They remark that ‘at the very moment when the nationalistic and chauvinistic history taught in state schools faces its own demise, it commits itself to the (hi)stories that regional ideologists tell both small and big children’ (op. cit.).
The term ‘regional colonialism’ surfaced in December 1961, during the miner strike of Decazeville (Aveyron). The event caused quite a stir. Robert Lafont writes:
It is in Decazeville that … both the Félibrige and the series of ideological defeats suffered by Occitanism genuinely came to an end.
The term is, however, far from having gained unanimous acceptance. A young doctor from Toulouse declares:
This expression is absurd. The members of extreme Left parties use it for the purposes of amalgamation and in order to awaken the memory of anticolonial struggles; but the problem that arises here is different.
The opportunity to conduct a struggle ‘against tourism’ has also given rise to polemics. In 1967–68, the development of the Languedoc-Rousillon coast (the ‘Great Clod’ complex in Fos-sur-Mer) was supported by a slogan — ‘A New Florida to Be’. The Occitans responded to it in a most abrupt manner:
Industrial Europe will have to find another region for people to tan their arses!
Mr Lafont writes:
Not being a productive sort of activity, tourism does nothing to alter the structural inferiority of underdeveloped regions. Instead, it reinforces their economic “deadweight” by diverting investments, sedating regional consciousness, weighing down the inactive proportion of the population, and keeping the workforce busy with unproductive tasks which, at times, are parasitic.
A young engineer from Marseille declares.
Provençal drumming, garlic mayonnaise and farandole — it’s all past now. We will not have anyone come and look at us the way they do with the Indians that dance in their reserves. When folklore turns into a show, it’s because tradition is dead.
In his Nouveaux Cathares pour Montségur,561 novelist Saint-Loup remarks:
Folklore embodies the shame of an ethnic group that is still alive yet no longer dares affirm its own sovereignty.
Mr Jacques Ressaire, the PNO’s secretary for the Provençal region, says:
We are not xenophobic. We do not wish to reject foreigners. You must, however, understand our situation. In the summer, our cities become the theatre of demonstrations that express the loss of our culture, attracting a clientele that is completely unaware of our problems.
In the eyes of a second-year student from Montpellier, however, ‘such events constitute genuine provocations’. He expands on things:
The tragedy that has struck the Occitan movement lies in the fact that it has fallen into the hands of extreme-Left militants who hope to dominate public opinion through it. If they rely on Occitania, it is only for tactical reasons: the smaller the political ensembles, the easier they are to control. In point of fact, excesses always feed off each other — Jacobinism plays right into the hands of separatism and vice versa. What is necessary is for us to break this vicious circle and impose a third solution.
In Bordeaux, a faculty assistant adds:
When we say “Volem viure al païs”, what we mean is that we want the Occitan personality to be recognised. The fact that some believe this can be achieved by embracing such a depersonalising doctrine as Marxism is paradoxical. Occitanism is what makes us different from one another. Marxism, on the other hand, represents universalism and internationalism. Between the two currents, there is a contradiction that some conceal but none can reduce.
Anarchy Within Anarchy
Mr Robert Lafont has also written that ‘although there is no great bourgeoisie in Occitania, middle classes abound. If Leftists find themselves unable to propose a socialistic regional project, there could still be a fascist Occitania’.
In order for this to happen, the South would have to achieve unity, a unity that remains completely out of reach. In spite of all efforts, of the ‘regional Jacobinism’ pervading autonomist movements, the Occitan unrest is still limited to the areas surrounding Toulouse and Montpellier. Catalonia, the Basque region and especially Corsica have their own specific issues. The inhabitants of Bordeaux, on their part, seem to have other concerns. As for the people of Provence, who were, at first, successively conquered by the Romans, the Visigoths, the Burgundians, the Ostrogoths, the Franks of Neustria and Austrasia, and the Teutons, then once again by the Burgundians, who were followed by the counts of Barcelona, Toulouse and Anjou, it is rather unlikely that they would now wish to find themselves under the control of the heirs of Catharism.
Born in Pertuis (Vaucluse), Mirabeau described his region in the following manner:
Disorder within disorder, incoherence within incoherence, anarchy within anarchy.
