Victor Gelu, writer and chansonnier of Provence, will be afflicted on these transformations undertaken under the second empire. In his memories one can read :
- "Destruam et aedificabo! these avid speculators of the North say who, not knowing anything of our pleasures, our needs, of our climate, want to impose their ideas to us to pile up million! They destroy; but what they do build?... They will shave the mountain in the north of our old port, this natural barrier which guarantees to us devastations of the wind of the North-West (1), and this cut down barrier, all the plain in the north of Marseilles will be maltreated by the mistral than are to it the deserts of Crau d' Arles!... They speak without sourciller to fill our Lacydon, one of the wonders of the Mediterranean, by throwing there spoil of the hills of the Mills and the Large-Carmelite friars! Then, they will sell by batches, like sites to be built, this ground conquered on the past and then, they will make there raise some supposedly model houses, quite massive, quite uninhabitable (2)! By means of some other starters, they will find some purchasers engoués of the progress which will buy the whole with beautiful sums of money cash and the turn will be played! And our very whole fatherland will be nothing any more but one immense Fouen dei ven (3)!..."
Août 1866: The buildings are finished
(1) Allusion to the projects of Mires and of the Company of the ports (1858). To easily solve the problem of the junction of the new port of Joliette and the Old man-Port, Mires proposed to level the old city, while shaving purely and simply the three hills of the St. Lawrence, of the Mills and the Carmelite friars and to establish on the site thus cleared a new district with broad avenues being cut to right angle. The opposition was large among the Marseillais of origin, faithful to their old acropolis and this more especially as Mires did not hide its desire to quickly lead to make in high place to approve its projects. The municipality succeeds in making them differ and, at the time of the visit of the emperor in 1860, it made approve by the sovereign the boring of the street of the Republic which, by a
bleeding
through the old city, would link the old men and the new quays. But alarm had been hot...
(2) Allusion to the houses of the street of the Republic which remained a long time uninhabited.
(3) Fouen dei ven : Fountain of the winds. Allusion to a street of Tourette where a particularly exposed fountain with the gusts of the mistral (wind) was.
Destruam et aedificabo : Let us destroy and build.
Victor Gelu - Marseilles in XIXe centuries - Plon 1971. Text annotated by Strong Lucien and Jorgi Reboul.
