Peregrinations

Stand up, rosé in hand, against terror

Anthony Peregrine

They cancelled festivities across France, including, naturally, the great jazz festival and a Rihanna concert in Nice itself. Also hit were fireworks shows throughout the land, a gay pride procession in Montpellier and our own village festival – a summer outbreak of music, starlit dancing, bull-running, drinking and the loosening of stays not that tight in the first place. There was no choice. National exuberance before the dead had been identified, never mind mourned, would have been obscene.

There was a sense, though, in which renouncing laughter, licence and liberty was ceding success to the pond-dwellers. That’s why it is vital, as soon as decency permits, to get back to the calm, the rough and the tumble of French normality. Everyone knows that. Everyone also knows that the best way of expressing the muchvaunted “solidarity with France” is not via hashtag vacuities on social media, but by getting off the seat and going there to fill up beaches and bars, restaurants, hotels and festivals presently emptying at an alarming rate.

This is particularly true of Nice, capital of the Mediterranean south, which, more than any other French city, survives on her powers of seduction. For generations, she has been a fine-looking courtesan, at once cultured, racy and desirable. Visitors have provided the lifeblood, the gloss and the wellbeing ever since the 18th century when, lead by the British, high-rollers started rolling in. Thus the English invented the French Riviera.

Later, in the 1820s, the English expat community created the five-mile seaside promenade (whence its name) to provide both work for locals and pleasant strolling for well-bred womenfolk. The dazzle of the Bay of Angels has been dimmed – damn near damned – by savagery, but will, in time, recover the promise of civilised sensuality so terrifying to the numbskulls. There are, this week, bikinis back on the beach.

And there are the proper Niçois – imbued with millennia of Mediterranean vigour – stacked up in an old town whose streets throb with Italianate colour, Baroque churches and arm-waving commerce. During the 1543 Turkish siege of the city, their historical heroine, laundress Catherine Ségurane, climbed on to the city walls, raised her skirts and mooned at the attackers. They fled. Such feistiness is in the Niçois DNA. Thus will the city rise again, sadder and tougher, but as glamorous and liberal as before.

It is our duty to honour tolerance, hedonism and the traditions of our noble forebears by piling in as elegantly and as soon as possible. I’ll be at a terrace table with a glass of rosé. There’s hardly anywhere better to be. Join me and do your bit for Western values.