6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4

Transcription

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4 / sheet 97 of 210
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Identity in a Divided Province:
The Folklorists of Lorraine, 1860–1960
David Hopkin
The original Lorraine came into existence at the Treaty of Verdun in
843, which divided the Carolingian Empire. Its boundaries have been
frequently redrawn since then, as the original Middle Kingdom of the
Franks was fought over, occupied, and divided by its neighbors, but
Lorraine survived, in the reduced form of an independent duchy, almost until the Revolution.1 However, from the Constituent Assembly’s
partition of France into departments in 1790 until after the Second
World War, the term Lorraine was only a geographical expression: the
four departments of the Moselle, Meuse, Meurthe, and the Vosges had
no significant institutions in common.2 Throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries some of its inhabitants felt that Lorraine deserved
more unity and control over its own actions. Mostly associated with the
political right, they ranged from moderate decentralizers to outright
autonomists. But they were all agreed that Lorraine was a real entity,
and its political claims were merely the recognition of this ‘‘fact.’’
But of what did this Lorraine consist? Even its boundaries were
uncertain; historically, the area covered by the four departments was
more one of divisions than of unity. The dukes were, from the fifteenth
David Hopkin is lecturer in social history at the University of Glasgow.
A short version of this article was delivered to the conference of the Association for French
Historical Studies in Ottawa, 1998. The author is grateful for the comments from participants at
the conference (particularly those of Tony Nuspl and the commentator Robert Schneider), as well
as those of the German Historical Studies Group in Cambridge (particularly Chris Clark, Ulinka
Rublack, and Brendan Simms) and the anonymous readers for French Historical Studies. The author
would also like to thank Carolyn Scott, fellow student of Lorraine, for sharing her knowledge and
enthusiasm for this region.
1 For a brief history of the ‘‘réunion’’ of Lorraine with France see André Gain, Géographie
lorraine, La Société lorraine des études locales (Paris, 1938), 1–40.
2 Lorraine, as an administrative region, reappeared in 1955, although only after Mitterrand’s decentralization in 1982 did it take on a political life of its own (Pierre Barral, L’Esprit lorrain:
Cet Accent singulier du patriotism français [Nancy, 1989], 143–53).
French Historical Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (fall 2000)
Copyright © 2000 by the Society for French Historical Studies
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FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
century, sovereigns over two distinct duchies, Lorraine and Bar. Until
1542 the bulk of this territory formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the portion west of the Meuse fell under the jurisdiction of
the Parlement of Paris. And although the duchy was the largest contender for the ‘‘espace lorrain,’’ it was not alone: its most important rival
was the city-state of Metz.3 Throughout the medieval and early modern periods the dukes were in dispute with Metz, a conflict that was
intensified when France first occupied (1552) and then incorporated
(1648) the Three Bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun. From the 1620s
onward the dukes, usually supported by one or other branch of the
Hapsburgs, were at war with the French monarchy, only to be finally
driven out in 1737. The duchy retained nominal independence under
Duke Stanislas, ex-king of Poland and Louis XV’s father-in-law, until
finally incorporated into France in 1766.4 Even then it remained legally
and administratively apart from the kingdom. The antagonisms created
by these historic divisions have sometimes proved more enduring than
the states that created them, particularly those between Metz and the
former ducal capital, Nancy.5
These internal conflicts posed problems for regionalists who
grounded their arguments for political recognition on history. Certainly the duchy had a long history of combative independence on
which to draw, and, like other regions tardily ‘‘reunited’’ with France,
regionalists could point to treaties promising the recognition of local
rights. But a modern region called Lorraine was unlikely to be concomitant with the duchy, which would have been an unworkable patchwork
of crisscrossing jurisdictions. Nor could Lorrainers have recourse to
ethnicity or language as a basis for regional identity, as was the case in
Alsace.6 The majority population of Lorraine and the Three Bishoprics
spoke langue d’oïl dialects, but both provinces contained a significant
minority of germanophones.
3 The historico-geographical complexity of the ‘‘espace lorrain’’ is depicted in two excellent atlases: Geographical Section of Naval Intelligence Division, Naval Staff, Admiralty, A Manual
of Alsace-Lorraine (London, 1920); and Georg Wolfram and Werner Gley, Elsass-lothringischer Atlas:
Landeskunde, Geschichte, Kultur und Wirtschaft Elsass-Lothringens (Frankfurt am Main, 1931).
4 For the history of the conflict and final settlement between France and Lorraine see, in
particular, Stéphane Gaber, La Lorraine meutrie: Les Malheurs de la guerre de trente ans (Nancy, 1979);
and Guy Cabourdin, Quand Stanislas régnait en Lorraine (Paris, 1980).
5 The present-day antagonism between the cities is very evident over such important issues
as the placing of the TGV line between Paris and Strasbourg, but also in football and even such
apparently minor matters as whether Metz University should offer degrees in sport studies. In the
past their conflicts were much more bloody; for instance, in 1790 when the National Guard of
Metz (and Toul) willingly helped crush the Nancy rebellion.
6 Solange Gras, ‘‘Regionalism and Autonomy in Alsace since 1918,’’ in The Politics of Territorial
Identity, ed. Stein Rokkan and Derek Urwin (London, 1982), 309–54.
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641
To justify their position, therefore, regionalists of Lorraine turned
to popular traditions as evidence of their cultural identity.7 The nineteenth-century study of folklore, as part of the romantic ‘‘discovery of
the people,’’ had proved a vital element in nascent nationalisms from
Finland to Serbia.8 Few Lorrainers would go so far as to argue that
folkloric unity gave claim to a national identity, but it was proof that
Lorraine continued to exist, despite its lack of common institutions.
Folklore also provided an argument for self-government, because this
traditional local culture was under threat from the centralizing and homogenizing policies emanating from both of the states that, between
1870 and 1945, battled for dominance in the region.
Although France had taken control over Lorraine in the eighteenth century, its position was disputed during the nineteenth and
twentieth by the Holy Roman Empire’s successors, Prussia and then
Germany. Prussia had already gained several pieces of Lorraine at the
second Treaty of Paris in 1815. After the war of 1870–71, Prussia, citing
both Lorraine’s history and her ethnic mix, occupied the eastern corner of the region. Until 1918 Lothringen, together with Alsace, formed
a German Reichsland. As France never gave up its claims to the lost provinces, both sides of the border in Lorraine became sites for symbolic
displays of national unity. France regained Alsace-Lorraine in 1918, but
German governments, before and after the Nazi takeover, continued to
interest themselves in the region, and for five traumatic years between
1940 and 1945 the Moselle once more formed part of the Reich.
The hostility between nations was matched by a desire to ensure
unity within each nation. Both France and Germany tried hard to inculcate a sense of national identity in their subjects, particularly in this
contested border region. In this climate of heightened nationalism it
was impossible to ignore the competing claims over Lorraine. Whatever their nostalgia for the time of the dukes, most regionalists agreed
with Maurice Barrès that ‘‘nous ne pouvons être aujourd’hui que Français ou Allemands’’ (and, indeed, most had a marked preference for
one or the other).9 Their search for a regional identity was, therefore,
7 Of course, even within France they were not alone in this; regionalists everywhere based
their claims on a mixture of history, language, and popular culture. For details of how folklore was
used by exponents of regionalism in Alsace see James Wilkinson, ‘‘The Uses of Popular Culture
by Rival Elites: The Case of Alsace, 1890–1914,’’ History of European Ideas 11 (1989): 605–18.
8 This history is well known, but for examples see William A. Wilson, ‘‘The Kalevala and
Finnish Politics,’’ Journal of the Folklore Institute 12 (1975): 131–55; and Duncan Wilson, The Life and
Times of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (Oxford, 1970), 1–10.
9 René Taveneaux, ‘‘Barrès et la Lorraine,’’ in Maurice Barrès: Actes du colloque organisé par la
Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Nancy (Nancy, 22–25 octobre 1962) (Nancy,
1963), 143.
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complicated by their desire for a strong nation to defend them from
their well-armed neighbors. The consequent dialectic between national
and regional identity is one of the issues considered in this article, as
folklorists reacted to the fluctuating policies and military fortunes of
France and Germany. Regionalist demands (and folkloric activity) were
at their most restrained when the process of nation building was at its
mildest, in the 1860s; they became more strident as the national or
racial ‘‘community’’ took political center stage in the 1920s and 1930s.
It is hardly surprising that nationalist and regionalist arguments developed in tandem: the more the state attempted to enforce uniformity the
more regionalists rushed to defend local identities. As nationalist policies were usually linked to a wider political agenda, whether Bonapartist, Republican, or even Fascist, there were always opponents of these
regimes for whom regionalism might prove a handy political weapon.
Yet most of the folklorists considered below thought of themselves as
good patriots: regionalism, in their eyes, was not necessarily in competition with nationalism. They were the twin descendants of the same anticosmopolitan reaction to the Enlightenment that posited a connection
between a defined geographical entity, a specific culture, and political
institutions. But whereas romanticism endowed nations with history, regions got folklore.
The difficulty for regionalists was that, although it was relatively
simple to uncover the traditions of Lorraine, it was harder to prove that
they were specific to Lorraine, or that they were associated with a particular Lorrainer identity. Should Lorraine, therefore, be considered as
an ‘‘imagined community,’’ whose existence was largely confined to the
minds of folklorists and regionalists? Was the folklore, which they deployed both as evidence of—and justification for—their province, just
another example of ‘‘invented tradition’’? 10 Neither phrase is entirely
adequate: both arguments have a tendency to reduce the perception
of community to an expression of political expedience. Yet the sense
of Lorraine identity was often deeply held: local folklorists, whatever
their political and national affiliations, sometimes felt more in common with each other than with either French or Germans ‘‘of the interior.’’ If we want to uncover the foundations of this sense of identity,
we should, perhaps, take seriously the arguments for a regional culture.
The folklorists’ version of Lorraine may be partial, but it was rooted in
10 The terms imagined community and invented tradition respectively derive from Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983), 5–7; and Eric Hobsbawm, ‘‘Inventing Traditions,’’
in Inventing Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), 1–14.
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the lived experiences of local inhabitants. As Carolyn Hamilton has recently demonstrated, albeit in a very different context, there are limits
to historical invention.11
On one level this article may seem parochial; however, the issues
raised have significance beyond Lorraine. It is certainly not the only
region where a belief in cultural identity has given rise to political demands. Its peculiarity lies in the vagueness of its borders, as demonstrated by the work of Emmanuel Cosquin.
What’s in a Name? Emmanuel Cosquin
versus Arnold van Gennep
In 1876 the journal Romania published a series of ‘‘Contes populaires
lorrains, recueillis dans un village du Barrois, à Montiers-sur-Saulx
(Meuse).’’ They had been collected in 1866–67 by the folklorist Emmanuel Cosquin. Cosquin rejected the practice of his French predecessors, the salon conteuses, of taking servants’ narratives and turning them
into elaborate fairy tales with grafted-on morals.12 His collection was
not literature but rather a contribution to the new science of folklore
(the term had only been coined in 1846) of which the brothers Grimm
were among the earliest exponents.
