Song for the Army of the Rhine”. Volunteers from Marseille adopted it as a marching song after hearing it in the city in June of that year, and they sang it as they entered Paris on July 30. The Parisians named it after them, and the name stuck.

How many people died in the plague of 1720?

In Marseille itself, between 30,000 and 40,000 out of a population of 80,000 to 90,000, in other words about half the city. In Provence as a whole, roughly a hundred thousand. It was the last great plague of its kind in France.

Why does the neighborhood facing Fort Saint-Jean look relatively new?

Because it was rebuilt after 1944. In January and February 1943, the Germans, with the help of the Vichy police, blew up 1,500 buildings in the Saint-Jean quarter, and 50 streets were erased from the map. In the 1950s, new architecture was built there, led by Fernand Pouillon.

Where is the Marseille port chain today?

In the cathedral of Valencia, Spain. The forces of Alfonso V of Aragon broke it and took it as a trophy in November 1423, and it is still on display there today.

Related reading

• The Time Paris Almost Burned Down (Twice)
• The Dark Side of the Eiffel Tower
• Joséphine de Beauharnais and Napoleon: A Stormy Love Story