Sanary-sur-Mer

French commune
nomcommune=Sanary-sur-Mer
View of Sanary-sur-Mer.
région=Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
département=Var
arrondissement=Toulon
canton=Ollioules
insee=83123
cp=83110
maire=Ferdinand Bernhard (UDF)
mandat=
intercomm=
longitude=5.80306
latitude=43.12
alt moy=
alt mini=
alt maxi=
hectares=1,903
km²=19.03
sans=17,021
date-sans=1999
dens=894
date-dens=1999

The commune of Sanary-sur-Mer is a seaside resort in the "département" of Var in Provence, located 13 km from Toulon and 49 km from Marseille, in the south of France.

Overview

The seafront location was part of the commune of Ollioules. In the 16th century the seigneur established a fishing village here, clustered around the medieval watchtower, under the protection of "Sanct Nazari" of Lérins Abbey. The port was constructed and the harbor deepened in the mid-16th century. The little fishing port of Saint Nazari was finally granted its independence from Ollioules in 1688, and in 1890 officially received its local name in Provençal, "Sanary", which was formalized and distinguished as "sur-Mer" in 1923.

As a tourist rendezvous, the village underwent a strong decade of growth in the 1980s.

Sights

*Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Pitié: From this chapel built in 1560 on a headland west of the town, the visitor sees a broad view over the bay of Sanary.
*Église Saint Nazaire: A Gothic Revival church of the late 19th century, Michel Pacha, architect.
*Tour "romane": In fact, a medieval construction.

"Sanary-les-Allemands"

With the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, a great number of German writers and intellectuals left Germany and settled here, where the cost of living was lower than in Paris: the playwright Bertold Brecht, Egon Erwin Kisch, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel, and Arnold Zweig. Patronised by Jean Cocteau and his coterie, Sanary had already drawn Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, who attracted other English visitors, such as D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda; Julian Huxley and his wife, Juliette; and others. The German expatriates clustered around Thomas Mann and his large family, his brother Heinrich and his wife (the model for "Blue Angel"), the writers Stefan Zweig and Arnold Zweig, the art critic Julius Meyer-Graefe, and the artist René Schickel. The impressionable Sybille von Schoenebeck (later, as Sybille Bedford, the author of "A Legacy") lived here with her mother.

"If one lives in exile," wrote Hermann Kesten, "The café becomes at once the family home, the nation, church and parliament, a desert and a place of pilgrimage, cradle of illusions and their cemetery... In exile, the café is the one place where life goes on."

With the declaration of war in 1939, the French government treated these exiles as enemy aliens and interned them in camps; they were seen as no more than so many Germans. After liberation, the little village that had been known as "Sanary-les-Allemands" chose to ignore the whole episode until the 1990s, when the volume of German and Austrian tourists encouraged the unveiling of a small plaque and some signposted tourist itineraries.

External links and references

* [http://www.toutsanary.fr/ 2000 pictures, history, agenda]
* [http://www.mairie-sanary.fr/ Official site]
* [http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article346535.ece "The Independent"] obituary of Sybille Bedford, February 20, 2006