The Grimms were Cosquin’s inspiration. In 1862, then a law student, he wrote to Jacob Grimm enclosing a tale he had heard from an
old servant that was almost identical to a text in the Grimms’ collection.13 Although the Grimms were well known in France (a French translation of the tales had appeared more than thirty years before), this was
the only direct contact between the brothers and a French folktale collector. Few French folklorists had yet emulated the Grimms and commenced fieldwork in their own country, and little of their work had appeared in print before 1876.14 So although Cosquin’s was not quite the
first French folktale collection, it was quickly seized on as the national
counterpart to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, a comparison that its size,
11 Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
12 Emmanuel Cosquin, ‘‘Contes populaires lorrains, recueillis dans un village du Barrois, à
Montiers-sur-Saulx (Meuse),’’ Romania 5 (1876): 82. The entire collection was published as Contes
populaires de Lorraine: Comparés avec les contes des autres provinces de France et des pays étrangers, et précédés
d’un essai sur l’origine et la propagation des contes populaires européens, 2 vols. (Paris, 1886).
13 Nicole Odette Stein-Moreau, ‘‘Les Frères Grimm, conteurs, et la France au dix-neuvième
siècle,’’ in Bruder Grimm Gedenken (Marburg, Germany, 1963), 553–54.
14 The notable exceptions were Jean-François Bladé in Gascony and François Marie Luzel
in Brittany, who had largely published in langue d’oc and Breton, and so were little known outside
their regions.
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range, and quality amply justified.15 In the Catalogue raisonné of French
folktales Cosquin’s is the only French collection to stand beside the
Grimms’ among the Recueils fondamentaux.16
Folktale collections, usually with some claim to represent a national tradition, had already appeared for many European countries.17
Yet sixty years had passed between the publication of the Kinder- und
Hausmärchen and Cosquin’s ‘‘Contes populaires lorrains.’’ The reason
for this lag becomes apparent in the Grimms’ reception in France. Even
for enthusiasts such as Alexandre Dumas, part of the tales’ attraction
was their air of the ‘‘Outre-Rhin.’’ They were expressions of a backward German mentality, simple and credulous, which French readers
might enjoy for its quaintness but which no longer formed any part of
French experience. French national culture was enlightened, rational,
and urbane; it had no room for the ramblings of illiterate peasants.18 According to another Lorraine folklorist, le comte de Puymaigre, ‘‘Nous
étions si fortement sous l’influence de certains préjugés, que la muse
populaire ne nous a plu qu’à la condition d’être étrangère.’’ 19
French sophistication had been reinforced by the centralizing effects of the Revolution and its successor regimes and by the consequent
domination of Paris in all cultural arenas. Both Napoléon I and Napoléon III made occasional attempts to encourage folklore studies, aware
that ‘‘tradition’’ could give cultural weight to nationalist policies.20 However, these efforts were couched in terms of recording for posterity
the remnants of feudal benightedness, rapidly being eradicated (thanks
15 For example, in Alice Sperber, Charakteristik der Lothringer Märchensammlung von E. Cosquin
(Vienna, 1908), in which she concluded on the basis of the comparison of Cosquin’s collection
with that of the Grimms that the French tales were less moral and more materialistic.
16 Paul Delarue and (from vol. 2) Marie-Louise Tenèze, Le Conte populaire français: Catalogue
raisonné des versions de France et des pays de langue française d’outre-mer, 4 vols. (Paris, 1957–85), 1:57–
58. Twenty-nine of the 320 items in Delarue’s bibliography of French folktales predate the appearance of the ‘‘Contes populaires lorrains,’’ but almost all of these, as Delarue indicates, were either
literary in style or of doubtful origin.
17 For example, Hungary (1822), Norway (1842), Serbia (1853), Denmark (1855), Russia
(1855), Spain (1859), Scotland (1860), and Ireland (1866).
18 Indeed, as James Lehning has demonstrated, the idea of what was ‘‘French’’ was all but
defined as the antithesis of what was ‘‘peasant’’ (Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France
during the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge, 1995], 11–34).
19 Théodore de Puymaigre, Chants populaires recueillis dans le pays messin (Metz, 1865), 3. Puymaigre knew from experience the likely reaction of the reading public: the Cardinal de l’Est, reviewing his collection in a local journal, asked ‘‘mais où allez-vous chercher tant de niaiseries?’’
According to the cardinal, who may be considered as a representative of the educated classes of
France, Puymaigre’s folk songs consisted of ‘‘des vers qui n’ont ni rimes, ni cesures, ni sens commun, qui souvent sont grossières, où l’on trouve des mots qui n’ont été accueillis par aucun dictionnaire; rien que des chansons de nourrices, des rondes d’enfants, des couplets insipides qui
heureusement, disparaissent de la mémoire des paysans’’ (Revue de l’Est [ Jan.–Feb. 1868]: 2).
20 See Harry Senn, ‘‘Folklore Beginnings in France, the Académie Celtique, 1804–1813,’’
Journal of the Folklore Institute 18 (1981): 23–29; and Charles Rearick, Beyond the Enlightenment: Historians and Folklore in Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomington, Ind., 1974), 162–63.
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to a beneficent government) by the spread of education, national culture, and the rule of law. Cosquin tried to combat this dismissive attitude even before he published his tales with articles on folklore in respected journals.21 Despite his efforts, folktales appeared irredeemably
old-fashioned, even ancien régime. The hostility of French national culture to folklore may explain why Cosquin placed his collection within
a regional setting. His tales could not be considered characteristic of
the nation, for France was modern and enlightened, but only of one
ancient (indeed extinct) province—Lorraine.
Cosquin was not alone in preferring the names of the former provinces of France to its current administrative divisions. Out of the three
hundred and more titles listed in Delarue’s bibliography of French folktales, only twelve make even a passing reference to the department in
which they were collected. Arnold Van Gennep, the doyen of French
folklorists, noted this peculiarity: ‘‘Les folkloristes locaux ont, d’une
manière normale et persistante, employé dans leur titres le nom de la
province, ou l’ont ajouté quand ils décrivaient un petit pays, un canton
et même un département.’’ 22 However, Cosquin’s choice of title was particularly confusing, as it referred to three incompatible geographical
entities: these were ‘‘folktales of Lorraine’’ collected in a village of the
Barrois (which, by definition, was not Lorraine), in the Meuse (which,
as a department, was the antithesis of the provinces).23 Perhaps this was
why Gennep singled out Cosquin for criticism: according to his magisterial Manuel de folklore français contemporain, the whole collection was
misappropriated. The tales belonged not to Lorraine but to the neighboring province of Champagne: ‘‘Le malheur est que ce titre a fait attribuer à la Lorraine . . . une richesse littéraire qu’elle est très loin de
posséder.’’ 24 This apparently minor dispute goes to the very heart of
folklore studies because it calls into question the link between folklore
and territory. But why argue about whether the tales belonged to either
Lorraine or Champagne, when both were long vanished?
21 Cosquin’s first article on folklore opened with the question ‘‘Y a-t-il donc, dans les contes
populaires, quelque chose d’intéressant pour un esprit sérieux?’’ (Les Contes populaires européens et
leur origine, extract from Le Correspondant, 25 June 1873 [Paris, 1873], 1).
22 Arnold Van Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 4 vols. (Paris, 1937–43), 3:96.
Gennep followed the same practice himself; his work on Dauphiné concerned only the department of Isère, that on Burgundy was based entirely in Côte-d’Or.
23 Cosquin did not explain why he called his collection ‘‘lorraine,’’ but the most obvious
justification was historical. Montiers-sur-Saulx now lies on the western edge of the department of
the Meuse, but until 1766 it marked the border between the territories of the dukes of Lorraine
and the French province of Champagne. Montiers was never part of the duchy of Lorraine itself
but rather belonged to the Barrois mouvant, yet since 1484 the Barrois had shared in the fortunes
and misfortunes of Lorraine, and in particular the century of conflict between the dukes and the
French from 1631, which developed a lively sense of Lorrainer identity.
24 Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 4:690.
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The explanation is that neither Cosquin nor Gennep used the
terms Lorraine or Champagne to refer to administrative regions but
rather to cultural entities. Cosquin’s implication was that the tales did
not belong to him as their editor, or to the persons who narrated them
(who are not even named), but to the people of Lorraine as a whole, a
people with unifying characteristics and their own cultural inheritance,
in this case an oral tradition of folktales. Some of his contemporaries
were more explicit about the provincial and collective nature of folklore. Léon Pineau was following a well-worn path when he described his
Poitevine tales as the literature into which ‘‘le vrai peuple, qui aime et
qui souffre, a mis toute son âme: ténèbres et rayons.’’ 25 So marked was
this trend that when a leading folklorist of the period issued a collection of Contes français he felt it necessary to apologize for the title. ‘‘Ces
recueils formés de contes rassemblés dans une province déterminée, la
Normandie, la Picardie, le Béarn, l’Anjou, etc., ont fait croire à beaucoup de personnes qu’il existait pour chacun de ces pays une littérature
orale toute différente . . . mais qu’on pense différencier les contes de
Haute Bretagne de ceux de la Bretagne bretonnante, de la Normandie
ou du Berry et de la Provence, nous ne l’admettons pas. . . . Il n’y a donc
pas de Folk-Lore provincial.’’ 26
Although Gennep dismissed the numerous works ‘‘plus ou moins
fantaisistes sur les diverses âmes provinciales,’’ he accepted the existence
of separate communities whose identity could be established through
folklore.27 One of his principal aims in compiling the Manuel was to
distinguish various folkloric regions and relate them to the ethnic,
linguistic, and historical diversity of France.28 These regions might
not coincide with either current or former administrative boundaries;
the royal provinces were just as arbitrary as the revolutionary departments.29 In practice, however, he was obliged to follow his predecessors
in using provincial names to describe his regions: ‘‘Le grand public y
est habitué.’’ 30 His argument with Cosquin was that, whatever history
said about the position of Montiers, culturally it was located in Champagne.31 Unfortunately, Gennep’s own attempts to fix boundaries to his
25 Léon Pineau, Les Contes populaires du Poitou (Paris, 1891), iv.
26 E. Henry Carnoy, Contes français (Paris, 1885), vi–vii.
27 Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 3:150.
28 Ibid., 3:149. The Manuel is littered with maps showing the precise geographical limits of
particular folkloric practices and patois terms in fulfillment of this goal.
29 Ibid., 1:3.
30 Ibid., 3:96.
31 Arnold Van Gennep, ‘‘Contribution à la méthodologie du folklore,’’ Lares 5 (1934): 20.
Gennep based his argument on the dialect used in some of Cosquin’s tales.
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cultural Lorraine proved just as difficult, although these did not lead
him to doubt its existence.32
The belief that oral literature belonged to a community rather than
to individuals indicates the roots of folklore in German romanticism
and in particular the inspiration of Johann Herder. In reaction to the
universalist claims of the Enlightenment, Herder’s philosophy stressed
the individuality of each nation. A national community was an organic
whole, its personality expressed through its customs and above all its
poetry.33 Folk songs and tales were national poetry, the artless expression of the national ‘‘soul.’’ Individual singers were merely the vehicle
for the voice of the nation as a whole. This idea was developed by the
Grimms, for whom a folktale ‘‘knows neither name nor place, nor a definite home, and it is something that belongs to the entire fatherland.’’ 34
Cosquin was certainly influenced by the Grimms’ ideas, although
he later became an exponent of an alternative school of folklore, and
the clear implication of his title is that Lorraine formed such a historic community. It is unlikely, however, that his ambitions, unlike the
Grimms’, ever included generating a sense of national consciousness in
Lorraine.35 Cosquin was a French patriot; he cut his formerly close ties
with German folklorists in memory of Alsace and Lorraine, ‘‘arrachées,
par la plus odieuse conquête, à leur patrie d’affection, à leur veritable
patrie.’’ 36 If his work implied that Lorraine was a cultural whole, perhaps with a right to political expression, this was because his concept of
France was one in which the province and the nation were not incompatible.
