The City of Nice and its Heritage delegation, led by Jean-Marc Giaume, invites you until May 2012 to attend conferences on the theme “Nice, capital of the French Riviera,” which will allow you, thanks to eminent speakers, to shed light on the three centuries of English presence in Nice.
The fourth conference of this series will take place on Saturday, March 17, 2012, at 3 PM, at the Théâtre de la Photographie et de l’Image in Nice. Entitled “Two Englishmen in the County of Nice: Tobias Smollett and Somerset Maugham,” it will be led by Ralph Schor, professor of contemporary history at the University of Nice-Sophia-Antipolis.
Scottish Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Englishman Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) both spent extended periods in the County of Nice. These two writers each popularized an image of the region, and at first glance, the differences in personality and perception seem to prevail. Smollett left a very detailed travelogue in which he displays his constant bad temper. Maugham painted the County through allusions in his novels and short stories. The period in which each lived introduces an obvious diversity in the conditions of their stay and the impressions they experienced. However, the commonalities seem more numerous than the differences: both authors were perfect gentlemen, cultured, doctors, excellent French speakers, famous; they embodied traditional British values; they ignored the locals but praised the area’s pleasantness, the natural beauty of the County, and the mild climate.
Ralph Schor, a history agrégé, doctor of Letters, is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, president of the Franco-Italian Committee for Historical Studies, a member of the editorial board of the journals Recherches Régionales and Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, and the author of many works, including L’Opinion française et les étrangers (Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), L’Antisémitisme en France dans les années 1930 (Complexe, Brussels, 1992), Crises et dictatures dans l’Europe de l’entre-deux-guerres (Nathan, Paris, 1993), Histoire de l’immigration en France (Colin, 1996), L’Eglise catholique au XX° siècle (Colin, 1999), Histoire de la société française au XX° siècle (Belin, 2004), Français et immigrés en temps de crise, 1930-1980 (L’Harmattan, 2004), Histoire du Comté de Nice (Alandis, 2007).
