Controversies and Viewpoints
Page 21
Catharism thus enters secrecy. At the Council of Toulouse, the Inquisition is established in the region. The ‘Occitan issue’, however, remains unresolved.
In 1240, the land of Carcassonne rises up and, in 1242, several Inquisitors are slaughtered in Avignonet (with the news of the massacre infuriating Blanche of Castile487 ). Raymond VII, who had attempted to put together a new anti-French coalition, is vanquished once again. The Cathars seek refuge in the lands of Ariège and the Corbières. In 1243, the siege of Montségur begins.
The Fallen Soul of Montségur
This bizarre citadel is a genuine hot spot. The puy488 (pog in Occitan) is an enormous calcareous bloc leaning towards the east and situated amidst an impressive scenery. The château was built in 1204 in accordance with plans provided by the Cathar clergy, establishing mysterious alignments and spiritual formulas set in stone. In the donjon, the arrow slits that span across opposite walls are, strangely enough, decentred in relation to one another. The result is that the sun can only traverse them from side to side once a year: at the dawn of the summer solstice.
Mr Alain Hubert-Bonnal489 points out:
Nowadays, a small crowd still comes here to watch the sun rise, just as people did back then. Akin to their predecessors, several dozens of curious individuals spend the night inside the castle walls, reconnecting with the eternal solar tradition.
Isolated, starved, and bombarded by perriers, the besieged capitulate after being surrounded for ten whole months. The terms of their surrender are negotiated: those who choose to embrace the Church would be amnestied and the others burned alive.
During the last night of the siege, four men manage to break through the surrounding enemy lines. It is said that they succeeded in concealing what was most precious to the Cathars — their spiritual treasure. Was it the Grail?
On 16th March, 1244, at dawn, a long procession comes out of the château of Montségur. It is comprised of the Cathars that have opted for death, with bishop Bertrand d’en Marti leading the way. He is followed by approximately 200 people, including Ramon de Perelle, the Lord of Montségur, his wife Corba and daughter Esclarmonde. They all mount an immense pyre that has been erected at some distance, in a place that would henceforth be known as the Camp dels Cremats.490 Torches are thrown upon the wood, which quickly catches fire. At the very moment when the flames rise, the army begins to chant the Veni Creator. Montségur is now history.
From this point on, the conquest is very quick. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV uses the Ad Extirpenda bull to grant Inquisitors permission to resort to torture. Arnault, the Pope’s legate, would shout during the attack on Béziers: ‘Kill them all, God will recognise his own!’. The last fortified Cathar bastion, Quéribus, would fall in 1255.
In 1258, Saint Louis has further prisons constructed under the City of Carcassone.
Today, a young Occitan woman affirms:
While violating this land, now in his grasp, the man of the North also violates the woman of the South, a crossbreed of the Sarasin and a diabolical creature. Having been vanquished, the man of the South begins to desire the victor’s blonde, evanescent and inaccessible woman.
In 1300, thirty-five Albigensian notables are accused of heresy. In 1321, a ‘Perfect’, Guillaume Bélibaste, is also burned alive. At this point, however, Occitan independence is already a mere memory: in 1271, upon Alphonse de Poitiers’ death, the County of Toulouse is annexed by France once and for all.
At the start of the fifteenth century, Charles VII takes control of Bordeaux. Montpellier is purchased in 1439 and Montélimar in 1447. The annexation of the Aquitaine follows in 1453, after the battle of Castillon. Next, in 1481, Louis XI claims the Provence region. Finally, Béarn is incorporated into France. Henri IV then declares: ‘Paris is well worth a Mass’.
The Occitan language declines as well. During the 13th century, at the time of the Leys d’amors491 and the floral games492 , one still spoke Occitan below the line that connects Rochefort, Niort and Poitiers. During the fourteenth century, the langue d’oïl takes over the regions of Civray, Montmorillon and most of the lower Charentes. In 1539, the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts replaces Latin with literary French as the official language of the ancient kingdom of the Franks. Clément Marot (1496–1544) declares ‘the relinquishment of the maternal language to embrace the paternal one’, for ‘only the prince’s language pays’.
