Through its frequent repetition in literary, historical, and journalistic descriptions of Marseille from the late nineteenth century onward, Victor Hugo's disparaging assessment of Marseille's cultural patrimony quickly became a commonplace. Hugo's observation implicitly emphasized the city's failure to preserve what he assumed must have once been a monumental landscape akin to those of nearby sites such as Saint Rémy de Provence, not to mention that of Paris. In perhaps not so dissimilar terms, the history of cultural memory in France has been written in large part with reference to sites renowned for their monumental heritage. This paper begins by considering how we might account for the dynamics of memory in a city whose identity has been significantly shaped by forgetting. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, I consider the concerted resurrection of Marseille's ancient history that was not visible to Hugo's eye in the context of rebuilding the city's Vieux-Port quarter after the end of the Second World War.

Ironically, the evacuation of over 20,000 inhabitants in the historic city center in January 1943 and the systematic dynamiting of the structures they left behind allowed for archeological investigations of the site where the ancient city of Massalia had legendarily first been founded as a Phocean port. In the process, through the alternatively complementary or competing projects and projections of archeologists and urbanists, the rebuilding of the Vieux-Port quarter was increasingly founded on the anticipated, if anachronistic, resurrection of the city’s excavated ancient past in the present postwar moment. In the process, archeological and architectural efforts effectively covered over the physical traces of the collaboration between Vichy and Nazi authorities that had allowed for the destruction of this site and displacement of its inhabitants in the first place. At the same time, however, I want to suggest that Hugo was perhaps not so far off the mark after all in his insistence upon the effects of monumental erasure in Marseille. While traces of 'Massalia' were unearthed in the Vieux-Port during its reconstruction, the elements that subsisted could not be considered "traces profondes" in Ricoeur's sense, but fragments from which the past could only be fantasmatically re-projected.