Grasse's Nightmare Street

There’s a short and unremarkable street in Grasse just off the rue Droite named Rue de la Rêve Vieille. Look for Maison Duplanteur, which makes amazing chocolate, on the corner with rue Droite, and you’ll find it.

At the time of writing this, if you enter the street name into Google Translate, you’ll get back ‘Old Dream Street’. But Google gets it wrong – dreams are masculine and this Rêve, as the gender of the adjective vieille shows, is female. A rêve is an obsolete form of taxation, so maybe ‘Old Nightmare Street’ would be better! It seems that modern high tech and archaic words don't always mix too well.

But the street and the name are significant in Grasse’s history.

Back in 10th-12th centuries, Grasse was effectively an independent town, much like the city-states of Italy. It is described in a document of 1154 of Adrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear, the only ever English pope) as a ‘consular republic’, and it signed trading treaties with both Pisa and Genoa in the 12th and 13th centuries. The town traded in cloth and later both manufactured and traded leather. Archaeological evidence from analysis made when the buildings were being refurbished (see, in French, here) shows that number 10, rue de la Rêve Vieille was in use from the tenth century onwards and that there was a water-course down the street, no doubt originating at La Foux. Several buildings were also evidently rebuilt, probably after an earthquake in 1222.

In 1227 Grasse lost its independence to the county of Provence and subsequently became part of France, but by the fourteenth century it had recovered much of its autonomy from the counts of Provence and was governed by an oligarchy of rich merchant families, financed mainly through rêves – basically a system of purchase taxation. The rich acted as tax farmers, by paying the town an annual lump sum which they recovered (and more!) by charging a rêve on the sale of corn, meat, wine and fish (but not beans and other foods regarded as staples). The town also controlled prices on many foods and other goods. It sounds paternalistic and a method making the rich richer, but it does appear that the oligarchs helped the population in times of shortages – for example in 1709, after a disastrous frost, they bought corn and sold it at subsidised prices until the next harvest started. No doubt they wanted to ensure that the working population survived for their own benefit, but even so…

Rue de la Rêve Vieille is so-named because it was location of the tax office (the ‘bureau de la rêve’), which, it is believed, was on the first floor above these two arches:

On the left, a postcard from before the Great War, compared to the view today. Little seems to have changed in the last hundred years, and probably for far longer.

Rue de la Rêve Vieille is also near the ancient marketplace which is now the Place Roustan and the Place d'Eveque. Even as late as the 1950s, there were many active small shops and traders in the immediate area, as an article in Nice-Matin in 2016 indicates. One can hope that the many initiatives to refurbish these older blocks (‘ilots’) of the town will gradually breathe new life into this historic quarter.