From the perspective of the electoral results of the past two decades, an ‘Occitan Assembly’ established within the framework of our federal institutions would have yielded, almost uninterruptedly, a parliamentary majority oriented towards the Centre-Left. In 1967, its ranks would have included twenty-five Gaullists, twelve Centrists, sixty-four Leftists and Centre-Leftists and fifteen Communists.
There is, of course, also a ‘Southern Right’, but it has hardly anything in common with the ‘consenting’ Right of the major electorates of French Flanders, Picardy, Alsace or Brittany. It is a protesting sort of Right that feels naturally at ease when in the opposition. Its representatives include Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet of Provence, Pierre Poujade of Quercy and Tixier-Vignancour of Béarn.
During the presidential elections of 1965, the first nineteen ‘Tixierist’ departments were all located in Occitania, a phenomenon that cannot be accounted for through the mere influx of repatriates.
Every year, in Baux-de-Provence (previously in Montmajour), a royalist celebration is organised by the Provençal Order, attracting thousands of participants. Mr Philippe Sénart writes:
Occitania’s ultimate opportunity to claim its freedom may have been embodied by the ultra-royalist resistance of Toulouse against king Louis XVIII, in 1815. Did they not intend to proclaim the duke of Aquitaine king of Occitania?
It is against this backdrop that the Occitan Movement arose, a movement which, as a literary school, dates back to the Félibrige,526 which was founded in 1854 by three Provençal authors: Aubanel, Roumanille and Mistral.
From the Félibrige to the Occitan Movement
The Félibrige’s primary purpose is to allow the Provençal language to reclaim its position of literary language. The ‘Félibres’ extol the Provence region, its folklore, popular celebrations and climate. When praising the sun, they sometimes undergo the existential experience of some sort of neopaganism (Mistral: ‘The sun makes me sing’). What they also strive for, however, is to ‘establish a national Provençal consciousness’, as proclaimed by the Armana prouvençau of 1867.
Mistral, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1904, declares:
I am not an ambitious man, yet my entire ideal lies in the resurrection of the Provençal fatherland, crushed by 500 years of Parisian centralisation.
In 1859, he writes the following in Mireille:
Those who have never lived in the South, and especially amongst our rural populations, could never have the slightest idea of the incompatibility, insufficiency, and poverty of the Northern language with regard to the traditions, needs and organisation of Southerners. Born under a rainy climate, characterised by a primness that mirrors the etiquette of French courts and specially forged for higher social classes, this inflexible language is naturally averse to free attitudes, fiery temperaments, rustic customs and the Provençal people’s vivacious and imaged speech. And nothing could ever change that.
In 1878, republican félibres would accuse Mistral of embracing separatism.
In 1887, a journal entitled Occitania is launched in Montpellier (this title would subsequently be readopted several times). In 1911, the Félibrige chooses to have the terms ‘Occitania’ and ‘Occitan’ respectively replace ‘Provence’ and ‘Provençal’ when referring to all langue d’oc regions. In 1919, an ‘Occitan school’ is established in Avignonet at baron Desazars de Montgalhard’s, who then becomes its very first ‘capiscol’527 . In 1923, the Almanach Occitan becomes the organ of the League of the Meridional Fatherland, whose manifesto opens with the following words: ‘What we want is the recognition of all that is Occitan’.
Nevertheless, the Félibrige, which was divided into ‘maintenance units’ and governed by a few ‘majorals’528 and a single ‘capoulié’,529 soon came across as some sort of conservatory. Wearing Ascot ties and ‘gardian’530 hats, the félibres gathered on specific dates so as to sing the Coupo Santo531 . During the war, they supported the state of Vichy, which fought against all kinds of autonomism but longed to resuscitate the ‘old provinces’.
Upon the Liberation of France, the Occitan movement made a sharp left turn, breaking with folkloric and picturesque themes.
Mr Jean-Michel Franco, a student at the university of Aix-en-Provence, states that ‘what is most harmful to the South are conventional ethnotypes: the ridiculous Gascons with their rough accent, the myth of Matamoros532 , the lazy Corsicans, the boastful people of Marseille, Marius and Olive,533 Tartarin,534 pastis and pétanque! Indeed, what are tall stories if not a colonial joke?’.
