The Revolution and the end of political Provence
March 1789 opens in rural Provence the first wave of anti-noble revolts, while at Aix Mirabeau calls on the Provençal nation to assert its rights. The Revolution begins in the towns : at Marseille, it is the forts of Saint-Jean and Saint-Nicolas that fall, and their fall there is worth what the Bastille is worth at Paris, while at Aix the rearguard battles of conservatism are fought, in the words of Michel Vovelle cited by Agulhon and Coulet, "by the nostalgics of the old institutions". Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, disputed between partisans of attachment to France and those loyal to the pope, join the kingdom only after two years of struggle, voted on 14 September 1791.
The revolutionary climax of 1792 and 1793 binds the province to the fate of the nation. The people of Marseille are at the forefront of the assault on the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, before federalism drives Marseille, Aix, Arles and above all Toulon into rupture with the Convention. The recapture of Toulon from the English, on 18 December 1793, marks the start of Bonaparte's military career and leaves for a long time a national discredit attached to Provençal royalism. The Terror punishes this federalism from September 1793 to September 1794, followed by a White Terror which, in the summer of 1795, drenches Fort Saint-Jean and then the Château de Tarascon in blood. The municipality of Marseille nonetheless still displays in Provençal, on its walls, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Constitution, before the decrees of the Year II impose French as the sole language of public instruction and official acts.
On 22 December 1789, the National Assembly decrees the division of the kingdom into departments. Provence, for which the principle of a division with Haute-Provence is settled as early as February 1790, finds itself divided into four departments, completed by the creation of Vaucluse on 12 August 1793 to bring in Avignon and the Comtat. Three centuries after the Provençal Constitution of 1482, the province ceases to exist as an administrative entity.
The nineteenth century, between Empire and Republics
The Empire falls in 1814. The following year, Napoleon, landed from the island of Elba, bivouacs at Cannes and then at Grasse on 1 March 1815, before making his way to Paris through the Alps. The news of Waterloo triggers in June 1815 an explosion of royalism in Marseille and a second White Terror, while the county of Nice falls back that same year under Piedmontese control. The early nineteenth century in Provence swings between liberal surges and royalist loyalties, until the failed landing of the Duchess of Berry near Marseille, at the end of April 1832.
The railway connects Avignon to Marseille in 1848, the year in which the June Days find their Marseille echo. The coup d'État of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, on 2 December 1851, makes Provence the principal centre of republican insurrections across the whole of France, one prefecture, that of Digne, being held for five days by the partisans of constitutional resistance. In 1860, the Treaty of Turin definitively attaches the county of Nice to France and recreates the department of Alpes-Maritimes, completed the following year by the annexation of Menton and Roquebrune.
Industrialisation then transforms Marseille into a port of empire. The Second Empire, in the words of Raoul Busquet as reported by Agulhon and Coulet, "made Marseille contemporary" : the city grows from 195,000 inhabitants in 1851 to 312,000 twenty years later. Politically, the province shifts to the left : the Bouches-du-Rhône elect the socialists Clovis Hugues and Antide Boyer in 1885, and Marseille, Berre, La Ciotat and then Toulon gain socialist mayors between 1892 and 1893.
The twentieth century, wars and transformations
The general mobilisation of August 1914 registers 140,000 men in the barracks of Provence and turns Marseille into a port of war. The following month, an article in the newspaper Le Matin, unreasonably generalising the conduct of the fifteenth army corps in the Battle of the Frontiers, casts for decades an unjust discredit on the fighting spirit of the Provençals. The Popular Front reaches in 1936 its greatest electoral extent in Provence. At the end of October 1938, the fire at the Nouvelles Galeries in Marseille kills more than seventy people and hastens the placing of the Marseille municipal administration under supervision.
On 11 November 1942, German and Italian forces invade the previously unoccupied zone, and the French fleet scuttles itself at Toulon to escape the enemy. Resistance groups develop in Haute-Provence, in the Vaucluse and the Var, until the Allied landing in Provence, on 15 August 1944. Marseille is liberated on 23 August, and the German garrison entrenched at Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, in Toulon, surrenders on 28 August. Major strikes shake Provence in the autumn of 1947, their most dramatic episode being the Marseille day of 12 November. That same year, the attachment of Tende and La Brigue to France ends five hundred and fifty nine years of division of Provençal territory that had begun in 1388.
