Provençal or Provençal language?

Provençal (in Occitan Provençal: provençau/prouvençau) is a Romance language of the Langue d'oc family. It is the result of the evolution of popular Latin and is spoken in Provence but goes beyond its limits. This dialect should not be confused with the notion of Provençal language, which refers to the whole of the langue d'oc until its "renaming" into Occitan around 1930.

Creation of the Félibrige movement

In the second half of the 19th century, the Provençal language underwent a tremendous revival thanks to one of its most fervent defenders, Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914), who, with friends, founded a movement - the Félibrige - to fight against the isolation and discrediting of this culture. He defined the basis of the dialect by specifying that it was composed of the sub-dialects of Alpine, Maritime (Marseille, Var), Nice and Rhodanian. The spelling was restored and codified by the writing of a bilingual dictionary in two large volumes, Lou Tresor dou Felibrige, thus encompassing all Occitan dialects. Frédéric Mistral enjoyed great success from 1859 onwards with an epic poem, "Mirèio"(Mireille), a work that was greatly appreciated, praised by Lamartine and adapted for the lyric theatre by Gounod. From then on, success never left Mistral, and in 1904 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From Henri Bosco to Peter Mayle

Henri Bosco, René Char, Jean Breton are perhaps the most deeply rooted of the Provençal poets, but they are not the only ones. Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) was a jack-of-all-trades: ethnology, philosophical analysis, art history. The open-air theatre of Orange fascinated him. It was in his notes on Provence that he expressed his emotion with praise; an emotion that we also find years later in Jean-Louis Vaudoyer (1883-1963).

Born in Avignon, Pierre Boulle (1912-1994) is the author of The Bridge on the River Kwai and the world-famous science fiction novel Planet of the Apes

.

Among all these artists, let's count Jean Echenoz, novelist born in Orange in 1947 who won the Médicis prize in 1983 for Cherokee and the Goncourt prize in 1999 for Je m'en vais, and Peter Mayle (1939- 2018), the most Provençal of Englishmen who became famous with the publication of his first novel A Year in Provence

, a worldwide success followed by other titles, two of which have been adapted for the cinema. Finally, it should be noted that shortly before his death, Camus bought his house in Lourmarin, and now rests in the small cemetery of this village in the southern Luberon.

To make people smile..

Here are some extracts from Marie Mauron's book Dictons d'Oc et Proverbes de Provence (1965)

It is better to slip with the foot than with the tongue.

The head carries the feet.

If the white beard was wise, the goats should be wise.