The History of Marseille, France's Oldest City

People often ask us, when friends come to visit: "so, how old is Marseille, anyway?" The short answer: Marseille was founded around 600 BC by Greek sailors, making it France's oldest city, well before Lyon or Paris. But reducing 2,600 years of history to a birth date barely scratches the surface. What fascinates us is everything that happened next, because it explains why the city is the way it is today: facing the sea, used to welcoming newcomers, and more than a little unbreakable.

A 2,600-year-old Greek foundation

The official story, which we all learned in school: Phocaean sailors, from the Greek city of Phocaea (on the coast of modern-day Turkey), land in a sheltered cove and found a trading post they call Massalia. The local legend is prettier: the Greek chief Protis was reportedly chosen by the local princess Gyptis, daughter of the Ligurian king Nann, to marry her at a banquet, and that marriage is said to have sealed the city's founding. True or embellished, this story tells one real truth: Marseille was born from an encounter between people who came from the sea and people who were already there. That theme comes back often in what follows.

Massalia quickly became an active trading post, linking the Greek world, the Celtic and Ligurian peoples of the hinterland, and later Rome. It was already minting its own coins. Wine, oil and pottery passed through in both directions, centuries before the rest of France was anything resembling organized.

A port that has always faced the sea

What strikes us, living here, is how much the city has never turned its back on the Mediterranean. Placed under Roman rule after picking the wrong side in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey (it backed Pompey, a bad bet, and the city lost part of its autonomy as a result), Marseille passes through the Middle Ages as a merchant city attached in turn to Provence, then finally joins the Kingdom of France in 1481 under Louis XI. But whoever was in power, the port stayed the beating heart of the city. It's from there that the royal galleys set sail, that goods from the Orient passed through, and later that the great trading companies organized routes toward the Levant and North Africa.

Even today, the Vieux-Port isn't a backdrop for tourists: it's literally the city's point zero, the one around which everything else was built outward, neighborhood by neighborhood.

1720: the Great Plague of Marseille

There's an episode we tell visitors less often, yet it deeply marked the city: the plague of 1720. A merchant ship, the Grand-Saint-Antoine, returning from the Levant with a cargo of silk, docks at the port despite signs of illness on board, pressure from merchants awaiting that valuable cargo for the Beaucaire fair is thought to have played a role in letting it dock. The epidemic that follows is one of the deadliest in French history: in just over a year, it kills roughly half the city's population, close to 50,000 people. Accounts from the time describe streets littered with bodies, entire neighborhoods walled off to contain the contagion. The city recovers slowly, but it does recover, and a century later becomes one of the largest ports in Europe.

Gateway to the Orient: a city of immigration

If one thing defines Marseille more than any other French city, it's its history of welcome. The free-port status granted as early as the 17th century made it a commercial hub; the colonization of Algeria from 1830 onward made it the mandatory gateway to North Africa. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, successive waves of people arrive and settle: Italians fleeing poverty or fascism, Armenians who survived the 1915 genocide, Spaniards fleeing the civil war and then Francoism. After the independence movements in the Maghreb in the 1960s, then the arrival of people from the Comoros, the city keeps reshaping itself.

This history isn't a folkloric detail: it explains very concretely why the food is so good in Marseille, why certain neighborhoods have such a particular soul, and why the city has always had that "we're not quite like the rest of France" feel, a bit Greek, a bit Italian, a bit North African, and completely Marseille on top of that.

1943: the destruction of the Vieux-Port

Another episode we think is important to tell, because it explains the current layout of Le Panier district: in January 1943, in the middle of the Occupation, the German army evacuates then dynamites a large part of the Vieux-Port quays and the neighboring district. Officially, it was for security and hygiene reasons; in reality, the area, a maze of old alleyways, was seen as a refuge for the Resistance and a parallel economy the occupiers wanted to wipe out. Nearly 1,500 buildings are razed in a matter of days, and about 20,000 residents are evacuated, sometimes by force. That destruction is why today's Le Panier, despite its old-quarter charm, is largely a post-war reconstruction, and why we like telling friends about it when we walk through it: what you see today isn't even a hundred years old, even though the neighborhood itself is far older.

Marseille today

The second half of the 20th century is economically harder: the decline of the port industry and the end of the colonial empire weaken the city, which carries a complicated reputation for a long time. The real turning point comes in the 2000s-2013, with a massive urban renewal project around the port (the Euroméditerranée project) and the year 2013, when Marseille becomes European Capital of Culture. That's the year the MuCEM opens, at the entrance to the Vieux-Port, which has since become one of the symbols of the new-generation city, without erasing the old one.

That's the Marseille we're trying to show you: a city with 2,600 years of history built into the stone, still carrying the marks of its dramas, and still, as it always has, facing the sea and welcoming those who arrive.