Provence in the south of France is famously picturesque – but it’s not all lavender fields and rosé…
Murder in Provence Available for Streaming
ANTHONY PEREGRINE - 2 July 2022
The opening credits of Murder in Provence tell no lies. Setting the scene for the detective series that premiered on ITV last year after launching on streaming service BritBox, the camera pans over fields of lavender and of vines, over a light-spangled sea, crags and prettily perched villages. Here are sunlit elements of Provence’s image as the most sensual slice of Europe.
And it’s all true. Our heroes – investigating judge Antoine Verlaque (played by Roger Allam) and his professional and romantic partner, law professor Marine Bonnet (Nancy Carroll) – are indeed operating in a land wrapped in warmth, light and a sense of sybaritic civilisation. Here, fiction gets the facts right. The monumental classicism of Aix-en Provence, the town from which the investigating duo operate, underlines that the region has been both elegant and seductive for a very long time. It’s been playful, too, since the Romans were scattering theatres about the place.
Later, when 14th-century Popes took refuge in Avignon, their interests were as much licentious as liturgical (contemporary poet Petrarch going so far as to call medieval Avignon “a thoroughfare of vices… where prostitutes swarm over papal beds”). The region, in short, has ever segued seamlessly from the sublime spirituality of great religious houses like Sénanque to the voluptuous.
One of my key Aix memories is of a nun cleavering a dead chicken at a market stall, before telling me how to cook its thighs. Thus does Provence fulfil so many promises – of beauty, bounty, a frisky good life and fine, full-frontal eating (not least at Antoine’s table: he spends much of his time cooking, apparently pretty well). Soon, however, the scenic setting of Murder in Provence is marred by homicide. The victim in the series opener is an Aix professor of medieval history who, I’d say, richly deserves a swift end (and gets it). Clearly, this is a further stab at introducing bloodshed to beauty spots (see also Midsomer Murders and Death in Paradise). But it also reflects another, tougher reality particular to Provence. This is not merely a region of rosé wine, colourful locals and frolics by the pool. The sweet, ripe aspects dance across the surface of a land rendered unyielding by hectic geography and turbulent history.
The soft life – lavender and the rest – has rock-hard roots. Beyond the beaches, Aix and other hotspots, the landscape can grow elemental in the turn of a hairpin. The much-vaunted Luberon, for instance, isn’t a designer holiday concept for the chatterati. It’s a big mountain, upon which you don’t want to linger when the weather turns.
The celebrated perched villages were situated for defence, not photographs. Well into the 20th century, remoter peasants shared accommodation with their animals, and took pagan beliefs to church. This hasn’t always lent itself to bucolic harmony. The 1952 murder of British biochemist Sir Jack Drummond, his wife and ten-yearold daughter near the village of Lurs was a case that might well have foxed Antoine and Marine. Certainly it’s foxed everyone else. Was a local peasant patriarch guilty – he was jailed initially – or not? No one’s had the definitive answer in the past 70 years. In truth, the tough Provençal countryside is punctuated with violence and crime scenes, not least in and around Aix itself.
In 18th-century Aix, local lad the Marquis de Sade was executed in effigy after scarpering on being convicted of attempting to poison prostitutes. More recently, the refined old city has acted as overspill for hoodlum shenanigans in nearby Marseille; French underworld figure Francis le Belge had tendrils round the place by the 1980s. Aix might look like Marseille’s brainier brother – the one with glasses, a bow-tie and first-class degree – but there has long been a subplot of slot machines, drugs and shoot-outs with Corsican bandits.
Doubtless, and in between dinners, Antoine would have appreciated the challenge. He still might: this is not ancient history. Francis le Belge was shot dead in 2000. Some of his lieutenants outlived him, but life expectancy was not high in these circles. (One, ‘the Roaster’, had victims burnt to death; police found a blackened corpse in an abandoned car near Aix, and ruled out the possibility of a traffic accident.) And there’s more where that comes from, including a recent affair that mirrors Murder in Provence’s first episode – involving, as both do, senior university figures and disputes over cash and works allegedly creamed from an Aix art foundation.
Thus it is that the show pulls off a rounded portrait of the region. It is sumptuous on the monumental, sunlit dignity of Aix, and the sheer loveliness of surrounding land- and sea-scape. But the action itself honours more muscular Provençal traditions, the lethal ones indicating that the region will never become a theme park of itself. Visitors inspired by the show to take in Aix will have a ball, following Aix-born artist Cézanne around town and roaming the Cours Mirabeau thoroughfare, the most majestic French avenue outside of Paris. But theirs is only a walk-on part. The essential, formidable Provence remains overwhelmingly Provençal, held together by family, farming, festivities, feuds… and the occasional murder.
