This chapter is extracted from Michael Nelson's book: Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riviera reproduced with the kind permission of I. B. Tauris (London). Michael paints a fascinating portrait of Victoria and her dealings with local people of all classes, statesmen and the constant stream of visiting crown heads, from the beautiful Empress Engénie of France to the monstrous Leopold II, King of the Belgians.

He describes the conduct of British diplomacy and domestic politics from Victoria's holiday retreats, as well as the cagaries of Anglo-French relations, as the Queen's visits and the national interests of Britain and France all impacted on each other. In the process we see an unexpected side to Victoria: not the imperious, petulant, mourning widow but rather an exuberant girlish old lady thrilled by her surroundings.

Introduction
In the spring of 1882 Queen Victoria, at the age of 62, arrived for the first time on the French Riviera. That region, which she called a ‘paradise of nature’, wrought a transformation in the last two decades of her life. She came to the Riviera on nine occasions and spent more time there than in any other part of continental Europe. Half her foreign travel was to France and of that three-quarters was spent on the Riviera. She never travelled outside Europe and never visited any part of her Empire, not even India. ‘Oh, if only I were at Nice, I should recover’, she said as she was dying. The Queen usually spent her mornings on the Riviera quietly riding round gardens in her donkey cart, and her afternoons on long carriage trips in the surrounding countryside. But she spent much of her time there with her strange companions, her dour Scottish gillie, John Brown, and, when Brown died, her troublesome Indian secretary, the Munshi, Abdul Karim. The royal household once threatened to go on strike if the Queen brought the Munshi to the Riviera again.

Table of contents:
Prologue - the Queen's delight with France; 1882 - Menton -the first visit to the paradise of nature; 1887 - Cannes - a pilgrimage to mourn the death of son Leopold; 1891 - Grasse - the Rothschild gardens and Duleep Singh's confession; 1892 - Hyeres -the royal resort; 1895 - Nice - the young officers and the Battle of the Flowers; 1896 - Nice - royal visitors, including King Leopold of the Belgians; 1897 - Nice - the courtiers revolt over the Munshi; 1898 - Nice - the agonies of King Leopold's daughters; 1899 - Nice - the Fashoda Incident threatens the visit; epilogue -the cancelled visit.

Guests included extraordinary European royalty, such as the reprobate Leopold 11, King of the Belgians, who on his deathbed married a former prostitute, and his daughters, Louise and Stephanie, central characters in two of the greatest royal scandals of the nineteenth century, as we shall see.

During Queen Victoria's visits to the Riviera her character appeared to change. According to her entourage, when she arrived on the Riviera she immediately became fresh as a daisy, her face lit up and she beamed at the welcoming officials. She shed many of the inhibitions of her life in England. She behaved as if she was 17, threw flowers at young army officers, enjoyed fireworks like a child and laughed heartily at the local newspapers. There were of course exceptions when she was in mourning, notably during the Cannes visit of 1887 for her son, Prince Leopold, Hyères in 1892 for her grandson, Prince Albert Victor and Cimiez in 1896 for her son-in-law, Prince Henry of Battenberg.

By letting Sarah Bernhardt perform before her she demonstrated that there could be occasions, though maybe rarely, when she would, at least on the Riviera, relax her standards of moral purity. Her reaction to an admonition she received from Alice de Rothschild for stepping on one of her flower beds was evidence that she could even be self-effacing. The Queen’s Journals make it apparent that, despite her age, her curiosity was acute and was stimulated by the everyday life of the Riviera.

The Queen’s compassionate nature showed itself strongly on the Riviera in her kindness, to her staff, however lowly, in her friendliness and gifts to beggars, her welcome to Nice fishwives, her donations to local charities and her messages of commiseration to those in distress.

The visits to the Riviera by Queen Victoria, the monarch of the most powerful empire in the world, were important to the area and to France because they affirmed and strengthened the Riviera’s role as the leading holiday centre for the British, for other Europeans and the peoples of the Americas.

The importance of her presence is shown by the increase in visitors during the two decades of her visits, by the concern of the French at the damage which would be done to the tourist industry if she were to cancel her trip in 1899 because of bad relations between France and Britain, by the many hotels, cafés and roads named after her and by the number of statues erected to commemorate her.

Robert Latouche, the principal historian of Nice, considered the ‘siren’ who enticed sovereigns and princes to Nice ‘was a Queen of England; Great Britain was the good fairy which guarded for Nice its prestige with the aristocracy of Europe.'