The Serre-Ponçon dam begins filling in 1955. General de Gaulle comes to rally the Marseille socialist leadership to a yes vote in the referendum of September 1958, and the events of May 1968 upend the universities of Aix and Marseille. The administrative map settles into its present shape : the Basses-Alpes become the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in 1970, and the Var gains Toulon as its chief town in 1974, in place of Draguignan. The death of Gaston Defferre, mayor of Marseille, in March 1986, deepens the decline of local socialism, and the elections of 1993 and 1995 confirm the political shift of Provence towards the right.
The Félibrige and the break in the language
While Marseille becomes a port of empire, the Provençal language moves in the opposite direction. The Lakanal decree of 1794 still tolerates "the idiom of the country" as a mere auxiliary means of instruction, before the period from 1795 to 1800 proves, in the words of A. Brun cited by Blanchet, "by far the most lamentable for the distribution of elementary schooling", for want of teachers and means. Blanchet notes a paradox : the Revolution and the Consulate lacked everything needed to enforce their decrees on language, so much so that the Provençal people go on speaking their language in public for a long time, including in the patriotic clubs, even as writing shifts to French. The true turning point comes more slowly, carried by schooling : French descends through the levels of Provençal society between 1830 and 1930, reaching the notables before the common people, while Provençal remains, until the end of the nineteenth century, the most widely spoken language, including in the large towns.
It is in this context of threat that the Félibrige is born, on 21 May 1854, at the Château de Fontségugne, near Châteauneuf-de-Gadagne : seven young poets, Frédéric Mistral, Joseph Roumanille, Théodore Aubanel, Jean Brunet, Paul Giéra, Anselme Mathieu and Alphonse Tavan, set themselves the goal of restoring the Provençal language and codifying its spelling. Agulhon and Coulet see in it the emergence of a "conscious traditionalism" facing the economic and social modernisation of Provence. The graphy codified by Roumanille and then Mistral, begun as early as 1852 with Li Prouvençalo and refined in 1853 by La Part dóu Bon Diéu, settles between the first Armana Prouvençau of 1855 and the appearance of Mirèio in 1859, which brings Mistral fame. It would come to be used, according to Blanchet, for about ninety nine per cent of written Provençal, far beyond Provence itself, as far as the Nice region, Gascony, Béarn and the Auvergne.
Mistral publishes in 1904 the achievement of his Nobel Prize in Literature, a reward for a work written entirely in Provençal, the proceeds of which he devotes to founding the Museon Arlaten. Blanchet stresses that this literary glow comes together with a political failure : the Félibrige obtained very little for the language in terms of real measures, having always refused the ground of institutions and parties. Blanchet grants it a mitigating circumstance, Paris in those years building its nation-state at forced pace and paying little heed to what the regions were demanding. Jules Ferry's secular, free and compulsory school, established between 1882 and 1886, applies with a century's delay the linguistic measures of the Revolution and drives out what the administration then called patois. Around 1930, French has reached the whole population of Provence, and three generations will have been enough for it to become the children's first language, while Provençal shrinks to the usage of the rural world.
Dead at Maillane on 25 March 1914, Mistral does not see this transmission finish breaking down. The Félibrige movement suffers, between the two wars, a decline in renown, and the post-war period, marked by suspicions of collaboration attached to certain regionalisms, blocks from 1945 to 1950 any regional claim in France. It takes the Loi Deixonne, promulgated on 11 January 1951, for the optional teaching of regional languages, including the langues d'oc, to obtain a legal framework, completed by an optional examination at the baccalauréat in 1970. Blanchet judges that this legislative apparatus remains largely optional and fragile, dependent on uncertain funding and often on the voluntary effort of teachers. His own surveys, carried out in 1990, show that a quarter of Provençals still speak the language to varying degrees, eight per cent of them daily, and that a further forty per cent understand it without using it, bringing to sixty five per cent of the population the total of potential speakers. He concludes that without the Félibrige, Provençal would probably not have reached us in the state in which it now stands, this movement having revived a strong sense of identity and given the language the lustre it had lacked.
