I attended my first Protestant service by accident. Long story, another time (ok, maybe I can't resist old-looking open gates and passages). So...
The Côte d’Azur was historically very Catholic, but in the late 19th century Saint-Raphaël started attracting wealthy northern Europeans looking for winter sun and healthier air. One of them was a Dutch former military officer turned diamond merchant, Johannes Marius Janszen. In 1881, he built a villa in the Notre-Dame district for his daughter Meryem, who had respiratory problems and was supposed to benefit from the Mediterranean climate.
Next to the villa, he had a private Protestant chapel built because the local Protestant community didn’t really have an official place of worship yet. The chapel was modeled after the royal chapel of Ulriksdal Palace near Stockholm, Sweden. Today it’s known as Temple of Saint-Raphaël and belongs to the Protestant community of East Var. The parish is connected to the Eglise protestante Unie de l'Est-Var.
The villa attached to the chapel ended up passing through several strange lives: it became a winter residence for a Russian aristocrat connected to the Tsar, later it turned into a clinic and the chapel itself was finally bought by the Reformed Church in 1907.
The temple of Saint-Raphaël:
