The Riviera the British invented and the French perfected

Nice's grandest seafront avenue, the wide curve of hotels and palm trees that every visitor eventually walks, is called the Promenade des Anglais, and the name is not a marketing flourish. It commemorates the fact that the walkway was substantially paid for by the city's English colony in the 1820s, so that its members might take the air along the bay without getting sand in their shoes. The Riviera, in other words, was significantly a British invention before it became a French institution, and the French have spent the two centuries since improving on the idea.

Doctors sent the patients, and the patients stayed

The pattern began in the eighteenth century with the belief, common among British physicians of the period, that a mild winter climate could ease consumption and other respiratory complaints, and Nice's position on a south-facing bay sheltered by the Alps made it an obvious destination for patients who could afford the journey. The Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett spent a winter in Nice in the 1760s and wrote about it at length on his return, and by the early nineteenth century a recognisable British winter colony had taken root, wealthy enough to fund public works, sustain English churches and, eventually, give the seafront its enduring name. Queen Victoria herself wintered repeatedly on the Riviera towards the end of her life, staying at Cimiez above Nice and at Grasse, and where the queen went, fashionable society generally followed.

Cannes owes its own transformation to a rather less deliberate visit. In 1834, the former Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham, travelling to Italy, found the road into Provence blocked by a cholera quarantine and stopped instead at the small fishing village of Cannes, liked it enough to build a villa there, and returned every winter for the following three decades. Other wealthy Britons followed his example, and a village that had previously lived from fishing and a little trade in orange blossom became, within a generation, one of the coast's fashionable winter addresses.

A casino built to save a principality

Monaco's contribution to the Riviera's reputation has a more calculated origin. By the mid-nineteenth century the tiny principality, having lost the towns of Menton and Roquebrune that had provided most of its tax revenue, was close to bankrupt, and its ruling Grimaldi family looked to gambling, then illegal in France itself, as a way to raise money from wealthy foreign visitors rather than from its own impoverished citizens. The casino at Monte Carlo, opened in 1863 and steadily expanded thereafter, succeeded well beyond expectations: profits from visiting gamblers eventually allowed Monaco to abolish direct taxation on its own residents entirely, an arrangement that still holds and that continues to draw a certain kind of resident to the principality today.

From winter resort to summer destination

What the Riviera's original British visitors would find strangest about the coast today is its season. They came in winter specifically to escape northern Europe's cold, and largely avoided the Mediterranean summer, which was considered unhealthily hot. The shift to summer tourism, sunbathing included, is a twentieth-century development, driven partly by changing medical fashion and partly by the arrival of paid holidays and, eventually, cheap flights, which turned a resort designed for quiet winter convalescence into one of the most crowded summer coastlines in Europe. Spring and autumn now offer something closer to what the original visitors actually experienced: mild, uncrowded and considerably easier to book a table in.

Getting to the Riviera

Travelsphere's French Riviera tour, seven nights based in Cannes, follows a route that would be entirely recognisable to Brougham, taking in Nice, Monaco and St Tropez. Just You's French & Italian Riviera Splendour extends the idea across the Italian border to Portofino and the Ligurian coast, on a solo-friendly small-group basis.

Fred. Olsen's Exploring the French Riviera, sixteen nights from Liverpool, reaches the coast by sea, sailing via Gibraltar to call at Toulon, Villefranche and Ajaccio before returning the length of the Atlantic coast.

Late spring and early autumn remain, by most accounts, the better months to see why the British bothered building a promenade in the first place: warm enough for the terrace, cool enough to actually enjoy the walk along it.