Queen Victoria did not herself discover the Riviera, of course, but she did affirm its position as an important holiday centre, rather than a centre for convalescence. The French have always been grateful for this, losing no opportunity to commemorate notable anniversaries of her visits. The Queen not only attracted the British to the Riviera, but also other nationalities and, as the ‘Grandmother of Europe’, the monarchs of other countries. Britain enjoyed a constitutional monarchy, but many countries of continental Europe, ruled by Queen Victoria’s relatives, did not. Her contacts with them, many of which she directly or indirectly maintained while she was on the Riviera, were exploited by many of her ministers, especially by Lord Salisbury, who himself holidayed there. Her informal intelligence service, based on this wide cousinage and maintained through extensive letter writing, was in many ways superior to that of the Foreign Office. In particular, the Queen’s conversations with Lord Salisbury on the Riviera from 1896 to 1899, when he headed the last administration of her reign, were important in the conduct of British foreign policy through successive crises which might have involved Britain in war.

The Riviera had been a backwater until the British started to settle there in the eighteenth century. At the time of the Queen’s death a century and a half later, it was one of the most developed parts of France and Europe.

In the eighteenth century Nice and the Comté de Nice were ruled from Turin by the kings of Sardinia of the House of Savoy. Britain had had an alliance with Sardinia since the seventeenth century as part of its Mediterranean policy following the conquest of Gibraltar and Minorca. Young Britons went to the military academy of Turin. During the War of the Austrian Succession from 1743 to 1748, Britain supported the Austro-Sardinians, and British army officers stayed in Nice in the winter and went back again as visitors after the war. However, the first English people to ‘discover’ Nice were probably Lord and Lady Cavendish, who visited the city in 1731. Lady Cavendish was heavily pregnant when she arrived there and gave birth to a son, Henry Cavendish, later to be a famous chemist. Appropriately for one born in Nice, he discovered the constitution of water and atmospheric air.

Dr Johnson said that ‘The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.’ He was not, though, thinking of the French shores, but of the Italian. ‘A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. On those shores were the four great Empires of the world; the Assyrim, the Persian, the Grecian and the Roman.” But the attitude to travel of Johnson and Boswell was becoming outdated. By the end of the eighteenth century Europeans were changing the view of the world which they had learned from the Bible - that man was the centre of the universe. They began to value the natural world and its beauties. ‘Within the last thirty years a taste for the picturesque has sprung up and a course of summer travelling is now looked upon to be ... essential’, Robert Southey, the poet and man of letters wrote in 1809.’ Queen Victoria concentrated in her Journals and letters on the natural beauties of the Riviera, not on the remains of the Roman civilizations which lay near the hotels she stayed in above Nice.

There has been much debate about the difference between travel and tourism. Evelyn Waugh said, ‘The tourist is the other fellow.’ In Old English the word ‘travel’ was the same as ‘travail’, meaning work. Travel implied effort, which tourism did not. The coming of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century changed travel into tourism, although the term was much older: the Oxford English Dictionary gives the first use of ‘tourist’ as 1780. The term quickly became pejorative. As early as 1799 William Wordsworth published a narrative poem, ‘The Brothers’, in which the priest of Ennerdale saw a stranger lingering over graves in the village churchyard. ‘These tourists, heaven preserve us!’, he cried.” The French drew a further distinction. ‘Villégiature’ implied rest, luxury, a long-term visit and ‘tourisme’ movement.

Queen Victoria on the Riviera was clearly a tourist and not a traveller by English language usage. By French usage she was a villégiateuse or a villégiaturiste.

There had been occasional English travellers to Nice in the mid-eighteenth century, including the painter Joshua Reynolds, who, coming from Venice, stayed in Nice in 1752. Arthur Young visited Antibes in September 1789 but, unable to hire a carriage, horse or mule, had had to walk from Cannes. He noted that the previous winter there had been 57 English visitors to only nine French. But Italy, not France, was the principal object of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century.

Young did not mention American visitors, and there were no doubt few, but in the previous year one of the most distinguished Americans ever to visit the Riviera went there. He was Thomas Jefferson, later to become American President, who visited the Riviera in 1787, when he was minister in Paris. He went to Hyères, Fréjus, Antibes, Nice, Monaco and Menton as part of a tour of the South of France and the north of Italy. ‘I have been pleased to find among the people a less degree of physical misery than I had expected,’ he wrote to Marquis de Lafayette, from Nice. They are generally well clothed and have plenty of food, not animal indeed but vegetable, which is wholesome.