In his Essays, Montaigne (1533–1592) writes:
My French language finds itself altered, both in its pronunciation and elsewhere, by the barbarity that I myself have devised.
Paris Makes French
Around 1560, a wind of turmoil blows across the South once again, as one witnesses the rebirth of political and religious separatism. Established in the Provence and Dauphiné regions for several centuries, the Waldensians embrace the cause of reformation. In 1571, Protestantism becomes the state religion in Jeanne d’Albret’s493 Béarn. Three years later, a national synod gathers in Nîmes. Reformed churches were, at the time, proportionally more numerous in the South than in the North. Toulouse sinks into heresy again.
Many other 16th- and 17th-century movements attest to the persistence of Occitan particularism: the revolt of the ‘Pétaults’ of Guyenne (1548); the revolt of the ‘Jacques’ (1560); the tax strikes of 1580; the ‘Croquant’ rebellions of Limousin (1595); the Montmorency rebellion in Languedoc; the ‘Casaveus’ revolt of Provence; the proclamation of an independent republic in Marseille (1650); the revolt of the ‘Sabreurs’ of Béarn (around 1650); and the 1670 rebellion of the ‘Camisards’(whose name is derived from the Occitan word camisa, meaning ‘shirt’).
In 1645, the Protestants are excluded from the states of Languedoc and, in 1663, their temples are razed to the ground. Then, in 1685, Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes494 and makes the necessary arrangements for the dreadful ‘dragonnades’495 .
While on a trip in Valence, Racine496 asked for a bedpan. Instead, the servant brought him a chafing dish. He writes:
My need of an interpreter is as great as that of a potential Muscovite in Paris. (Letters from Uzès)
In the 18th century, Montesquieu497 would declare:
It is Paris that makes one French. In its absence, Normandy, Picardy, and the Artois region would be as German as Germany itself. As for the Guyenne, Béarn, and Languedoc regions, they would be just as Spanish as Spain.
In his Historical Review of Occitania, Mr André Dupuy498 tells us that ‘on the eve of 1789, 95% of the Occitan population only spoke the langue d’oc’.
Two Occitan men, acting as the delegates of the Third Estate, dominate the early hours of the Revolution: Abbé Sieyès499 and the Count of Mirabeau. This does not prevent the revolutionaries from pursuing, with increased vigour, the unification undertaken under the monarchy.
The Capetians abolished the Treaty of Verdun (842), which had enabled the inclusion of Provence into Lotharingia. On its part, the night of 4th August, 1789 consecrated the disappearance of the province of Béarn. Abbé Grégoire, a passionate defender of human rights, dreamed of finding the right means to ‘erase all traces of Patois500 ’. Through its struggle against local languages, what the Convention strived for was ‘political provincialism’. This marked the birth of Jacobinism501 .
In 1792, three Occitan men, Guadet, Gensonné and Vergniaud, declare themselves in favour of a ‘federative republic stretching from Lyons to Bordeaux’. This project triggers the quarrel between the Montagnards502 and the Girondins.503
During the 19th century, the establishment of the road network and the subsequent installation of the railway system places Paris at the very centre of everything. The industrial momentum accelerates the rural exodus and compulsory recruitment inaugurates the intermixing of regional milieus. The Hexagon thus takes shape around its capital city, the ‘eccentric donjon’ of the northern half of the country and the soon-to-be development and emigration centre.
The divide, however, remains unchanged. One still contrasts th
e poor France with the wealthy one, the wine of the South with the wheat of the North, the olive tree with the oak, early fruit and vegetables with potatoes, the swing-plough with the plough, and the sheep with the cash cow; perhaps even the ant with the grasshopper.
On 10th December, 1948, at the time of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s election to the Presidency of the French Republic, voters in the Bouches-du-Rhône and Var departments only grant him a 23% and 25% support rate respectively, compared with 75% for the rest of the country. Three years later, the 2nd of December coup leads to turmoil in Toulouse, Limoges and the Languedoc. The movement takes on an insurrectional aspect and hundreds of suspects are deported to Algeria.