When Cosquin was not researching folklore he was a dedicated
Catholic and Legitimist journalist. His articles on religious, archaeo32 Gennep, Manuel de folklore français contemporain, 3:61. Gennep defined Lorraine as the
four departments of the Meuse (minus the area around Montiers), Moselle, Meurthe-et-Moselle,
and the Vosges, together with a bit of the Ardennes, thus including the germanophone population of the Moselle. True, the latter had formerly been the subjects of the dukes of Lorraine, but
in terms of language and culture they were closer to the Franconians of the Rhineland Palatinate.
33 William A. Wilson, ‘‘Herder, Folklore, and Romantic Nationalism,’’ Journal of Popular Culture 6 (1972–73): 819–35. For the continued influence of romantic notions on folklore see Roger D.
Abrahams, ‘‘Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism in Folkloristics,’’ Journal of American Folklore 106
(1993): 3–37.
34 Christa Kamenetsky, The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics: Folktales and the Quest for Meaning
(Athens, Ohio, 1992), 65.
35 The proposition is not quite as far-fetched as it sounds: other ‘‘French’’ folklorists of the
first generation, particularly the Bretons, had been accused of separatism. The first ‘‘French’’ folklorist (in the sense of a follower of Herder), Théodore-Claude-Henri Hersart de La Villemarqué,
was also the author of a Breton patriotic song sung at the Breton banquet of 1837: ‘‘Ils [nos pères]
étaient libres, nous aux chaînes, / Mais nos fers, nous les briserons, / Leur sang coule encore dans
nos veines, / Nous sommes encore bretons’’ (Xavier de Planhol, An Historical Geography of France
[Cambridge, 1994], 323).
36 Cosquin, Les Contes populaires européens, 1.
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logical, and ethnographic matters appeared regularly in Le Quotidien,
Le Français, and Le Moniteur.37 Cosquin helped organize the Fribourg
meetings that paved the way for the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum
and was a cofounder of the Congrès internationaux des catholiques
sociaux.38 He was a leading collaborator of the Cercles catholiques ouvriers founded in 1871 by Albert de Mun and René de La Tour du PinChambly. The Cercles were born out of their direct experience of class
conflict during the suppression of the Paris Commune; their main aim
was to unite the working classes with the ‘‘classe dirigeante.’’ Opposed
to the unregulated labor market, but equally horrified by the socialist
alternative, they proposed a more organic society made up of medievalstyle corporations, in which ‘‘natural’’ elites performed their paternalist
duty by the workers and were rewarded with the latter’s filial obedience.
The political stance of the Cercles was summed up in 1878 by de Mun as
‘‘nous sommes la Contre-révolution irréconciliable.’’ 39 As part of their
counterrevolutionary campaign, the Cercles wished to reverse the post1789 concentration of power in Paris through decentralization within a
framework of provinces. The revolutionary departments had no basis in
history; to create an organic society one had to return to the provincial
map of France, each province with its own, unique heritage.40
Folklore was one expression of this heritage. By the time Cosquin
published, he had rejected the Grimms’ theories and had become an
exponent of diffusionism. Like his mentor, Theodor Benfey, Cosquin
argued that folktales originated in India, from whence they had spread
with traders, missionaries, and conquerors.41 However, he never followed the logic of the diffusionist argument to its conclusion, which
would have denied the connection between folklore and locality. Instead, he emphasized that folktales kept communities in touch with
37 Most of these took the form of book reviews or commentaries arising from his frequent
travels in central and eastern Europe. His polemics on freemasonry, which appeared in Le Moniteur, caused quite a stir.
38 Raymonde Robert, ‘‘Emmanuel Cosquin et les contes lorrains,’’ in Lorraine vivante: Homage
à Jean Lanher, ed. Roger Marchal and Bernard Guidot (Nancy, 1993), 204.
39 Charles Molette, Albert de Mun, 1872–1890: Exigence doctrinale et préoccupations sociales chez
un Laic catholique, Séries recherches d’histoire religieuse 1 (Paris, 1970), 57. There is a large literature on social Catholicism in France and its links to Legitimism; see Steven D. Kale, Legitimism and
the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852–1883 (Baton Rouge, La., 1992), 179–209.
40 Unlike other Legitimist organizations, decentralization was not a key policy for the
Cercles, whose main concern was industrial relations. But that they were favorable to such a policy
is made clear in a pamphlet published by the Cercles, which argued that ‘‘la division de la France
en quarante provinces correspond, qu’on vient de la voir, à une décentralisation réelle et vraiment
salutaire’’ (Le Marquis D’Auray, Du pouvoir de l’organisation administrative en France avant et après 1789,
extract from the Association catholique, journal of L’Œuvre des cercles catholiques d’ouvriers [Bar-le-Duc,
1888], 8).
41 Every tale in his collection is followed by a chain of comparisons back to Indian religious
texts.
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649
their past: in tales a king still sat on the throne of France, where he
doled out rewards in livres and not in francs. In more than one tale institutions and even named individuals from the ancien régime have their
place.42 Hierarchy is apparent in the very form of the collection: the
tales were told by Cosquin’s servants and their friends, but it was their
master’s name that appeared on the cover. However, through their enthusiasm for folklore, both classes were united, unlike the antagonism
that Cosquin considered the consequence of the modernizing, secularizing Republic.43 Although there is little overt royalism or religiosity in
Cosquin’s folklore publications, his interest in the discipline was associated with his vision of France as rural, pious, and hierarchical. His
sense of his country’s geography was part and parcel of this vision, as it
recalled the lost provinces of what Cosquin considered a more natural,
organic society.44
Folklorists, regionalists, and the political right were often found in
each others’ company in the nineteenth century. It was not a necessary
connection: Franche-Comté’s two leading folklorists were Max Buchon
(a democratic-socialist, exiled after the June Days) and Charles Beauquier (a radical-socialist deputy during the Third Republic). However,
there is a logic to the alliance. A roll call of folklorists from Lorraine
would include some half dozen aristocrats and a similar number of
clerics, traditional social elites sidelined by successive revolutionary
regimes.45 They found themselves lumped together with popular traditions as the useless baggage of the past. The threat of the secularist
and centralist direction from Paris forced these social groups to look
for new allies and new weapons. The study of folklore provided one defense against the interference of the state and the incursion of industrial capitalism into the rural world from which both landowners and
clergy drew their strength. It enabled them to portray themselves as the
42 For example, the tale of Pou et Pouce ends with a visit to ‘‘Père Quentin,’’ the last operator
of the four banal before its closure during the Revolution (Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine, 1:
no. 18).
43 Of course, the hierarchies of folktales are constantly being turned upside down—deserters murder their captains, cobblers rape princesses, seigneurs are tricked by peasants. Cosquin
does not comment on these developments.
44 Cosquin was a prolific journalist, but I have not been able to discover an article in which
he tackles decentralization or regionalism directly. However, in the notes to his published correspondence with Jacob Grimm he wrote, ‘‘Ma petite ville de Vitry-le François (département de
la Marne) faisait partie, en effet, autrefois de la province de Champagne, une de ces régions
historiques qui ont été morcelées à la Révolution, et que maintenant beaucoup de bons esprits
voudraient voir rétablies’’ ( Johannes Bolte, ‘‘Kleine Mitteilungen—Jacob Grimm an Emmanuel
Cosquin,’’ Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde 21 [1911]: 251n).
45 Louis Jouve, a friend and supporter of the republican Jules Ferry, is the one obvious
exception among the folklorists of Lorraine. Interestingly, his Chansons en patois vosgien (Epinal,
1876), is one of the few folk song collections to explicitly refer to a department, rather than a
province, both in the title and in the text.
650
guardians of ‘‘True France,’’ whose destruction no election result could
justify.46 Hence there is a tendency to paint folklorists as romantic reactionaries, whose commemorations of a golden age of pious peasants
and paternalist seigneurs, united through love of their pays, was little
more than a work of political imagination. There is an element of truth
to this image, although it does not do justice to the serious scholarship
of someone like Cosquin. It does recognize, however, that folklore, for
him and for others, formed part of a wider interest in society. Cosquin,
like other folklorists, was intent on recording a traditional way of life
he considered to be in danger, but he was also active in attempts to
preserve (or perhaps even re-create) links to the past.
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Le Comte de Puymaigre:
Folklore and Decentralization
Such was also the case with Théodore-Joseph Boudet, comte de Puymaigre. Before the Revolution his family had been the seigneurs of the
château of Inglange (Moselle). Puymaigre’s father was an émigré, and
after the Restoration became the ‘‘Ultra’’ prefect who suppressed the
Belfort rebellion of 1821. Théodore inherited his father’s political beliefs and in 1846 stood as the (losing) Legitimist candidate in the elections at Thionville. In 1848 he was made mayor of Inglange, a post he
was forced to resign after the coup d’état of Napoléon III. Thereafter
he took little active part in politics, but unofficially he was the leader of
the Legitimist faction in the Moselle, and in frequent contact with the
Bourbon pretender to the throne, the comte de Chambord.47
When his political career foundered on the rock of his obstinate
loyalty to the Bourbon cause, Puymaigre turned to folklore to keep
himself busy. His most important contribution was published in 1865
under the title Chants populaires recueillis dans le pays messin. The choice
of wording is significant, for what Puymaigre meant by the pays messin
was not the territory that had formerly belonged to the city-state of
Metz. Instead, he included all the pieces of the Three Bishoprics, the
duchies of Lorraine and Bar, and the Spanish Netherlands, which had
been put together in 1790 to form the department of the Moselle. His
activities as a folklorist were, therefore, limited by the boundaries of the
department, but he could not bring himself to use its name in the title:
‘‘Ce nom de département a quelque chose de moderne, d’administratif,
46 Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1992), 1–11.
47 J. Eich, ‘‘Un Littérateur et érudit lorrain: Théodore de Puymaigre,’’ Annuaire de la Société
d’histoire et d’archéologie de la Lorraine 53 (1953): 110–26.
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
651
de préfectoral, de bureaucratique qui s’accorde très-peu avec la poésie
populaire.’’ 48 He preferred his invented ‘‘province.’’
Puymaigre’s folkloric and political activities went hand in hand.
His contacts with folksingers were made through his network of aristocratic and political acquaintances. Perhaps it was his work in preserving local folk culture that prompted Chambord to suggest to Puymaigre that he turn his attention to decentralization, a Legitimist objective
since at least 1832. The centralized state, which consisted only of the
government and the mass of individuals that it governed, was anathema
to their organic concept of society made up of natural (and implicitly
hierarchical) groupings—the family, the village, the trade corporation.
To revive the body politic one needed to revive the natural hierarchies
of society. Without hierarchies the state descended into disorder.
What was natural was also traditional, so decentralization would,
in the words of the Legitimist Arthur de Gobineau, ‘‘reconnect the
chain of time.’’ 49 Other parties, therefore, suspected plans for decentralization as the forerunner of a return to the ancien régime.50 However, under Napoléon III, when all opposition groups were smarting
from their exclusion from power, the possibility arose for consensus. In
November 1862 Chambord published an open letter that argued that
the only way to reconcile representative government with public order
was through decentralization: ‘‘Elle seule aussi peut créer les mœurs
politiques sans lesquelles les meilleurs institutions se dégradent et tombent en ruines.’’ 51 At Chambord’s direct behest Puymaigre and a group
of Lorraine Legitimists (including Puymaigre’s successor as editor of
the local Legitimist paper, Victor Vaillant, who also made several contributions to folklore) came together to develop his ideas. The resulting
pamphlet—Décentralisation et régime représentatif—was published anonymously in 1863.52 The authors’ underlying concern was to ensure liberty
without anarchy. At present, they argued, the populace had become
unruly because they were denied any control over their own affairs. The
48 Puymaigre, Chants populaires recueillis dans le pays messin, 5. The department of the Moselle
where Puymaigre did his collecting is not identical with the modern department of the same name,
which consists of those parts of the old departments of the Moselle and the Meurthe occupied by
Germany between 1871 and 1918.