Chronology
The language in this period
The Revolution begins by opening a door to the language of the country. A decree of 14 January 1790 authorises the translation of decrees and laws into the languages understood by the people, and the Aix deputy Charles-François Bouche seizes upon it to publish a Provençal version of the Constitution. Marseille likewise posts the Declaration of Rights in Provençal. That door closes within a few years, the decrees of brumaire year II making French the sole language of public instruction and of official acts.
While Marseille becomes a port of empire, the Provençal language moves in the opposite direction. The Lakanal decree of 1794 still tolerates "the idiom of the country" as a mere auxiliary means of instruction, before the period from 1795 to 1800 proves, in the words of A. Brun cited by Blanchet, "by far the most lamentable for the distribution of elementary schooling", for want of teachers and means. Blanchet notes a paradox : the Revolution and the Consulate lacked everything needed to enforce their decrees on language, so much so that the Provençal people go on speaking their language in public for a long time, including in the patriotic clubs, even as writing shifts to French. The true turning point comes more slowly, carried by schooling : French descends through the levels of Provençal society between 1830 and 1930, reaching the notables before the common people, while Provençal remains, until the end of the nineteenth century, the most widely spoken language, including in the large towns.
It is in this context of threat that the Félibrige is born, on 21 May 1854, at the Château de Fontségugne, near Châteauneuf-de-Gadagne : seven young poets, Frédéric Mistral, Joseph Roumanille, Théodore Aubanel, Jean Brunet, Paul Giéra, Anselme Mathieu and Alphonse Tavan, set themselves the goal of restoring the Provençal language and codifying its spelling. Agulhon and Coulet see in it the emergence of a "conscious traditionalism" facing the economic and social modernisation of Provence. The graphy codified by Roumanille and then Mistral, begun as early as 1852 with Li Prouvençalo and refined in 1853 by La Part dóu Bon Diéu, settles between the first Armana Prouvençau of 1855 and the appearance of Mirèio in 1859, which brings Mistral fame. It would come to be used, according to Blanchet, for about ninety nine per cent of written Provençal, far beyond Provence itself, as far as the Nice region, Gascony, Béarn and the Auvergne.
Mistral publishes in 1904 the achievement of his Nobel Prize in Literature, a reward for a work written entirely in Provençal, the proceeds of which he devotes to founding the Museon Arlaten. Blanchet stresses that this literary glow comes together with a political failure : the Félibrige obtained very little for the language in terms of real measures, having always refused the ground of institutions and parties. Blanchet grants it a mitigating circumstance, Paris in those years building its nation-state at forced pace and paying little heed to what the regions were demanding. Jules Ferry's secular, free and compulsory school, established between 1882 and 1886, applies with a century's delay the linguistic measures of the Revolution and drives out what the administration then called patois. Around 1930, French has reached the whole population of Provence, and three generations will have been enough for it to become the children's first language, while Provençal shrinks to the usage of the rural world.
Dead at Maillane on 25 March 1914, Mistral does not see this transmission finish breaking down. The Félibrige movement suffers, between the two wars, a decline in renown, and the post-war period, marked by suspicions of collaboration attached to certain regionalisms, blocks from 1945 to 1950 any regional claim in France. It takes the Loi Deixonne, promulgated on 11 January 1951, for the optional teaching of regional languages, including the langues d'oc, to obtain a legal framework, completed by an optional examination at the baccalauréat in 1970. Blanchet judges that this legislative apparatus remains largely optional and fragile, dependent on uncertain funding and often on the voluntary effort of teachers. His own surveys, carried out in 1990, show that a quarter of Provençals still speak the language to varying degrees, eight per cent of them daily, and that a further forty per cent understand it without using it, bringing to sixty five per cent of the population the total of potential speakers. He concludes that without the Félibrige, Provençal would probably not have reached us in the state in which it now stands, this movement having revived a strong sense of identity and given the language the lustre it had lacked.
Sources for this page
- Maurice Agulhon and Noël Coulet, Histoire de la Provence, coll. Que sais-je?
- Philippe Blanchet, Le provençal, essai de description sociolinguistique et différentielle, Peeters, 1992.
- Wikipedia, articles "Histoire de la Provence", "Félibrige" and "Frédéric Mistral".