In 1860, the County of Nice becomes French once and for all. In 1870, the Ligue du Midi,504 comprising thirteen departments of the South-East, proposes the ‘federalisation’ of democracy.
On 23rd March, 1871, Gaston Crémieux505 proclaims the founding of the Commune of Marseille. On the 24th, it is an outcast from 1852, Emile Digeon, who follows suit in Narbonne, where the 52nd regiment allows the population to disarm its men after having delivered its own officers into the hands of the rebels (Marseille would only be reclaimed on the 4th of April).
While in Toulouse, Taine506 writes the following in his Carnets de voyage:507
My colleagues tell me that the South has always displayed less loyalty than the North.
Staying in the very same city, Michelet508 notes in his Tableau de la France:509
The well-off are Frenchmen; common people, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter, being either Spanish or Moorish.
As for author Huysmans (1848–1907), he rages against Southerners, ‘those walnut-stained, glossy-eyed, chocolate-crushing and garlic-chewing beings!’
A Demarcation Line
The year of 1907 sees huge demonstrations against the viticultural legislation which had (already!) been judged unfavourable to an industry stricken with overproduction, as agitators channel the movement. On the 9th of June, more than 80,000 demonstrators gather in the streets of Montpellier. Monsignor de Babrières, the city’s bishop, opens the cathedral’s doors for them. The leader of the rebellion and the mayor of Narbonne, socialist Ernest Ferroul, boasts about having gone to spit on Simon de Montfort’s grave as a student. Clémenceau510 decides to have the army intervene. Composed of Béziers residents, however, the 17th territorial regiment refuses to open fire. It is on these events that Montéhus511 bases a famous song entitled Salut, salut à vous, braves soldats du 17ème!512 The Revolutionary Communist (Trotskyite) League would then add it to its repertoire.
At the time when Mistral513 was awarded the Nobel Prize, the teachers of the Third Republic declared war upon all ‘Patois’. Mr Gaston Bonheur514 writes:
During my childhood, if one partook in the religion of lost Alsace, it was to the detriment of the langue d’oc, which was deemed a kind of “patois” and banned in our schools. It was my mother who taught me the extremely syntactic and grammatical French that I speak. Fortunately, however, my grandmother held on and only spoke to me in “Patois”. And it was through the lessons given to me by this old peasant of the Corbières region that all of Occitania lodged into me.
Mr Jean Cau, who comes from the Audes region, also remembers:
My father and mother both addressed my grandparents using the equivalent of the formal French “vous” and only spoke to them using the langue d’oc. If my father had ever dared to speak to my grandmother in French and had addressed her using the informal “tu”, I think the ground would have opened up under my own two feet. The same did not apply at school, however; for the secular form of teaching, which was both compulsory and free, held us in check and compelled our minds to relinquish any and all notions of race by arousing shame for the language of our fathers. (La Grande Prostituée. Table Ronde, 1974)
In 1940, France is, once again, cut in half. Mr Henri Espieux writes:
During the Occupation, the Franciens were separated from the Occitans by the famous “demarcation line”. For a long time, we believed that the drawing of this line had been suggested to Hitler by the Romanists around him. Nowadays, however, it is our conviction that the line was actually imposed upon the occupier by the geopolitical realities which we are well familiar with. And it is no miracle if, owing to the very same imperatives, the Resistance’s principal hotbeds (Limousin, Cévennes, Vercors) essentially surfaced across the entire Occitan territory, at a time when the demarcation line had already ceased to exist.
It was in Toulouse, on 27th May, 1943, that the National Resistance Council (CNR) met for the first time, presided by Jean Moulin, an Occitan from Béziers.
