Corniche Kennedy

Château d'If is visible from Corniche Kennedy. For some of the people building this road, the island once stopped being a point on the horizon and became a prison.

After the February Revolution of eighteen forty-eight, thousands of stonemasons, excavators, and day laborers in Marseille were out of work. The new republic promised them work in municipal workshops—the name given to city construction sites that took on unemployed people. The Marseille council even abandoned its plan for a new city hall building: the money set aside for it was directed to sewerage and a road along the sea.

The engineer Franz Mayor de Montricher, who had already brought water to Marseille, was put in charge of the workshops. He now had to find work quickly for several thousand people. He proposed cutting a route through the coastal cliffs, from the Prado exit to the sea in the direction of the Old Port. Before that, separate steep paths led down to the coves. The workers began on the southern section of the future Corniche Kennedy and took the road toward Anse de la Fausse-Monnaie.

In the first months of the republic, Marseille workers won a ten-hour working day—one hour shorter than the general provincial limit. For an unemployed person taken on for temporary city construction work, that hour represented a very real share of daily earnings. When the assembly of deputies revoked the concession in June and the prefect Émile Ollivier failed to defend it, workers from the municipal workshops, including the builders of the Corniche Kennedy and the canal, demonstrated.

On June twenty-second, they headed for the prefecture. After clashes with soldiers, the participants built barricades; the next day they were crushed. Hundreds of people were arrested, and four hundred nineteen were charged. Many spent more than a year in Château d'If. One hundred fifty-three people were brought to trial: eighty were acquitted, the rest were sentenced mainly to prison, and three to deportation. On the walls of If's inner courtyard, prisoners carved their names and the date of the June uprising, and called one of the doors of their prison the “Hotel of the Sovereign People.”

The first section of the road reached Anse de la Fausse-Monnaie by eighteen fifty-one. Builders reached the point where the route now runs later: between eighteen sixty-one and eighteen sixty-three, they extended the route toward Les Catalans and carried it over the coves on viaducts. So the stone bridge ahead was built by different workers, but they followed the line de Montricher had devised for the unemployed of eighteen forty-eight.

The broad boulevard appeared another century later. The municipal government of Mayor Gaston Defferre removed the tram, laid out two traffic lanes in each direction, and carried the sidewalk with its long concrete seat out over the slope on supports. The work continued between nineteen fifty-four and nineteen sixty-eight. During this reconstruction, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, president of the United States, was killed in Dallas. In that same year, nineteen sixty-three, the city council gave his name to the former Corniche promenade. Kennedy had never been here: the name became Marseille's response to his assassination.

Beneath the concrete sidewalk runs the route begun by the municipal workshops. And across the water remain the names carved into the walls of Château d'If by Marseille workers for whom building the Corniche Kennedy ended in an island cell.