*
Clefs pour l’Occitanie, an essay by Robert Lafont. Seghers, 269 pages.
Lettre ouverte d’un Français aux Occitans, an essay by Robert Lafont. Albin Michel, 224 pages.
Le Sud et le Nord. Dialectique de la France562 , a series of essays edited by Robert Lafont. Privat, Toulouse, 249 pages.
Renaissance du Sud. Essai sur la littérature occitane au temps de Henri IV563 , an essay by Robert Lafont. Gallimard, 312 pages.
Histoire de l’occitanie564 , an essay by Henri Espieux. Cap e cap, 247 pages.
Occitanie: volem viure!, an essay by Michel Le Bris. Gallimard, 366 pages.
L’Occitanie et la lutte des classes,565 an essay by Paul Alliès. Maspéro, 48 pages.
Petite encyclopédie occitane,566 an essay by André Dupuy. Saber, 293 pages.
Nouveaux cathares pour Montségur, a novel by Saint-Loup. Presses de la Cité, 382 pages.
Albigeois et cathares,567 an essay by Alain Hubert-Bonnal. Lieu dit, 128 pages.
L’épopée cathare,568 an essay by Ferdinand Niel. PUF, 126 pages.
Occitanie libre!,569 an essay published by the PNO. Cap e cap, 70 pages.
Le petit livre de l’Occitanie, a series of essays edited by Jean Larzac. 4 Vertats, 250 pages (second edition by Maspéro, 213 pages).
Historique de l’Occitanie,570 an essay edited by André Dupuy. Alain Nouvel (P.O. Box 129, 34004 Montpellier Cédex), 159 pages.
***
In his Procès de l’Occitanisme571 (L’Astrado, Toulon, 1975), Mr Louis Bayle, the manager of ‘L’Astrado provençal’ magazine (2 Vincent-Allègre street, 83100 Toulon), strongly objects to the separatist tendencies of the current Occitan movement; all from a regionalist and ‘Mistralian’ perspective. He contends that the ‘Occitan nation’ is an illusory viewpoint, specifying that the words ‘Occitania’ and ‘Occitan’ are, in themselves, ‘pure barbarisms’ from the Languedocian phonetical point of view. In the conclusion, he expresses his wish for the Félibrige to ‘reclaim its initial vocation’ (and ‘sacrifice its amusements’) and for Occitanism to ‘renounce all political, partisan or Jacobine activity’. The book also comprises a circular by Mr Pierre Bonnaud and Jean-Claude Rivière whose purpose is to create an Association of Langue d’Oc Teachers.
*
The Flemish
In 1973, the municipality of Dunkerque proceeded to rename about twenty streets. We now have a Leughenaer Street (the street of the ‘lying’ beacon), a Dyck Street (Dyke Street), a Bazennes Street (the street of the Baas’ wife, i.e. the seafaring fisherman-skipper’s wife), a Michiel de Swaen Street, and many others.
A Lille student explains:
This constitutes a sort of return to the sources. All of it, however, has come rather too late, because the Flemish language has been losing ground incessantly. Our region has even lost its own name! One speaks of Normandy, Provence and Béarn, but around here, all we are is the “North”, meaning a mere point on a map.
As an indirect consequence, the term ‘French Netherlands’ is making a comeback into our everyday language. Taken in its general meaning, what it designates is French Flanders, as well as the Artois, Hainaut, Boulon and Cambrésis communes and regions.
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It is a ‘flat land’ with houses of remarkable cleanliness, market places and belfries, pediments with stairs, brick buildings whose colour is reminiscent of dry rust and ripe fruit, a pervading smell of beer, countryside canals, and grass-covered dunes.
The area has been inhabited since prehistoric times, but it was during the 6th century that Germanic populations established themselves there.
