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Mass tourism dates from the 1840s, when Thomas Cook began chartering trains to take Britain's working class at reduced fares to temperance meetings within the country. By the 1860s Cook was selling tours to continental Europe, and by the start of the 20th century even the grandest hotels on the newly named Côte d'Azur were doing deals with the English entrepreneur. A century later 2 million travelers — half from outside France — descend on the Riviera as August begins and hotels from Menton to Théoule proclaim they are complet (full).

The history of Nice, affectionately charted by Robert Kanigel in High Season in Nice (Little, Brown; 309 pages), effectively mirrors the history of tourism. From small beginnings as a Greek fishing village and Roman frontier outpost, the town developed slowly until the late 18th century, when the continent, for a change, was at peace and wealthy Europeans started to travel in search of different art, culture — and weather. The following century saw Nice inundated with French, English and Russian aristocrats. In La Belle Epoque Nice was such a popular destination for its mild winter, Kanigel says, that it "luxuriated in civic self-confidence [and] flaunted its excesses." England's Queen Victoria visited five years in a row for a couple of months each winter, along with 60 staff.

After World War I a series of setbacks — the Great Depression, German occupation, local corruption scandals — took their toll, even as sunbathing became fashionable and ordinary folk began flocking to the Côte d'Azur in the summer. Now, asserts the generally optimistic Kanigel, Nice has all the woes of mass tourism — traffic jams, polluted beaches, collapsing sewage systems and a mur de beton, or concrete wall, of hotels and apartment blocks that have compromised the Riviera's beauty forever.

Kanigel's method is to rely on scores of diaries, letters and other records from visitors down the years. Tobias Smollett, a pugnacious British writer whose Travels through France and Italy became a best seller in 1766, put Nice on the map by depicting the lush beauty of the Med to rain-soaked readers back home. Almost as memorable are some of the eyewitness contributions by American fans of Nice. They range from 14-year-old Henrietta Maria Schroeder of Boston, who in the 19th century was refused entry to the nearby gaming rooms of the Monte Carlo casino; through Elizabeth Foster, an elderly woman unaccountably stuck in Nice throughout World War II; to teenager Abby Green, who took a language course in the city in 1994 and found the topless bathing "liberating."

One American who never visited Nice was Mark Twain. "Travel," he wrote in 1869, "is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness" — but then he never met the hordes following the lock-step of all-inclusive tours. Yet even in Twain's era many observers were aghast that tourism was making places like Nice increasingly dependent on revenues from visitors. Then it was the influx of "ordinary people" stimulated by the coming of the railroad from Paris through Lyon and Marseilles. About a century later, it was decadence and crime, a subject that sufficiently aroused English novelist and long-time Nice resident Graham Greene to write his famous polemic J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice.

Kanigel has compiled a hybrid, neither a lightweight beach book nor a dry work of scholarship. Instead, High Season in Nice is a lively contribution to the literature of travel history. A writing teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he manages to evoke the warm, seductive lure of Nice in the 19th century and the grubby contemporary reality with both sympathy and balance. He also unearths a memorable cast of characters who have helped to make Nice such a troubled paradise.

Kanigel doesn't see a quiet future for the city. Each day at this time of year 170 flights pile into one of Europe's busiest airports. A thousand hotels and 3,000 restaurants cater for the arrivals, who will spend at least $5 billion this year. Most it is true, leave satisfied. But tourism is a delicate beast and, as Kanigel gently points out, Nice has all but exhausted its resources — environment, physical capacity, attractions. Growth is no longer an option. Nice either stabilizes, or diversifies or declines. Thomas Cook has a lot to answer for.

• ROBIN KNIGHT
• A new book tells the story of the Riviera's biggest town