49 Kale, Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 96.
50 Montalembert complained in 1865, after thirty years of campaigning for decentralization, ‘‘On n’y pouvait songer sans être atteint et convaincu de vouloir ramener la féodalité!’’ (Le
Correspondant 29 [1865]: 1009).
51 Louis Philip Robert d’Orléans-Bourbon, La Monarchie française: Lettres et documents politiques, 1844–1907 (Paris, 1907), 70–75.
52 According to Nérée Quépat (a pseudonym of René Paquet, himself a folklorist), Puymaigre wrote the pamphlet ‘‘en collaboration avec Vaillant, sur des notes du comte A. de Circourt, à
la demande du comte de Chambord’’ (Dictionnaire biographique de l’ancien département de la Moselle
[Paris, 1887], 419).
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
652
way to prevent further disturbances was to re-create the links between
the people and their rulers. Puymaigre wanted to put the community,
in the shape of genuine local government, back in between the state
and its subjects.The model he had in mind was the English county councils. Decentralization, even on this modest scale, would teach both the
electors and the elected to take their responsibilities seriously.53
Puymaigre did not use this pamphlet to make overt party-political
points; he hoped that his suggestions would appeal to notables across
the political spectrum. Yet it is not difficult to detect his political preferences. The danger of centralization was that it deprived government of
‘‘son élément essential, la représentation vraie des groupes naturels de
citoyens et d’intérêts dont la réunion constitue le pays.’’ Without decentralization ‘‘un citoyen pût s’arroger le droit de changer un gouvernement sans tenir compte de la tradition et des faits établis.’’ 54 This is the
voice of the Legitimist landowner, deprived of the influence that he
thought his right and his duty.55 For Puymaigre, the established habits
and traditional customs of local communities included the deference
due to the natural hierarchies of an organic society.
According to Jacques Droz, seventy-seven major works on decentralization appeared between 1861 and 1870, mostly written by royalists
of various shades.56 Although Décentralisation et régime représentatif caused
a ripple of interest when it was published, it would only be a footnote
of history if it had not been taken up two years later by the Nancy Committee as the blueprint for their Projet de décentralisation.57 The members
of the committee were drawn from all the opposition groups under the
Second Empire, although the majority, including the organizer Alexandre de Metz-Noblat, were aristocrats with Orleanist or liberal Catholic connections. Their Projet appeared at precisely the moment when
the government was considering some modest measures of decentralization, and it was designed to unite the opposition behind more radical demands. Through judicious use of press and political contacts in
53 His suggestions were to have elected mayors under the supervision of cantonal councils,
which would replace the subprefects. The cantons would be responsible for electing representatives to the departmental council, which would take over most of the functions of the prefect,
except for national issues such as the army, the police, and the execution of justice.
54 Théodore de Puymaigre, Décentralisation et régime représentatif (Metz, 1863), 43, 58.
55 When, in 1981, the Mitterrand government put forward a program of decentralization,
the then prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, said it had become possible because ‘‘the men in the châteaus are gone now,’’ a phrase that could fairly be applied to Puymaigre (Kale, Legitimism and the
Reconstruction of French Society, 120).
56 Jacques Droz, ‘‘Le Problème de la décentralisation sous le Second Empire,’’ in Spiegel der
Geschichte: Festgabe für Max Braubach zum 10 April 1964, ed. Konrad Repgen and Stephan Skalweit
(Münster, Germany, 1964), 783.
57 The history of the Nancy Committee and its Projet de décentralisation is explored by Odette
Voillard, Nancy au XIXe siècle, 1815–1871: Une Bourgeoisie urbaine (Paris, 1978), 298–314.
653
Paris the committee managed to line up some heavyweight supporters among Legitimists, Orleanists, and even Republicans (including the
Lorrainer Jules Ferry). With the liberal government of Emile Ollivier
in 1870, decentralization was firmly established on the political agenda;
elements of the Nancy Projet might have made it into law had the events
of the latter half of that year not intervened.58
The Nancy Projet followed most of Puymaigre’s and Vaillant’s suggestions for decentralization: cantonal councils, the abolition of the arrondissement, more powerful conseils généraux. Indeed, large chunks of
the Projet were copied word for word, as Vaillant pointedly remarked
in 1870.59 The claims to precedence threatened to develop into the traditional verbal spat between the two rival cities.60 However, the messin
contribution went unacknowledged for the same reason that Puymaigre’s own pamphlet was anonymous. His links to Chambord would have
discredited the Projet with other parties.61
How did Puymaigre define the community that he felt should have
such an important administrative role, from whence came the shared
sense of identity that would make individuals more politically responsible? If the community was one of shared habits and customs, then
it could be defined through folklore. He wrote, ‘‘Dis-moi ce que tu
chantes, je te dirai qui tu es!’’ playing on a French proverb in a way that
explicitly linked folk song and identity.62 Vaillant gave a more vivid description of the role of song in uniting a community. In 1861, as part
of the celebrations for the Exposition universelle held in Metz, musical
societies from neighboring departments and countries were invited to
take part in a massive choral festival held in the main square:
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
Tous les chanteurs, venus de cinquante lieues à la ronde, défilèrent
en bon ordre, fiers . . . de l’illustration collective dont chacun jouis58 Brigitte Basdevant-Gaudemet, La Commission de décentralisation de 1870: Contribution à
l’étude de la décentralisation en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1973), 27–29.
59 Victor Vaillant, Congrès décentralisateur de Lyon: Nos Réserves (Paris, 1870), 70.
60 In 1887 Quépat accused ‘‘ces politiciens de Nancy, plus habiles et surtout peu scrupuleux’’ of outright plagiarism (Dictionnaire biographique de l’ancien département de la Moselle, 504). The
charge is unfair, as both Alexandre de Metz-Noblat and Maurice de Foblant, the founders of the
Nancy Committee, had also taken part in the discussions at Puymaigre’s home that led to the messin
pamphlets. The Metz and Nancy decentralization initiatives can be seen as two prongs of the same
campaign.
61 Vaillant showed the potential danger of the Legitimist connection in 1869 by quoting
at length from Chambord’s 1862 letter at the Lyons Congress of decentralist newspaper editors
even though Chambord’s name was not likely to inspire the liberal Bonapartists and moderate
republicans who did so well in the elections that year (Congrès décentralisateur de Lyon, 62–69).
62 Théodore de Puymaigre, Poésie populaire: Chants allemandes recueillis dans le departement de
la Moselle, extract from the Revue de l’Est (Metz, 1864), 4. (The proverb is ‘‘Dis-moi qui tu hantes,
je te dirai qui tu es.’’) Puymaigre’s ideas about folklore developed subsequently in a diffusionist
direction, but he never totally renounced the connection between place, community, and folklore.
654
sait. . . . Et quands toutes ces cohortes pacifiques, rangées en cercle,
réalisant l’unité dans la diversité du coup-d’œil, entonnèrent d’un
même cœur et d’une même voix les chants de l’arrivée et du salut, un
frisson électrique parcourut la foule non habituée à un tel spectacle.
. . . L’association du chant à trouvé grâce devant les prohibitions et
les défiances. L’association a groupé des hommes, leur a donné le
même stimulant, les a fait vivre de la même vie. Ces hommes sont
des chanteurs. . . . Qu’importe? . . . Ce concours pacifique était plus
qu’un vain spectacle pour les yeux, il avait un sens profond. Il célébrait les bienfaits de l’agrégation, de l’entente libre, de l’association
sympathique. . . . Le temps viendra, nous le verrons peut-être, où il
ne sera plus vrai de dire qu’il n’y a en France que l’Etat et l’individu,
l’Etat maître, l’individu isolé. Alors nous aurons tous les jours un
spectacle semblable, le spectacle de l’ordre dans le mouvement, de
l’harmonie dans la diversité, de la solidarité dans l’organisation! 63
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
For both Puymaigre and Vaillant, the community of voices that needed
the freedom of decentralization was more provincial than departmental. Although Puymaigre denied that his intention was to revive the
royal provinces, he did suggest that it might be necessary to have supradepartmental bodies for such matters as the positioning of railways.64
The authors of the Nancy Projet were equally keen to distance themselves from the ancien régime but similarly saw the necessity for cooperation: ‘‘On ne peut revenir aux anciennes provinces (le mot luimême suscite des ombrages), mais les changements qui sont intervenus
. . . suggèrent d’envisager des circonscriptions aggrandies ou des ententes entre départements voisins.’’ 65 Although the Nancy committee
was too shy to mention the word, its chairman had, a few years before,
proposed the grouping of departments to form new provinces corresponding with France’s ‘‘sous-nationalités’’ defined by his mentor, the
Lorraine patriot and antiquarian Baron Auguste Guerrier de Dumast.
So, despite the shadows, it might be fair to see the decentralization proposed by Puymaigre and Metz-Noblat as a step toward the resurrection
of something shaped like the former provinces. Their successors, who
took up the battle after the Franco-Prussian war, were not so hesitant.
63 Victor Vaillant, La Décentralisation à l’œuvre: Par l’un des auteurs de ‘‘Décentralisation et Régime
représentatif ’’ (Metz, 1863), 65–66. Vaillant does not specify this event, but his description tallies
exactly with the choral program of the 1861 Exposition universelle at Metz.
64 Puymaigre wrote, ‘‘Que l’on ne’en revienne pas aux anciennes provinces, mais que l’on
n’isole pas les départements afin de les réduire à ne pouvoir rien faire que d’insignifiant; et n’en
est-il pas beaucoup qui ont entre eux des rapports d’intérêts positifs’’ (Décentralisation et régime
représentatif, 69). Vaillant went further and suggested a division of the country into twenty-two
economic regions, following the plan laid down by his fellow Legitimist Ferdinand Béchard (La
Décentralisation à l’œuvre, 50).
65 Voillard, Nancy au XIXe siècle, 300.
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655
Charles Sadoul: Folklore and Regionalism
After the Franco-Prussian war a new parliamentary commission on decentralization was formed. However, the impetus for wide-ranging reform had been lost, particularly in Lorraine, which had experienced
the first shock of defeat. A quarter of the province had been forcibly removed by the Treaty of Frankfurt, and the remainder found itself on the
frontline of national defense against a confident and aggressive neighbor. Lorrainers were understandably more concerned to strengthen
the nation rather than the region. Although decentralizers believed
that the collapse of 1870 was the consequence of too much centralization, their opponents took the opposite view and argued that the state
needed to take more active control over every aspect of life. For the
next thirty years the regionalist movement was nursed in Provence by
Mistral’s Félibrige. Only the University of Nancy remained a haven for
decentralist theory.66
The regionalist revival in Lorraine was stimulated by the growing
disenchantment of the province’s most famous son, Maurice Barrès,
with the Republic. Parliamentary politics were, he believed, tainted by
particular interests and individual ambitions; the sense of the general
good had been lost. Barrès the nationalist was more concerned with
the collective than the particular, and above all with the unity of the
nation. However, he recognized that the sense of belonging was necessarily formed at a more local level, in the landscapes that people knew,
in the familial and community relationships that formed them. It was
at the provincial level that Barrès’s doctrine of ‘‘la terre et les morts’’—
the influence of the environment and the heritage of one’s ancestors
—worked to shape collective identity. His patriotism was, therefore,
rooted in his attachment to his native Lorraine, in his grandfather’s
war stories, in his mother’s grave, in the pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de
Sion.67
Barrès was not directly involved in the foundation of the Union
régionaliste lorraine, but the new group was anxious to procure his
blessing. The initial impetus had come from the visit to Nancy in 1902
of Jean Charles-Brun, the leading advocate of regionalism in the first
66 As exemplified in N. Pierson, L’Université de Nancy et la décentralisation (Nancy, 1890). The
university, it should be explained, was one of the glories of the ducal regime, but it had been allowed to decay under French control. Its renewed vigor from the 1860s onward owed much to
the tireless campaigning of Guerrier de Dumast. It was, therefore, both the product of—and a
justification for—decentralization.
