The Roaring Twenties on the Riviera: Zelda and la garçonne

In the 1920s the French Riviera transformed from a winter resort into a summer stage for the American bohemian set, and Zelda Fitzgerald became the face of the new woman — short-haired, independent and asking no-one’s permission. We look into where the garçonne image came from, what the coast has to do with it, and what this freedom cost Zelda herself.

🏖 How Americans discovered the summer Riviera

Before the First World War the Riviera had been a winter resort: European aristocracy came here to wait out the northern cold, and by June the coast emptied — it was thought unbearable in summer. Americans changed that habit. The wealthy couple Gerald and Sara Murphy, settling on the Cap d’Antibes, began spending the summer there and persuaded the local hotel not to close for the heat. Around the Murphys gathered a circle that included Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, John Dos Passos and the Fitzgeralds. That is how the season on the coast developed into the one that now seems eternal.

🏡 The villa above Saint-Raphaël and summer in Juan-les-Pins

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda came to the coast in 1924 and rented the villa «Marie» in Valescure above Saint-Raphaël — there Scott was finishing The Great Gatsby. Later the couple moved to Juan-les-Pins, into a house that has operated since 1929 as the hotel Belles Rives: an Art Deco building, a bar named after the writer and a view of the bay. Fitzgerald would later gather the Riviera of those years in the novel «Tender Is the Night» (1934), dedicated to Murphy.

👗 Where the garçonne came from

The word “garçonne” came not from fashion but from literature. In 1922 the Frenchman Victor Margueritte published the novel La Garçonne — about a woman who decides for herself how to live, work and love. The scandal was such that the author was stripped of the Legion of Honour, and the word entered the language and became the name of a type: a short “bob” haircut, dresses without a corset or a defined waist, a cigarette, and talking as equals.

Zelda did not invent this type — she embodied it herself, and more convincingly than many. The American version was called the flapper, and on screen it was embodied by Clara Bow, the “It girl”. The difference between a heroine in a novel and a real person is that the novel ends, and life goes on.

💃 What was behind the façade

Zelda’s freedom was real, but costly. The summer of 1924 in Saint-Raphaël ended with her affair with the French pilot Édouard Jozan — an episode that later resurfaces in various forms in the prose of both spouses. Zelda’s own ambitions — literary, balletic, pictorial — almost always found themselves in the shadow of her husband’s success: her material was published under his name or under both names together, and she took up ballet too late and with too much intensity.

Her novel «Save Me the Waltz» Zelda wrote in 1932, in a matter of weeks, while in a clinic. Scott was furious: he believed his wife had taken apart the same material from which he was constructing «Tender Is the Night».

📚 How she is read today

A century on, Zelda has ceased to be considered merely an appendage to her husband. The French writer Gilles Leroy made her the heroine of the novel Alabama Song, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2007 — the book is written in the first person and challenges the image of “the genius’s wife”. Researchers are doing much the same: «Save Me the Waltz» is being reissued, letters are published, and Zelda’s paintings are exhibited as independent art rather than a biographical curiosity.

🌊 Where to look for traces of the era on the coast

The settings of those years haven’t disappeared. The Cap d’Antibes and Juan-les-Pins have preserved villas and hotels from the interwar period, and documents from the era lie in the city archives — we told how they were rescued in the piece “Antibes Archives”. Neighbouring Cap-Ferrat gives a sense of how the same crowd lived a class higher. And that the coast still lives by literature today — read the piece on Menton’s literary debut.

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Photo: Agustina Tolosa / Pexels