Occitan: history

MOST specialists refer to the language of the south of France as ‘occitan’, a term which dates from the fourteenth century. This language used generally to be called ‘limousin’ in the Middle Ages, when the troubadours spread its fame as a literary vehicle, and ‘provençal’ in the nineteenth century, when a major revival of its literary renown was last attempted. The area, almost a third of metropolitan France; lacks any one large centre which could rival Paris, avoided early invasion by the Franks and retained a mixture of Roman and feudal administration until quite late in its history. For Occitan nationalists three dates are significant: 1228, when northern France conquered the South in the Albigensian Crusade; 1793, when federalism was crushed by centralisation as the fundamental policy of the Revolution; and 1907, when peasants and workers rose in revolt against economic domination.

After the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, and despite its replacement by feudalism, the South retained both Roman law, thus avoiding the imposition of the customary law which had been introduced by the Franks, and, through the Church, the administrative organisation of the Roman Empire. Although fragmented, much of the area was controlled from the ninth century by the counts or dukes of Provence, of Toulouse, and of Aquitaine, while in the thirteenth century it became part of the ‘Angevin Empire’, to be finally attached to France in the fifteenth.