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Armand Frémont, a former recteur [chief education officer], is Chairman of the Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale (DATAR – Delegation for town and country planning and regional action). The opinions given in this article are solely those of the author

France is one of the very few countries in Europe or indeed the world to have long coastlines facing three different seas: the Channel and the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean. Its 5,500km of coastline, plus the 1,500km of the overseas departments and territories, give it an undeniable maritime destiny. France’s coasts and the civilizations of the coastal regions have played a major role in forming the French nation, but very probably not as much as might sometimes have been hoped. They constitute an important locus of settlement, wealth and culture. But like the historian Fernand Braudel, we should not forget that France first took shape in the interior of the country, first and foremost in the Paris Basin.

From Dunkirk to Menton, 5,500 kilometres of coastline

The coastal regions of France display an extraordinary variety of features, climates, landscapes, traditions and activities.

In the north-west, the Channel and North Sea coasts give on to a shallow and rather narrow sea which was long the theatre of the maritime rivalry between France and England. It is now the busiest sea in the world, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the great industrial and urban areas of north-west Europe, the Paris Basin, Flanders, the London region, the Netherlands, northern Germany and the Scandinavian States. France’s window on these hives of activity, the Channel and North Sea coasts are also deeply marked by their age-old maritime traditions and the proximity of Paris. The Seine estuary, between Rouen and Le Havre, is the main highway for these multiple exchanges.

To the west, the Atlantic coast, often called the "Atlantic arc", is relatively far from the major world shipping lanes which skirt the Bay of Biscay, and not that close to the great population centres of western Europe. The two great estuaries of the Loire and the Gironde appear naturally as areas of more intensive development, with the Loire flowing into Brittany and the Loire region with Nantes, and the Gironde flowing through Aquitaine to Bordeaux, while the coastal regions of Poitou and Charente in the centre, and the Landes and Basque regions to the south also have a wealth of coastal and maritime traditions.

To the south-east, the Mediterranean coasts are the cradle of the most ancient civilizations, around the ancient port cities like Marseille or Nice. The Mediterranean climate there is irresistible, with its dry, sunny summers and the mildness of the other seasons. Moreover, on the French shore of the Mediterranean we find the mouth of one of western Europe’s great north-south river routes: the Rhône valley, running into the Saône valley with, further north, the valleys of the Rhine and Moselle. It is thus easy to see the strategic importance of Marseille, located a short distance from the Rhône delta.

The overseas departments and territories are almost all islands or tropical archipelagos in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean or the Pacific. They provide France with a vast maritime economic exclusion zone.

Appeal of the seaside

Coastal areas are a magnet, and increasingly so. Population densities in most of her coastal regions are among France’s highest (over 200 per square kilometre). Studies associated with the most recent population census show that this trend is very likely to continue and grow more marked in the coming years, particularly in and around what are already the most densely populated areas.

The invention of the seaside, as historian Alain Corbin aptly put it, dates from the first half of the nineteenth century. The fashion for sea bathing, initially confined to an aristocratic or bourgeois clientele, eventually transformed the image of the coast; at the same time, the main ports were receiving a fresh impetus from France’s colonial expansion and the opening up of international markets. New stretches of coastline with rocky cliffs or sandy bathing beaches began to attract visitors, while the great ports consolidated their position as centres of economic activity (Dunkirk, Le Havre, Rouen, Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseille).

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, artists drew much of their inspiration from the sea and coastal areas. Seine Bay was a cradle of impressionism, with the painters Claude Monet, Boudin and a number of others. Similarly, the Pont-Aven school in Brittany, Cézanne in Provence, the painters of l’Estaque near Marseille, the Fauves at Collioure, Picasso on the Côte d’Azur, all in their own ways contributed to creating today’s seaside, in an atmosphere of joie de vivre. The novel, the cinema, television, journalism and fashion create or recreate the romanticism of ports, picturesque quality of the little fishing villages, psychology of the old merchant bourgeoisies, history and adventure of the sea, seductive power of art, frivolity of seaside resorts, and hedonism of beaches, sand, sea and sun: Marseille, Honfleur, Saint-Tropez... There is no section of the seashore and no port without its painters, salons, film directors, novelists...

Consequently, mass tourism finds every attraction on France’s coasts. In a country where about two thirds of the population goes away on holiday and which receives the largest number of foreign visitors (75.5 million tourists in 2000), the seaside is the place most people head for in summer. It also attracts permanent residents, particularly retired people, and, in the most alluring areas, above all those bordering the Mediterranean, service and high-tech companies. What is already a very high population density may therefore be doubled, tripled and sometimes more during the two or three summer months. And even though leisure habits are changing, the seaside still remains the foremost tourist destination in France. About a third of all holidays are spent there, primarily during a short summer season.