Perhaps they are over-worked, the excess of rent required by the landlord obliging them to too many hours of labor, in order to produce that, and wherewith to feed and clothe themselves.’ He recommended that Lafayette should investigate as he had done: ‘You must be absolutely incognito, you must ferret the people out of their hovels as I have done, look into their kettles, eat their bread, loll on their beds under the pretence of resting yourself, but in fact to find if they are soft.’

In a letter from Nice to William Short, his private secretary, Jefferson compared Nice with Hyères. ‘In favor of this place are the circumstances of gay and dissipated society, a handsome city, good accommodations and some commerce. In favour of Hieres [sic] are environs of delicious and extensive plains, a society more contracted and therefore more capable of esteem.’

One of the first visitors to France after travel became possible again following Britain’s victory over France in the Seven Years War was Dr Tobias Smollett M.D. In 1763 Smollett, ill with incipient tuberculosis, journeyed to Nice with his wife, his Scottish manservant and two young ladies under the chaperonage of Mrs Smollett. He was seeking a kinder climate than England. When he returned to England he published a book of his experiences, Travels Though France and Italy, which was destined to start a revolution in the travel habits of the British. It had great success and was soon republished by pirate publishers in Dublin and in German translations. The consequence was that several members of the British aristocracy followed in his footsteps, including the Duke of York, brother of King George 111, the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of Bedford, the Duchess of Cumberland and the famous dandy, Lord Bessborough.

The British settled in the Croix de Marbre quarter of Nice, which was known as Newborough or Little London. By a strange quirk of history, this development had been made possible by a natural son of James II of England. The son was the Duke of Berwick, who had been brought up in France. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duke was commanding the French troops and grabbed Nice, for which he was created Maréchal de France. He ordered the ramparts, which enclosed the city, to be destroyed. Thus the burghers could expand to the west, which is where the British established their colony. By 1775 they had an Anglican cemetery and by 1787 110 English families stayed in Nice.

However, the invasion of Nice by French revolutionary troops in 1792 stopped the development of tourism.

British tourism timidly resumed in 1802 following the Peace of Amiens and 15 families wintered in Nice. They were headed by the Duchess of Cumberland, sister-in-law of George III. Napoleon instructed the local Prefect to give a banquet to which 40 leading French citizens and a similar number of English were invited. They drank many toasts. But the re-sumption of hostilities in June 1803 set tourism back again until the fall of Napoleon in 1814. By the fist Treaty of Paris in 1814, Nice reverted to Sardinia and remained so after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Gradually the British started to come back and a highlight of their return was the construction of an Anglican church in 1821. King Charles-Félix authorized it on condition it did not look like a church. By 1829, 80-100 families were wintering in Nice.

The percentage of nobles among the visitors was initially high. But a consequence of the Industrial Revolution was that the percentage of bourgeoisie increased and became predominant. Bankers were an important group. As Stendhal had said, ‘bankers are the nobility of the bourgeoisie’. A lot of money was needed to spend several months on the Riviera. The season was long, starting in September and finishing at the end of April. But most visitors preferred to arrive in December and start for home at the beginning of April. The minority that travelled grew. In 1866 Anthony Trollope wrote:

Those who can be allowed to enjoy themselves quietly at home or eat shrimps through their holiday quietly at Ramsgate, are becoming from year to year not fewer in number, but lower down the social scale; so that this imperative duty of travelling abroad - and doing so year after year - becomes much extended, and embraces all of us who are considered anybody by those around

The role of the British was underlined in 1834 when the outbreak of cholera in Provence led, by chance, to the establishment of Cannes as a major resort. Lord Brougham, a former Lord Chancellor of England, was on his way to Nice with his sickly daughter and on 28 December 1834 was stopped at the Sardinian frontier because of the outbreak of cholera. He stayed in the little fishing village of Cannes and was so delighted with it that he bought a piece of land and built a villa. This striking representative of early nineteenth-century Britain, a radical, a great lawyer and a utilitarian, had no difficulty in encouraging his friends also to build there and so was founded the large British colony in Cannes.

The main square of Cannes was named after Brougham and a marble statue on the promenade was unveiled in 1879. He was buried in the cemetery. His invention of the brougham, the first four-wheeled carriage intended to be drawn by only one horse, was well known. Every year he left ‘Fog-land’, as he called England, to pass the winter on the Riviera. His French was not very good and one French wit once said that ‘in addition to his other gifts, he must have the gift of unknown tongues’.

