Two square kilometres in the first and sixth arrondissements of Marseille. Seven stops. The daily market that is the social and spatial heart of post-colonial Marseille. The memorial site of a building collapse that killed eight residents on the morning of the fifth of November, two thousand and eighteen. Nineteenth-century tenement stock that still houses the inner-city immigrant working class. A Comorian community marker. A Wenzhou Chinese commercial edge. The gentrification frontier on the Cours Julien plateau. A contested public square at the end. The Republic has built this neighbourhood twice and displaced its working population both times.
Start · Marché des Capucins: The Social Heart of Post-Colonial Marseille
DirectionsStops
- 1
Marché des Capucins: The Social Heart of Post-Colonial Marseille
Place du Marché-des-Capucins, first arrondissement. The daily produce market of Noailles. Site of the sixteen sixty-five Capuchin friars' convent on land purchased earlier by Catherine de Medici. Convent nationalized in seventeen ninety-one; the current formal food market dates from nineteen fifty-six.
- 2
Sixty-Three and Sixty-Five Rue d'Aubagne: The Memorial
The site of the fifth of November, two thousand and eighteen, building collapse. Two contiguous residential buildings at numbers sixty-three and sixty-five collapsed on the morning of the collapse; eight residents died. Number sixty-seven was demolished after the collapse as a precaution. Memorial wall at the corner.
- 3
Rue Longue des Capucins: The Housing Stock That Failed
Nineteenth-century vernacular tenement stock of central Marseille, between the Canebière and the Préfecture. Five and six storey buildings, small windows, narrow co-ownerships, the same vernacular block stock that failed catastrophically two streets east in twenty eighteen.
- 4
Comorian Marseille: The Largest Diaspora Outside the Archipelago
Comorian community marker on the Noailles streetscape, on the eastern side of the Marché des Capucins. Streetscape-level anchor for the largest Comorian diaspora outside the Comoros archipelago. Migration began in the late nineteen-forties via Messageries Maritimes sailors. Comoros independence, nineteen seventy-five.
- 5
Belsunce Edge: The Wenzhou Commercial Layer
The Belsunce-Noailles boundary edge, northwest of the Marché des Capucins. Wenzhou-origin Chinese settlement in Belsunce from the early two thousands. Distinct from the Paris-Belleville Wenzhou diaspora in scale, period of arrival, and commercial register.
- 6
Cours Julien: The Gentrification Frontier
Cours Julien plateau in the sixth arrondissement, east-uphill from Noailles. Site of the eighteen sixty wholesale Marché Central until its relocation in nineteen seventy-three. Artist and bookseller settlement of the vacant commercial spaces from the early nineteen-eighties. Post twenty ten creative-class gentrification frontier.
- 7
Place Jean Jaurès, La Plaine: The Republic Has Built This Neighbourhood Twice
Place Jean Jaurès, locally known as La Plaine. Sits between Noailles, downhill to the west, and Cours Julien, uphill to the north-east. Site of the contested twenty eighteen to twenty twenty municipal redevelopment, read by residents as gentrification-by-public-works.
Details
Best Time to Visit
Late morning to mid-afternoon on a Tuesday through Saturday, when the Marché des Capucins is fully open and the rue d'Aubagne memorial wall is undisturbed by commuter traffic. The market reads most fully between ten and one. The Cours Julien plateau is most legible in the late afternoon, when the cafés and boutiques are open and the foot traffic is moderate. Sundays are quieter at the market and at the Cours Julien; the memorial stop reads equally on a Sunday. The fifth of November anniversary of the twenty eighteen collapse draws annual commemorations on rue d'Aubagne; the tour is walkable that day and respectful behaviour at the memorial is expected.
Pro Tips
- •The audio anchors on the exterior of every stop. You do not need to enter any building, mosque, or restaurant to follow the tour. The Marché des Capucins is open from approximately eight in the morning to seven in the evening, Monday to Saturday, with a shorter Sunday session.