The development of a leisure economy in the coastal areas has put France in first place in Europe and even the world for marinas and the manufacture of yachts, sailing dinghies and inflatables, 40% of which are exported. Tourism is right at the top of the coastal economy. It generates annual consumption worth EUR 44 billion. Its turnover is twelve times that of fisheries and fifteen times that of the sea ports.

The variety of facilities and styles reflects the diversity of the French coasts, offering every possibility. The delights include long-established resorts like Trouville and Deauville on the Normandy coast, ancestral venues, elegant and somewhat snobbish pioneers, where one might still run into Marcel Proust or Claude Monet, the glamour of all the fortunes accumulated over a century on the Côte d’Azur, from Cannes to Nice to Monte Carlo, with film stars and jazz musicians and Russian financiers and oil barons rubbing shoulders with showbiz personalities, the publicly-funded development of the Languedoc-Roussillon coast, to cater for the middle-class masses of France and northern Europe eager for beach and sun, family holidays and a variety of tourist attractions between Loire and Gironde, the charm, temperate climate, and unpretentious resorts, with the seafood platter as gastronomic high point and nature still close at hand, together with the beauty of the isles of Noir-moutier, Oléron, Yeu and Ré.

Maritime economy

France has been extremely successful in making the best use of her coastal areas through family holidays and tourism. When it comes to what might more strictly speaking be classified as maritime activities, she is today somewhat less so.

The 300 or so fishing ports bring life to the entire coast, located in the midst of the tourist activities whose appeal they enhance by the fresh produce they supply to the summer visitors, and their picturesque features. Socially, economically and in terms of regulation, the French fishing industry has to adapt to the European directives, not without some conflict. The fishing fleet is the fourth-largest in Europe – ranking third in the EU in tonnage of catch – behind Denmark, Spain and the United Kingdom, but far behind the big world producers of Russia, the Far East and South America.

Economic activity is geographically highly concentrated around the southern and western coasts of Brittany (40% of the catch – Le Guilvinec is the top French port in nominal terms), Boulogne on the Pas-de-Calais coast (foremost French port in tonnage) and a number of ports in Normandy, the Vendée and Charente. In and around the Marennes – Oléron and Arcachon basins and on the Basse Normandie coast –, oyster and mussel farming supplement these high value-added activities. Increasingly, the market in fish, fish packaging and fish canning is becoming international. French shipowners are investing abroad, notably in Morocco, Senegal and Madagascar. But the fish wholesalers and canners are turning to imports.

The passenger ports are limited to short-haul services, with cross-Channel traffic from Calais, France’s foremost passenger port and a world leader (20 million passengers a year), and, although on a smaller scale, from Boulogne, Dieppe, Le Havre, Caen, Cherbourg and Saint-Malo, and with services to Corsica from Marseille, Nice and Bastia. Cruise ships also make stopovers at almost all these harbours, as well as in the French West Indies, Fort-de-France and Pointe-à-Pitre.

The Chantier de l’Atlantique shipyard in Saint-Nazaire is among the foremost in the world in the construction of big cruise liners, almost all for foreign shipowners.

The trading ports are enviably placed in Europe and in the world by reason of their diversity, their situation, the high quality of their installations, their technical performance and the volume of their traffic. Marseille, lying on the Mediterranean coast where the great Saône-Rhône river route flows into the sea, is France’s foremost port and the European Union’s third in terms of total traffic (90 million tonnes in 1998). Le Havre on the Channel coast, the major port serving Paris and the Paris Basin, ranks second in France and fifth in Europe (65 million tonnes).

Major industrial zones are located alongside the port installations. Six large ports autonomes [ports managed by their Port Authorities, which are State-controlled bodies with corporate status and financial autonomy] enjoy all the benefits the State can bring to them: Dunkirk, Le Havre, Rouen, Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, Bordeaux, Marseille and Pointe-à-Pitre. Some major projects are under way, such as Port 2000 at Le Havre. Worldwide goods traffic is constantly increasing. Over half of France’s imports and more than a quarter of her exports are carried by sea.

Despite all this, the situation of the ports and maritime trade in France cannot be considered really satisfactory. The French merchant navy has shrunk, and now ranks only 28th in the world, whereas it long held a place among the top ten. There is fierce competition among the European ports, and the largest French ports could find themselves in difficulty if the trend towards concentrating traffic around a few hubs were to be confirmed. This applies particularly to containerized shipments, which is the fastest-growing mode of transport. Marseille is keeping its place as one of Europe’s foremost Mediterranean ports only through the import of hydrocarbons. On the Atlantic coast, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Nantes are finding themselves relatively marginalized. In the Channel, Le Havre, Rouen and Dunkirk are able to take part in the enormous traffic of the great north European "ports", from Le Havre to Hamburg.