In 1945, René Nelli535 and Ismaël Girard, the former director of Oc magazine (whose first issue came out in 1923), founded the Institute of Occitan Studies (IEO) in Toulouse. Inspired by a certain pre-war project (namely the Institute of Catalan Studies, established at the start of the 20th century), it originated directly from the Resistance. Its first president was Mr Jean Cassou, a writer, art historian and former commissary of the Republic in Toulouse, who, at the time, sympathised with the French Communist Party (P.C.). The second one was none other than Mr Robèrt Lafont, in 1951.
Displaying dishevelled hair and a ‘Mao’ collar, Mr Lafont, a professor at the Paul-Valéry University of Montpellier, is the author of a large number of essays and novels (La phrase occitane536 , Mistral ou l’illusion537 , Phonétique Provençale538 ). He has recently published La révolution régionaliste539 (Gallimard, 1967), Sur la France540 (Gallimard, 1968), Renaissance du Sud541 (Gallimard, 1970), Clefs pour l’Occitanie542 (Seghers, 1971), Lettre ouverte aux Français d’un Occitan543 (Albin Michel, 1973), La revendication occitane (Flammarion, 1974), and others. Acting as the director of Viure magazine, he is one of the principal theoreticians of Leftist regionalism.
He declares:
I am, indeed, the heir of both Jaurès and the Jacobins. Nowadays, however, the Jacobins would be in favour of autonomy.
He then adds:
Around 1954–55, we found ourselves facing a necessity of rupture. The communists, for instance, used the argument of the elimination of Occitan nationalism to raise the issue of the “unity of the French nation” and reject what they termed “the economic impasse”, meaning the interest that we attached to specific problems.
And yet, it was on the fringes of the IEO that the Occitan Nationalist Party (PNO) surfaced in 1959. Its founder, Mr François Fontan, made his debut in Action française before frequenting anarchist and Trotskyist milieus. During the war of Algeria, he took part in assisting the FLN544 and the desertion networks. He then settled in Italy. A neo-Freudian disciple of Wilhelm Reich, he also sides with ethnicism and ‘revolutionary nationalism’.
The PNO would be represented in Paris by P. Maclouf, the director of the Lu Lugar (‘Morning Star’) newspaper, who would then go on to join the ‘Volem viure al païs’ committees at the end of 1973.
In 1962, the IEO gives birth to an Occitan Committee of Studies and Action (COEA), which then undertakes to attack the PNO and Mr Fontan, whose ‘reprehensible behaviour’ and ‘Gaullist tendencies’ it denounces. Mr Robert Lafont becomes its Secretary General.
From 1963–64 onwards, this Committee presents an ‘action programme’ that it submits to various Leftist clubs. For this purpose, it participates in the creation of the Convention of Republican Institutions. In 1966, Mr Michel Rocard, then leader of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU), draws inspiration from its principles so as to formulate the contents of a brochure that he titles Décoloniser la province.545 In it, he adopts the COEA’s three watchwords: Occitania, regionalism, socialism.
In 1967, poet Robert Allan launches an Occitan Socialist Party (PSO) in attempt to find a middle path between the PNO and the COEA. The party would only last a few months.
‘Resurrection’
The events of May 1968 trigger a series of ‘realisations’ in the Occitan Movement. One witnesses the emergence of Occitan Action Committees (CAOs) which, in turn, give rise to various newspapers and small groupings: Lutte occitane546 , Fédératio
n anarchiste-communiste d’Occitanie547 (which came about through a local scission of the Anarchist Revolutionary Organisation), Esquerra catalana548 , Action régionale catalane549 , Occitania nova550 , etc.
The most important one is Occitan Struggle (‘Lucha Occitana’), which was founded in 1971 by elements originating from both the CAOs and the PSU and took over from the COEA in an almost official manner.
Its president, forty-two-year-old Mr Gaston Bazalgues, is a professor at the Faculty of Letters in Montpellier who is in ‘touch’ with the Parisian parties. It is also said that he has found in militarism a distraction from his own personal problems. One of his collaborators, Mr Roland Péquou, is the president of the movement’s Coordination Committee. Very hostile to the PNO but rather favourable to the IEO, Occitan Struggle (O.S.) intends to fight against ‘centrist regionalism’ and keep ‘all nationalistic contamination’ at bay, while pronouncing itself in favour of both autonomism and a rather vague sort of ‘class organisation’.
