One of the most beautiful railway lines in France meanders along the coast of the southeastern French Riviera: From Marseille it goes via Toulon to Nice.

For long stretches of the journey, the deep blue of the Côte d'Azur spreads to the right of the tracks and to the left the reddish sandstone of the rocky hinterland, which is occasionally interspersed with olive groves.

How good that the “TGV” high-speed train also has to travel slowly here.

If you have some time, you can get out and stretch your legs on the panoramic paths of the stony headlands, enjoy one of the long beaches or include a stroll through the city with a restaurant in Saint-Raphaël, Cannes and Antibes.

Christian Schubert

Business correspondent in Paris.

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In the past few days, however, another aspect of this railway line has made headlines in France: The Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region decided to no longer allow the regional line to be used by the state railway SNCF, but by its competitor Transdev, one third of which belongs to the German entrepreneurial family Rethmann. For the first time since it was founded in 1937, the SNCF lost its monopoly in regional transport. Soon the first competitors will also arrive on the high-speed lines. The future will be more uncomfortable for SNCF, but perhaps a little richer in the offers for travelers.

Change is a snail in France, say quite a few observers. The French tend to change their circumstances in a more eruptive and revolutionary way, but that doesn't happen often, they say. After seventeen years as a business correspondent for the FAZ in Paris and before moving to Rome, I started looking. Goal: To take stock of how the country has changed. Train stations don't seem a bad starting point for this. They stand for movement, for leaving as well as for arriving, for people who reject standstill.

Appointment in a former station concourse in Paris: When I arrived in the French capital in 2004, parcels and letters were still being packed from the trains onto the trucks in the “Halle Freyssinet” at the Gare d'Austerlitz. This has been the case since 1929. Then the hall fell into disrepair, only a few organizers of parties and fashion shows got lost there. It was only when the French telecom entrepreneur Xavier Niel invested 250 million euros in the renovation on his own account that the next chapter of the hall came about: The start-up center "Station F", which is set up there today, is the largest facility in the world with a thousand companies located there Art.

Roxanne Varza is the director of this French Silicon Valley in the middle of Paris: “Station F has become an integral part of the international start-up scene,” she says. Fittingly, the 36-year-old American grew up in Paolo Alto; the daughter of Iranian parents has also taken French citizenship, and she's dating a Sino-French start-up with whom she has two children. Varza has been heading Station F for six years. The French economy in this place no longer reminds of the sedate mixture of dusty offices that it used to be.The private sector renewal is palpable here - just like in dozens of other start-up centers on the Seine or in the IT school "42" in the seventeenth arrondissement, also founded by billionaire Niel, where young people can program themselves and learn to code.