To have a place in the sun is to hold a favourable position: a fair share of success, prosperity or recognition, especially one you feel entitled to and may have had to push for. The phrase carries the picture of people jostling for the sunlit spot while others are left in the shade. In everyday British use it has also taken on a cheerfully literal second sense, meaning a home or holiday somewhere reliably warmer than Britain.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘a place in the sun’?
The expression starts in French, with the mathematician and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). In his Pensees, published after his death, Pascal used a child’s squabble over territory to illustrate how all claims to property begin: “‘This dog is mine,’ said those poor children; ‘that is my place in the sun.’ Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth.” His French phrase was ‘ma place au soleil’, and the earliest English translation, Joseph Walker’s of 1688, rendered it directly as “That’s my place in the Sun”. For Pascal the phrase was a rebuke: staking out your place in the sun was the seed of every land-grab in history.
The modern sense, in which a place in the sun is something to be proudly demanded rather than repented of, owes most to German foreign minister Bernhard von Bulow. Defending the seizure of the Chinese port of Kiaochow in a Reichstag speech on 6th December 1897, he declared that “we do not want to put anyone in our shadow, but we also demand our place in the sun” (‘Platz an der Sonne’). The line was reported in the British press within days and became the catchphrase of Germany’s colonial ambitions; by January 1898 The Times was writing that Germany had “taken her place in the sun”. Pascal would presumably have felt his point about usurpation was being proved rather thoroughly.
The twentieth century softened the phrase back into personal ambition. George Stevens borrowed it, with a heavy dose of irony, for his 1951 film A Place in the Sun, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy in which Montgomery Clift’s social climber is destroyed by his own striving; the film took six Academy Awards. In Britain the literal sense got institutional backing from A Place in the Sun, the Channel 4 property series first broadcast in 2000, which has spent a quarter of a century helping couples swap drizzle for the Costa del Sol. There is, as Ecclesiastes nearly put it, nothing new under the sun.