- •Stop two on rue d'Aubagne is the memorial stop and the load-bearing stop of the tour. The audio holds maximum restraint. Behave as you would at any memorial. Quiet voice, no posed photographs, walk on after listening.
- •The walk from the Belsunce edge at stop five up to the Cours Julien plateau at stop six is about four hundred metres of slope. The climb is gradual but continuous. Comfortable shoes recommended.
- •Place Jean Jaurès, locally known as La Plaine, hosts a weekly market on certain days. If you walk on a market day, the synthesis stop reads against the live square. If you walk on a quiet day, the redesigned perimeter and the documentation of the twenty eighteen to twenty twenty redevelopment are more legible.
- •The Marché des Capucins and the Belsunce edge are working markets and working commercial strips for the communities that live and shop there. Photograph buildings, signage, and the streetscape; avoid photographing people, especially in restaurants, cafés, and mosques, without consent.
- •If you only have ninety minutes, walk stops one through four, finish at the Comorian community marker, and return to the Marché des Capucins. The thesis still resolves on the housing stock and the Comorian presence as the Noailles half of the tour. The Cours Julien and La Plaine half can be walked on a second pass.
- •The Vieux-Port is fifteen minutes' walk west of the Marché des Capucins. The Canebière is one block north of the market. Neither is on this tour. Marseille's port and its Belle-Époque architecture are held by two separate Roamer Marseille tours.
Safety & Precautions
- •Noailles and Belsunce are working-class neighbourhoods with strong residential and commercial character. The communities the tour observes live and work on the streets the tour walks. Treat the neighbourhood as a neighbourhood, not a backdrop.
- •Pickpocketing is documented around the Marché des Capucins and the lower rue de Belsunce, and on the metro lines one and two serving the area. Keep wallets and phones in front pockets or zipped bags, especially in the market crowd.
- •The walk is about two kilometres total. The route is mostly flat in Noailles, with a continuous gradual climb from the Belsunce edge at stop five up to the Cours Julien plateau at stop six. Comfortable closed shoes recommended.
- •The rue d'Aubagne memorial site at stop two is the most sensitive moment of the tour. Annual commemorations are held on the fifth of November. On other days the memorial is a quiet streetscape feature. Approach it as a memorial in any city.
- •Marseille summers run hot, and Noailles has limited shade between stops. Carry water and consider an early-morning or late-afternoon start in July and August.
- •The Cours Julien plateau at stop six and Place Jean Jaurès at stop seven host evening nightlife from late afternoon onward. The audio holds equally in the evening, with louder foot traffic. If you prefer a quieter read, walk before three in the afternoon.
Travel advisory: Exercise Increased Caution (Level 2).
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The full story of Noailles and Cours Julien: The Port-City France Hasn't Decided About, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.
Introduction
Two square kilometres in the first and sixth arrondissements of Marseille. Maghrebi, Comorian, sub-Saharan, Wenzhou Chinese, and Eastern European Roma populations on the same small grid. A building collapse that killed eight residents in twenty eighteen. A gentrification wave descending from the plateau in twenty twenty.
Noailles and Cours Julien together hold the present stakes of a Mediterranean port-city that the French Republic has never quite admitted is post-colonial.
The twenty nineteen INSEE census of the Marseille metropolitan area counts approximately sixty thousand Algeria-born, seventeen thousand Tunisia-born, sixteen thousand Morocco-born, and ten thousand Comoros-born residents. The Republic that decolonized Algeria in nineteen sixty-two, Tunisia and Morocco in nineteen fifty-six, and Comoros in nineteen seventy-five has built one of the most concentrated post-colonial neighbourhoods in France, and has never quite named it as such. The fifth of November twenty eighteen building collapse on rue d'Aubagne killed eight residents and forced the state evacuation of approximately four thousand five hundred people. The post twenty twenty gentrification wave descending from the Cours Julien plateau is displacing the same families again.
Seven stops. About two kilometres on foot. Roughly seventy-five to ninety minutes including stop dwell. The first arrondissement around the daily market, then south to the memorial street, back through the housing stock and the community markers, east up the slope to the Cours Julien plateau, and down to the contested public square between them.
