For many people today, the name the French Riviera most immediately conjures up one of two images.

For the film fans and the starstruck, it's the images flashed across the press and social media of the annual con film festival,

with international stars wearing their designer finest blinking in the

intense sun and dodging camera flashes as they appear on the red carpet or are interviewed

outside the famous Palais de Festival, its vast glass windows reflecting the golden Mediterranean sun.

For others, also movie fans, the image of the French Riviera is perhaps more nostalgic.

The name can take one back to that period of glamour in the 1950s and most specifically

to images of the 26-year-old Grace Kelly wearing the stunning

fashions of Edith Head, playing opposite Carrie Grant in the Hitchcock Classic to Catch

a Thief, which premiered on the screen in 1955.

The movie was, of course, set along the Riviera, and actual filming locations included

Khan and Nice. What makes this film all the more romantic is that we know that Grace, not long

before the film's theatrical release, would meet the dashing, titled and wealthy Prince Ragné of Monaco,

and would be on her way to joining one of Europe's oldest and most aristocratic titled families

as Princess herself.

Music Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast where every two weeks we journey into corners light and dark for a look at America's Gilded Age, France's Belle-Epoch, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

The Riviera is the name known to most Americans in the British, but the French call it the

Cote d'Azu, referring to the extraordinary deep blue of the water.

Calling it the Cote-Azure in the true French spirit reflects perhaps as much a state of mind as an actual place.

The Riviera perhaps reached its height as a playground for the royals, the rich, and the rascals in the late 19th century,

and meandered through the years of the 20th century up to World War I,

the same period that roughly corresponded to America's Gilded Age and France's Belle-Epoch,

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