In London, the people around General de Gaulle grew increasingly concerned over the implantation of the FTPs (The Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français) in the South of France — Guingouin, the head of the Resistance in Limoges, was a member of the French Communist Party, and so was Ravanel in Toulouse. There were even some elements that hinted at the creation of a ‘Soviet Republic of the South of France’. In 1943, Simone Weil515 went as far as to write:
Current collaborators espouse the same attitude towards the new Europe which a German victory would forge as the people of Provence, the Bretons, the Alsatians and the people of Franche-Comté are required to embrace with regard to their past and their land’s conquest at the hands of the king of France. (L’enracinement516 )
A year later, the purge takes on particularly intense proportions in the South, where a sort of ‘Popular Republic of the Maquis517 ’ is established from the end of August to the end of November 1944. In Toulouse, Nimes, and Montpellier, certain animosities reach far back. It is a war involving the very same people.
It is a tradition of dissent has survived from this past. Mr Guy Héraud518 writes the following in L’Europe des ethnies519 (Presses d’Europe, 1963):
It does seem to be the case that the specific voting preferences that surfaced in both the South and the Centre of France during the various referendums of the Fifth Republic are to be attributed to certain constants of the meridional personality.
The Obstinate Permanency of the ‘Refractory’ South
The ‘Red South’ actually emerged as early as the general elections of 1849. Mr Michel Le Bris520 specifies:
If one were to examine the various French election results, one would notice that in 1849, 1871, 1965 and 1968, the South of France always displayed great obstinacy in shaping the very same red bloc upon the French map.
Of the twenty departments in which the majority voted against the proposed direct election of the President in the constitutional referendum of 28th October, 1962, a total of eighteen lie south of the Loire. Two others, namely the Indre and the Allier departments, are tangent to it. ‘It was as if the lands of written law had displayed a more scrupulous sort of respect for constitutional laws than the lands of customary law’. The results of the ‘Algerian’ referendums of 8th January, 1961 and 8th April, 1962 were analogous.
Mr Robert Lafont asserts:
The Occitan hostility to the violent reconquest of Algeria was basically the negative film image of the consciousness of a colonised people that could not present itself as such. (La revendication occitane521 )
During the presidential elections of 1965, Mr François Mitterrand522 was nicknamed the ‘Occitan President’. In the first round, he claimed first place in twenty departments, of which seventeen were southern ones; in the second, the total was twenty southern departments out of twenty-four.
During the referendum of 27th April, 1969, which led to General de Gaulle’s retirement, the departments that voted favourably were all situated in French Flanders, Brittany and Alsace-Lorraine. In June 1969, Mr Pompidou was the ‘candidate of the North’, where he only failed to obtain less than his first-round national average in twenty-seven departments out of sixty-two, compared to twenty-one out of thirty-two in Occitania.
This is all because the South and the North do not perceive political participati
on in the same manner. Liberal democracy originated from Northern Europe, but the ‘party regime’ was born on the shores of the Mediterranean. The South is more ‘politicised’, and people adhere more often to major political formations there, especially those of the opposition. The ‘Nordic’ electorate, by contrast, votes for specific men and abhors parties. The Gaullist movement remained in power for about fifteen years but, proportionally to its own electorate, never included a large number of adherents. The man of the North is a man of consent and ‘monarchy’. The man of the South, on the other hand, espouses protestation and ‘democracy’.
Mr Grosclaude523 affirms:
Everyone knows that there is a North whose votes are Right-oriented and a South where voters lean towards the Left.
He then adds:
The reason for this is that the South of France is less inclined to trust one single man, even if his policy is, or seems to be, a Leftist one. One is under the impression that the North of France responds more readily with a “yes”, whatever the question asked. The South, on the other hand, is more reticent and more rebellious when it comes to giving a favourable response, no matter what the question may be.
And here is Mr Philippe Sénart’s524 diagnosis:
The South is refractory and, as we tend to say, antagonistic.
The workforces of the Socialist and Radical Parties are clearly ‘regionalised’ in Occitania. Mr Jean Cassou525 has, in fact, traced the ‘birthplace’ of socialism to ‘Jaurès’ fatherland’, which is also that of Gambetta, Louis Blanc, Jules Vallès, Elisée Reclus, Blanqui, Combes, Jules Guesde, Arago, Ramadier, Daladier, Paul Reynaud, Vincent Auriol, Gaston Defferre, Edgar Faure, Roger Garaudy, Georges Séguy and Jacques Duclos.