In
Souvenirs d'enfance
but also in
L'Eau des Collines,
Marcel Pagnol has never ceased to magnify these hills of Provence where he lived his first years.
Today the small town of Allauch, east of Marseille, has just decided to immortalize the memory of the great writer and filmmaker born in 1895 in Aubagne, not far away, by opening the Marcel Pagnol museum in 2024.
It will be the first dedicated to the gesture of this son of a teacher who will enter, like a supreme honor, the French Academy in 1946.
To read also: Marcel Pagnol: 120 years old, and not a wrinkle
Allauch, its hills and its scrubland are the backdrop for biographical novels and films which contributed to the glory of Pagnol.
It is there, very close, in its mountain massifs, in the heart of Garlaban which dominate Marseilles, between Allauch and Aubagne, that the future writer aged about ten years discovered the bartavelle hunt near his father.
Read also: A summer with Pagnol: in the skin of little Marcel
The secrets of the hills of Pagnol
This new museum institution will take up some of the objects and souvenirs that the Allauch museum created in 2002, dedicated to history and local culture, already reserved for the work of Marcel Pagnol.
The museum should be installed in an old electrical factory built in 1906 and disused since 1960. The city which has become the owner, will rehabilitate it in order to be able to accommodate there all the artistic memory of the great Provencal man who will have been at the same time an immense writer and a pioneer of cinema with in particular the grandiose
Marseillaise Trilogy
(
Marius
,
Fanny
and
César
), embodied on the screen by the sacred monsters Raimu and Pierre Fresnay.
Nicolas Pagnol, the grandson of the academician, himself a writer, worked for Allauch to open this museum.
And fully approved the decision of the municipality during the 20th anniversary Marcel Pagnol award in 2020:
“I congratulated Lionel de Cala, the young mayor of the city.
He kept his promises.
He knows that the genius of Provence and of its most beautiful singer was born on these hills. ”
La Gloire de mon père
by Yves Robert in 1990, based on the novel by Marcel Pagnol, with Philippe Caubère, Nathalie Roussel, Julien Ciamaca ...