The British predominated on the Riviera to such an extent that when the writer Alexandre Dumas asked an innkeeper what the nationality of the guests who were just arriving was, he said that they were all English, but he was not sure if they were Germans or Russians.

The English always predominated, but the Russians’ visits increased at a faster rate. (Local sources usually referred to the English and not the British, but no doubt there were Scots, Welsh and Irish there.) In 1850-51 there were 189 English and 52 Russian families in Nice, but by 1856-57 the English had increased to 284 and the Russians to 141. The visits of the Russian Empress-Mother, Alexandra Feodorovna, widow of Nicholas I, in 1856-57 and 1859, were important in attracting other Russians. She installed herself in the vast Villa Bermond, which acquired the name of Parc Impérial. In 1860, 704 foreign families spent at least part of the winter in Nice. They included 252 English, 172 French, 128 Russians, 37 Germans and 22 American. Other nationalities were also represented and the Queen of Denmark acquired a villa on the Boulevard Carabacel.

The first waves of visitors either built or rented villas. But by 1847 Nice boasted 30 hotels and, as they became more and more luxurious, visitors started to prefer them to villas. Queen Victoria followed this trend. She stayed in villas for her first two visits to the Riviera and then moved to hotels. Hotel keeping was starting to become a science and in 1874 the architect Edouard Guyer published in Zurich the first analysis of hotel needs, Das Hotelwesen der Gegenwart (The Contemporary Organization of Hotels), which he had been working on since 1840. He considered the first duty of a hotelier was to ensure the high quality of the welcome to the traveller arriving with his family and servants. He therefore gave pride of place to an impressive entrance hall.

Piedmont-Sardinia’s rulers, the House of Savoy, delighted the British in 1858 by permitting the public celebration of non-Catholic services, and in that year they built a church which looked like a church.

France acquired the Comté de Nice from Piedmont-Sardinia on 24 March 1860, subject to a referendum, which was held on 15 April. According to the official figures 25,743 were in favour and only 160 against. A new department was created, the Alpes-Maritimes, which included Grasse and the surrounding area, which had previously been part of the Department of the Var.

The origins of the change went back to a secret meeting Napoleon III had with Count Camillo di Cavour, Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia, at Plombières in the Vosges on 20 July 1858. Napoleon outlined his plans for a federally united Italy without Austria, which then held Lombardy and Venetia. piedmont-Sardinia could count on French support in a war. The main French reward would be the eventual acquisition of Savoy. A treaty of alliance between France and piedmont-Sardinia was signed on 19 January 1859 which provided that Nice, as well as Savoy, would be ceded to France. The idea of a federal Italy was dropped, but France would support Piedmont-Sardinia in the event of war, Cavour and Napoleon did not have to wait long for a casus belli. On 19 April Austria issued an ultimatum to Piedmont-Sardinia to disarm, which Cavour rejected on 26 April. On 29 April Austrian forces crossed the Piedmont-Sardinia frontier. The French declared war on 3 May and their army entered Italy. They beat the Austrians at the two famous battles of Magenta and Solferino.

Napoleon made a truce with Francis Joseph, the Austrian Emperor, at Villafranca on 11 July and Austria ceded Parma and Lombardy to France for eventual cession to Piedmont-Sardinia. Napoleon did not immediately demand from Piedmont-Sardinia his reward of Nice and Savoy because the Austrians still held Venetia. But when central Italian states moved to join the Kingdom of Sardinia, Cavour offered Nice and Savoy to Napoleon, subject to a referendum, if he would accept the adhesion of the Italian states to the Kingdom, which he did. Thus Nice became part of the French Riviera and the momentous return to ‘natural frontiers’ was marked by a celebratory visit to Nice of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie in the autumn of 1860.

Bad or non-existent roads had always been the greatest barrier to the development in tourism on the Riviera. On the west were the mountains of the Esterel, which were difficult to cross and which also carried the risk of encounters with bandits. Once at the border with Nice, the barrier of the River Var was often overcome only by being ferried on the shoulders of the locals. The sea route had the danger of pirates. It took 16 days of continuous and uncomfortable travel to reach Nice from London.

‘All the inns of this country are execrable’, claimed Dr Smollett. He particularly objected to the state of the toilets, which he called ‘conveniences’ and ‘temples of Cloacina’. The cantankerous doctor also considered dealing with a Frenchman a burden: ‘He will even affirm that his endeavours to corrupt your wife, or deflower your daughter, were the most genuine proofs he could give of his particular regard for your family’, he complained, presumably based on some experience during his long journey through France.

Improvements to the roads by Napoleon for military reasons cut the journey to under two weeks early in the nineteenth century. Nice was connected to Menton and the Italian Riviera only by a mule track laid by the Romans as part of the Via Aurelia. Napoleon improved things somewhat by cutting a carriage-way eastwards from Nice - the Grande Corniche.

On 10 April 1863 the railway from Paris first reached Cannes and the journey time was only 21 hours 28 minutes. In October 1864 it reached Nice and in 1869 Menton. ‘Railways have all but annihilated space’, enthused Dr Jarnes Henry Bennett, who had first visited the Riviera before trains served the area. ‘A traveller may leave London Bridge station at 7.40 on Monday morning by mail train for Paris, and be at Nice or Mentone for supper the following day, Tuesday. By the time of Queen Victoria’s first visit by train to the Riviera in 1882 it was estimated that 20 million people in the world were travelling by train, of which nearly three-quarters were in Europe.

Not that all was sweetness and light. Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, attacked the Paris-Nice Express in 1870 as:

a wretched imposture, of which any civilised nation ought to be ashamed. . . . What would the English public think of a train so ordered that . . . by its carrying only first-class passengers, it compels invalids and delicate ladies to be shut up with brutal drunken men, offending (to say nothing of other annoyances) their ears with profane and foul language during the whole night and day of the journey?

Most European trains were unheated until the 1870s, although hot-water footstools were offered to first-class passengers on French trains. Few trains had toilets, so there was a great rush for the station conveniences at any stop. Only the principal stations had buffets and the food was not very good. Dining cars were not introduced until 1883. But even in the 1898 edition of his guide to south-eastern France, Baedeker was counselling travellers to bring their own food and consume it at leisure in the railway carriage. The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits was founded to provide sleeping cars in 1872.

The impact of the railways on the numbers of visitors who stayed in the area was considerable. At the start of the 1860s about 4000 visitors stayed in Nice. By 1879 the number had at least trebled to between 12,000 and 15,000. But by the end of the roughly two decades of Queen Victoria's visits to the Riviera, the number of visits had increased six to eightfold, to about 100,000.

The census for the Alpes-Maritimes of March 1886 showed 43,770 foreigners resident in the department. Ten years later the number had increased by two-thirds to 72,265. In 1886 there were only 870 English, Scottish and Irish but by 1896 the number of British had quadrupled to 3509.

How much of the colossal increase in British visitors was due to the Queen’s visits is impossible to say. But that it was considerable is clearly shown by the great concern evinced in 1899 when the Fashoda Incident in the Sudan, when a party of Frenchmen took over a fort which the British considered in their sphere of influence and which represented a serious conflict between Britain and France, looked like leading to a cancellation of the Queen’s visit.

The local government were very conscious of the transformation tourism had wrought on the economy of the Riviera, and Nice in particular, compared with the rest of France. In the half century between 1861 and 1911 the population of France grew by only 5.9 per cent. The population of the Department of the Alpes-Maritimes grew by 83 per cent. But Nice, which had 44,091 inhabitants in 1861, had grown to 142,940 in 1911, an increase of 225 per cent.

An intriguing statistic which was used in France as an indicator of wealth of a town was the number of doors and windows per inhabitant. The national average was 1.5 but Nice stood at nearly double that at 2.64.

A month before Queen Victoria arrived on the Riviera for the first time in March 1882 a local newspaper, La Colonie Etrangère, said, ‘We need visitors, more visitors and still more visitors.’ Earlier Abbot Bonifassi compared the new culture of tourism with the old one of agriculture: ‘It is real income and equivalent to a good olive oil year.’ Before tourisme the only important industries in a stagnating Nice were the manufacture of sail-cloth, soap, candles, leather goods and liquor. The people were mostly engaged in processing the agricultural produce of the hinterland - grain, wine, olive oil, fruit and silk cocoons. Nice had to import grain and wine and its only exports were olive oil, cocoons, linens and hemp.

The great French historian of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel, said of the mountains which ring the Mediterranean:

Life there is possible, but not easy. On the slopes where farm animals can hardly be used at all, the work is difficult. They stony fields must be cleared by hand, the earth has to be prevented from slipping down the hill, and if necessary must be carried up to the hilltop and banked up with dry stone walls. It is painful work and never-ending.

