Toulon

• 1. Introduction

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  Toulon sits at the eastern edge of the Gulf of Lion, on the French Riviera, where a natural harbour so protected and deep that it became the beating heart of France's Mediterranean navy. Today a city of nearly 180,000 people, it is France's twelfth-largest and the third most populous French city on the Mediterranean, behind Marseille and Nice. But population figures barely hint at what makes Toulon distinctive. This is a place where the Venus de Milo first touched French soil, where Napoleon Bonaparte first made his name under fire, where an Ottoman admiral once quartered his entire fleet for a winter, and where the French navy chose to sink its own ships rather than surrender them to an occupying army. How did a Roman dye works on a provincial harbour become all of this? The answer lies in a rare combination of geography, royal ambition, and the kind of violent history that leaves its mark on stone.

• 2. From Dye Works to Royal Port

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  Telo Martius, the Roman name for the settlement at Toulon's location, carried a double meaning: Telo for either a local spring god or the Latin root of the hill, and Martius for the god of war. That military association proved prophetic. The Romans chose the site in part because the harbour offered natural shelter for trading ships, and they built one of their two principal purple-dye manufacturing centres there, drawing colour from a local sea snail called murex and from the acorns of local oak trees. Purple was the colour of imperial robes, so Telo Martius supplied a commodity bound directly for the most powerful people in the ancient world.

  Greek colonists from Phocaea, in Asia Minor, had already established trading depots along this stretch of coast in about the 7th century BC, including one called Olbia at Saint-Pierre de l'Almanarre south of Hyères. The Ligurians settled the broader area from the 4th century BC. Rome arrived later, summoned by the people of Massalia to help pacify the region, and the legions defeated the Ligurians before planting their own colonies. The name of the town itself traces a slow drift: Telo became Tholon, then Tolon, then Toulon.

  By the 5th century, Christianity had arrived, and Toulon's first cathedral was built. A bishop named Augustalis, identified by historian Louis Duchesne as the first historical bishop of the town, attended councils in 441 and 442 and signed letters to Pope Leo I from the province of Arles in 449 and 450. A later bishop, Saint Cyprian, who had been a disciple and biographer of St. Caesarius of Arles, began his episcopate in 524 and was still serving in 541. He converted two Visigothic chiefs, Mandrier and Flavian, to Catholicism; both became anchorites and martyrs on the peninsula of Mandrier.

  In 1486, Provence became part of France, and the strategic value of Toulon's harbour instantly attracted royal attention. King Charles VIII, aiming to make France a sea power on the Mediterranean and to back his military campaign in Italy, began constructing a military port there in 1494. His Italian campaign failed, and by 1497 the rulers of Genoa had blockaded the new port. The harbour's potential was real, but so was the danger of leaving it exposed.

• 3. Alliances, Sieges, and Plague

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  In 1524, King François I completed a powerful new fortification called the Tour Royale at the harbour entrance, built as part of his long campaign against Emperor Charles V and the Holy Roman Empire. Within months of its completion, the commander of that very fort sold it to an officer of the Holy Roman Empire's army, and Toulon surrendered. The city's defences were only as reliable as the men who held them.

  François I responded to this setback with a diplomatic move that astonished his contemporaries. In 1543, he invited the fleet of Ottoman Admiral Barbarossa to winter at Toulon as part of the Franco-Ottoman alliance. The town's residents were forced to vacate except for heads of household, and Ottoman sailors occupied the city for the season. An alliance between a Christian king and the Ottoman Empire was calculated to unsettle Charles V, and it did.

  In 1646, Toulon served as the staging point for the Battle of Orbetello, also known as the Battle of Isola del Giglio. France's first Grand Admiral, the Marquis of Brézé, Jean Armand de Maillé-Brézé, gathered a fleet there of 36 galleons, 20 galleys, and a large complement of smaller vessels. Aboard them rode an army of 8,000 infantry and 800 cavalry under Thomas of Savoy.

  King Louis XIV had his own ambitions for French sea power. In 1660, his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert ordered the military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban to build a new arsenal and to fortify the town. Then, beginning in 1678, Vauban constructed an elaborate system of fortifications that would reshape the city's physical form for centuries. In 1707, during the War of the Spanish Succession, those defences proved their worth when Toulon successfully resisted a siege by an Imperial Army led by Duke Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia and Prince Eugene.

  But no fortification could stop disease. In 1720, a plague spreading from Marseille killed 13,000 people, roughly half of Toulon's population at the time.

• 4. Revolution, Napoleon, and Reinvention

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  In 1790, following the French Revolution, Toulon became the administrative centre of the new département of the Var. Three years later, the city's Jacobin administration was toppled by Girondins and royalists who joined the Federalist revolts against the central government of the First Republic. The new administration surrendered both the city and its fleet to the British. Republican forces then besieged Toulon, compelling the British to withdraw. The departing British took some ships with them and burned the rest.

  An artillery captain named Napoleon Bonaparte served during that siege. His performance there helped launch the career that would dominate Europe for the next two decades. As punishment for its rebellion, Toulon was stripped of its status as département capital and briefly renamed Port-la-Montagne, after The Mountain faction.

