10 Reasons Not to Visit St. Tropez

I don't understand St. Tropez. You fly all the way across the ocean to France, and you go to Paris, with the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame, and about a dozen bathhouses, right?  Or you tour the chateaux on the Loire.   Or you go out to Brittany to see the Carnac Stones built by Mesolithic tribes.

Why would you want to go to the beach?

Or if you have to go to the beach, I suggest Deauville or Dinan.  Definitely not St. Tropez, the heterosexual capital of Europe.

Here are 10 reasons to stay away.

1. St. Tropez was a sleepy fishing village until the 1950s when it became a favorite of the French New Wave Cinema, which showed heterosexual women taking their clothes off.  The most famous of them was And God Created Woman, 1956, with Brigitte Bardot as a heterosexual woman who takes her clothes off and has sex.

The topless one in this case is her director, Roger Vadim.

2. There was also a kurfuffle over real topless swimmers at the beach, resulting in a comedy, The Troops of St. Tropez (1964), in which uptight police officer Cruchot (Louis de Funes) tries to stamp out female nudity, and ends up foiling robbers. 

It spawned innumerable sequels: The Troops in New York (1965), The Troops Get Married (1968), The Troops on Vacation (1970), The Troops Meet Aliens (1979), and so on, as well as a museum in St. Tropez (which actually covers all of St. Tropez as visualized in the movies).





3. Going topless is now acceptable on St. Tropez beaches.  As are revealing bikinis.  You'd be subjected to whatever is behind the black box a dozen times a minute.


4.  In the 1970s, when I was in high school, there was a series of commercials in which a very thin white woman with a very dark tan applied suntan lotion to herself, while a sultry voice sang "Bain de Soleil for a St. Tropez tan."

Apparently men in the 1970s didn't worry about melanoma.

You can still get Bain de Soleil, and the commercials still show thin white women with very dark tans.

5.   The art museum of St. Tropez is the Musée de l'Annonciade, a former chapel with a rotating series of 20 paintings, and a statue of a naked lady.


6. There's also a butterfly museum, the collection of 35,000 specimens donated by painter Dany Lartigue, in the former home of his mother.  He explains his interest:  "I had fallen in love with a butterfly that was so beautiful I had just been touched by grace.  This feeling of supreme happiness at the sight of a butterfly I have kept all my life."

So he killed as many as he could find and took them home to affix to paper and mount on his wall.

Actually, that sounds sort of interesting.  And Dany definitely sounds gay.




7. For architecture, you have Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption de Saint-Tropez, which is...well, orange and yellow.   I'm not sure what's heterosexual about that, but I'm on a roll.

8. For men, instead of 20 bathhouses and gay bars with darkrooms, you have a gay-friendly beach, the Plague de Pamplonne.

Just gay-friendly?  I can get totally-gay back in Paris.











9. Of course, it's probably the only place in France, other than Cannes, where you can regularly see American celebrities.  Like Patrick Schwarzenegger.

He's heterosexual.














10. And European celebrities, like soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo.

He's heterosexual too.