Tired of the Côte d’Azur? France has 35 other named coastlines 

Name one French coastline. Great. Now name another. Can’t? Here are all 36.

Despite a number of recent high-profile terrorist attacks, France remains the world’s most visited country. The numbers are going up, in fact: last year, the French welcomed 89 million foreign tourists, 8% more than in 2016.

But how familiar are those visitors with the many splendors of France? Here’s a test: quickly, name your favorite French museum, city, wine region (1) and beach. Most likely answers: the Louvre, Paris, Bordeaux (or Burgundy) and the Côte d’Azur.

Hot and glamorous, the Côte d’Azur is the jewel in the crown of French seaside tourism. It’s also crowded and pricey. However, as this map shows, it’s just one of 36 named coastlines stretching along the country’s Atlantic and Mediterranean shores.

Commonly referred to in English as the French Riviera, the Côte d’Azur covers the eastern part of France’s Mediterranean coast. The term was coined by Stéphen Liégeard, who used it as the title for his 1887 book about his travels along the coast of the Provence in France and beyond, to Genoa in Italy. ‘Azure’ is the heraldic term for ‘blue’; he was perhaps inspired by his home département of Côte d’or (2). ‘Côte d’Azur’ quickly caught on, but only for the French part of the coast.

Hoping to emulate the success of their azure counterpart, many other French coasts were named soon thereafter, often after minerals, metals or colors (3). Each has its own particular history, climate, geography and charm. Below is a sample of some of the more remarkable stretches.

The Côte d’Opale (Opal Coast) was named in 1911 by local Édouard Lévêque, in homage to the region’s changeable light. Go here for two illustrious capes: Blanc-Nez (‘White Nose’) and Gris-Nez (‘Grey Nose’), the closest point between Europe and England, only 34 km (21 mi) from the white cliffs of Dover.

The Côte Fleurie (Flowered Coast) refers to the flowering apple trees in the interior. Dotting the coast are Deauville, Honfleur and other renowned seaside resorts – not forgetting Balbec, the fictional one from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.

The beaches of the Cote de Nacre (Mother-of-pearl Coast) are better known by their D-Day code names: Gold, Juno and Sword.

The Baie du mont Saint-Michel (Bay of Mont Saint-Michel): A Unesco World Heritage site, this part of the Golf of Saint-Malo dividing Brittany from Normandy is dominated by the Mont Saint-Michel, a tidal island topped by a medieval abbey and pilgrimage site.[ . . . ]

Read full article at BIG THINK: Tired of the Côte d’Azur? France has 35 other named coastlines | Big Think

The Years by Annie Ernaux review – a masterpiece memoir of French life

Annie Ernaux is long overdue to be recognised in Britain as one of the most important writers in contemporary France, and this edition of The Years ought to do the trick. Originally published there in 2008, it was immediately heralded as Ernaux’s masterpiece, her brief Remembrance of Things Past. It has been expertly rendered into English by Alison Strayer, who captures all the shadings of Ernaux’s prose, all its stops and starts, its changes in pace and in tone, its chatterings, its silences.

The book spans the timeframe from the author’s birth in 1940 up to 2006, and moves from her working-class upbringing in Normandy to her years teaching French literature in a lycée, living in the Parisian suburb of Cergy, raising two sons and eventually divorcing. But it is not a straightforward autobiography; rather it is told in a choral “we”, which sometimes shifts into the third person, so the author appears as “she”. This is as close in as it gets. In so doing, Ernaux puts paid (hopefully once and for all) to the idea that memoirs by women are about the small-scale, the domestic. She shows it is possible to write both personally and collectively, situating her own story within the story of her generation, without ever confusing the two. She reflects on the book she is writing even as she writes it, resolving: “There is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’, as if now it were her time to tell the story of the time-before.” [ . . . ]

Continue at THE GUARDIAN: The Years by Annie Ernaux review – a masterpiece memoir of French life | Books | The Guardian

Anthony Bourdain’s Greatest Triumph Was Calling B.S. on French Food

It took more than a century but who can now seriously believe that French chefs have no equal? Bourdain’s one-man odyssey to Parts Unknown finally put that to rest.

It’s strangely poignant that Anthony Bourdain should end his life in France, because nobody did more than he did to end the long hegemony of France over international cuisine.Few of those who followed him on CNN as he relished exotic entrails, smelly noodles, the most inflammatory spices, will have realized that not so long ago all these pleasures were virtually shut out of any chance of recognition as serious food by the belief that only France could decide what counted as world-class dining [ . . . ]

Continue at THE DAILY BEAST: Anthony Bourdain’s Greatest Triumph Was Calling B.S. on French Food