Philip Whalen teaches European and Colonial History at Coastal Carolina University.
He is currently conducting research for a book entitled Wine, Gastronomy and Tourism
in Modern Burgundy.
“‘A merciless source of happy memories:’ Gaston Roupnel and
the Folklore of Burgundian Terroir”
The period between the two world wars (1919–1939) saw a
flowering of French regional culture. Held up as a more
authentic complement (and sometimes alternate) to national
French culture, Burgundian regionalism was anchored in
the concept of terroir, the belief that local geography played
a role in contributing specific qualities to local culture and
products such as wine. Gaston Roupnel, a Burgundian
provincial folklorist, was especially important in efforts to
link terroir and Burgundian regional culture through the
figure of modern rustic vignerons (viniculturalists/
vintners).
Interwar France (1919-1939) struggled to modernize its economic base without
jeopardizing its cultural traditions. Civic leaders mired in debates over expedient
solutions to real and imagined problems concerning their nation’s vitality, sought
solutions to galvanize regional pride, appease political anxieties, stimulate economic
trade, stabilize gender roles, and promote a “healthy” and “virile” national outlook. The
French sought collective refuge from tired national narratives in regional traditions and
practices. They turned to their provincial cognoscenti to articulate regionally anchored
cultural agendas that embraced modern industrial practices while retaining conservative
social values. Providing an early example of “applied folklore,” broadly understood as
any folklore work that advocates “a wide spectrum of implicit and explicit agendas for
social change” (Payne 1998, 251; also see, Levine 1992), the Burgundian cultural
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regional project of the interwar period illustrates how French regionalists exploited
familiar folk images and rural idioms to articulate reassuring and idealized model of
regional existence.
The seductive landscapes used to promote the marvels of regional tourism in the
golden age of French posters offered tantalizing glimpses of such rustic landscapes.
Firmly anchored in the nation’s geography, they promised immediate leisure and
reinvigoration. This combination of the rustic and the modern draws attention to the
commercial links between marketing practices and popular interests. Tracing Burgundian
regionalism’s investment in the construction of such phenomena, particularly through the
work of Gaston Roupnel (1871-1946), this article examines how an inherited
conservative collective identity found renewed application through economically viable,
instantly recognizable, and popular cultural projects. (See Figure 1 for an example of a
reinvented and commercially successful folkloric tradition.)
Figure 1. Burgundians celebrate their folkloric heritage
through recreated traditions such as this post-harvest meal
(paulée) in Meursault, Burgundy, circa 1928. The paulée
revival was a reinvented tradition insofar as such meals
had been traditionally served to laborers not Parisian
tourists and affluent provincials. (Contemporary postcard)
From Milieu to Terroir
The result of this exploitation of images of rural life was that the cultural determinants of
French identity traditionally assumed as inherited became available through the selective
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processes of product identification and consumer preference. In Burgundy, these
determinants were framed in terms of terroir, a polymorphous concept in use since the
seventeenth century that found its greatest cultural resonance and practical expression in
early twentieth-century Burgundy. Wine expert James Wilson has defined terroir as “the
totality of the elements of the vineyard habitat” and noted “Burgundians are very nearly
Freudian about the influence of the soil in shaping the character and the quality of their
wine.” In addition to the “physical elements of the vineyard habitat, the vine, subsoil,
site, drainage and microclimate,” Wilson includes a spiritual component: “beyond the
measurable ecosystem, there is an additional dimension—the spiritual aspect that
recognizes the joys, the heartbreaks, the pride, the sweat and the frustrations of its
history” (1998:55–56, 113, 326).
The use of geographical determinism both to explain social practices and legitimize
political practices is a tradition that, in France, may be traced back at least to Jean Bodin
(1530–1596). His Six livres de la République (1576) suggested that different
geographical and climactic milieux (temperate, frigid, torrid; plains, valleys, mountains,
etc.) might influence the development of social differences and could, therefore, be used
to explain them. Attempting to establish a firm theory of government for the troubled
Kingdom of France, Bodin identified three basic milieux based on ethnographic
observations and astrological beliefs. Each of these “different environments brought
about different combinations of the humors, which in turn manifested themselves as
different physical and mental characteristics” (Livingston 1993:121–22) Anticipating
future naturalists, Charles-Louis de Montesquieu (1689–1755) sought to identify the laws
that determine political activity in order to deduce the principles of the body politic in his
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De l’esprit des lois (1748). Legal systems, he argued, played an essential mediating role
between what he called internal (social and psychological) and external (bio-geographical
and technological) milieux (Livingston 1993:121–22).