Mr Henri Platelle, a professor at the Free University of Lille, writes:
The Germanisation of the western part of Pas de Calais and Flanders is particularly accounted for by the invasions that swept in from overseas, and not by the impact of the Salian Franks who, from within their encampment of Campine, chose to head towards Tournai and Cambrai and then lower, towards the Somme river. They were tribes who originated from the coastal areas of the North Sea in Germany or immigrants who had come from England during the seventh century and Germanised the Flanders and Boulon regions. The name litus saxonicum (“Saxon coast”), which this coastline bore around 400 A.D., is a sign of the very pressure that lasted for a long time. (Histoire des Pays-Bas français572 )
The names given to the area attest to massive settlement. It was Saint Eligius573 who, around 646, built the church around which Dunkerque would be born — duyne, meaning ‘hill’ (Celtic: duno, Latin: dunum), and kerke, i.e. ‘church’ (German: kirche).
The new arrivals brought with them a Frankish dialect comprised of Frankian, Frisian and Saxon elements and related to the ‘Low German’ (Nederduitsch) family of eastern and southern Germanic languages. This group includes the now extinct Lombardic language, the Plattdeutsch spoken on the northern plains of Germany, the Dutch language, Afrikaans and Flemish.
During the 7th century, the Frankish language reached the banks of the river Seine.
‘Louis the Debonair574 was forced to put the Bible into Teuton verses and Charles the Bald575 sent monks from Ferrières to Pruym so that they could familiarise themselves with the Germanic language’, Louis de Baecker576 reminds us (in Les Flamands de France577 ).
The backward surge commenced in the 9th century with evangelisation. When, in 912, Viking leader Rollon (Hrolfr), to whom Charles the Simple578 had handed over control of the Duchy of Normandy, presented himself before the king and exclaimed ‘By Got!’ (meaning ‘By God’, an expression that resulted in the word ‘bigot’ in the French language), the king’s assistants all burst into laughter. An interpreter had to be brought in. Mr Platelle adds:
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Romanisation was a fait accompli all the way to Calais, Andres, Ardres, Audruicq, Eperlecques, and Saint-Omer.
In the 15th century, the Great Netherlands represented a political, cultural and ethnic unit that comprised the seventeen provinces (including the contemporary North and Pas-de-Calais) as well as the north-west of the Somme. To designate this common linguistic sphere, the word diets (Low Dietsch dialects) was used. According to A. Van Loey579 (La langue néerlandaise au pays flamand.580 Office de publicité, Brussels, 1945), the word ‘Dutch’ did not surface until 1514, as part of a book published in Anvers.
The son and successor of John the Fearless,581 Philip the Good582 allows Burgundian power to enjoy extraordinary progress. In 1428, he is acknowledged as the ruwaert, meaning the governor of Hainaut, whose countess he forces to abdicate in 1433. In 1477, however, the death of Charles the Bold583 puts an end to the dynasty’s astonishing ascent.
Two centuries later, the Treaty of Münster separates the North of the Netherlands from the South; whereas the former becomes independent, the latter remains under Spanish domination.
Professor Meijer of the University of London states:
The North then evolved into the independent Dutch Republic, experiencing a well-defined national identity as well as a flourishing culture in an atmosphere of liberty and relative tolerance. In the South, on the other hand, the Counter-Reformation smothered the Dutch culture, so to speak. A northern, heretical and rebellious language, Dutch was relegated to a background position and became the language of the household. It was replaced by French in terms of literary and cultural language in the broad sense of the word. (Septentrion number 1, 1975)
Through the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668, Louis XIV proceeded to annex coastal Flanders once and for all. Jean Baert (Bart), a ‘privateer’ of the ‘Royal Navy’, is ennobled in 1694. He had previously served under admiral De Ruyter, the commander of the Dutch fleet.
In 1830, with the failure of William I’s584 attempt to bring about the reunification of the Great Netherlands, the South (i.e. Brussels and its region) rebels and embraces secession. Belgium is thus born.
Language and Customs
From the perspective of customs and language, the situation took much longer to evolve. Spoken in most of the Artois region and far to the south of the Lys in the Middle Ages, the Flemish language was driven back north, mainly after the Revolution. The examination of inscriptions carved into gravestones even leads us to believe that the higher social classes were not fully francised until the 19th century.
