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Chanel’s Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival in Peace and War, 1930-1944
Bottom of the pile
10
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
15/100Critics
4/100Scholars
Author:
Anne de Courcy
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press
Date:
February 11, 2020
Between the World Wars, the French Riviera became a playground for the rich and famous, with Coco Chanel and her villa, La Pausa, at the center of it all. De Courcy takes readers through this flashy era through the lens of the fashionistaâincluding its ultimate demise when the Nazis swooped down, bringing the horrors of evacuation and the displacement of thousands of families during World War II.
What The Reviewers Say
In Chanel’s Riviera, Anne de Courcy has written a well-researched and compelling story. She maintains a remarkable balance between, on the one hand, Chanel and her world of the rich and famous and, on the other, the lives of ordinary people desperately struggling to survive in a country on the brink of annihilation. Drawing on an immense volume of material, she has succeeded not only in constructing an intriguing portrait of Chanel herself but also in expertly conjuring the two very different worlds that then existed side by side..
De Courcy juggles an immense cast of characters. In the book, aristocrats, politicians, artists, writers and movie stars show up for cameos on the Riviera and then depart. Except for the politicians and the artists, the participants in that extended bacchanalia are forgotten today, and De Courcy is generally unsuccessful in bringing them back to life.
Anne de Courcy claims that her book Chanel’s Riviera is neither a biography of Coco Chanel nor a history of the Riviera, but it certainly reads like a biography of this glamorous part of the world that continues to capture the imagination.
For today’s real estate-obsessed, much of Anne De Courcy’s retelling of the characters, events and properties of the French Riviera in the 1930s reads like a Sotheby’s International catalog punctuated with Page Six-style rundowns of who’s sleeping with whom and banal descriptions of what F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described as 'the diffused magic of the hot, sweet South'.
