Hôtel de Ville & The Reconstructed Waterfront: Surviving 1943

Why is it significant?

Stand before the elegant seventeenth-century baroque stone facade of the Hôtel de Ville, with its carved acanthus pilasters and classical bust of King Louis the Fourteenth.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand before the elegant seventeenth-century baroque stone facade of the Hôtel de Ville, with its carved acanthus pilasters and classical bust of King Louis the Fourteenth. Notice how the stone buildings flanking it look completely different: they are monolithic five-story apartment blocks constructed of golden Cassis limestone in the late nineteen forties by architect Fernand Pouillon.

Why did the waterfront change? In January nineteen forty-three, during the Nazi occupation, German SS commander Heinrich Himmler declared the old harbor district a dangerous nest of resistance fighters, Jews, and underground saboteurs. In the brutal Battle of Marseille, over twenty thousand residents were forcibly expelled and sent to concentration camps, and Nazi demolition squads planted dynamite charges that systematically blasted fifteen hundred historic medieval houses into rubble.

The Hôtel de Ville survived only because an impassioned French architect convinced the German officers that destroying it would be an unforgivable crime against international architectural heritage.

Climb the steep stone steps behind the city hall into the labyrinthine alleys of Le Panier.