67 Ann-Marie Thiesse, Ecrire la France: Le Mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française
entre la Belle Epoque et la Libération (Paris, 1991), 69–75; Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New
Haven, Conn., 1994), 179–80.
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656
half of the twentieth century. His concept of regional France had initially developed in the Félibrige, but like many other second-generation
Félibres, he became disenchanted with Mistral’s unwillingness to consider a political solution to the dominance of the north. In 1900 he had
founded the Fédération régionaliste française to campaign for regional
self-government.68
Charles-Brun’s regionalist agenda found a ready audience among
the academics of Nancy. Shortly after his visit a group of about thirty
university teachers and students met to found the Union décentraliste
lorraine. Within a year the group changed its name to the Union régionaliste lorraine (URL), an indication of the development of ideas
since 1865. It issued a manifesto, broadly in line with the objectives of
Charles-Brun’s Fédération, and a program of initiatives. Most of these
came to nothing, with the exception of its journal: Le Pays lorrain is
still going strong today, an achievement that owes much to the man to
whom the URL entrusted its publication, Charles Sadoul.69
Like Cosquin, Sadoul trained as a lawyer. At the law faculty of
Nancy he was taught by regionalist academics, including Gaston Gavet
(the first president of the URL). Like the Grimms, it was his law studies
that kindled Sadoul’s enthusiasm for folklore. While researching in
Lorraine’s rich archives of witchcraft trials he became interested in
magic. From this starting point he developed a broad knowledge of
every aspect of the traditional life of Lorraine, from furniture and
cookery to customs and legends, which he put to good use as the curator of the Musée Lorrain from 1910 to 1930.70 In addition, he was probably the most active collector of folk songs and tales that francophone
Lorraine ever had.71 According to scholars who had access to it before the Second World War, his collection was unique in quantity and
quality.72 The few songs and tales that were printed hint at a very rich
source, but the vast bulk remained in manuscript at his death. Sadly,
they were accidentally burnt by American troops in 1945.73
If Sadoul’s reputation as a folklorist relied only on his published
68 On Jean Charles-Brun and the Fédération régionaliste française see Thiesse, Ecrire la
France, 57–102.
69 Paul Sadoul, ‘‘Union régionaliste lorraine (1903–1912),’’ Le Pays lorrain 78 (1987): 139–41.
70 Charles Bruneau, ‘‘Charles Sadoul et le folklore lorrain,’’ Le Pays lorrain 23 (1931): 22.
71 Sadoul claimed, in a speech originally given in 1912, to have transcribed more than
four hundred songs in just six months (Les Chansons lorraines, extract from Le Pays lorrain [Nancy,
1933], 6).
72 Bruneau, ‘‘Charles Sadoul et le folklore lorrain,’’ 23. Four tales were printed in the Revue
des traditions populaires and one in Le Pays lorrain, all in 1904. A notebook containing six manuscript tale-texts is supposed to exist, although I have not been able to see it. Individual songs are
scattered throughout both journals.
73 Information supplied by Paul Sadoul.
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657
work he would be a minor figure, but despite difficulties in bringing his
own projects to fruition, his enthusiasm proved infectious and inspired
a host of other Lorrainers. In Le Pays lorrain appeared articles on folklore by Louis Lavigne, Jean-Julien Barbé, René Schamber, and the abbé
Thiriot, all of whom went on to make substantial contributions to the
subject. Sadoul was also responsible for Barrès’s own flirtation with folklore. Whereas Barrès had once declared, ‘‘Tout ce félibrige m’ennuie,’’
his later novels, such as Colette Baudoche, bear the marks of his long conversations with Sadoul on the popular culture of Lorraine.74 Sadoul was
a proselytizer, both for regionalism and for folklore, and his preaching
went well beyond the pages of Le Pays lorrain. Through the museum,
regular public meetings, and by making his collection of songs available
to local singing clubs, he introduced large numbers of nancéiens to the
region’s traditions.
Although the URL faded after the First World War, Le Pays lorrain
remained a platform for regionalist ideas until Sadoul’s death in 1930.
Sadoul himself provided a regular column on ‘‘Régionalisme.’’ This was
in addition to feature articles on all aspects of regionalism, from the
historical origins of the province in the pre-Roman, Roman, and Merovingian periods and its glory days under the dukes to its geographical
homogeneity, its economic needs, its cultural tradition, and its political
future.
Sadoul obviously remained wedded to the regionalist cause, but,
because of the wide-ranging content of Le Pays lorrain, it is not so clear
what he or the other members of the URL meant by regionalism, nor
what region precisely was to be emancipated. It was always easier to
state what regionalism was against ( Jacobin conformity, Napoleonic
centralization, and Parisian domination) than what it was for. CharlesBrun himself avoided defining the term regionalism, in order not to put
off potential supporters.75 But regionalism certainly implied administrative decentralization. The URL saw themselves as the successors to
the Nancy Committee. The first volume of Le Pays lorrain contained a
history of their Projet, and when the URL hosted a joint conference with
the Fédération régionaliste française in 1909, the program focused on
the objectives of 1865.76 However, the URL felt that their predecessors
74 Bruneau, ‘‘Charles Sadoul et le folklore lorrain,’’ 26. See also Abbé Joseph Barbier, ‘‘La
Colline inspirée, roman historique ou poème symphonique,’’ in Maurice Barrès, 189.
75 Philippe Vigier, ‘‘Régions et régionalisme en France au XIXe siècle,’’ in Régions et régionalisme en France du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, ed. Christian Gras and Georges Livet (Strasbourg, 1977),
163.
76 Maurice Payard, ‘‘Un projet de décentralisation Nancy, 1865,’’ Le Pays lorrain 1 (1904):
297–303, 320–25, 335–41. The program for the 1909 conference was announced in Le Pays lorrain
5 (1908): 348.
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658
had been too timid: although they had bemoaned the work of 1790 in
making arbitrary and ahistorical divisions in the country, they had not
publicly called for undoing the department and re-creating the provinces. Their successors were more decided: they wanted France recast
into twenty or so regions. This more radical stance may be considered
surprising, given that the international threat to Lorraine had hardly
existed in the 1860s, but it may have been a response to rapid industrialization since 1871. The economic pull brought large numbers of immigrants to the region, which in the minds of Sadoul and others posed a
definite threat to Lorraine’s traditional culture.77 The decline of a genuine monarchist alternative to the Republic also eliminated concerns
about a return to feudalism.
Regionalism was about more than administrative reform; regionalists were equally concerned with the economic, demographic, intellectual, and cultural life of their petite patrie, and in developing a regional sense of identity through learning about a shared past. Robert
Parisot, the leading historian of the duchy and one-time president of
the URL, also founded the Société lorraine des études locales dans
l’enseignement public with the aim of making future generations aware
that the history of Lorraine was not necessarily the same as the history
of France.78 Most importantly, at least in Sadoul’s eyes, was the preservation of the cultural traditions of the region. Lorraine possessed ‘‘un
caractère propre. Ses mœurs et son langage ont leur saveur.’’ Regionalists had to defend that character, to ensure that ‘‘les tempéraments et les
mœurs restent divers’’ and were not surrendered to the dull mediocrity
of national standardization.79
Partly because of the variety of tasks the region was supposed to
perform, its boundaries were often left fuzzy.80 For those politicianregionalists like Charles Beauquier (radical deputy and Comtois folklorist) and Louis Marin (nationalist republican deputy for Nancy and
ethnographist) who were primarily concerned with depopulation and
economic development, there was no need for the regions to be tied
to any historical arrangement. Marin in particular was keen to sepa77 Lorraine seems not to have responded to the Popular Front’s attempts to include workers’
culture within the discipline of folklore (Lebovics, True France, 135–88).
78 Robert Parisot, ‘‘La Décentralisation de l’enseignement de l’histoire et de la géographie,’’
Le Pays lorrain 1 (1904): 201–5. The Société lorraine des études locales dans l’enseignement public
continues its work to this day, bringing local history into the classroom.
79 Charles Sadoul, ‘‘Le Roman rustique lorrain et Julien Pérette,’’ Le Pays lorrain 14 (1922):
555.
80 Parisot recognized this when he asked himself in a paper delivered to the URL, ‘‘Existet-il une région lorraine?’’ His reached the conclusion ‘‘yes,’’ but only after skating over some tricky
problems of definition (‘‘La Lorraine, région française, telle qu’elle est constituée par les conditions géographiques, historiques et économiques,’’ Le Pays lorrain 5 [1908]: 465).
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rate ‘‘le régionalisme proprement dit qui est la conscience prise par les
Provinces de leur activité et du rôle qu’elles doivent jouer dans la vie
nationale, d’avec le traditionalisme, tourné plus spécialement sur le passé
qu’il s’efforce de faire revivre par un culte fervent, mais passif.’’ 81 However, when (in his capacity as president of the Fédération régionaliste
française) he presented his plan for a totally novel division of the country to the 1909 conference, the other Lorrainers present rose in protest.
Parisot and Sadoul opposed a plan that would sacrifice ‘‘l’essentiel du
régionalisme, les souvenirs et les traditions du passé, de supprimer, par
un morcellement plus arbitraire encore que celui de la Constituante, ce
qui depuis un siècle a subsisté d’esprit local.’’ Echoing the protests of
Lorrainers against the 1790 division, they proclaimed, ‘‘On ne fait pas
d’expériences d’anatomie sur des corps vivants.’’ 82
Traditionalists may have been convinced that Lorraine was a living
body, but even they did not find it easy to position its borders precisely. Barrès’s conception of ‘‘la vieille Lotharingie’’ sometimes ranged
as far as Cologne and beyond; others, like Pierre Braun and Charles
Berlet (secretary of the URL), imagined a return to the territorial divisions that existed under the monarchy.83 Considering the complexity
of the pre-1789 map of Lorraine, most regionalists recognized that this
was impractical, and it had unpopular connotations. They had chosen
the term région precisely to avoid the counterrevolutionary overtones
of the word province. Sadoul, whose family was politically connected to
Jules Ferry, was explicit about his rejection of the ancien régime: ‘‘La
région lorraine que nous réclamons n’est pas l’ancien duché: elle comprendrait celui-ci, le Barrois, les Trois-Evêchés, la principauté de Salm,
les enclaves françaises, etc., soit les quatre départements de Meurthe,
Meuse, Moselle et Vosges.’’ 84
Sadoul’s solution had the advantage of simplicity (and the Lorraine
region formed in 1981 consists precisely of these four departments), but
it would not have satisfied all his colleagues. The inclusion of Moselle
in Sadoul’s Lorraine (whose capital would undoubtedly be Nancy) worried some people in Metz. When, in 1909, Le Pays lorrain changed its
title page to include le pays messin, Sadoul was rebuked by the editors of
the journal Austrasie (based in Metz), who claimed to be the true voice
81 In a speech given to the URL, Marin cited Le Pays lorrain itself as an example of the passive
traditionalism that acted as a brake on regionalism (‘‘Chronique,’’ Le Pays lorrain 4 [1907]: 299).