While nineteenth-century French social theorists generally recognized humanity to be
the empirically grounded product of history and environment, they remained uncertain,
nonetheless, about the extent to which racial heredity preserved, mediated, or transformed
the influence of environmental and social factors that determined social change (Buttimer
1971:16, Whalen 1999a). Their understanding of the concept of race, while ambiguous,
was not burdened by late twentieth century genetic and/or socio-biological constructions
and was anything but nonsensical. Unaware of modern genetics, they focused on the
mechanisms that had been identified in the transmission of the attributes associated with
different social groups: race was a combination of heredity and culture. The hereditary
component of race was implied rather than identified.
Literary critic and social theorist Hippolyte Taine outlined a theory concerning the
predominant determinants of human behavior in the “Introduction” to his History of
English Literature (1863–64). His theory of historical development combined various
elements of social determinism traceable to the “limited anthropological and biological
theories of mid-nineteenth century thought” (Gooch 1967:235) and identified three causal
historical factors as producing civilizations and determining their evolution: environment,
epoch, and race (Taine, 80). Their influence, he alleged, was manifest through inherited
personality and intellect (race), socio-political and geographical influences (milieu), and
the historical context (epoch), with race the most important factor.
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Whereas Taine virtually reduced human agency to racial proclivities, humanist
geographers of the early twentieth century focused instead on the dynamic tensions
between humans and their environment. The nation’s relation to its milieu was
systematically investigated and integrated into the French curriculum through the
geographical works of Paul Vidal de la Blache. The introduction of his Principles of
Human Geography (1921) offered “a new conception of the interrelationship between
earth and man—a conception resulting from a more synthetic knowledge of the physical
laws governing our earth and of the relations between the living beings which inhabit it”
(p. 4, see also Meynier 1969:25). Vidal (re)animated the naturalist’s concept of milieu
and turned it into an analytic and descriptive composite capable of grouping and
encompassing heterogeneous beings and elements in vital mutual relationships without
recourse to narrative history or the then-unpopular “study of origins.” Vidal’s work
offered an enhanced ecological understanding of a historical geography that emphasized
the interactions and complex bonds between society and its terroir (1911:193–212, 289–
304). This mapping gave scientific credibility and therefore greater utility to the French
discourse of terroir.
Wine—as the quintessential produit de terroir—has long been endowed with
symbolic and emotional appeal and serves as a powerful social and political tool in
modern France. Kolleen Guy’s work on the Champagne industry demonstrates that the
consumption of wine and the geography of terroir became “fundamental references” for
collective French identity by the early twentieth century (2002:42-44). Not since
nineteenth-century neo-Romantics first identified patrimoine as a shared national
resource have emotional responses to landscape been so adroitly harnessed to a project of
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identity formation. Exuding the confidence of nineteenth-century social positivists,
interwar provincial notables and regional leaders made careers reducing Burgundy’s
existence (past, present, and future) to the seductive operations and necessary
determinations of terroir.
Regionalism, Folklore and Terroir
In interwar Burgundy Gabriel Jeanton and Gaston Roupnel stand out in the development
of modern conceptions of terroir and in efforts to “(re)cover” and anchor (both
geographically and culturally) an essentialized, rustic, and traditional cultural identity that
could provide an alternative to the generic model of “modern,” anonymous, urban, and
bureaucratic national French identity. Jeanton’s research in the 1920s and 1930s on
village fairs, communal practices, folkloric traditions, and relations between rural and
urban areas within the Mâconnais region revealed how contemporary regional cultural
practices were heavily informed by the folklore and mores of the Mâconnnais vignerons
[wine makers] (1917, 1920–24, 1924, and 1937. He depicted “[a] timeless peasant
civilization, representing the repository of tradition . . . retaining the traces on France’s
Celtic origins . . . and animated by costumed feasts, chants, and convivial dances”
(Carcano, 18).