The naval ports round out this picture of a highly active but not problem-free maritime economy. The French navy has made Brest and Toulon its two main bases, taking advantage of their quite exceptional sheltered natural harbours. Cherbourg and Lorient also have important naval dockyards. The naval installations and arsenals where the warships are manufactured, fitted out and repaired provide employment for large communities of workers, engineers and technicians. A marked trend towards reducing and streamlining armaments manufacturing is leading to a very noticeable scaling-down of activities. The naval ports are not exempt from a relative decline in port activity.

More generally, an entire maritime and port system is tending to die out. It owed much, beginning in the eighteenth century with Colbert, and very probably too much, to the tutelage of the State. It enjoyed a high degree of economic and social protection. It had the support of numerous related industries and heavy industries which are now disappearing or reducing their workforce. It is significant that virtually all employment zones organized around a port show unemployment rates much above the national and regional averages. The contrast is all the more striking with the success of tourism right next door.

Economic development and protection of the environment

As in every other country, the seashore is a fragile milieu while at the same time being part of the national heritage. The general public and government took this on board following publication of the 1973 Piquard report and adoption of the 1986 Act on coastal areas. The coastal environment ideally restores the vision of nature still in its wild state, of beauty unspoiled by the industrial era and the leisure society, of a bond between man and nature... The coastal zones appear as a museum of sites meeting these requirements through their morphology, climate, flora and fauna. The principal types of coastal zones have been studied by generations of scientists and cohorts of learned societies: the cliffs of the sedimentary basins and the ancient massifs, dead or alive; the beaches and dunes created by the accumulation of windblown sand; estuaries and deltas fringed with marshes, ponds and mudflats. With an endless variety of such sites, France has an exhaustive inventory of all these landscapes.

But the coastal environment must also be seen in terms of heritage because of all those who have studied it and the communities which have enhanced its value or occupied it, some of them still present, very often doing so with more respect for it than can be mustered by the hordes of tourists or the industrial and maritime enterprises. Thus, concern for protection of the coastal environment extends to historic sites, city and ancient fishing ports, industrial wasteland, citadels, lighthouses, chapels, and a huge variety of archaeological remains where nature and history are commingled.

Considerable threats hang over the coastal environment and the maritime heritage because the contact between sea and land, between men and this very special milieu, is also almost always a confrontation. They are in fact manifold, deriving from nature, for example, when storms rage, erosion eats away at cliffs or sand dunes, or the build-up of alluvial deposits. The climatic upheavals of the planet, if confirmed, could exacerbate these damaging effects, particularly along the Channel and Atlantic coasts, as we saw during the great storms of 1999.

The threats are also man-made, associated with every kind of modern activity without exception: in the maritime environment, those arising from shipwrecks, ships emptying their tanks, hydrocarbon pollution, whether furtive or large-scale, with a very sensitive area at the entrance to the Channel and to the right of the two lanes where traffic is particularly intense; those resulting from industrial and port zone activities to which the three great estuaries of the Seine, the Loire and the Gironde are particularly vulnerable, as are the Marseille region and the Rhône delta; and, finally, those – more insidious, but every bit as formidable – from the ever-growing numbers of tourists.

But the greatest danger lies in the combination of all these threats, in the intricate maze of conflicting interests, collective and individual, and in the feeling that we are powerless to prevent the particular being sacrificed to the essential. For the doctrine which has gradually emerged – as against more black-and-white precepts – is that a balance has to be found in a conceptual triangle combining urban development and tourism, industrialization and port infrastructure, and the protection of nature and the heritage, each lending positive value to the others rather than the reverse.

For the past thirty years the government authorities have been carrying out a policy of planned development and environmental protection designed to achieve these objectives. Since the early ’seventies, the most innovative and persistent of these efforts has been aimed at protecting an important part of the coast from runaway urban development and uncontrolled industrialization. The Coastal and Lakeside Areas Conservation Agency, a major creation of the ’seventies, supplemented by the work of the National Forestry Office and the departments, owns about 20% of France’s coastal land.

Measures have been taken to control shipping in the most sensitive sectors, notably off the port of Brest and in the Channel, but they need to be supplemented by European regulation. The major port and industrial projects, essential to economic development, are covered by the directives d’aménagement du territoire (DTA) (town and country planning directives). France’s three coasts, the Channel and North Sea, Atlantic, and Mediterranean, confer great coastal and maritime advantages on the country. This is also an enrichment for Europe, now that goods and people are hurdling national barriers.

Bibliography

Schirmann-Duclos, D. and Laforge, F., La France et la mer, PUF, 1999.

For further information:

www.environnement.gouv.fr (Ministry for Town and Country Planning website)

www.mer.equipement.gouv.fr (Ministry for Capital Works and Transport website)

www.conservatoire-du-littoral.fr