Marseille

Greek settlers from Phocaea founded Massalia around 600 BC, and it became the leading Greek city of southern Gaul. It sided with Rome against Carthage and kept its independence and trade empire until 49 BC, when it backed the losing side in Caesar's civil war and was besieged and taken. It remained a major port under the Visigoths, declined after a sack in 739, joined the County of Provence in the 10th century, and suffered the Black Death and a sack by the Crown of Aragon before René of Anjou rebuilt its defences in the 15th century.

In 1720 the Great Plague killed a large part of the population, though numbers had recovered by mid-century. In 1792 volunteers from the city sang the new revolutionary anthem on their way to Paris, and it has been called the Marseillaise ever since. The 19th century brought industry and the colonial empire; new docks at La Joliette replaced the Old Port for trade, and Marseille became one of Europe's busiest ports by 1900. During the German occupation the northern quayside was destroyed in 1943, later rebuilt by Fernand Pouillon.

After 1962 French citizens from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia arrived in large numbers; the port and docks declined in the 1970s after the oil crisis. Gaston Defferre was mayor from 1953 until 1986. The Euroméditerranée renewal project began in the 1990s, and the city was European Capital of Culture in 2013, opening the MuCEM and other new museums. Since the early 2020s it has struggled with a notable rise in drug trafficking and organised crime.

Openness to the Mediterranean has shaped Marseille for 2,600 years. Waves of Provençals, Italians, Armenians, Corsicans, Jews from North Africa, Maghrebis, Comorians, Vietnamese and Chinese have made it a cosmopolitan city, with the third-largest Jewish community on the continent and the second-largest Corsican and Armenian populations in France. Residents of many origins share a strong local identity, and the city stayed relatively calm during the riots that shook other French suburbs in 2005.

The arts range from the opera house and the theatres of La Criée and Le Gymnase to La Friche, a former factory turned arts centre. Painters from Renoir to Cézanne worked at L'Estaque. Marseille is also a capital of French hip hop — IAM, Fonky Family and Keny Arkana come from here — and of ragga through Massilia Sound System. The Marseille dialect, coloured by Provençal, Italian and Arabic, gives the city words such as 'fada' and 'peuchère'.

Football is close to a religion: Olympique de Marseille became the first French club to win the Champions League, and the Stade Vélodrome seats around 67,000. Pétanque is played everywhere, and the Mondial la Marseillaise à Pétanque each July is the sport's biggest competition. Sailing, water polo and the Marseille–Cassis road race complete the picture.

About 886,000 people lived in the city in 2023, making it the second-largest city proper in France, and about 1.9 million in the wider metropolitan area. The city is divided into 16 arrondissements and 111 informal quartiers; the south-east lies inside the Calanques National Park, making Marseille the only large French city with a national park within its limits.

The port remains the economic engine — the first in France, with about 45,000 jobs linked to it — alongside the shipping group CMA CGM, Airbus Helicopters, subsea engineering, oil refining, research centres at Luminy and Château-Gombert, and a growing service sector in the Euroméditerranée business district. Tourism and cruises bring millions of visitors. Unemployment, 13.1 per cent in 2022, remains above the national average, and youth unemployment is far higher in some districts.

The city is sharply divided between the poorer, largely Muslim northern districts and the richer south, though rich and poor neighbourhoods also sit side by side. Everyday life spills outdoors: markets in the morning, pétanque in the squares, the beaches in summer, and the whole city stopping for OM's matches.

Bouillabaisse is Marseille's most famous dish: a fish stew made with at least three kinds of very fresh local fish, typically red rascasse, sea robin and conger, often with shellfish and sea urchins. Traditionally the fish is served on a platter separate from the broth, which comes with rouille — a mayonnaise of egg yolk, olive oil, red pepper, saffron and garlic — spread on toasted bread. In Marseille it is rarely made for fewer than ten people. Bourride is a soup of white fish and aïoli.

The everyday table is Provençal. Aïoli, a sauce of raw garlic, lemon juice, eggs and olive oil, is served with boiled fish, eggs and vegetables; anchoïade is a paste of anchovies, garlic and olive oil; tapenade is made from olives and capers. Soupe au pistou combines a sauce of basil, garlic and olive oil with a broth of pasta and vegetables, and pieds paquets is a dish of sheep's feet and offal. Cade is chickpea flour cooked into a mush, set, cut into blocks and fried, and fougasse is a flat Provençal bread, sometimes filled with olives, cheese or anchovies.

Navettes, boat-shaped biscuits tasting faintly of orange peel, have been made in the same shop since 1781. Pastis, flavoured with aniseed and spice, is the drink of the region. The fish market on the Quai des Belges and the Noailles market, with its Lebanese, North African and Asian stalls, show how the city eats today.