The troubadours: the Occitan model

Abstract

For much of the twentieth century, French literary scholars interpreted the word ‘French’ in ‘medieval French literature’ in the narrowest possible manner – as a linguistic rather than political or geographical marker. Despite the conquest of Occitan lands in the thirteenth century and the gradual incorporation of those lands into the French state in the centuries that followed, the appellation ‘French’ has rarely been applied to the languages or literary texts from the South. Individuals were, of course, understood to belong to the political collective known as France but they retained their local appellations (Gascon, Rouergais, Toulousain, Provencal, etc.). Because they did not write or speak primarily in French, they and their culture were largely excluded from national cultural history. Yet it was already clear in the twelfth century that some portion of the Occitan population was bilingual and certainly by the time of the Ordonnances de Villers-Cotterets (1535), which mandated its use in all legal and judicial documents, French had made significant headway amongst the educated classes in the South. It had also long been used as a lingua franca around the Mediterranean and was written and spoken in dialects that dominated commerce along the major trading routes throughout northern Italy and on to the Levant. Yet in writing the cultural history of France, in producing a coherent post-1789 narrative in which the power and prestige of the French people is said to emerge from this first republican identity, varieties of French, and the regional languages that nourished its early literary production, were conveniently overlooked.