What never ceases to amaze is the abundance of books or scholarly articles that, for nearly two centuries, are devoted to Queyras. These scholarly writings form a memory, as distinct from popular memory, whether oral or written, as expressed by the storytellers, the "old" or older Queyrassins (Borel, M. Bourcier, Mrs. Messimilly, M . Arnaud) who remember with emotion the harsh living conditions they have experienced "past". Scholarly memory is not very different from the popular memory: it also obeys requirements which exceed, its meaning depends on when it was developed, it carries intentions or assumptions that must be analyzed, in order not to "knowledge" accumulated truth of the Gospel. Take three or four specific examples.
The Republic of escartons
the mid-nineteenth century, the lawyer-Broke Heal (1795-1863), in his Essay on the old autonomous institutions or popular Alpine Cottian briançonnaises (2 volumes, 1856, 1857), written p 321, Volume 1: "Abolition of feudalism that the French (...) have obtained (...) until the late eighteenth century by an eminently fair and equitable (...), the Briançon have obtained, even before the middle of the fourteenth century, through an agreement voluntarily and reciprocally contracted (...) ". It is, under the Second Empire, when it seemed unlikely to establish a republican regime in France, the inventor of the "republic of escartons. With the charter of 1343, the Briançon have torn feudal power "full freedom of local government in the country by country." This assumption is repeated
last century and a half without ever being examined. However, Henry Falque Verde, author of Men and Mountains in the thirteenth century Dauphiné (Grenoble University Press, 1997), reverses this beautiful and happy vision. Eighteen delegates representing only thirty-seven communities were present at the Briançon Beauvoir Royans, where the charter was signed. Queyras sent a delegate, and Chateau-Dauphin Pragelas no. The seventeen other delegates represented Briançon and Oulx, the two most prosperous valleys. They are the merchants who have played a role in the negotiation, farmers and non farmers. In 1343, the Dauphin is drowning in debt. So he sold the rights. In 1282, accession to power of the barons of the Tour du Pin has extended the state to the plains of the Rhone, richer. The high valleys, Dauphin that oppresses (over 50% of the wealth produced is taken), then lose their interest. In 1339, Umberto II was considering selling the Briançon. Without a buyer, so he offered to buy people's rights. The 12,000 guilders from the sale corresponded to taxes each year in the 37 communities in Greater Escarton (11,723 guilders in 1339). There's been nothing "Republican" in these feudal haggling. According Broke-Blackthorn, this "republic" would continue to ancient Gallic municipalities. But freedoms that were granted Dauphin often over a long time. This is so the right to elect representatives, trustees, mansiers, prosecutors. In 1265, the Briançon already chose their representatives: mansiers (corresponding to the manse of a local village or neighborhood), which divided between families tax which weighed on the manse. "Full freedom of directors" has actually earned over the years in the tax community's manse the neighbors of the same village or even neighborhood. This is so the title "freedmen and bourgeois." It meant only that the burghers were freed from the arbitrary size and subjected to a fixed size. People shelter and all the rich peasants had obtained the franchise before the Charter was signed.
Poverty
General William gave his book The Queyras the subtitle "The splendor and agony of high Alpine valley, with the word Calvary sending a tragic vision of Queyras, forcing the poverty that would have lived the Queyras. Those who write about Queyras insist on poverty, giving the impression that Queyras had fallen to the lot only misfortune. Certainly a very serious economic crisis hit the Queyras from 1830. In the years 1900-60, the situation following the carnage of 1914-1918 and the mass exodus is dramatic.
But for several centuries until the beginning of the XIXth, Queyras has been relatively successful (compared to other regions of southern France). Many facts testify to this. In the eighteenth century, Abriès account laborers paid by the day. They marry, they acquire property, they write wills. In 1748, one of them bequeath to each of his children and his grandchildren amounts ranging from 9 to 80 pounds (80 pounds since then the annual salary of a schoolmaster). It is a large estate, which is lower than that of peasant proprietors - which explains, among other reasons, so many notaries have been able to establish a study into the smaller villages of the Queyras. Engineers, and the Blottière Ricord, who quartered with the royal armies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, were surprised at the relative prosperity of Queyras. Harriet Rosenberg's often quoted in A Negotiated World. The instruction from the early sixteenth s (and perhaps earlier) is often better in the Queyras in rich and prosperous cities of the Paris basin. While, elsewhere, the rule was the rent, sharecropping or wage labor, almost all were Queyrassins owners. They owned land, their homes, tools, livestock (the word also means "capital") for sheep and cattle, mules, donkeys and even horses. Forests, meadows, steep slopes that were the communal people managed themselves. Furnaces and mills were public goods. All this represented a capital which, with work, producing income.
Culture Heritage Queyras has long been known. It is true that he was in the years 1900-1950, through which officials of the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions Museum or potatoes, which have bought carved chests, mule saddles, wooden forks, rakes, beds closed, shuttles, spinning wheels, kits, tools, tool-maker, etc.. However, another heritage that is listed in the Inventory of Heritage of France that can be accessed via the Internet in the databases Merimee Palissy and the Ministry of Culture: not the objects of everyday life or the tools of the agropastoral economy, but everything that relates to the spiritual life or moral, chapels, shrines, churches, religious objects, altarpieces, carved crosses, paintings, sculptures, etc. . The base Mérimée (buildings) has about 160,000 detailed records; based Palissy (furniture, objects) 260 000 references. France has just over 36,000 communes. The average buildings listed by town is about 5 and the furniture and objects is 8. Both figures 5 and 8, provide an indicator to evaluate the wealth of built heritage (chapels, wash houses, shrines, fountains, churches, dams, old houses, etc..) or furniture (religious objects, paintings, sculptures, etc..) of a municipality. Abriès has 47 buildings listed and 49 references on the objects, pictures or pieces of furniture, 10 and 7 times the national average, the town of Needles 38 and 8; Arvieux 56 and 62; Chateau-Queyras 54 and 82; molines 23 and 17; Ristolas 20 and 7, St.-Veran 40 and 48. The common Queyras among the richest in France in buildings and objects and, in proportion to their population, richer than large cities such as Aix en Provence (198 references in the database Merimee and 483 in the base Palissy) and Marseille ( 258 and 289). If Queyrassins were poor or destitute, they would never have accumulated such a wealth of heritage. Let the town Abriès (350 inhabitants today, nearly 2,000 in 1830). Buildings and countless articles have appeared in the general inventory if they had not been destroyed during the Second World War. The artworks are paintings of religious edification (fight against Protestants, Counter Reformation, late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and subject to the baroque aesthetic, marked by the Baroque of Piedmont, Turin Cuneo; tables Historical (subjects taken from history holy crowd, careful composition and narrative: the 14 Stations of the Cross, The circumcision of Jesus, the visit of St. Anthony of the Desert at St. Paul the Hermit); neoclassical paintings of the nineteenth century (a Saint Roch squire, a dying light appeared in St. Joseph and Blessed Emilie Vialar, 1797-1856, founder of the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition) sundials painted by the Piedmontese Zarbulla (years 1830-1840) of reliefs of altar paintings and sculptures dolores (Our Lady of Seven Sorrows pierced with seven swords, late nineteenth s) reproductions of folk art (statues Saints stucco moldings, lithographs and chromo including Via Crucis), a wrought iron cross art nouveau scenes of the Passion carved and painted (1930) on metal plates. In short, this heritage is of great interest in itself and what is the history of regional art. Different objects Heritage Agro, it changes the view that historians are a century and a half Queyras and valleys of these so-called closed or isolated or remote or backward.
communities
In the 1920s, Robert Husson observed in Saint-Veran Community institutions (The Mountain wants to live, Editions R. Guillon): "As a large country, this tiny republic has its own laws to protect its citizens and its institutions. We find in them what is necessary to the pastoral life of a small independent people (...) These prerogatives were maintained until today since the great republic could not absorb the laws of the small . The mayor here is a revered figure whose voice takes precedence over other people. The mark of his authority is felt in the negotiations and decisions that concern the community. It is the patriarch of primitive societies, the paterfamilias other fathers of families. " Robert Husson takes the myth, circulated by the lawyer-Broke sloe, the Republic of escartons. In People and the mountains in the Dauphine in the thirteenth century, Henry Falque Verde notes the emergence of communities or universities (in the Latin Middle Ages, universities means "community"). While the nobility, too poor, blends among the peasants, is a new power, that of the community, whose name is often quoted from the tax investigation of 1265. It is she who keeps records, which controls certain taxes, which operates mills. S in the fourteenth, it obtains new powers. She decides Cuts wood, collects revenues, participates in load balancing, acquires offices.
