La Croisette

Highlights: Palais des Festivals et des Congrès · Carlton · Majestic · Martinez · La Malmaison · Pointe de la Croisette · Private beaches

Between sea and grand hotels, the Croisette is far more than a boulevard: it is the tale of a fishermen's bay become a meeting place of the world. Named after a modest cross that once marked the tip of the cape, it saw born, in a century and a half, the finest grand hotels of the Côte d'Azur and the Festival de Cannes. Here is the story of a place where elegance has never gone out of fashion.

Origins: the path of the little cross

Long before the crowds of the whole world thronged here, this shore was but a wild point at the far end of the bay of Cannes, then a modest fishing village living within the orbit of the monks of the île de Lérins, settled there since the 5th century. A little cross — crouseto, in Provençal — stood upon it, giving its name to the place: the archives mention a "Campum crucis" as early as 1370, then a "Cap de la Croix" in 1634, before the diminutive "Croisette" took lasting hold over the following centuries, designating precisely this point turned towards the open sea.

Everything changed in 1834, when the British chancellor Lord Brougham, held at Cannes by an epidemic that closed the Italian border, fell under the charm of the site and had a villa built there. The English aristocracy, and then the Russian and the Northern European, followed in his footsteps and gradually transformed the fishing hamlet into a prized winter resort. The municipality understood what was at stake: in 1863, it opened a seafront promenade as far as the Croisette quarter; christened boulevard de l'Impératrice in 1866 in homage to Eugénie, wife of Napoléon III, it resumed its historic name of Croisette as early as 1871, the one it still bears today.

Development and heritage: the golden age of the grand hotels

The Belle Époque set the Croisette into legend. Along the palm-lined boulevard, the European aristocracy — Russian grand dukes, British lords, crowned heads come from all across Europe — took to wintering here facing the sea, in villas and then in vast establishments built to receive them. In 1911 the Carlton opened, built from 1909 by the architects Charles Dalmas and Marcellin Mayère for the hotelier Henry Ruhl; its two famous domes, completed after an extension in 1912-1913, have for more than a century traced the very silhouette of the bay.

The Majestic answered it in 1926, followed in 1929 by the Martinez and its elegant Art Deco façade. These three grand hotels, with their terraces turned towards the open sea, fixed forever the image of a boulevard devoted to the art of hospitality. Around them settled refined boutiques, villas and gardens, while the promenade itself became adorned with avenues of palm trees which remain, even today, the vegetal signature of the Croisette and the setting of its most beautiful postcards.

Defining episodes: the birth of a myth

In 1939, Cannes prepared to host a very first international film festival, conceived as a free counterpart to the grand cinematic showcases of the day. A single screening took place, on 1 September, the very day Germany invaded Poland: the event was suspended at once. It would take until 1946 for the Festival de Cannes to hold its first edition in earnest, on that same Croisette which did not yet have a venue to its measure to welcome the world of cinema.

Built in four months in 1947 on the site of the former Cercle nautique, the Palais Croisette was officially inaugurated in 1949 and became, for more than thirty years, the setting of the Festival. It was there, upon its steps, that the now world-famous ritual of the climbing of the steps was invented, the moment when cinema and the elegance of the Croisette meet each spring beneath the lenses of the whole world.

Transformation: a boulevard that reinvents itself

Having become too narrow for its growing success, the Palais Croisette gave way to a new edifice, built from 1977 by the architects Hubert Bennett and François Druet. Inaugurated in 1982, the present-day Palais des Festivals et des Congrès hosted its first Cannes selection at the 1983 edition, while the old palais, henceforth superfluous, was demolished in 1988, making way for new developments of the seafront.

Around this new beating heart, the Croisette pursued its transformation with measure: La Malmaison, a former pavilion of the Grand Hôtel preserved through the successive redevelopments, became an exhibition space open to all; the boulevard itself is regularly redrawn to better combine traffic, promenade and unobstructed view over the open sea, without ever losing the elegant bearing that made its renown throughout the world.

Identity and art of living today

Today, the Croisette naturally combines the memory of the grand hotels with the daily life of its inhabitants: private beaches and striped cabanas, boutiques of the greatest houses, terraces open onto the bay and the familiar profile of the îles de Lérins on the horizon. One walks here as one has always walked since 1863, between sea and palm trees, in a light that nothing has altered for nearly two centuries.

To live on the Croisette is to inhabit an address that has crossed through history without ever ceasing to embody a certain art of hospitality and of gazing upon the sea. It is to inherit a setting where each façade tells a part of this adventure, and to choose, with each passing day, to prolong it with elegance and discretion.