82 Pierre Braun, ‘‘Le Congrès régionaliste, Nancy, 1909,’’ Le Pays lorrain 6 (1909): 501.
83 Ibid., 499.
84 Charles Sadoul, ‘‘Régionalisme,’’ Le Pays lorrain 13 (1921): 589. Sadoul used the pre-1870
departmental titles, but the territories covered by the four departments today is essentially the
same.
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of that region.85 At the time Metz was part of Germany, and there was
little immediate chance of it forming part of any French region. After
1918 the problem became acute because it seemed possible that, in a
new regional division of the country, Moselle might remain joined to
Alsace. Sadoul argued vociferously for a return to the pre-1870 departmental boundaries as the nullification of the period of German occupation: ‘‘ ‘Alsace-Lorraine’ est une expression géographique qui ne signifie rien. . . . Les Alsaciens-Lorrains ne constituent pas un peuple,’’
the implication being that Lorrainers collectively did.86 Most francophone Mosellans were equally anxious to break the dominance of Strasbourg, but this did not mean they were keen to see it replaced by the
‘‘ueberallisme nancéien.’’ For the germanophone population the options were also not so straightforward. In the plans of regionalists, however, the existence of the language division was largely ignored: Le Pays
lorrain paid little attention to the German-speaking minority. The inhabitants of Thionville, Sarreguemines, and Fénétrange were considered—by their history, economic interests, and some aspects of cultural tradition (such as their Catholic faith)—to share in the unity of
Lorraine, even if they called these towns Diedenhofen, Saargemünd,
and Finstingen.
Despite their difficulty in defining the region Lorraine, regionalists
had little doubt that it was French. Although Barrès and others occasionally referred to Lorraine as a nation forcibly rather than willingly
incorporated into France, there can be no doubt where their sympathies lay.87 Even those members of the URL like Parisot, whose revaluation of the ‘‘good’’ dukes was certainly read as a comparison with the
poor record of the French, nonetheless recognized that an independent
Lorraine, squeezed between two confronting continental powers, was
impractical. German troop maneuvers could be watched from the hills
above Nancy, a powerful reminder of the need for a strong French presence. The involvement of such ultranationalists as Barrès and Marin
with the URL indicates that it had no separatist or even autonomist
leanings. Instead, they argued, in the words of Barrès, that France was a
garden made beautiful by its variety.88 This metaphor had already been
used by the author of Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, the ‘‘little red
book of the Republic,’’ which also celebrated the diversity of France
85 ‘‘Lettre de ‘l’Austrasie,’ ’’ Le Pays lorrain 6 (1909): 717–18. The name L’Austrasie refers to a
Merovingian kingdom considerably larger than either the pays messin or Lorraine.
86 Sadoul, ‘‘Régionalisme,’’ 588. Sadoul was quoting the journalist Trygée. For various practical reasons, the policy was never adopted, and the present departmental map preserves the
1871–1918 border.
87 Taveneaux, ‘‘Barrès et la Lorraine,’’ 143.
88 Maurice Payard, ‘‘Le Projet Beauquier,’’ Le Pays lorrain 4 (1907): 589.
661
as a source of its strength.89 Regionalists differed from republicans in
that they perceived that the only way to ensure that this diversity was
retained was through political decentralization. Even so, no member
of the URL argued that the region should have control over such primary matters as defense, the police, or even education. If Le Pays lorrain seemed obsessed with La Mothe (Lorraine’s Masada), it was equally
interested in Joan of Arc. Indeed, as was the case with Barrès, regionalism could be the cover for French nationalist objectives. After the
First World War Le Pays lorrain expanded its interests into new regions.
Sadoul ran features and regular columns on Belgian Lorraine, Luxembourg, and the Saarland, suggesting that these, too, might form part of
a new region of France, either because of their historical attachment to
the duchy or for economic and strategic reasons. The essential Frenchness of Lorraine, however defined, was never seriously questioned. And
it was the rallying cry for another group of folklorists, over the border
in the pays messin.
Raphaël de Westphalen: Folklore and Irredentism
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In 1887 the Académie de Metz sought studies on ‘‘les anciens usages
particuliers au pays mosellan’’ for its essay competition. The chairman
of the adjudicating committee, Charles Abel, tried to encourage a good
response through a short article on messin folk songs in the Académie’s
journal. Songs invoked memories of better days: ‘‘Les soirs d’été d’avant
la guerre de 1870, j’écoutais avec les oreilles attendries d’un archéologue nos jeunes filles se livrer sur l’Esplanade de Metz à de joyeux ébats
en chantant: ‘Nous n’irons plus aux bois / Les lauriers sont coupés.’ ’’
Sadly, he wrote, one hears them no more. Instead, one was obliged to
listen to ‘‘des sons plus ou moins mélodieux du Wacht am Rhein. . . .
C’est le cas de dire en Lorraine, des chants français comme de bien
d’autres souvenirs, ‘requiescant in pace!’ ’’ 90 The competition drew only
one, anonymous entry, headed by the device ‘‘Pro Patriâ.’’ 91
89 David Denby, ‘‘ ‘Le Tour de France par deux enfants’ (1877): Mapping of Territory and
Construction of a National Memory’’ (paper presented at the France, History and Story Conference, University of Birmingham, July 1999). Sadoul and his contemporaries would have been
brought up on this book, whose heroes were their fellow countrymen. That the educational policies of the Third Republic may not have been as ‘‘Jacobin’’ and homogenizing as they are sometimes presented is also argued by Anne-Marie Thiesse (Ils apprenaient la France: L’Exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique [Paris, 1997], 7–14). However, the diversity so valued in the rhetoric
of the Republic was usually geographical (and therefore unchanging), whereas for regionalists it
was human (and therefore changeable and in need of protection).
90 Charles Abel, ‘‘Revue rétrospective des vieilles chansons populaires du pays mosellan à
propos d’un concours ouvert en 1888,’’ Mémoires de l’Académie de Metz, 3d ser., 17 (1887–88): 11–12.
Abel’s own interest in folklore dated back to the July Monarchy.
91 Charles Abel, ‘‘Rapport sur le concours d’histoire de l’année 1887–1888,’’ Mémoires de
l’Académie de Metz, 3d ser. 17 (1887–88): 47–53. The author was Celestin Loiseau of Barchain.
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Despite the disappointing response to this competition, Frenchspeaking Moselle is probably the most studied region of France in terms
of folklore (only rivaled by parts of Lower Brittany). Of course, between
1871 and 1918 this region was not part of France—it had been incorporated into the Reichsland of the new German Empire—and it can hardly
be a coincidence that this period also witnessed the greatest activity
by francophone folklorists. In the absence of any political or military
developments, folklore provided a link to the lost Fatherland.
Few of these folklorists made explicit reference to the political
situation of the Moselle, but their loyalties are evident in the content of
the collections. In Quépat’s Chants populaires messins, for example, ‘‘La
belle Nanon’’ follows her lover to serve the Bourbons; the female soldier ‘‘La Douceur’’ tells us, ‘‘Dans la troupe de France, / J’y ai servi longtemps; / J’ai fait voir ma vaillance / A tous les Allemands’’; and ‘‘La belle
se voulant marier’’ only wants a Frenchman.92 The cities of Paris, Rouen,
Orléans, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle are mentioned, orientating the
minds of listeners (and readers) toward the west. The past achievements
of the armies of France from the siege of Maastricht in 1675 to Sebastopol are noted, and Mosellans share in the reflected glory. Yet few of
these songs were overtly nationalistic in content. They had little to offer
the patriotic French folklorist except the fact of their existence in the
pays messin, because the same songs were being sung in Poitou, Savoy,
and the Nivernais, not to mention just over the border in the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle.93 As long as Mosellans shared a song culture with the rest of Lorraine, and France in general, the attempts of
their new masters to ‘‘Germanize’’ the region were doomed to failure.
Folklorists believed that Lorrainers would remain French, even during
half a century of German occupation, because the memory of France
was alive in their songs.94
The irredentist potential of folklore is best exhibited in the work
of Raphaël de Westphalen. Born in Metz in 1873, from 1900 on he
worked as a country doctor with responsibility for the Hospice des vieillards in Novéant. His privileged access to elderly, francophone peasants
92 Nérée Quépat, Chants populaires messins, recueillis dans le val de Metz en 1877 (Paris, 1878),
nos. 6, 8, 20.
93 The boundaries of this song community are drawn up in Eugène Rolland, Chansons populaires de la France (Paris, 1883), in which those he collected in his native pays messin are included
alongside those from all other parts of France.
94 It is not surprising, then, that Puymaigre dropped his plans for a volume of songs he
had collected from the germanophone population of the Moselle. Despite their far more blatant
French patriotism (compared with the songs of their francophone neighbors), it would inevitably
have emphasized the ethnic divisions of the region. The manuscript of this collection now rests in
Metz, Archives départementales de la Moselle, 12/ J/102, Fonds Puymaigre.
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enabled him to build up a collection of more than four hundred folk
songs, as well as information on popular traditions, particularly folk
medicine. He moved back to Metz during the First World War to work
at the hospital (part of a successful attempt to avoid being drafted into
the German army).95 The bulk of his folklore collection was made in
the period 1900–1917.96
According to Westphalen the people of the Moselle always hoped
to be reunited with France: ‘‘Il [le peuple] sent fleurir les ronces de
son cœur, il réunit ces fleurs en un modeste bouquet, le tend vers le
soleil couchant en murmurant tout bas: Vive la France!’’ 97 In the meantime Westphalen made it his task to preserve the romance heritage of
his homeland. In a speech given to the Gesellschaft für lothringische
Geschichte und Altertumskunde (SHAL) in April 1914, he reproached
his colleagues for their previous neglect of ‘‘les vestiges lorrains d’un
riche passé.’’ 98 One senses that Westphalen was worried that the educated elite of Metz had become too involved with the administrative
and economic life of Germany and were in danger of forgetting their
roots. For Westphalen, as for Herder, folk song was a means to remain
true to one’s identity. The study of folklore necessarily turned one’s
mind toward ‘‘l’ethnie lorraine’’ and revealed the ‘‘caractère’’ of the pays
messin. Folk song in particular ‘‘nous permet de faire certaines déductions sur le niveau d’une culture,’’ a culture shared not only by the population of the pays messin but by other Lorrainers.99
Westphalen’s ambitions were the same as those he ascribed to his
fellow doctor and folklorist Frédéric Estre, ‘‘endiguer les vagues envahissantes du germanisme.’’ After the invasion the teaching of German in schools became mandatory, a rule that Estre and Westphalen
believed was having a detrimental effect on local romance dialects:
‘‘Les campagnards s’entretenaient entre eux en patois, mais l’évitaient
lorsqu’ils s’adressaient à leurs enfants.’’ 100 Estre combated this trend
95 H. Tribout de Morembert, ‘‘Raphaël de Westphalen (1873–1949),’’ Nos Traditions: Cahiers
de la société du folklore et d’ethnographie de la Moselle, n.s. 2 (1949): 25–33.
96 Westphalen’s Petit Dictionnaire des traditions populaires messines (a misleading title at 490
pages) was not published until 1934; the collection of Chansons populaires de Lorraine was only published in 1977, long after his death.
97 Raphaël de Westphalen, ‘‘Frédéric Estre: Médecin, artiste peintre, lou felibre de la Mousello, folkloriste de la Nied française,’’ Nos traditions 1 (1938): 17.
98 The Gesellschaft für lothringische Geschichte und Altertumskunde had been set up in
1888, under the patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had a summer residence near Metz. Its publications were bilingual, and it was clearly intended to rival the overtly francophile Académie de
Metz, but in practice both institutions shared many members. Perhaps because of the German
influence the SHAL was more interested in folk culture than the Académie, which, despite Abel’s
example, remained wedded to the ‘‘French’’ idea of culture as something urbane and polished.
99 Raphaël de Westphalen, Chansons populaires de Lorraine, 2 vols. (Metz, 1977), 1:vii–ix.
100 Westphalen, ‘‘Frédéric Estre,’’ 21. Not coincidentally, the period 1870–1918 saw the pub-
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with a series of patois almanacs; Westphalen joined the battle with a
patriotic song, ‘‘Lo Péys messîn,’’ originally written for the children
taught by his friend the abbé Thiriot at Servigny-lès-Sainte-Barbe. Thiriot was a folklorist in his own right and, like several clergymen of the
Moselle, an expert on dialects.101 The Church was concerned that the
Christian message should be taught in the mother tongue the better
to penetrate the hearts of their flock, and this led to its involvement in
the defense of education in French. For pious Catholics such as Westphalen and Thiriot, Germanization contained overtones of the Kulturkampf.102 Thiriot published ‘‘Lo Péys messîn’’ in 1913 in a collection of
chansons lorraines so that the other Mosellan children might also know
that ‘‘Mon pays, c’est la Lorraine. / C’est là qu’au monde je suis venu!’’ 103
In 1920 the song was sung as the final number in a concert of chansons populaires de Lorraine for the Exposition nationale de Metz, part
of the triumphant affirmation of the city’s return to France. By then
Westphalen had added another verse: ‘‘Maintenant enfin, nous avons
retrouvé notre Mère. / A qui nous pensions toujours au milieu de nos
chagrins. / Regardez nos cœurs, ils vous dirent sans crainte / Que nous
sommes Français / Nous avons appris à bien aimer la France, / Dans
notre pays, dans notre pays!’’ Thiriot noted that ‘‘cette pièce . . . avait
l’heur de donner sur les nerfs à un de nos maîtres de jadis, le ‘‘Kreisdirecktor’’ von Loeper; il l’appelait une Marseillaise déguisée. Il n’avait
peut-être pas tort.’’ 104
However, if Westphalen thought that ‘‘Lo Péys messîn’’ was part of
Lorraine in 1913, there is evidence to suggest that he changed his views
after the war. Although he described his songs as ‘‘lorraines’’ in 1914,
the traditional cures he cataloged and published in 1934 were titled
‘‘messines,’’ despite being collected in the same geographical area. A
similar change of tack is noticeable among other Mosellans. During the
lication of two mammoth surveys of the dialects of francophone Moselle, by Léon Zéliqzon and
Robert Brod.
101 Abbé Hubert Vion of nearby Bazoncourt, for example, had published studies on (and
written poetry in) the patois of the pays messin, and Abbé Ritz had a regular patois column in the
newspaper Le Lorrain. For the clergy’s attitude to dialect in general see Gérard Cholvy, ‘‘Régionalisme et clergé catholique au XIXe siècle,’’ in Gras and Livet, Régions et régionalisme en France,
187–201.
102 Stephen L. Harp’s study of primary schooling in Alsace-Lorraine has shown that the
German authorities were not as dogmatically Prussian and Protestant as generations of historians
have believed; they worked closely with locals and permitted both Catholic and French instruction. It is Harp’s contention that this subtler approach may have been more successful at turning
Alsace-Lorrainers into Germans than the more authoritarian myth, which may have been precisely what Westphalen and Thiriot objected to (Learning to Be Loyal: Primary Schooling as Nation
Building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–1940 [Dekalb, Ill., 1998], esp. 106–24).
103 Abbé J. Thiriot, Chansons lorraines (Metz, 1913). This pamphlet was published by SHAL.
104 Morembert, ‘‘Raphaël de Westphalen,’’ 27.
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period of the German occupation they had wanted to demonstrate that
their homeland was divided: it formed a whole with the other Lorraine
over the border. Hence the political group supported by most francophones was called the ‘‘Bloc lorrain,’’ whose leaders made regular pilgrimages to the cross of Lorraine at the summit of Mont Sion, Barrès’s Colline inspirée. In their campaign to Germanize the Moselle the
new authorities had hoped to capitalize on the history of the duchy
as part of the Holy Roman Empire (portrayed in the history curriculum as the forerunner of the new German Reich), but the plan failed
as long as the bulk of Lorraine remained in France.105 After the war,
however, and particularly after the electoral victory of the Cartel des
Gauches in 1924, which threatened the religious settlement in former
Alsace-Lorraine, Mosellans were increasingly willing to stress their particular identity and experience.106 Even before Edouard Herriot announced his plans to implement the laic laws in the recovered provinces, the Académie nationale de Metz had debated the proposition
‘‘Metz n’est pas en Lorraine. Metz doit se séparer de Nancy.’’ Arguing
from history and military strategy, the military governor, general de
Lardemelle (whose very title recalled the days when Metz had been a
bastion of France surrounded by a hostile duchy), demanded that Metz
become the capital of its own region, which would stretch along the
German/Luxembourger/Belgian border to Sedan.107
Westphalen’s views on this project are unknown, although he was
a member of the Académie at the time. His creation, in 1937, of the
Cercle folklorique de Metz does appear to have been an attempt to
assert the independence of messin folklorists from the Nancy-based Le
Pays lorrain. Mosellans who had previously published in Le Pays lorrain,
such as René Schamber, transferred their loyalty to the Cercle’s journal
Nos Traditions. Yet the Cercle was entirely concerned with the francophone population of the Moselle, and Nos Traditions affirmed that the
pays messin remained French to its core. There remained a threat from
the east, and Westphalen’s intention in setting up the Cercle was not
only to guard against the pretensions of Nancy but to counteract the
influence of a new folkloric organization in the germanophone half of
the department—the Société du folklore lorrain de langue allemande
105 In the Second World War, when the Moselle was once more incorporated into Germany,
the Nazis tried to avoid this difficulty by renaming the region ‘‘Westmark’’ and joining it to the
Saarland.
106 Because Alsace-Lorraine were under German occupation at the time of the separation
of church and state in France, the Concordat and the Falloux law were still in place. Abbé Ritz,
who before the war wrote articles in patois for Le Lorrain, became the paper’s political editor after
1921 and the leading defender of religious schooling.
107 Charles Sadoul, ‘‘Metz et Nancy,’’ Le Pays lorrain 15 (1923): 581.
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founded in 1936 by the abbé Louis Pinck. Some of its members had a
very different concept of the identity of Lorraine.108
Louis Pinck: Folklore and Autonomism
The folklorists of the pays messin, like the contributors to Le Pays lorrain,
had little to say about the German-speaking inhabitants of the Moselle.
Considering the powerful competing claims over the area, even to acknowledge their existence could have national, or even international
repercussions. Perhaps more surprising, considering the keenness of
the post-1870 authorities to assert the Germanic identity of Lorraine,
was that German folklorists did not fill the gap. Only in the early summer of 1914, when the SHAL was persuaded to contribute to the formation of the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (DVA), was any concerted attempt made. A regional commission was set up to collect folk songs
and had made a good start before war intervened once more.109 One
member of that commission, the abbé Louis Pinck, went on to have a
successful, if contentious, career as a folklorist.110
Louis Pinck was born in Lemberg in 1873, the same year as Sadoul
and Westphalen, but his national orientation was very different. The
Pinck family illustrates the dilemmas over identity facing a population
that changed nationality four times between 1870 and 1945. Although
German was his mother tongue, Louis Pinck’s grandfather opted for
France in 1872. His father stayed on but was a known French patriot and
in 1919 formed part of the Commission de naturalisation, which oversaw the return to France. Louis Pinck’s eldest brother was even impris108 I have no definitive proof that the Cercle folklorique de Metz was set up to rival the
Société du folklore lorrain de langue allemande, but I do not believe it was a coincidence that in
the years running up to the Second World War the department of the Moselle could boast two
folklore organizations while none of the other departments of Lorraine could manage even one.
According to Henri Hiegel, the Cercle refused to have a joint publication with the germanophones
(‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck [1873–1940],’’ Les Cahiers lorrains n.s., 33 [1981]: 249),
and although Pinck and Westphalen knew each other, there was a fair amount of tension between
the two organizations, to judge by Jean de Pange’s account of the launch of the germanophone
society ( Journal, 1934–1936 [Paris, 1970], 436).
109 This collection is also to be found in Metz, Archives départementales de la Moselle,
21/ J/12, Fonds de la Société de l’histoire et de l’archéologie de la Lorraine.
110 Because of the contentious nature of the Pinck family’s involvement in the political, cultural, and religious life of germanophone Lorraine, they and their work have been the subject of
numerous studies. For Louis Pinck I have drawn on Henri Hiegel and Charles Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du
folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck (1873–1940),’’ Les Cahiers lorrains, n.s., 33 (1981): 199–218, 249–66;
and Laurent Mayer, ‘‘La Chanson populaire en Lorraine germanophone d’après le recueil ‘‘Verklingende Weisen’’ de Louis Pinck,’’ 3 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Metz, 1983). For his folklorist
sister, Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck, see Henri Hiegel, ‘‘Deux Folkloristes lorrains: Henri Lerond
et Angelika Merkelbach,’’ Les Cahiers lorrains, n.s., 27 (1975): 108–14; and Karl-Heinz Langstroff,
Lothringer Volksart; Untersuchung zur deutsch-lothringischen Volkserzählung an Hand der Sammlung von
Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck (Marburg, Germany, 1953).
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oned during the First World War as a suspected French sympathizer.
However, another brother, Emile, used his position as a banker in Strasbourg to channel German money to friendly organizations in Alsace in
the interwar years. He was a founder of the Alsatian autonomist publication Die Zukunft and at the trial of autonomist leaders in 1926 was
sentenced in absentia to fifteen years’ imprisonment for plotting against
the security of France.111 The conflict-ridden history of Lorraine caused
many divisions in the Pinck family.
Like Emile, Louis Pinck enjoyed a tempestuous political career.
Imbued with his family’s religious faith (two of his siblings would also
take holy orders), Pinck was destined for the Church. It was his talent
for polemic, however, that drew him to the attention of the bishop of
Metz. Soon after his ordination in 1901 he was appointed editor of the
German-language Catholic daily the Lothringer Volksstimme, where he
gave free rein to his vehement religious and political opinions. He was
a tireless critic of the German authorities, mostly Protestant Prussians,
whom he accused of treating Lorraine as a captive colony. He was not
afraid to launch himself against the kaiser himself, and was finally dismissed and exiled to the rural parish of Hambach in 1908 after a particularly vitriolic attack on ‘‘le roi de Prusse’’ for using local taxpayers’
money to rebuild an imperial residence in Alsace.112
Pinck’s antagonism toward Lorraine’s new rulers should not be
mistaken for French irredentism. He disliked them as agents of the
Kulturkampf, but his other main targets in the pages of the Lothringer
Volksstimme were the Bloc lorrain and the pro-French newspaper Le Lorrain. Pinck had never known his homeland as part of France, and those
who hankered after the lost Fatherland appeared to him as nostalgic
buffoons. He saw in France not the eldest daughter of the Church but
the secular Republic, teeming with Voltairean freethinkers and Jacobin
centralizers. A return to France posed more of a threat to the culture
of eastern Lorraine (envisaged as fervently Catholic) than even Protestant Prussia. Pinck was therefore a militant for the Zentrum ElsassLothringen, linked to the German Catholic party, the Zentrum. The
main policies of the Center Party in Alsace-Lorraine were the reten111 Emile Pinck’s roles as the link between Robert Ernst (organizer of German propaganda
in Alsace and the future governor of the province under the Nazis) and the Alsatian autonomists,
and his later role as a leading informer on the autonomist movement for the French security services, are narrated in Pierri Zind, Elsass-Lothringen/Alsace-Lorraine: Une nation interdite, 1870–1940
(Paris, 1979), 589; and Philip Charles Farwell Bankwitz, Alsatian Autonomist Leaders, 1919–1947
(Lawrence, Kans., 1978), 15–27.
112 According to Pinck, his exile from Metz was the result of the direct appeal of the kaiser
to the Vatican over the Hohkönigsburg affair, a story that is certainly widely believed in Lorraine
today, although Hiegel is doubtful (‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 211).
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
668
tion of religious education and the achievement of federal status for
the Reichsland within the Empire. Pinck’s support was wholehearted.113
Catholic, germanophone Lorraine would be safe, he believed, only
when united with the strong Christian-democrat forces within Germany.
Given this background, the Allied victory of 1918 came as a terrible
shock. His pro-German sympathies made him an object of suspicion
for the returning French authorities, who prevented him from traveling outside his parish. This harassment, and the gibes of local French
patriots (whom Pinck always referred to as ‘‘chauvinistes’’), goaded him
back into political action. By 1921 he had become the vice president of
L’Union de la presse catholique d’Alsace-Lorraine, which was designed
to preserve the religious settlement in Alsace-Lorraine, where the Concordat and the Falloux law still applied. He was also an indefatigable
defender of mother-tongue education, particularly for the catechism.114
This was a traditional position for the clergy in germanophone Lorraine
from before 1870, but in the highly charged atmosphere of the interwar
years it inevitably led to involvement in autonomist politics.115
Support for the autonomist movement within Alsace-Lorraine only
became widespread after the new left-wing prime minister Herriot declared in 1924 the intention of implementing the laic laws. This repudiation of promises made in 1918 reopened ‘‘la question d’AlsaceLorraine,’’ and as the dispute became more bitter, the defenders of the
religious settlement were pushed to take more radical positions.116 For
Pinck autonomy and the religious issue were inevitably bound together.
When in 1926 he was asked, during one of his frequent court appearances, whether he was an autonomist, Pinck answered (in German to
annoy the judge), ‘‘Ja.’’ When asked why he replied, ‘‘afin que nos chrétiens ne deviennent pas des paîens.’’ 117 Although Pinck was seldom so
directly involved as his brother Emile in political action (he was under
direct orders from his bishop to stay out of trouble), the local anticlerical press described him as ‘‘l’âme de mouvement autonomiste lorrain.’’ 118 He was probably the author of a report on behalf of ‘‘les ré113 He even ran an article in the Volksstimme in 1907 in which his brother Emile, a Center
Party candidate, ridiculed their own father for supporting the Bloc lorrain (it was published under
a pseudonym) (Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 210).
114 [Louis Pinck], Religion und Muttersprache in der Schule: Vortrag gehalten beim KantonalKatholikentag zu Wolmünster am Ostermontag (Metz, 1921), 1–23.
115 The local clergy had been the main opposition to Maggiolo’s plans to impose French as
the first language of education when he was inspector of schools at Nancy in the 1860s.
116 For the history of this period see Samuel Houston Goodfellow, Between the Swastika and
the Cross of Lorraine: Fascisms in Interwar Alsace (De Kalb, Ill., 1999), 13–27.
117 Mayer, Chanson populaire, 1:19.
118 Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 216–18. He is widely believed to
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669
gionalistes lorrains’’ to the Vatican that accused the bishop of Metz of
apathy on the religious issue and of being too cozy with industrialists
like the Wendels (whose rapacity was pushing the workers into the arms
of the communists).119
Pinck’s self-appointed mission as priest, journalist, and politician
was to defend what he considered to be an oppressed minority—germanophone Lorrainers. Folklore fitted with his concerns. His enthusiasm had been kindled by the songs sung by his grandmother around the
family hearth. After his exile to Hambach he began to collect in earnest. In 1914 Pinck joined the commission collecting for the DVA. Although it was disbanded with the outbreak of hostilities, Pinck worked
on throughout the war. In 1917 he offered his songs for use in propaganda by the Gesellschaft für elsässische Literatur. Depressed by defeat
in 1918 and temporarily deprived of his contacts with German folklorists, Pinck ceased collecting until the revival of the autonomist movement in 1924 gave him a new lease on life. In 1926 he published one
hundred songs as Verklingende Weisen: Lothringer Volkslieder [Fading melodies: Lorrainer folk songs]. The title clearly indicated Pinck’s belief that
his was a culture under threat. Three more volumes appeared between
1929 and 1939. Together they form one of the finest folk song collections of any period, although they represent just the tip of the iceberg
of Pinck’s collecting.120 He also inspired his sister, Angelika MerkelbachPinck, to collect the narrative tradition of the same region. The three
thousand or more tales she noted between 1933 and the 1950s form an
equally impressive corpus.
Each song in Verklingende Weisen was accompanied with copious
notes on its variants, sources, and singers, a great contrast with Puymaigre and Westphalen. This was the policy of his mentors at the DVA who
were setting new standards in folklore, but Pinck was also aware that
his political history would bring his probity into question. Even with
all the details of persons, dates, and places supplied, the anticlerical
have been the éminence grise behind Victor Antoni’s germanophile Parti chrétien social populaire.
119 Pinck was an inveterate enemy of the Wendels, who had been leading figures in the Bloc
lorrain before the war. At the time of his dismissal from the Lothringer Volksstimme he was being
sued for defamation by Charles de Wendel.
120 In total he recorded more than two thousand songs, and he also sought out Liederheften—
the handwritten songbooks of his informants, Fliegenblätter or peddler’s song sheets, and popular
hymnbooks. Some of this material was destroyed by looting troops in the first months of 1940, but
much has been preserved in the DVA in Freiburg or in the departmental archives in Metz. A guide
to his collection in Freiburg is given in Otto Holzapfel, ‘‘Nachlasse Pinck in Deutschen Volksliedarchiv: Ammerkungen zum deutschen Volkslied in Lothringen,’’ Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 22
(1977): 119–31. The material in the Archives départementales de la Moselle can be found under
codes 42/ J/22–25, Fonds Pinck.
670
newspaper Le Messin still claimed in 1926 that the songs had not been
found in Lorraine at all, but in the ‘‘bouges’’ of the Palatinate.121 Only
by demonstrating that he was merely recording tradition, rather than
inventing it, could he justify the existence of the collection.
This scientific meticulousness does not mean that no personal element crept into the Verklingende Weisen. The choice and arrangement
of the songs reveal Pinck’s personality and his vision of Lorraine. Although he used the ducal arms as his frontispiece, Pinck’s Lorraine was
a much smaller place than for any regionalist discussed thus far, consisting of just the eastern half of the department of the Moselle. Nearby
Metz could never be for Pinck the bastion of Catholic France envisaged by Barrès in Colette Baudoche; rather, it was the haunt of socialists, freemasons, and Jews.122 The defining characteristic of this rump
Lorraine was its piety, and so each volume opens with religious songs,
Pinck’s favorites.123 They make up 18 percent of the total, whereas in a
comparable collection from the neighboring Saarland they account for
only 1 percent.124 These are followed by rural craft songs: the industrial
trades of mining and glassblowing, so important to the area, are not
represented. Although Pinck was a leading advocate of social Catholicism, and vocally supported strikes in these industries, his Lorraine
remained pastoral. This was one facet of his traditionalism. He also
worked hard to ensure that every song had been known in Lorraine
before 1870. This choice of a cutoff date was partly to avoid any accusation of anti-French sentiment, which would certainly have fallen on
him if he had included the German patriotic songs learnt in schools
and barracks, but was also to please his own tastes.125
Considering Pinck’s leanings, it is paradoxical that the result of
this policy was to make the germanophone Lorrainers appear as loyal
Frenchmen and the Germans as the enemy. As one conscript song has
it: ‘‘Es gibt nichts Schöneres auf der Welt / Als wie die Franzosen wohl
in dem Feld, / Wenn sie in Batallje sind.’’ 126 Yet while the singer boasts
of his French identity, the song itself belongs, Pinck demonstrated,
to the deutsches Volkstum—cultural Germany. The song had originally
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121 Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 255.
122 His consequent hope to separate germanophone Lorraine from the pays messin was ex-
pressed in the slogan ‘‘Los von Metz: Hin zum Elsass’’ [Away from Metz: Toward Alsace].
123 He had planned a fifth volume of purely religious numbers, but he died before the
project reached fruition, and his manuscripts were destroyed during the war. His sister, together
with the folklorist J. Müller-Blattau, managed to piece enough together to produce a fifth volume
in 1962.
124 Mayer, Chanson populaire, 1:118. The following section draws heavily on Mayer’s analysis.
125 The post-1870 collection of Liederheften, which is preserved in the DVA, seems to consist
almost entirely of songs learnt by conscripts during their time in the army.
126 Louis Pinck, Verklingende Weisen: Lothringer Volkslieder, 4 vols. (Metz, 1926–39), 1:144.
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671
appeared in that great monument of German romantic nationalism,
Ludwig Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn of 1808,
where it was Hussars who delighted in the field. The song had been
adapted to the peculiar historical circumstances of Lorraine, but it was
also proof that the cultural affinities of eastern Moselle lay over the
Rhine.127 It was, in Pinck’s words, a pearl washed up on the shore of the
Germanic ocean.128
Like Herder, Pinck argued that folk song was the true mirror of
the folk soul.129 In the case of Lorraine, that soul was German—distinctive but definitely part of the wider deutsches Volkstum. Indeed, Pinck
asserted that in a border zone people were more passionate about preserving that culture than elsewhere; his best singers came from communities right on the language divide. This border was all but impenetrable, Pinck argued: in terms of folklore there was no contact between
the cultures. To judge from their Liederheften, some of his informants
also knew songs in French, but these he ignored. According to Pinck,
songs only traveled ‘‘avec ceux qui les chantent et se conservent dans
leur langue maternelle, même dans un entourage parlant une langue
différente.’’ His work as a folklorist was therefore a part of his agitation
for mother-tongue schooling. In a speech to the Congrès International
de folklore held in Paris in 1937, he made the connection himself: ‘‘Il
n’y a plus de doute, les chansons . . . se conserve[nt] grâce à la langue
maternelle. Mais là où la langue maternelle se perd les chansons populaires se perdent également.’’ He praised the British for their broadminded toleration of French culture in Canada, so unlike the French
themselves in Lorraine! 130
Pinck’s folklore had a very political edge, with the result that his
work has been contested both at the time and ever since. Even for modern French historians, who have largely shed revanchisme, the Verklingende Weisen appear as a continuation of the prewar policy of Germanization.131 This is partly because Pinck was not satisfied with recording
folk culture; he wanted to make it live again.132 He saw himself, like
Herder, giving back a voice to the people, and with it their sense of
themselves as an organic whole. He supported choirs, gave lectures,
made films, and broadcast on radio (from Germany). He willingly let
127 Ibid., 1:299.
128 Ibid., 2:i.
129 Ibid., 1:274: ