Pagnol. Its golden hills of La Treille, its warm speech, its childhood memories. Provence owes him its most beautiful letters. The playwright and filmmaker never stopped singing about this
“land of which you were the son and of which you are today the glory”
, as academician René Clair proclaimed upon his death. Thanks to him, and in every corner of France, we now have a bit of a southern soul. Even covered in glory and honors, Marcel Pagnol remained a child of Aubagne.
“I was born in the town of Aubagne, under the Garlaban crowned with goats in the time of the last goatherds,”
he writes at the beginning of
The Glory of My Father.
Dreaming of a literary career, he became famous with his play
Topaze
in 1927. He then founded his own film production company in Marseille, from which he eventually left to return to writing. Then comes the writing of his childhood memories, then his Marseille trilogy:
Marius
,
Fanny
,
César
. Its settings will be the golden villages of the south and the masses of rushes. His muse, the Provençal soul. His language ? One could easily imagine that he preferred the dialect of his native region to the national language.
A local language?
It is not so. Or almost. The French Academy welcomed him with these words, in 1947:
“You have had the honor, the great honor, of giving this dialect the right of inclusion at the Academy. The noble Phocaean city knows this, I am sure, infinitely grateful to you.”
What about then? If he brought out the charm of the South, it was more through the way his characters spoke,
“Marseille santons who smell of garlic and lavender, shellfish and pastis, the nostalgic smells of the old port”,
than by the language itself.
Jérôme Tharaud, while donning the green coat, apostrophes him thus:
“Do you write in French, Mr. new Academician? »
And to declare:
“Your characters speak the language they must speak, and that they cannot speak any other. They speak Marseille, they speak as they think, an excellent and true dialect. »
We know only too well that the southern accent is inseparable from frank speaking...
"Your language has the double advantage of expressing the feelings of your people in their truth"
, he continues. But if the Academy praises the
“particular and local character”
of Pagnol’s language, the latter does not write in Provençal. The playwright chooses to take a path other than that of Frédéric Mistral, whom he nevertheless venerates.
The school of the Republic
Let's go back a little.
Since the 13th century, this langue d'oc which stops at the border going from the mouth of the Gironde to the Alps
has been called
"Provençal"
. The name of this group of southern dialects then merges with that of the dialect specific to Provence. For this reason, from the 20th century onwards, the term
“Occitan”
is preferred to the former . As for
“Provençal”
, it will diverge here and there into
“Rhodanian”
in Vaucluse, into
“Marseillais”
or
“Maritime”
in Marseille, Aix, Toulon, into
“Niçois”
, into
“Alpine”
around Digne, depending on the local linguistic variants.
Revolutionary ideas sign the death warrant of regional dialects, accused of conservatism, even separatism. The Republic is wary of
“patois”
. The union can only come from French. In 1854, seven young Provencal poets met in Vaucluse to restore Provençal dignity. Their figurehead? Frédéric Mistral. Their means? Poetry. They organized themselves in 1876 around
“Fébrilige”
, with the aim of
“bringing together and stimulating the men, who, through their works, serve the language of the Pays d'Oc”
.
But the school of the Third Republic and its
“black hussars”
arrived . Jules Ferry's laws fiercely prohibit teaching in the local language. In mainland France, we will not speak Breton, Occitan or Basque in class. In Algeria, neither Arab nor Kabyle.
“Patois is the worst enemy of the teaching of French in our primary schools
,” declared the primary inspectorate virulently in 1893. When Marcel Pagnol was born in 1895 to a teacher from Aubagne, firmly secular and republican, the Occitan therefore no longer has the right to be cited. What he says is very revealing of the wave of democratization of education. His grandfather
“knew how to read and sign, but nothing more. He secretly suffered from it all his life, ending up believing that education was the Sovereign Good
. The progress of the mind is then inseparable from the single language.
Words in Provençal
Although Pagnol's work is in French, it is nevertheless peppered with regional words. First of all, there are all these names of flowers, birds or plants to which French has never given an equivalent. Because little Marcel
“hermit of the hills”
, as he wrote in his charming spelling to his parents, roams the hills and olive groves with enthusiasm. Let’s take
My Mother’s Castle
. Marcel
“keeps watch for the ortolans”
, small passerines from the Mediterranean. He will then lie flat on his stomach under the thickets of
“argeras”
, the gorse of Provence. There will also be a question of a
“bedouïde”
, the Provençal name for the farlouse, a type of lark. He will beg the
“Holy Virgin to protect him against these limberts”
, the Provençal name for the green lizard. He will marvel at the
“darnagas”
, shrikes, taken while hunting. He lunches with
“aïgo boulido”
, a few cloves of garlic boiled in water.
And then we find, of course, words that we happily use today. Which can only be read
“with the accan”
.
“When you speak to me in this tone, when you approach me as if I were a scoundrel…”
exclaims Marius, this young man exalted by the sea.
“Panisse wants to marry Fanny? Oh! poor fool! »
he writes to himself while he still prefers to go to sea. A word that Pagnol uses in
La Gloire de Mon Père
, to designate the magpie trapped in the hunters' trap:
"It must have been the fadade of his family"
. In the feminine, the word
“fada”
does indeed have its equivalent.