Figure 2. Folkloric music and drinking song reproduced
on a contemporary postcard (late 1920s).
Contemporaries noted Roupnel’s proximity to his subject as the source of his
expertise: “[h]is talent excels in those parts dedicated to wine and vineyards. He knows
the faults of the vigneron, his stubbornness, malice, [and] distrust of the bourgeoisie”
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(Clément-Janin 1936, 5). Indeed, happy childhood memories provided Roupnel with
valuable ethnographic observations of the vintner’s villages and folkways: “[f]rom the
depths of my young memory,” he wrote, “I rediscover[ed] memories– happy times
without a name– when, as a child, I would return with the grape harvesters…. I also
remember the wine days,” he adds, as “a merciless source of happy memories
(souvenirs)” (Roupnel 1936a, 118 and 121).
Roupnel’s work paralleled Jeanton’s etiology of contemporary “peasant civilization”
and focused on Celtic pre-history, the social and material organization of medieval rural
villages, the folkloric traditions of the Côte-d’Or, and the “peasant soul” (1932). His
preface to Camille Rodier’s 1931 history of Burgundy’s iconic Clos de Vougeot
vineyards stands as a manifesto for Burgundian cultural regionalism. It privileged
viticultural folkways as uniquely representing a holistic and ecological relationship
between the Burgundian people and their natural milieu (1931a:22–24). This relationship,
he argued, was influenced by the region’s distinct terroir, folkways, and products,
especially wine(s), whose transcendental properties reflect all aspects of Burgundian
existence: “[wine] is a world larger than us. Because it contains the spirit of the past and
is sustained by that which preceded it, its destiny is determined in proportion to its distant
origins. . . . It transcends time and the brief passage of human life” (1931a:20–21).
Roupnel more generally linked the merits of Burgundy’s agrarian practices and rural
vitality to the cultural identity of modern France in his 1932 Histoire de la campagne
française [History of the French Countryside]. His work on the mentalités of French
peasants followed the work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), who distinguished
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“primitive mentality” from “Occidental mentality” on the grounds that the former was
primarily mystical, totemic, and affective (see Lévy-Bruhl 1922a, 1922b, and 1927).
Roupnel proposed a transcendental history of the unity of French agrarian
“civilization” in which cultural progress radiated from an original core region—“la
France des vieux terroirs” [the France of the old soils], i.e., historic Burgundy and
Lorraine)—outward along the vectors of open-field agriculture. In keeping with
contemporary moralists who depicted regional identity as the cosmic negotiation between
the universal and emancipatory demands of neo-Kantian humanism, Roupnel’s work
employed a neo-Romantic moral discourse to locate the origins of occidental civilization
in medieval rural experience. This approach—with slight modification—corresponds to
the man/nature relation that underpins the “true France” found in Jules Michelêt’s 1833
History of France.
Figure 3. A French open-field peasant as national icon.
Advertisement for the Crédit de l’Ouest bank “Emprunt de
la Libération” (Liberation Loan), c. 1920s.
Grounded in a tradition that depicted Nature as the physical manifestation of a cosmic
synthesis between humankind and spirit, this work elevated the peasants (paysans) of
Burgundy’s open fields into national icons that pointed to the ideological and mythical
referents of a “traditional order” based in agrarian folkways and labor practices (see
Figure 3) (Cachin 1997). Roupnel’s History employed the ecology of terroir to invoke a
metaphysical relationship between the spiritual and natural worlds as organically
unfolding within an endlessly recurring teleology: rustic peasants communed with their
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ancestral and collective identity in the course of their daily activities. Roupnel further
employed pseudo-scientific theories of “primitive mentality” to link “traditional” agrarian
cultural practices to modern psychology and aesthetic desires (1932:376).
These rustic, imaginative, idyllic, nostalgic, and lyrical depictions of village life and
organization contributed to a highly popular French interwar folk stereotype that reflected
and informed contemporary desires reproduced in debates concerning French identity,
participatory politics, social order, and sustainable economic development. While
inherently conservative insofar as it sought to establish a cultural majority on the basis of
an ontologized “heritage,” Roupnel’s emphasis on communal practices, ecological
husbandry, international pacifism, race mixture, and populist politics did not rest easily
within either the Third Republic’s political and cultural ideology or within the competing
variants offered by political parties adhering to the political right. Distinct from
politicized variants (such as Jean Charles-Brun’s reconciliatory and Christian-democratic
regionalism, Mistral’s spirit of “right folklorism,” or Charles Maurras’ atavistic,
nationalist monarchism), Roupnel’s cultural agenda was closer to the Radical-Socialist
Party’s celebration of rural France and was consistent with that of a broad range of rural
folklorists. This agenda is now remembered through Jean Giono’s glorification of rural
values and practices presented as courageously resisting contemporary trends and
developments in his novel Regain [Harvest], a novel so popular that it was made into a
film staring Fernandel, Orane Demazis, and Gabriel Gabrio in 1937 (Charles-Brun 1929
and 1934, Peer 1998:144, and Whalen 2000b:20, 151, Whalen 2001).
By the late 1930s, Roupnel became one of Burgundy’s most eminent promoter
(homme sandwich) and general spokespersons. Roupnel’s lyrical flair for producing
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compelling readings of Burgundian culture was again solicited when Camille Rodier,
president of the Committee for the Promotion (propagande) of Burgundy, asked him to
pen a “Preface” on the history of Burgundian art for an important exhibit at the JeanCharpentier Gallery in Paris (Roupnel 1936c).
The publication of Roupnel’s La Bourgogne, types et coutumes [Burgundy:
Characters and Customs] in the popular series called Visage de France in 1936, along
with his contributions on regional, rural, labor, gastronomy, and viticulture matters, such
as in Edmond Labbé’s 1937 Rapport official for the Paris International Exposition,
revealed Roupnel to be a passionate and engaged participant in contemporary regionalist
agendas. His interventions showed that, far from being an antiquarian pastime practiced
by sleepy provincials, French folklore was a dynamic discourse practiced by
contemporary regionalists intending to refashion and reform modern France.
A Modern Rustic Icon: From Paysan to Vigneron
Despite the prominence ascribed to solitary field laborers in Roupnel’s geographical and
historical works, what is most surprising is that his interest in contemporary agricultural
practices turned attention away from the paysans (with whom his reputation remains
attached to this day) and toward the socio-natural order of the skilled vignerons (growervintners) of Burgundy’s wine-growing areas (1932:384–85). This shift towards practices
associated with viniculture and viticulture (relatively late arrivals, with a historically
limited presence in Burgundy dating from the Middle Ages) was not, however, without
complications. Roupnel cleverly resolved the contradiction between paysans and
vignerons by merging the farmer’s solitary ways with the sociability he associated with
artisans. The resulting synthesis produced the Burgundian vignerons who figured in
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Roupnel’s popular Burgundy: Characters and Customs (1936) and illustrated a shift from
earlier literary representations of “epistemic subjects” toward ethnographic “types” that
metonymically stand for a newly imagined national community (Whalen 1999b,
Harrotunian 1998:147).
As model Burgundian, Roupnel’s jovial and sociable vigneron displaced the
iconographic centrality of the paysan and thereby reoriented the iconography of French
rural identity towards a distinct regional model promising both change and stability.
Reflecting changing rural conditions, Roupnel argued that the vigneron’s villages
“developed the vigorous and alert Burgundian spirit in which vivaciousness is associated
with the calm millennial forces emanating from the earth” (1936a:100). More broadly,
Burgundy: Characters and Customs invoked the concept of terroir to identify practices
associated with viniculture and viticulture as being quintessentially folk. While the
cultural harmony reified through rural allegories—“where human destinies ceaselessly
ferment as in a vat that bubbles with . . . eternal harvests” (1936a:82) depicted a
Burgundian history driven by universal spirit and reflecting a unitary, inter-subjective,
and indissoluble relation between folk and terroir, it also served to mask real social
problems and economic divisions.