When you arrive at the Marché des Capucins, begin with stop one.
1. Marché des Capucins: The Social Heart of Post-Colonial Marseille
You are standing at the Marché des Capucins, in the first arrondissement of Marseille, in the neighbourhood called Noailles. The market is open. The halal butchers are on one side. The North African groceries are on the other. The Senegalese cafés are at the corners. Stalls of dates and dried fish and saffron and ras-el-hanout and fabric. The voices around you are Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, Comorian, Senegalese, and Malian.
Per the Marseille Tourism Noailles-district record and the Manifesta thirteen venue archive, the market sits on the site of the sixteen sixty-five Capuchin friars' convent, built on land purchased earlier by Catherine de Medici. The convent was nationalized in seventeen ninety-one and the friars expelled. The current formal food market dates from nineteen fifty-six. Noailles is bounded by the Canebière one block north and the Préfecture three blocks south, in the first arrondissement.
The twenty nineteen INSEE census of the Marseille metropolitan area counts approximately fifty-nine thousand nine hundred Algeria-born, seventeen thousand three hundred Tunisia-born, sixteen thousand seven hundred Morocco-born, and ten thousand four hundred Comoros-born residents. These figures count first-generation residents only. Eighteen per cent of the metropolitan population was foreign-born in twenty nineteen. Approximately forty-six per cent of immigrants in the metropolitan area arrived from the Maghreb.
The French sociologists Michel Peraldi, Claire Duport, and Michel Samson, in their twenty fifteen book Sociologie de Marseille, published by La Découverte, describe Noailles as the social and spatial heart of inner-city immigrant Marseille. The market is the daily fact of that description. The Republic narrates Marseille as France's second city, the oldest city in France, the Mediterranean port. The Republic does not narrate the colonial pipeline that produced the demographic in front of you. Algerian independence, nineteen sixty-two. Tunisian and Moroccan independence, nineteen fifty-six. Comoros independence, nineteen seventy-five. Sixty years of post-colonial migration are visible on the stalls.
The next stop is one hundred and fifty metres south. Walk out of the market on the southern side, onto rue d'Aubagne. After about one block on rue d'Aubagne, you will reach a gap in the street wall where two buildings once stood and where a memorial wall now stands. That is the load-bearing stop of this tour.
2. Sixty-Three and Sixty-Five Rue d'Aubagne: The Memorial
You are standing on rue d'Aubagne, in front of the memorial wall at numbers sixty-three and sixty-five. Stop. Look at the gap in the street wall. Look at the memorial. This is the stop the tour holds with maximum restraint.
On the morning of the fifth of November, two thousand and eighteen, two contiguous residential buildings at sixty-three and sixty-five rue d'Aubagne collapsed. Per the Wikipedia entry on the twenty eighteen Marseille building collapse, the Courthouse News Service investigation, and the Marseille Tourism collapse-memorial record, eight residents died. The tour refers to them collectively. They are remembered on the wall at the corner.
Number sixty-three had been emptied since two thousand and sixteen and was owned by the municipal housing company Marseille Habitat. Number sixty-five was occupied and privately co-owned. The neighbouring building, number sixty-seven, was demolished after the collapse as a precaution.
Approximately eight thousand people walked a memorial march through Noailles on the tenth of November, two thousand and eighteen. The Fondation Abbé Pierre had earlier estimated that approximately one hundred thousand Marseille residents lived in substandard housing at the time of the collapse. In the months that followed, authorities evacuated approximately four thousand five hundred people from five hundred and seventy-eight buildings declared unfit. Per Courthouse News Service.
