19-07-2025
As World War II ended, the French Riviera became a 'GI's heaven'
Blues, pinks, reds… Multicolored sparks lit up the sky over Nice on the evening of July 4, 1945. Ten days before the traditional Bastille Day festivities, the city was celebrating on the Baie des Anges. The war already seemed far away, even though fighting had continued into the spring near the Italian border.
Food was still scarce, reconstruction was slow to begin and the atmosphere remained heavy with purges and calls for vengeance, just as they did across France. Though perhaps more intensely in Nice, a city that in 1940 had inherited the grim nickname "Eldest Daughter of the National Revolution" from Philippe Pétain. But on this night of July 4, as firecrackers echoed, the mood along the Promenade des Anglais was relaxed.
The famous seaside boulevard had not regained its former glory. Mines still littered parts of the coast, swimming was not entirely safe and bunkers still lined the beach – sometimes disguised with fake shopfronts painted by the Germans. As a result, sea bathing was not really part of daily life for "long-established Niçois, who were generally not very receptive to this semi-Baudelairean invitation," read a column in La Liberté de Nice et du Sud-Est. So, no swimming for the people of Nice, but the entertainment was still plentiful.
One year after the city's liberation, on August 28, 1944, audiences at the Paris-Palace cinema applauded Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece The Great Dictator – "remarkable in every respect," according to one local critic. Next to the Rationing section, newspapers listed daily "Feasts and banquets." Bars and dance halls regained their clientele and enjoyed certain privileges that were not universally appreciated: "Since the Liberation, they have invested several tens of millions to renovate their establishments. (...) It seems to us that raw materials should go not to places of pleasure, but rather to schools, hospitals and workers' housing," lamented La Liberté de Nice et du Sud-Est.
