France and Monaco

France was assembled over a thousand years by a monarchy and then a republic based in Paris, absorbing duchies, counties and kingdoms that had their own languages and laws — Brittany, Burgundy, Provence, Alsace, Savoy, Nice, Corsica. The price of unity was a state that decides from the centre: the roads, the rail network, the schools and even the layout of town halls follow national templates.

Monaco is one of the edges that never joined. The Grimaldis held their rock through alliances with Genoa, Spain, France and Sardinia, and when Nice and Savoy became French in 1860, Monaco stayed apart, sold its eastern towns to France a year later, and turned itself into a resort. Its survival is a product of French tolerance, formalised in treaties in 1918 and 2002.

For travellers, the centre-and-edges pattern explains most logistics: the TGV runs Paris to the regions, not region to region; national museums follow national closing days; and the Riviera, Alsace and Corsica feel different because they joined France late and kept part of their identity.

France built the first TGV line, Paris–Lyon, in 1981, and extended high-speed lines to Marseille, Bordeaux, Rennes, Strasbourg and Lille. Journeys that once took a day take three to five hours, but only along the spokes from Paris. The coast from Marseille to Nice and Monaco still runs on a classic line, which is why Paris–Nice takes nearly six hours.

The Riviera line between Nice, Monaco, Menton and Ventimiglia is one of the busiest regional lines in the country. It links a string of towns with little flat land, and it is the only practical way to reach Monaco without a car. Road traffic on the coast is heavy all year, and parking in Monaco is scarce and expensive.

Rural France is a different system: villages, vineyards and châteaux sit far from stations, and buses are infrequent. The pattern that works is a train to a regional hub and a short car hire from the station, then back on the train.

The Côte d'Azur — the name was coined by a writer in 1887 — became a winter resort for British and Russian aristocrats in the 19th century, when the railway arrived and the mild climate was sold as a cure. Nice's Promenade des Anglais was named after the British colony that paid for its first path. Summer seaside holidays came later, with artists and writers in the 1920s and paid holidays for workers after 1936.

Monaco's casino, Cannes's film festival (from 1946) and Saint-Tropez's 1950s beach culture turned the coast into a byword for glamour. Behind it the landscape is steep: the Alps drop into the sea, villages like Èze and Saint-Paul-de-Vence cling to ridges, and the three corniche roads between Nice and Menton stack one above the other.

Today the Riviera is densely built, expensive and crowded in summer, but also well served by trains and buses, with museums from Matisse to Picasso and a mild winter that makes it one of Europe's best off-season coasts.

Food across the region follows geography more than borders. Northern France cooks with butter and cream, the south with olive oil, garlic and herbs. Nice and Monaco share a Ligurian kitchen closer to Genoa than to Paris: chard, chickpeas, anchovies, stockfish, pasta and pesto (pistou). Socca, pissaladière and barbajuans are street snacks on both sides of the boundary.

The rhythm of eating is also shared: bakery in the morning, a set lunch between 12:00 and 14:00, an apéritif in the early evening, dinner from 19:30. Restaurants close between services, and in Monaco and on the Riviera, dinner reservations matter in summer and on event days.

Both countries sit inside the Schengen area in practice, so there are no routine passport checks between them or with most neighbours. But France has run temporary internal border checks since the 2015 attacks, especially on trains and roads from Italy near Menton, and 2025–26 brought the EU's Entry/Exit System for non-EU visitors at external borders, with ETIAS expected later.

The Channel is the hard border: the UK left the EU in 2020, so Eurostar and ferry passengers pass French checks in Britain before boarding and British checks in France on the way back. Andorra, to the south, sits outside Schengen and the EU customs union. For travellers, the rule is simple: carry the passport on every cross-border leg, even when nobody asks.