Dynamic vignerons provided a refreshingly modern yet reassuringly rustic alternative
to tired images of open-field laborers. They inhabited idealized villages whose “narrow
intimacy” fostered habits of modern sociability: “a sort of rural urbanism” generated “a
rude and jovial sense of social life; a solid and dedicated intelligence; and a quick and
firm mind” (1936a:100). Such half rural/half urban vignerons challenged the paradigm
prevalent in the national imagination of a rural world populated by desultory field
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peasants perceived as generic and ineffectual (Thompson et al. 1980; Le Roy Ladurie
1994; Luxardo 1981; Bloch 1931; Roupnel 1932; Dion 1934). “One must recognize,”
wrote Roupnel, “that it was an incessant miracle of labor to which the vine owes it
greatness and preservation. Our great Burgundian wines are as much the children of
human hands as that of the soil” (1936b:3). Most importantly, through their labor the
vigneronnes enacted the patterns of sociability that constituted the very context
surrounding the Burgundian gastronomical culture of consumption. Far from early
twentieth-century stereotypes of the vigneron as exotic and alcoholic, Roupnel’s
vignerons were tamed, cleaned up, and spoke mostly French as opposed to local patois.
The Dijonnais historian, Henri Drouot, invoked this image when he geographically
anchored the Burgundian vigneron in the Côte-d’Or: “[t]he spirit of the vineyards . . . the
homeland par excellence of the Burgundian spirit is found within the rich vineyards
stretching from Dijon to Beaune. . . . Good food and good wine nourish . . . the
Burgundian vigneron—quick witted and gourmand” (1925:418–19).
These images not only provided a looking glass for modern Burgundians, they also
served to better situate Burgundy within the national political and tourist imagination.
The Burgundian regional cultural paradigm added nuance and complexity to the
existing and unifying national folk stereotype. It offered a national political identity based
on regional models without invoking the adjustments necessary to achieve real political
transformation, labor-management alignment, social fluidity, and/or gender equality
called for by the political Left. The pages of regional journals such as La Terre de
Bourgogne [The Land of Burgundy] or Le Bourguignon [The Burgundian] regularly
reported on the dire conditions of agricultural laborers during the 1920s and 30s, but the
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changing fortunes of Burgundian vignerons—who bought and sold vineyards as
economic conditions dictated—made their political allegiances difficult to predict.
Benefiting from gains made following the phylloxera (1863–1900), mildew (1884), and
black-rot (1898) blights, the vignerons of the Burgundian Côte-d’Or appreciated the
benefits of agricultural cooperatives but remained particularly indifferent, if not hostile,
to radical syndicalism (Vigreux 1996:191–95). These small proprietors readily identified
with and permitted Burgundian notables to represent their interests, even during the
economic depression of the 1930s.
The promise of a shared Burgundian cultural identity was successful to the extent that
maintaining the status quo was perceived as more important than wealth redistribution.
When the Sub-Prefect Bally of the Côte-d’Or rhetorically asked the Board of Beverages
in Beaune in 1931 whether the “life in the cellars of our vignerons, as in those of our
Commerce, must be one Grand Friendship of Labor?” and added that “nothing can be
accomplished without the Union of all” (from a copy of the speech dated 22 June 1931),
he was addressing an audience familiar with the increasingly polarized interests between
the vignerons, with sufficient resources to weather difficult economic times, and the
underemployed, penurious, and poorly organized agricultural laborers (paysans).
Symbolically Central but Socially Marginal Female Labor
If the labor of man is the hard and barbarian soil . . . the labor of woman is the
vine; everything that burgeons and grows. – Gaston Roupnel (1936a:3)
No labor realignment in the early twentieth century was perceived as more
threatening to patriarchal notions of national virility than the growing presence of women
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in the labor force. The examination of gender relations within Roupnel’s idealized
villages, for instance, reveals how the conservative politics of Region and Nation
converged within regional cultural projects to (re)structure France’s social fabric without
undermining the French Third Republic’s conservative values. (French women did not
gain suffrage until 1944.) In an era that pondered the ability of French men to assume
their patriotic and parental responsibilities, Roupnel conjured modern vigneronnes who
could more reliably shoulder France’s productive and reproductive hopes (Childers
2003). In contrast to folklorists who eliminated or ignored women in their descriptions of
rural labor arrangements (a longstanding tradition from Olivier de Serres through the
nineteenth century [Van Gennep 1949:210–304, Segalen 1984:187]), Roupnel recognized
the vigneronne’s role laboring in the fields, vineyards, and gardens while keeping her
tethered to the family hearth.