On 6th May, 1971, Occitan Struggle organised a ‘march’ on the Larzac plateau: 3,000 people responded to its appeal. Local actions have since multiplied. During the autumn of 1972, the peasants of Larzac brought their sheep to graze upon the Champ de Mars,551 at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Soon afterwards, they constructed a ‘wild sheep pen’. On 24th July, 1973, on the summer solstice, Occitan Struggle gathered 5,000 youths on the slopes of the rock of Montségur in order to celebrate the ‘Occitan resurrection’, seven centuries after the Cathar surrender.
Bearing within itself highly heterogeneous tendencies, Occitan struggle has been the focus of several ‘hijack’ attempts, particularly on the part of Maoists and currents stemming from the PSU’s Left.
During its Lille congress in 1971, the PSU had created a Commission of National Minorities headed by Serge Mallet. In July 1973, shortly before passing away, the latter came up with the project of forming a ‘unified Occitan socialist party’ that was meant to gather, on a common basis, the militants of Occitan Struggle, the PNO, the Communist Party’s oppositionists, the Occitan sympathisers of Leftist parties, the members of the CFDT (French Democratic Confederation of Labour), former FTPs,552 etc.
The group calling itself Pòble d’Òc was excluded from this gathering, since the Leftists accused it of bringing ‘disguised fascists’ together. Its main leader, thirty-seven-year-old solicitor Mr Richard Roudier,553 declares himself in favour of a ‘free Occitania’ and opposed to ‘class collaboration’. He is, however, reticent with regard to Marxism. The Algerian affair has left its mark on him. Pòble d’Òc identifies with a ‘libertarian’ Occitan tradition; which leads it to reject the ‘traditional French Left’. It was the militants of this very group who, in 1974, assaulted and booed Mr Mitterrand on the Larzac plateau, labelling him a ‘political hijacker’. The director of the Pòble d’Òc newspaper (formerly Jeune Languedoc) is Mr Jean-Louis Lin554 from Montpellier.
Ethnic Personality
In 1972–73, the viticultural movement also became an Occitan movement, and has remained so since. ‘Not for political reasons, but ethnic ones’, Mr André Dupuy specifies.
There is a certain newspaper that played a significant role in this evolution: The Echo des Corbières monthly, which presents itself as the ‘opinion page’ of the Viticultural Action Committees (CAVs). Its founder, Mr Henri Fabre, is a former partisan of French Algeria and someone who enjoys great popularity in the Aude department.
Another spokesman for the CAVs, Mr Emmanuel Maffre-Baugé, who also happens to be the grandson of a Félibrige ‘majoral’, declares:
I am not an Occitan in the revolutionary sense of the word. I am, however, as much of an Occitan as I have been this land’s son for centuries, through my own kin.
Standing before an immense crowd that had gathered on the Peyrou esplanade in Montpellier on 17th March, 1975, Mr Maffre-Baugé screams out, ‘Awaken, Occitan people’! A few days later, 60,000 wine-growers invade the city of Sète and chant the Coupo Santo. Mr Maffre-Baugé continues:
Oh, people of Oc! Mediterranean people! My people! The time will come when we shall claim the right to our own parliament and govern our own affairs!
Later on, in February 1976, he would write in L’Echo des Corbières:
If it genuinely longs to become the focus of credibility, the Occitan land must confront and accept several thought currents. It must neither be the land of a minority of long-haired idealists nor a privileged place for notables to gather. It must bestow upon each of its sons the proof of his ethnic personality, the vocation of his specificity and a taste for community.
Beginning in 1974, it became obvious that the extreme Left, was, despite its efforts, unable to take charge of the viticultural movement. Occitan Struggle proceeded to direct itself towards ‘Gramscian culturalism’, while its centre of gravity shifted towards the regions of Provence and Nice. Leftists Daniel Chatelain and Pierre Tafani write:
Despite espousing a different style compared to the COEA, Occitan Struggle has failed to become anything but a regional pressure group whose only pretence is to strive for “the intellectual and moral reformation of large masses” from the perspective of an enigmatic sort of cultural revolution. (Qu’est-ce qui fait courir les autonomistes?555 Stock, 1976)
Faced with Occitan Struggle’s failure and supported by P. Maclouf, Mr Robert Lafont attempts to appropriate Serge Mallet’s project. On the occasion of the presidential elections of 1974, he launches the ‘Volem viure al païs’ committees. The latter describe themselves as ‘socialist, self-managing and autonomist Occitans’ (one notices, however, that they do make certain concessions towards nationalism). An individual brought into the region from Paris itself strives to cleanse them, albeit unsuccessfully: Mr Michel Le Bris, the former manager of the Cause du people newspaper and a man who, in addition to his collaboration with Libération, acted as the organ of the former Proletarian Left (the ‘Mao-Spontex’ of May 1968). The book that he published through Gallimard (as part of the ‘Savage France’ collection run by Mr Jean-Paul Sartre) is entitled Occitanie: volem viure!556 and ends with a quote by an unexpectedly Occitan figure: Mao Zedong.
In 1975, an Occitan Popular Movement (MPO) is launched in Agen. Its purpose is to unite all the tendencies, without ‘imposing upon anyone any sort of ideology with the potential to weaken the great momentum of ethnic solidarity’.
Free from political action in the strict sense of the word, what the Institute of Occitan Studies deals with henceforth are, above all, pedagogical and literary issues. Its current president is Mr Pierre Bec, a university professor and a specialist in Occitan medieval lyricism. Alongside him, one encounters Mr Yves Rouquette, a forty-one-year-old history professor and the Institute’s vice-president, as well as his brother, Mr Jean Larzac, a clergyman in Viviers.
The Ambiguity of Occitan ‘National Regionalism’
Considering linguistics to be ‘the foundation of Occitania’s legitimacy’ (R. Lafont), the IEO publishes an informational bulletin and strives to unify all Occitan languages. Mr Rouquette explains:
A language is not solely a literature. What it represents instead is the very breath of a people. And as for the famous “southern accent”, it is merely a matter of pronouncing French words with the accent of another language — Occitan. The words have been lost, but the musicality remains!
Questioned by Jacques Chancel557 on 1st February, 1974, Mr Rouquette had this to add:
What constitutes my personality is not French. My parents, incidentally, made love in Occitan, and I see no reason not to imitate them.
On his part, Mr Lafont attributes the sterilisation afflicting Occitan culture to ‘conquest’. Besides, ‘Oc literature is largely reactionary’, he declares.
In Toulouse, Privat Editions’ second youth came about through its publishing of books with a focus on regionalism. Mr Michel Roquebert runs the ‘Occitan Domain’ collection there. As for the IEO, it has launched a collection of paperbacks written in Occitan, with
fifteen volumes released each year. There are also other publishing houses — 4 Vertats (‘Four Truths’) and Cap e cap (‘One on one’).558
It is, however, in the music sector that the Occitan rebirth has particularly been felt.
Small, dark and stocky, thirty-eight-year-old Claude Marti is the most famous of the new troubadours. He has published, through Stock editions, a book entitled Homme d’Oc.559 His Leftist wife is said to have influenced him. This is what he sings:
One does not hunt crows with a butterfly net.
There is also Patric, a thirty-year-old student in Montpellier who began a successful life in Paris; thirty-six-year-old Pèire-Andrièu Delbeau, who sings in Gascon and has lived in a resin collector’s hut; Mans de Breish, a former employee of the Crédit Agricole of Carcassonne; as well as Beltramme, Morcheoine, Broglia, Los Caminaires, Longamai, Mauris, Gérard Franco, Miquela, Daniel Daumas, Maria Roanet, Toni Rodriguez, Bramaric, and many others.
It was with them in mind that the IEO created the ‘Ventadour’ cooperative; indeed, there are who some live in dread of being ‘hijacked’.
The Occitan movement is nowadays the most markedly Left-oriented of all regionalist movements; or, to be more precise, the one in which the Leftist faction of regionalism enjoys the greatest representation. Will this always be the case? The issue arouses numerous comments.
Some ‘ultra-Marxists’ have criticised the ‘interclass ambiguity’ of regionalism. Paul Alliès, a member of the Communist Revolutionary League in Montpellier, states:
It is impossible to grant Occitan awareness a reality of its own without a class basis. If it does exist, of course, it will be formulated by the workers themselves, within their organs of power.
Likewise, Mr Chatelain and Tafani, both of whom are ferociously opposed to ‘national-regionalism’, denounce the persistence of a ‘national ideology’ within ethnicist demands. They point out the fact that Mr Lafont has been labelled by Emmanuel Le Roy-Ladurie560 as ‘a Maurras of the extreme Left’!
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 22