In the middle of the previous century,585 Louis de Baecker, two of whose ‘classical’ works have recently been reedited, undertook to identify the ‘archaisms’ that are still observable today; his harvest was plentiful. He writes:
We, the Flemish of France, have preserved intact the language of our Frankish ancestors, the old language of the founders of the ancient French monarchy. This Germanic idiom has remained constant in our region and retained its vivaciousness on our soil, despite all the changes in territorial conscription that politics have subjected it to. (Les Flamands de France)
Not having undergone the consonantal mutation of High German (Dutch: paard, German: pferd — both meaning ‘horse’), the Flemish language is reminiscent of English in its consonants but closer to German in its vowels, vocabulary and syntax. It allows for the creation of diminutives on the basis of adverbs (to speak zoetjes or stilletjes: to speak in a hushed or low voice). With its four dialectal groups (Western, Eastern, Brabant and Limburgish), it is a complete language that is highly similar to Dutch. In the French Netherlands, there are approximately 120,000 people who use it on a daily basis.
Referring to customs, Louis de Baecker also quotes the words of Tacitus, according to whom Germanic people had the habit of measuring time in terms of nights, and not days, and, on the other hand, harboured a ‘mad passion’ for dice games. He adds:
Well, the habit of counting things in nights and the passion for dice games were perpetuated by our fathers until the fourteenth century. Joanne of Constantinople had already banned the inhabitants of Bergues and Bourbourg from playing dice under penalty of a twenty-sol fine.
In the religious domain, pagan survivals are numerous in a land where the name of the god Thor is encountered in the names of the cities of Tongres, Turnhout, Tournay, Tume, and Tourcoing. Mr de Baecker writes:
The custom of lighting fires on the occasion of the summer and winter solstices has been preserved in certain Flemish cities of France. In Bergues and Dunkerque, on both Saint John’s Day and Saint Peter’s Day, children roam the streets, asking for firewood and singing: “Wood, wood, we come for Saint John’s wood; give us a little, a little wood, and then a little more still for Saint Peter!”
There are also carnivals, kermesses, Saint-Martin’s Vigil, the ‘bouhours’ or fires of the first Sunday of Lent (the commencement of spring), the procession of giants, the Visscherbende, May trees (which Saint Eligius tried to ban), the ‘Papegaults’ (cardboard birds placed at the top of a tree or a pole — in Beauvais, during the 19th century, those that managed to shoot them down would be exempted from their tax duty for a whole year!), and so on.
‘Prohibited from Throwing Pebbles and Speaking Flemish’
Politically speaking, having been the first to free itself from servitude, the French Netherlands gave France two men whose actions and personal relations had a profound impact upon our century: Philippe Pétain, who was bo
rn in Cauchy-à-la-Tour (Pas-de-Calais) and Charles de Gaulle, born in Lille.
Nowadays, the French Netherlands has new vocations. Exchange routes have replaced invasion routes and some axes have surfaced — the one that connects England to the Rhineland (through Wallonia and the Manche) and the one that joins Paris to Holland. The ‘region of the North’, which is located at the very heart of the ‘golden delta’ (an economic space that covers almost all of continental north-western Europe, with a ‘peak’ in Bâle and a coastal base stretching from Ijmuiden to Calais), intends to take advantage of things.
The Dunkerque agglomeration rose to the level of an urban community in 1969. In February 1968, the guiding ideas of a regional management plan had been expressed in a White Book, which was then followed by a Green Book for rural management.
On the linguistic level, the situation is a source of concern. The Flemish language is hardly spoken at all these days in the ‘Westhoek’, meaning in the Hazebrouck and Dunkerque arrondissements. Some people have found themselves wondering ‘why the ORTF,586 which dedicates half an hour of its radio broadcast time to the Polish language every three weeks (to cater to immigrant workers), has never been willing to reserve as little as a few minutes for a Dutch language programme to be broadcasted once or twice a week, whether in its radio or television transmissions’.
And yet the University of Lille lies at a mere twenty-six-kilometre distance from the Flemish University of Courtrai (Kortrijk) in Belgium. Additionally, the Dutch language is used by more than twenty million people worldwide (in the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, and the former Dutch Indies). In spite of these facts, there is not a single primary or secondary educational establishment that would provide Dutch language lessons in the North. And despite the Guichard Law of 1972 and the Deixonne Law of 11th January, 1951, which introduced regional languages into primary school programmes, there are only two Dutch language professors receiving their salaries through our National Education system.
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 23
