Une ville des jardins: The Consiglio d’Ornato and the Urban Transformation of Nice (1832-1860)

Abstract

This article examines the urban transformation of Nice in the early nineteenth century. It does so using the papers of the Consiglio d’Ornato (1832-1860), an urban planning committee charged with overseeing the development of the city at a time of demographic and economic growth brought about by tourism. This article argues that the Consiglio cooperated with private speculators to create a city rooted in a series of myths—Orientalist, Greco-Roman, and early Christian—that both shaped and were shaped by the expectations of world-wearied tourists. Nice was turned into a commodity whose purpose was to provide tourists with a feeling of fleeing a modern world characterized by instability and inauthenticity. Paradoxically, as a direct result, Nice became one of the earliest cities to experience a modern form of consumer capitalism in which people, places, cultures, and nature itself were packaged and peddled to the leisured classes.