«SUDWALL» History of the Mediterranean wall

Abstract

Among the most emblematic and most visited heritages of Marseille, there are the four forts which command it (castle of If, fort of Notre-Dame of the Garde, forts Saint-Nicolas and Saint-Jean). However, their introduction into tourism is more a myth than an intrinsic military nature. Apart from these media locomotives, several dozens of contemporary military works punctuate the municipal territory, on the edge or set back from the coastline, waiting for an enemy coming from the sea. The coast and the islands are at this point full of forts and coastal batteries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made in the expectation of an enemy coming from the sea. Through their relentless refactoring – reduced - model 1846, then coastal batteries updated with shelter under rock after the crisis of the shell-torpedo in 1887, then blockhouse of the organization Todt, set up in the framework of SudWall from 1943), these massive structures covering sublime sites relate to those who want to hear it the arms race, the technical escalation of the armour struggle against an ever more powerful projectile, and in this respect the violence of the blows which were wiped off by the Marseille works in the last days of August 1944, during the fighting of the Liberation. The delay in the protection of this military heritage, which is now being completed by the Ministry of Defence, has begun in 1970 with the sale of the Frioul archipelago to the city. Beyond their significance for scientific and technical culture, these objects pose the problem of their heritage status, on the one hand because they lost their weaponry which constituted its reason to be, and because they are the result of pre-established patterns, repeated several hundred copies along the coast, and lastly because they bear the wounds of the blows received, an extraordinary conservatory, but an instable one, of an archeology of the seat. Their protection, therefore requires a previous thorough inventory in order to estimate their relative value so as not to blindly protect, to rapidly carry out so many unconscious disappearances are increasing today. But the patrimonial recognition of these objects passes through a memory appropriation that is hard to do, in Marseille perhaps more than elsewhere. Is it due to the mixed identities which constitute the different memorial layers of this balcony on the Mediterranean?