A document reveals what a community: the settlement of the community of Moline, passed June 4, 1770, and published by J Tivollier in the Bulletin de la Societe d'Etudes des Hautes-Alpes, Gap, 1901. It is a meeting of heads of families, always men, small landowners, many paying taxes and having their wives under their authority, sometimes elderly parents and many children, giving girls and boys laying them by sharing the Land of the family. These are heads of households who annually elect two consuls, appointed as trustees. In 1770, the two consuls are Molines Pierre Sibille Pierre and Eme. Regulation of 1770 includes 35 items and is characterized by a long series of prohibitions, with penalties for each offense. The main provisions prohibit cutting trees in the woods have said (it's forbidden to say), to graze flocks of sheep in these same woods or fields, edges of canals and embankments, to bring Fire on Grillia (utensils for carrying coals from one house to another), hold false weights and measures, to bring to justice those disputes about damage crops or the boundaries between properties (for disputes to be settled by the consuls). Prohibitions match penalties in the form of fines that may be raised.
Yet we can not stop there. At the end of the XIXth, a traveler, Gustave Derennes, school inspector, reported the testimony of a factor Queyrassins (Through the French Alps): "I made the road (of Chateau-Queyras Needle) with a factor a brave man, who knew perfectly the country ... There are not too long ago, I was there, the mayors of hands bore the title of kings (in fact, the consuls or trustees). Once elected, they became absolute masters of the community, judged disputes fined offenders cited by them in front of them, sometimes even condemned to exile for one, two or three years. The people could have avoided this coverage. They did not think none of them dared violate an order or ask the law to protect against a ruling that could be regarded as unfair. This trait of manners reminiscent of old habits of independence has disappeared communities in recent times. " Regulation of Molina was signed by 42 heads of family or community then had 178 families. Similarly, Then there was to Arvieux the late eighteenth century 195 families, only 40 heads of families have elected consuls in 1696. It appears that communities were less unified than it has been said. The Queyras, early literacy, were attached to the written law. However, if disputes have pitted seven communities in the administration of the kingdom or communities of Embrun, disputes also between the communities, and that about the rights of each, Boundaries, grazing or the affouage. The archives are full of Queyras minutes of the trials on meadow Pra-Patris, Riou Forest Green, Forest of Fusina, Forest Marassan (the first trial took place in 1387 and the last in 1834). These hard facts are very important to understand what was Queyras. We must beware of that idyllic vision can read about communities. Violent conflicts have opposed. This has resulted in strengthening the peculiarities of each, which allows, among other factors, to explain the persistent mistrust that characterizes relations sometimes necessary relationship between the Commons today.
agropastoral economy In the thirteenth
s, Queyras lives of cereals. Approximately three quarters of the taxes paid by residents cover crops. Cultivated cereals, which alternate in the same field with the fallow are rye, the basis of human food, and barley or oats, which can feed the animals. The soils are characterized by an opposition between the fields and meadows that stretch on southerly around villages and hamlets on the one hand and other uncultivated areas, including pastures, and by staging the vegetation according to altitude. Livestock development leads Trade, farmers selling some of the animals they raise, thereby creating crafts. In 1259, the Dauphin Abriès based on a market livestock (sheep, ewes, lambs, goats, pigs, beef, cow, horse, horse, donkey). The goal was to compete in the market of Lucerna. This market has been relatively successful, that of Briancon, at the same time, growing much faster. Currency circulates better. In 1250-65, 18% of taxes owed to the Dauphin are paid in cash, in 1339, 25% - leading to rising agricultural prices and the use of currencies such as the penny tournaments and even the gold florin of the Lombards. Craft activities appear: cheese making, wood working (to make dishes and bowls), gravel (for the rehabilitation of Fort-Queyras), bats or flatter (fabrication shops for clothing), bread ovens, mills.
These are the features of traditional agro-pastoral economy. Raoul Blanchard is a famous geographer. He is the author of an article "Life in Saint-Veran," published in The Mountain in 1910. This article is divided into three parts: the geographical conditions of Saint-Veran, life in Saint-Veran, the signs of transformation. The third part is the most interesting. Raoul Blanchard lists the transformations that bring a "very ancient civilization and very stable" general conditions of modern life ': the creation of good gravel road, the village connected to the rest of France by the telegraph, the creation small cottage industries that employ in winter (gem cutting, machine knitting workshops), the introduction of the ski through which it moves more easily in winter, the development of trade butter and cheese. Yet he remains convinced that the future of the village is agriculture, " This is not the life that was going to change, Saint-Veran course to remain a farming village, he will always rush to shake all the field work in the short period given by the climate. " At no time, it does ensure that tourism to the villagers, like all Queyrassins, the same standard of living than the French. If he can not imagine a different future qu'agropastoral is that Raoul Blanchard deterministic bias. He is convinced that human life is forever fixed by the physical conditions of the country in which they live. The Queyrassins have shown that the opposite was possible.
These examples show that memory must be scholarly subject, as the popular memory, a careful and know that it transmits is not as "pure" than it seems.