The opening credits of Murder in Provence tell no lies. Setting the scene for the detective series that premiered on ITV last year after launching on streaming service BritBox, the camera pans over fields of lavender and of vines, over a light-spangled sea, crags and prettily perched villages. Here are sunlit elements of Provence’s image as the most sensual slice of Europe.
And it’s all true. Our heroes – investigating judge Antoine Verlaque (played by Roger Allam) and his professional and romantic partner, law professor Marine Bonnet (Nancy Carroll) – are indeed operating in a land wrapped in warmth, light and a sense of sybaritic civilisation. Here, fiction gets the facts right. The monumental classicism of Aix-en Provence, the town from which the investigating duo operate, underlines that the region has been both elegant and seductive for a very long time. It’s been playful, too, since the Romans were scattering theatres about the place.
Later, when 14th-century Popes took refuge in Avignon, their interests were as much licentious as liturgical (contemporary poet Petrarch going so far as to call medieval Avignon “a thoroughfare of vices… where prostitutes swarm over papal beds”). The region, in short, has ever segued seamlessly from the sublime spirituality of great religious houses like Sénanque to the voluptuous.
One of my key Aix memories is of a nun cleavering a dead chicken at a market stall, before telling me how to cook its thighs. Thus does Provence fulfil so many promises – of beauty, bounty, a frisky good life and fine, full-frontal eating (not least at Antoine’s table: he spends much of his time cooking, apparently pretty well). Soon, however, the scenic setting of Murder in Provence is marred by homicide. The victim in the series opener is an Aix professor of medieval history who, I’d say, richly deserves a swift end (and gets it). Clearly, this is a further stab at introducing bloodshed to beauty spots (see also Midsomer Murders and Death in Paradise). But it also reflects another, tougher reality particular to Provence. This is not merely a region of rosé wine, colourful locals and frolics by the pool. The sweet, ripe aspects dance across the surface of a land rendered unyielding by hectic geography and turbulent history.
The soft life – lavender and the rest – has rock-hard roots. Beyond the beaches, Aix and other hotspots, the landscape can grow elemental in the turn of a hairpin. The much-vaunted Luberon, for instance, isn’t a designer holiday concept for the chatterati. It’s a big mountain, upon which you don’t want to linger when the weather turns.
The celebrated perched villages were situated for defence, not photographs. Well into the 20th century, remoter peasants shared accommodation with their animals, and took pagan beliefs to church. This hasn’t always lent itself to bucolic harmony. The 1952 murder of British biochemist Sir Jack Drummond, his wife and ten-yearold daughter near the village of Lurs was a case that might well have foxed Antoine and Marine. Certainly it’s foxed everyone else. Was a local peasant patriarch guilty – he was jailed initially – or not? No one’s had the definitive answer in the past 70 years. In truth, the tough Provençal countryside is punctuated with violence and crime scenes, not least in and around Aix itself.
In 18th-century Aix, local lad the Marquis de Sade was executed in effigy after scarpering on being convicted of attempting to poison prostitutes. More recently, the refined old city has acted as overspill for hoodlum shenanigans in nearby Marseille; French underworld figure Francis le Belge had tendrils round the place by the 1980s. Aix might look like Marseille’s brainier brother – the one with glasses, a bow-tie and first-class degree – but there has long been a subplot of slot machines, drugs and shoot-outs with Corsican bandits.
Doubtless, and in between dinners, Antoine would have appreciated the challenge. He still might: this is not ancient history. Francis le Belge was shot dead in 2000. Some of his lieutenants outlived him, but life expectancy was not high in these circles. (One, ‘the Roaster’, had victims burnt to death; police found a blackened corpse in an abandoned car near Aix, and ruled out the possibility of a traffic accident.) And there’s more where that comes from, including a recent affair that mirrors Murder in Provence’s first episode – involving, as both do, senior university figures and disputes over cash and works allegedly creamed from an Aix art foundation.
Thus it is that the show pulls off a rounded portrait of the region. It is sumptuous on the monumental, sunlit dignity of Aix, and the sheer loveliness of surrounding land- and sea-scape. But the action itself honours more muscular Provençal traditions, the lethal ones indicating that the region will never become a theme park of itself. Visitors inspired by the show to take in Aix will have a ball, following Aix-born artist Cézanne around town and roaming the Cours Mirabeau thoroughfare, the most majestic French avenue outside of Paris. But theirs is only a walk-on part. The essential, formidable Provence remains overwhelmingly Provençal, held together by family, farming, festivities, feuds… and the occasional murder.