How the French Riviera came to be known as the Côte d'Azur

The Lido beach in Toulon. DANIÈLE SCHNEIDER / PHOTONONSTOP

History of a notion. The Côte d'Azur is said to be all about summer. But that's not so true: Its fame was born as a winter destination, long before its emblematic name was invented in the 1887 book La Côte d'Azur, by the lawyer and dandy Stéphen Liégeard (1830-1925). For a long time, the coastal strip between Cassis, France, and San Remo, Italy, was referred to not as the Côte d'Azur but rather as the Riviera, a term popularized by English aristocrats.

The first shift, which started in Nice in the 1760s, came from the British, who were at the forefront of two fashionable trends. One was the Grand Tour, the formative trip to Italy that every upper-class Englishman was expected to make. In 2014, Alain Bottaro wrote in the magazine In Situ that the tradition "fueled a desire for the Mediterranean in the imagination of Europe's elite, leading to the practice of winter vacationing in the Midi," using another name for the South of France. Health was soon added to pleasure thanks to the writings of the Scottish physician Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), who extolled "the therapeutic virtues of a climate elevated to the rank of panacea by the neo-Hippocratic school," explained Bottaro, a heritage curator.

As the 19th century progressed, the Riviera was taken over by the foreign aristocracy. First they went to Hyères, then Cannes in 1834, and in the 1860s, Monaco, Menton and Golfe-Juan. "Other winter resorts followed, such as Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Cap-d'Ail and Mandelieu," lists Université Côte d'Azur professor Jean-Christophe Gay in the online Scientific and Technical Encyclopaedia of Leisure and Tourism. The landscape was reshaped by a singular heritage, characterized by the "majestic architecture" of palaces and villas and the exoticism of gardens that featured imported winter-blooming tropical plants (orange trees, palm trees, bougainvillea...).