Even the produce of the fertile plain between the Alps and the sea had the problems of transport. Turin was the administrative and political capital of Piedmont-Sardinia, but in the winter even mule carts found getting there very difficult. The position of Nice worsened after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when Piedmont-Sardinia was given the port of Genoa. Piedmont-Sardinia abandoned the use of the port of Nice. Tourism was the salvation. C. James Haug, a scholar specializing in tourism, claims that Nice was the first majoy city of the modern Western world to become dependent on an economy based on tourism.

Queen Victoria was welcomed to the Riviera with brass bands and cheering crowds in the street. But not all French citizens appreciated the benefits they derived from the British visitors. La Revue de Cannes reported that on several occasion in Le Cannet urchins of 12 to 14 years insulted foreigners and tried to tear their clothes, jumping up at their faces and trying to grab their watches and earrings, shouting out that they were attacking them because they were foreigners. The journalist wrote:

It is impossible to explain the anger of these children other than by the stupid feeling of hatred and jealousy which they heard their families expressing against foreigners. Several foreigners have expressed their indignation to me that they could not only go along paths in the country, but could not even walk along the main street without being insulted and pursued by stone-throwing, and surprisingly enough they had seen the children being incited by grown-ups.

Queen Victoria was famous for her generosity to beggers while she was on the Riviera, but the generosity of foreigners was not always appreciated. The Journal de Nice reported that on 4 January 1866 a little girl of 12 was persistently demanding alms of passers-by. A policeman tried to arrest her, but had to give up because of the shouts of the crowd. But a few years later the same thing happend and, not very logically, it was the foreigners who, by giving alms, showed themselves in flagrant opposition to French law, which wanted, at all costs, to eliminate begging. Sometimes the locals wanted neither the foreigners nor their money, the newspaper concluded.

One of the main reasons why Queen Victoria and other foreigners visited the Riviera was medical. She was there to be with her son, Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany, who suffered from haemophilia.

The president of the society of medical men practising in Menton was Dr James Henry Bennet. He had done much to publicise Menton as a health resort, having gone there in 1859 ‘to die in a quiet corner . . . like a wounded denizen of the forest’, he said. He had contracted tuberculosis, but to his surprise, his condition soon improved. The next year he decided to go further south to Italy but he concluded that was a bad move because ‘the unhygienic state of large towns of that classical land partly undid the good previously obtrained.’ In 1861 he made Menton his permanent winter home. His routine was soon to be to practise as a doctor in Menton in the winter, to take a holiday in April and May, when he studied the Mediterranean climate and vegetation, and to resume his medical practice in England in the summer.

Bennet decided as a result of his careful meteorological records what many later travellers also discovered as they sheltered from the rain in the cafés on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. The Riviera is not a land of perpetual spring or eternal summer. But he did state that there was a greater probability of tuberculosis being arrested, of life being prolonged and even of a cure being eventually effected if the patient could winter in the south. The proof was that he was surrounded in Menton by ‘a phalanx of cured and arrested comsumption cases’.

In 1861 he published the first edition of his book Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean, in which he described the benefits of the town for the invalid. At that time it was a quiet little Italian town on the sunny shore of the Riviera, with tow or three small hotels, principally used by passing travellers, and half a dozen recently erected villas. By his 1875 edition he was describing it as 'a well-known and frequented winter resort, with thirty hotels, four times that number of villas, and a mixed foreign population of about sixteen hundred. With some prescience he wrote:

The opening of the railway from Paris to Nice and Genoa has rendered the lovely Riviera very easy access, even to confirmed invalids, and I believe that the time is fast approaching when tens of thousands from the north of Europe will adopt the habits of the swallow, and transform every town and village on its coast into sunny winter retreats. I may remark that it is the first point of the Mediterranean shore where birds of passage from the north make a halt for the winter.

The Queen was no doubt influenced in her decision to go to the Riviera by Bennet's conclusion that ‘our beloved country is “merrier” in winter, only for the hale and strong, who can defy and enjoy the cutting winds, the rain, the snow, and the frost of a northern land.’

Bennet published a German translation of his book in 1863, which brought a flood of Germans. In 1870 an edition appeared in New York and he reported, ‘Our American cousins are finding their way to Menton in increasing numbers.’

