Nice Video Guide

Nice
The capital of the Riviera and fifth largest city in France, NICE scarcely deserves its glittering reputation. Living off inflated property values and fat business accounts, its ruling class has hardly evolved from the eighteenth-century Russian and English aristocrats who first built their mansions here; today it’s the rentiers and retired people of various nationalities whose dividends and pensions give the city its startlingly high ratio of per capita income to economic activity.

Bordeaux Video Guide

Bordeaux
The city of BORDEAUX is stunning when approached from the south along the river. It’s big, with a population of over half a million, and obviously rich – as it has been since the Romans set up a lively trading centre here. Especially attractive is the relatively small eighteenth-century centre, paid for by the expansion of colonial trade. The rest is scruffy and, even with its long history, contains few sights. But if you’re just passing through – it’s the main regional transport centre – there are a couple of sights worth checking out, and plenty of cheap places to sleep and eat. The atmosphere is inviting and worth sticking around for.

Cannes Video Guide

Cannes
The film industry and all other manner of business junketing represent CANNES’s main source of income in an ever-multiplying calendar of festivals, conferences, tournaments and trade shows. The spin-offs from servicing the day and night needs of the jetloads of agents, reps, dealers, buyers and celebrities are even more profitable than providing the strictly business facilities. Cannes may be more than its film festival, but it’s still a grotesquely overhyped urban blight on this once exquisite coast – a contrast reinforced by the sublime ?les de L?rins, a short boat ride offshore and the best reason for coming here.

Lyon Video Guide

Lyon
LYON is physically the second biggest city in France, a result of its uncontrolled urban sprawl. Viewed at high speed from the Autoroute du Soleil, the impression it gives is of a major confluence of rivers and roads, around which only petrochemical industries thrive. In fact, from the sixteenth century right up until the postwar dominance of metalworks and chemicals, silk was the city’s main industry, generating the wealth which left behind a multitude of Renaissance buildings. But what has stamped its character most on Lyon is the commerce and banking that grew up with its industrial expansion. It is this that gives the town its staid, stolid and somewhat austere air.

Marseille Video Guide

Marseille
The most renowned and populated city in France after Paris, MARSEILLE has – like the capital – prospered and been ransacked over the centuries. It has lost its privileges to sundry French kings and foreign armies, recovered its fortunes, suffered plagues, religious bigotry, republican and royalist Terror and had its own Commune and Bastille-storming. It was the presence of so many Marseillaise Revolutionaries marching from the Rhine to Paris in 1792 which gave the Hymn of the Army of the Rhine its name of La Marseillaise, later to become the national anthem.