Marseille, France—The cruise ships are almost never out of sight from Chantal Rouet’s bedroom window. Up on a hill in the northern neighborhood of L’Estaque overlooking a chunk of Marseille’s sprawling port, the 58-year-old painter can sometimes count several passing through every day: gargantuan floating hotels—more than 1,000 feet long and 100 feet high—spewing their dark fumes into the dry Mediterranean air, even once they’ve docked.

While Rouet has lived here since 1991, she says that, in the last few years, she has increasingly felt some of the symptoms commonly associated with air pollution. “The last few days, for instance, I’ve woken up feeling fatigued, like I was out at a party,” she said. “I feel nauseated. And I get headaches. Those are the recurring symptoms.”

In the spring of 2020, at the peak of France’s first Covid-19 lockdown, Rouet decided she’d had enough. After spending weeks observing docked cruise ships while confined to a one-kilometer radius from her home, she got in touch with similarly minded neighbors, determined to do something about the pollution visibly billowing into their city. That June, they draped a banner on a nearby bridge overlooking the train tracks with a provocative message: “In Marseille, breathing kills.”

“It became kind of an obsession,” she told The Nation. “I told myself, ‘Instead of getting stressed out, I’m going to take action.’”

The slogan may sound incendiary, but Rouet and her neighbors did have a point. According to a 2016 study from the national public health agency, the pollution from particulate matter is responsible for just over 1,000 deaths in the Marseille metropolitan area every year—and according to the state-commissioned regional air quality observatory, the city’s nitrogen oxide levels remain well above the safe limits recommended by the World Health Organization. While these emissions come from a multitude of sources, maritime transit plays a major role. A June 2023 study from the prominent Brussels-based NGO Transport & Environment found that the 75 cruise ships that visited Marseille last year emitted more nitrogen oxide than a third of the city’s entire fleet of 369,000 registered passenger vehicles—and nearly twice as many sulfur oxides, another group of toxic gases.

In 2021, Rouet and her neighbors started circulating a petition calling on authorities to speed up their planned electrification of the docks within Marseille’s city limits. As it stands, this part of the port is slated to supply power to two cruise ships by 2025—and allowing ships to run on electricity instead of dirty marine fuel when docked will almost certainly save lives.

But these days, Rouet has come around to a more radical position. She recognizes that the port plays an integral role in the region’s economy—with ferries shuffling passengers across the Mediterranean Sea and container ships moving billions of euros of goods through the much larger wharves outside of city limits—but she thinks the cruise ships need to go.

“Cruises don’t serve any purpose,” she said as the morning sun filtered through her kitchen windows, hinting at another sweltering August afternoon. “The container ships and the ferries benefit everyone, but the cruises are benefiting the shipowners and then the people who save up to afford a cruise. It’s entertainment, and it’s entertainment that’s filled with completely ridiculous things, like an ice-skating rink on a ship. I mean, how can we authorize that?”

That point of view is increasingly common in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, as well as other cruise hubs across the Mediterranean like Venice and Barcelona. Some residents are calling for stricter regulations to tackle air pollution such as limiting visits during peak pollution hours and tightening emissions caps—but more militant voices are calling for an end to the industry altogether. Launched in Marseille last May, and inspired by similar initiatives in Venice and Barcelona, the direct action-oriented group Stop Croisières (Stop Cruises) has gained traction with a bold and simple argument: Given the advanced state of the climate crisis, it is madness for cruises to exist at all.

As a couple of activists from Stop Croisières explained at a downtown café, their ambitions extend beyond the shores of Marseille. “For me, the goal is honestly to stop cruise ships around the world,” said Lucie, an air pollution researcher who declined to provide her last name for professional reasons.