The motivations of the Americans in visiting the Riviera were generally different from those of Europeans. In 1879 the American writer Henry James wrote:

One might enumerate the items of high civilisation, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentleman, no palaces, no castles . . no museums, no pictures.

To be associated with these elements of ‘high civilisation’ was undoubtedly the reason why so many Americans went to Europe. On the Riviera there were few cultural attractions and it must have been a combination of the weather and the desire to be where European royalty and aristocracy went that drew Americans there. Writing in 1865, Robert Tomes said, ‘It is not easy to analyse the vague and confused motives which induce our wealthy people to travel abroad. Many of them go for not better reason than because traveling costs money, and being more or less exclusive, is approved by fashion.’

But some Americans went to Europe to save money. The American novelist, Edith Wharton, recounted how the depreciation in the American currency at the close of the Civil War so reduced her father‘s income that, in common with many friends and relations, he let his town and country houses and went to live in Europe for six years. In 1880, when she was 18, the family went back again. Edith Wharton went to Cannes and later described life there:

The small and intimate society we frequented was made up of French and English families, mostly connected by old friendship, and some by blood. Our amusements were simple and informal, as social pleasures were in those days, and picnics on the shore, or among the red rocks and pine forests of the Esterel, lawn tennis parties and small dinners, united the same young people day after day, under the guardianship of a pleasant group of their elders.

In 1887 the Americans moved a step ahead of the British when James Gordon Bennett Jr., who had a house in Beaulieu, founded the Paris Herald, an off-shoot of the New York Herald, which visitors to Nice would peruse in a Herald reading room there. Not until 1906 did the British get an affiliate of a London newspaper, when the Daily Mail started a Continental edition.

The Queen’s return to the Riviera in 1997 after an absence of five years epitomized the transformation of Rivieira tourism. She did not return for medical reasons. Her invalid son, Price Leopold, had slipped in the Cercle Nautique yacht club in Cannes in 1884 and had died. When she returned to the Riviera she went for a holiday. The Queen was among the first Europeans to show that it was possible to visit the Riviera for relaxation and not for a cure. In the very year of the Queen's return, Dr J.A. Lindsay, a specialist in consumption, wrote that he detected a decline in the popularity of the Mediterranean resorts ‘in the presence of the modern drift of medical opinion in favour of the view that they afford on the whole less favourable results in consumption that then mountains sanatoria [and] the dry inland resorts’.

The Riviera resorts were victims of their own success. ‘Large centres of population are uniformly and radically ineligible as sanatoria for consumption,’ wrote Lindsay. ‘The evidence that the disease is essentially one of civilised life in large communities is overwhelming.’ But the main Riviera sanatoria of Nice and Cannes had become large cities precisely because of the influx of invalids with consumption. Even Menton became crowded in the season.

Immorality was a further important reason for condemnation of the Riviera health resorts. ‘Where climate supplies constant stimulation for the senses passion will predominate over reason; and where the passions are indulged, the range of existence will be curtailed.’ Thus warned Dr James Johnson in 1830. Dr Lindsay weighed in again with: ‘Undue excitement, heated and crowded rooms, over-exertion and late hours - the usual accompaniments of life at the fashionable sanatoria are . . . in the last degree of noxious to the suffered from pulmonary disease. The Ex-Lord Provost of Edinburgh, William Chambers, had a wealth of cautionary tales from his stay in Menton. A young gentleman of fortune with his lungs much gone, contrary to advice, attended a dancing party. He collapsed, was carried out, and died in the passage. ‘In that Dance of Death he had finished the last atom of lung . . . gaily ending his days in the revelry of a waltz.’ intoned the ex-Provost. Ladies brought enormous boxfuls of fashionable attire and wanted to show it off somehow. One young lady, considered to be the reigning beauty, had had only one lung ‘which it was alleged she was doing all in her power to get rid of’.

But despite the attractions of Switzerland compared with the climatological and moral disadvantages of the Riviera, at the end of the century the total population of Davos, the most popular mountain resort, was only 13,000, compared with the increase of population in Nice in the winter of 80,000 and a total population of 170,000. The Riviera continued to be supreme in Europe because it replaced its role as a convalescent centre with that of a holiday region, greatly increasingly the number of visitors in the process. Lindsay believed the resorts of the Riviera were surviving only by virtue of ‘their long-famous name, the ample and often luxurious accommodation, and the patronage of wealth and fashion’.

The Queen Empress was the summit of that patronage.