The criminal trial of sixteen individuals and entities ran from the seventh of November, two thousand and twenty-four, to the eighteenth of December, two thousand and twenty-four, in Marseille, on charges of involuntary manslaughter, involuntary endangerment, and providing unsuitable living conditions. Defendants included Xavier Cachard, co-owner of number sixty-five and lawyer for the managing-agent firm Liautard; Jean-François Valentin, the director of Liautard; Christian Gil, the director of Marseille Habitat; Julien Ruas, the city councillor responsible for urban-risk prevention at the time of the collapse; and the architect Richard Carta. The verdict was delivered on the seventh of July, two thousand and twenty-five. Three co-owners received prison sentences. The heaviest sentence was against Xavier Cachard. Per Courthouse News Service, France twenty-four, and the Jacobin May twenty twenty-five investigation.
Jean-Claude Gaudin had been mayor of Marseille since nineteen ninety-five. He had announced in June two thousand and seventeen that he would not seek another term. The November two thousand and eighteen collapse fell into the final months of his fourth term.
That is what happened on this corner. The next stop is eighty metres back toward the market, on the housing stock that failed. Walk west on rue d'Aubagne, then turn right onto rue Longue des Capucins. About eighty metres in, stop at a five or six storey nineteenth-century tenement facade. That is your next stop.
3. Rue Longue des Capucins: The Housing Stock That Failed
You are on rue Longue des Capucins, in front of a five or six storey nineteenth-century tenement. Look up. Small windows. Wrought-iron balconies in places, closed shutters elsewhere, laundry on a line. Painted plaster on the lower floors, sometimes patched, sometimes peeling.
The bulk of central Marseille's residential stock dates to the Belle-Époque rebuild of the second half of the nineteenth century, when the city expanded south of the Canebière for a rising bourgeois population. The Espérandieu monumental architecture of that period belongs to a different tour. This is the vernacular tenement stock, never signature work, that filled the back streets of the same expansion.
The same buildings that housed bourgeois Marseille in eighteen eighty house Maghrebi, Comorian, and sub-Saharan Marseille in twenty twenty-six. Per the Fondation Abbé Pierre figure cited at the previous stop, approximately one hundred thousand Marseille residents lived in substandard housing at the time of the twenty eighteen collapse. The buildings are divided into small co-ownerships, often unmaintained for decades, sometimes with absentee landlords, sometimes with municipal stewardship. Per Peraldi, Duport, and Samson, twenty fifteen, the central-Marseille housing stock has carried successive immigrant generations through inherited disrepair.
The gap between the building's design life and its present condition is what failed catastrophically at sixty-three and sixty-five rue d'Aubagne. The Republic celebrated this stock as bourgeois modernity in eighteen eighty. The same stock has become, by neglect, the failure point of working-class central Marseille in two thousand and eighteen.
The next stop is one hundred and twenty metres back through the market, on the Comorian community presence. Walk back to rue Longue des Capucins's market end, then on through the Marché des Capucins toward the eastern side, to a Comorian-run grocer or café on the streetscape edge. That is your next stop.
4. Comorian Marseille: The Largest Diaspora Outside the Archipelago
You are on the eastern edge of the Marché des Capucins, on the streetscape near a Comorian-run grocer or café. The signage carries Arabic script, sometimes Shikomori, and French. Stop on the pavement. This is a community marker, not a monument. The tour observes; it does not…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
5. Belsunce Edge: The Wenzhou Commercial Layer
You are on the Belsunce-Noailles boundary edge, near the Cours Belsunce or the southern end of rue de la République. The signage in front of you is Chinese, sometimes alongside French. The shopfronts open onto wholesale-import storefronts. Boxes, bolts of fabric, manufactured…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
6. Cours Julien: The Gentrification Frontier
You have arrived on the Cours Julien plateau, in the sixth arrondissement of Marseille. Look around. The square is open. The walls carry painted murals across the storefronts. The cafés are styled. The boutiques sell design objects, vintage clothing, vinyl records. The rents are…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
7. Place Jean Jaurès, La Plaine: The Republic Has Built This Neighbourhood Twice
You have arrived at Place Jean Jaurès, locally called La Plaine. Stop on the square. Noailles is downhill to the west. Cours Julien is uphill to the north-east. The redeveloped square sits between them. The weekly market spreads on certain days. The redesigned perimeter, with…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.