Figure 4. An aestheticized “Vigneronne” by Louis Graux,
woodcut for Roupnel’s “Comment les Françaises ont fait la
France.” (From the “Fonds Roupnel,” courtesy of the
Gallois family.)
In a discussion of the value of rural women’s labor, rare among contemporary
scholars, Roupnel employed the rhetoric of the “eternal feminine” to structure rural
society according to prevalent gender roles and thereby reassure readers that French
women would continue to shoulder both the material burdens and moral responsibilities
of French civilization. Without contesting the conservative politics of an insecure
Republic that blamed depopulation on feminism (birth control and abortion) and
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countered the threat of women’s suffrage with paternalist “family allowances,” Roupnel
sought to defuse anxieties concerning ’the fantasy of female liberation,’ by locating and
policing women as (re)productive while subordinate subjects (Childers 2003; Berenson
1992; Muel-Dreyfus 2001:26–39; Soweraine 2001:124–29; Zeldin 1977).
Confronting prevalent depictions of the rural world iconically characterized by male
paysans engaged in outdoor pursuits and solitary inclinations, Roupnel performed a
double displacement; he shifted symbolic centrality away from France’s open fields to
Burgundy’s wine villages and from male to female figures. The novelty and potentially
unsettling ramifications of shifting geographical and agrarian milieu are compensated, in
the minds of traditional and/or conservative readers, by consigning the “charming” but
“unloved” paysanne and “vibrant” but “devilish” vigneronne to the gilded and supervised
realm of domestic chores, yard work, and maternal activities associated with rural life in
early twentieth-century rural Burgundy (Roupnel 1933:126–27, Bernhardt 1934:45).
Roupnel’s early novels and mature scholarship depict the ideal Burgundian paysanne
and vigneronne (Figure 4) as an obedient, not too intelligent, and diligent worker. She
must bring a good dowry into what will probably be a loveless relationship (Bernhardt
1934:47). She toils and sacrifices herself for others, as her life is punctuated by the loss of
charm. The daily activities, material condition, subordinate status, and labor activities of
Roupnel’s paysannes are consistent with those described by contemporary commentators
(Normand 1939; Keranflech-Kernezne 1933:21–23). The difference lies in the symbolic
centrality Roupnel confers: abased, she becomes the fitting emblem for a patriarchal and
frequently misogynist culture. Old Garain, the protagonist in Roupnel’s novel about an
unrepentent Burgundian mailman’s sexual conquests (c. 1850), for example, likened the
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process of finding a wife to that of purchasing a cow (Roupnel 1913:2). Alice Turcotte–
the tavern keeper’s lascivious daughter in Old Garain– is described as “a flaming youth…
with the eyes of the Devil” (Roupnel 1913:134-35). Once redeemed and elevated into an
“angel of the hearth” by Roupnel, the ideal Burgundian woman comes to represent the
essence and guaranteed the survival of regional folk identity. Burdened with the selfless
responsibility of taming mankind’s destructive and instinctual tendencies, she remains
virtuous, infantilized, selfless, and holds out the possibility of the nation’s ultimate
salvation (Roupnel 1933:129). The cultural work this “eternal feminine” incantation
performed was to translated an existence of beatified self-sacrifice into the guarantor of
the survival of the French nation through tractable and underpaid female labor (Roupnel
1936:90, 104).
