Of all the cities of the Mediterranean (always excepting Marseilles), Toulon is the most gay. It has not the feverish commercialism of Marseilles, but it has an up-to-dateness that is quite as much to be remarked. There are no boulevards maritimes or great hotels, as at Cannes or Nice, neither are there any special tourist attractions to make Toulon a resort, but there are cafés galore and much gaiety of a convivial kind. “Une ville régulière, d’aspect Américain,” Toulon has been called, and it merits the appellation in some respects, with its straight streets and tall houses of brick or stone. A large number of great branching palms just saves the situation.
The great defect of Toulon is that the quarter where centres the life of the city is far away from the sea. To get a satisfactory view of the magnificent harbour, or the commercial port of the Vieille Darse, one has to go even farther afield and climb one or the other of the hillsides round about, when a truly great panorama spreads itself out.
La Seyne, the great ship-building suburb of Toulon, is a model of what a manufacturing town of its class should be, though it has no real meaning for the tourist for rest or pleasure. For the student of things and men, the case is somewhat different. For instance, you may read, posted up on the wall opposite the entrance to the ship-building establishment, that the Gazetta del Popolo of Genoa has a correspondent at Toulon, this in big, staring red and green letters surmounting a more or less rude woodcut of an Italian soldier. From this one gathers that the Italian workmen are numerous hereabouts, as indeed they are, and almost everywhere else along the coast. As like as not the hotel garçon serves your soup with an “Ecco,” instead of a “Voilà!” and sooner or later you come to realize that the hybrid speech which you hear on street corners is not Provençal but Franco-Italian.
Toulon, in history, makes a long and brilliant chapter, but a cataloguing even of the events can have no place here. Its prominence as a stronghold and bulwark of the French nation was due to Louis XII., the second husband of Anne of Bretagne, who, it is said, inspired his predecessor on the throne (and in her affections) to first appreciate the advantages of Brest as a stronghold of a similar character.
Ages before this Toulon was founded by the Phœnicians, it is supposed sometime before the tenth century. The royal purple of the East and the desire to possess it, or make it, was the prime cause; for the ancients found that the waters around Toulon gave birth to a mollusk which dyed everything with which it came in contact into a most brilliant purple. It seems a small thing to found a great city upon, and the industry is non-existent to-day, but such is the more or less legendary account.
After the Phœnicians Toulon fell into the background, and the possibilities of building here a great port which might rival Marseilles were utterly neglected.
It seems probable that the original name of the town was Telo, which in the itinerary of Antony is given as Telo-Martius, from an ancient temple to Mars, thus distinguishing it from a similar name applied to many other places in the Narbonnais.
Finally Toulon emerged from its semi-obscurity, and Guillaume de Tarente, Comte de Provence, in 1055, surrounded with wall “the place called Tholon or Tollon.”
Until the tenth century Toulon’s ecclesiastical history was more momentous than was its civic. It had been the seat of a bishop for a matter of six centuries, with St. Honorat, St. Gratien, and St. Cyprien as bishops, all within the first century of its existence.
The plan to make Toulon one of the great fortified places of the world was carried on assiduously by Richelieu, who commanded a certain Jacques Desmarets, professor of mathematics at the university at Aix, to make a plan which should show the Provençal coast-line in all its detail. The instructions read, “...sur vélin, enluminé en or et representant la côte jusqu’à deux ou trois lieues dans les terres.”