  From 1803 to 1805, during the Napoleonic Wars, Admiral Horatio Nelson led a British fleet in a blockade of the harbour.

  Then, in 1820, a French naval officer named Emile Voutier was on the Greek island of Milo when a statue was discovered there. He persuaded the French Ambassador to Turkey to purchase it, and the work was shipped to Toulon aboard his vessel, the Estafette. From Toulon, the statue that became known as the Venus de Milo was taken onward to the Louvre.

  In 1849, Louis-Napoleon appointed Georges Eugène Haussmann as Prefect of the Var. Haussmann served only one year, but he laid out the current street plan for Toulon's city centre, including landmarks such as the Toulon Opera, the Place de la Liberté, the Chalucet Hospital, and the Palais de Justice. He would later apply the same urban approach on a far larger scale to the rebuilding of central Paris. Napoleon Bonaparte had departed from the Porte d'Italie, one of Vauban's surviving city gates, at the start of his triumphant Italian campaign in 1796.

• 5. War, Scuttling, and Recovery

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  In August 1935, a year before the Popular Front came to power, workers at the Toulon shipyards launched violent uprisings against austerity policies. The unrest resulted in deaths, injuries, and a state of emergency.

  World War II brought a more catastrophic rupture. After the Allied landings in North Africa, known as Operation Torch, German forces occupied southern France under the plan called Case Anton. On the 27th of November 1942, French naval officers ordered the scuttling of the French Fleet based at Toulon, sending the ships to the bottom of the harbour rather than allowing them to fall into German hands. The following year, Allied bombing destroyed much of the port and killed five hundred residents.

  After the war, recovery was gradual. The Hôtel de Ville, the administrative centre of the city, was not completed until 1970. The University of Toulon opened in 1979. In the local elections of 1995, Toulon was one of four French cities where the extreme-right Front National won power; the party was voted out in 2001.

  The French Mediterranean Fleet remains based in Toulon today. The harbour is home to the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and her battle group, continuing a thread of naval occupation that stretches back to Charles VIII's construction project in 1494.

• 6. Culture, Literature, and Memory

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  Toulon appears in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables as the location of the bagne, the notorious prison where the protagonist Jean Valjean serves nineteen years of hard labour. It is also where Valjean first encounters his pursuer Javert. A portion of the wall of the old bagne still stands to the right of the entrance of the Old Harbour.

  The writer Anthony Powell stayed at the Hotel du Port et des Negociants in Toulon on two occasions in the early 1930s, and later used the old town as a setting in his novel What's Become of Waring. In his memoirs, he described the naval port as having a small inner harbour and a row of cafés along the rade, quite separate from the business quarter. A paddle steamer ran several times a day between the roadstead and the beach at Les Sablettes. Joseph Conrad's last novel, The Rover, is also set around Toulon.

  The Museum of Asian Arts in the Mourillon neighbourhood occupies a house that once belonged to the son and later the grandson of Jules Verne. Its collection, donated largely by naval officers during the period of French colonization of Southeast Asia, includes objects and paintings from India, China, Japan, and Tibet. The Museum of Art, created in 1888, holds works by Fauvist painters of Provence including Charles Camoin and Auguste Chabaud, as well as photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész.

  At the summit of Mount Faron, which rises 584 metres above the city, the Memorial Museum to the Landings in Provence was opened in 1964 by President Charles de Gaulle. It commemorates Operation Dragoon, the Allied landings in Provence in August 1944, with photographs, weapons, and models. The annual Paris-Nice and Tour Méditerranéen bicycle races both use the road over Mount Faron as one of their stages.

• 7. A City of Winds and Sunshine

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  Meteorological data collected by Météo-France places Toulon second only to Marseille among metropolitan French cities in total sunshine hours per year: an average of 2,854.1 hours annually from 1991 to 2020. Nice records 2,695 hours per year and Perpignan 2,472. A wall of mountains to the north shields Toulon from the weather systems that reduce sunshine elsewhere in France. The city's yearly average temperature is 16.7 degrees Celsius, and January, its coldest month, averages 9.9 degrees, the warmest January average of any city in metropolitan France.

  The wind is a defining feature of Toulon's experience. On 115 days a year, strong winds blow through the city. They come from multiple directions and carry distinct characters: the cold and dry Mistral and Tramontane from the north, the wet Marin, the Sirocco that sometimes carries reddish sand from Africa, and the wet and stormy Levant from the east. January is the windiest month, averaging 12.5 days of strong winds; September is the calmest, with seven. The interplay between intense sunshine and persistent wind gives Toulon a climate unlike anything else in France.

  Sporting Club Toulon, the city's main football club, has fielded players including Jean Tigana, David Ginola, and Sébastien Squillaci across its history. The rugby union club RC Toulon plays at Stade Mayol, a stadium named after Félix Mayol, a singer and entertainer who was born in the city in 1872. The handball team Toulon St-Cyr Var Handball won the French Championship in 2010, and the city hosted one event in the Americas Cup World Series in 2016 alongside Portsmouth and New York.