The folk practices, rural motifs, and the promise of national redemption (during the
Great Depression) prominent in Roupnel’s message found a receptive audience at the
1937 Paris International Exposition. The Exposition’s General Commissioner, Edmond
Labbé, sought to identify and promote crafts and techniques that emblematized qualities
uniquely associated with France’s provinces: “to show how new methods are adapted to
the respective character of each corner of the Nation” (Livre d’Or Officiel, p. 188). The
Exposition’s General Committee’s promotional magazine announced that the crafts
center, “like a small commercial city quarter lined with shops bright and gay,” would
have “a particularly important position in the Exposition” where “craftsmen [would] be
shown working as they do at usual times.” Attempting to simulate an authentic
experience, “visitors to the Fair,” it promised, could “enter into the internal lives of
craftsmen and artists” (Exposition Paris 1937:1). As a powerful representation of the
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qualities associated with traditional regional practices (real, imagined, and purported),
Burgundy’s modernized vigneronne provided a fresh, seductive and reassuring
alternative. She was adopted by both the 1937 Paris Exposition and the Ministry of
Agriculture (Figure 5). “Marianne moissoneuse,” the conventional
anthropomorphicization of France harvesting the nation’s wheat, became “Marianne
vandangeuse,” now harvesting in the vineyards. This iconology suited the General
Commission’s desire that publicity surrounding the 1937 Paris International Exposition
use “new techniques . . . in which the fantasies of our artists are expressed with feminine
grace and style onto products to make them attractive; on landscapes that must be made
to appear productive… [we] must do everything to reveal the French spirit (l’âme
française)” (Labbé 1938, vol. 7:276–77).
Figure 5. An idealized vigneronne in a publicity poster by
André Galland, 1937- Ministry of Agriculture (public
domain)
The iconographic regularity and rhetorical prevalence of modernized vigneronnes at the
Exposition’s Burgundian Pavilion and the Rural Center and in the Regional Committee
and General Commissioner’s speeches echoed the popularity of Roupnel’s folkloric
tropes and imagery. In one example, a vigneronne, marked by her traditional headgear,
represents Burgundy’s contribution to a productive national agenda by harvesting grapes,
which Marianne then collects in a traditional Burgundian basket.
Figure 6. Bas-relief by Albert David of Marianne as
vandangeuse and a Burgundian vigneronne for the
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Burgundian Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition. From
Labbé, Rapport general. Vol. 8. “Courtesy of the Hagley
Museum and Library.”
Conclusion
If the measure of French intellectuals includes their ability to address important issues by
reaching broad audiences—from the newspaper wars surrounding the Dreyfus Affair to
current affairs debates hosted by Tel Quel– none have been more successful, perhaps,
than the provincial intellectuals who fashioned the cultural icons and practices associated
with modern French regionalism. The vital and often unacknowledged role provincial
intellectuals have played in the development of a republican tradition of regional
commercial culture continues to inform and serve French agricultural policies today. As
cultural intermediaries, they played an important role by mediating competing visions of
traditional and cosmopolitan France. Thanks to interwar regionalists, millions of tourists
continue to discover, consume, and reinvent Burgundian cultural identity through popular
and lucrative cycles of annual folkloric gastronomical fairs and wine festivals. The
Burgundian example shows how regionalists buttressed faded paradigms of national
identity by promoting rustic stereotypes that insinuated stimulatingly modern and
reassuringly conservative elements into the national consciousness. Interwar regionalism
also allowed provincial men of letters (hommes de lettres) to contest the authority of
metropolitan experts and administrators. They gained regional influence and national
prestige by voicing their interests and demonstrating their expertise, and thereby
influenced contemporary notions of French identity.
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Figure 6. Wine-growing regions of France represented as
folklorized vigneronnes in a poster for Colmard’s
Viticulture and Tourism Center. c. 1948. (author’s
Photograph)
Regionalism developed novel and enticing stratagems calculated to preserve existing
rural traditions and (re)invent their ideological underpinnings. Both endorsing the
emergence of new material conditions and accommodating contingent social formations,
regionalism continues to inform the cultural politics of modern France. From G. Bruno’s
sententious Le Tour de la France par deux enfants through the regional depictions
annually reported in coverage of the Tour de France since 1903 (see Figure 6) and on to
René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s enduring folkloric caricatures in Le Tour de Gaule
d’Astérix, regional stereotypes have been consistently deployed to forge French national
unity (Bruno 1920; Goscinny and Uderzo 1965; Palmer 2002; Leduc 1991, 138).
Allegorical perambulations across the national patrimoine continue to teach French
schoolchildren that regional differences represent unique qualities that collectively unite
the nation’s territory and define its identity (see Figure 6).
19 of 28
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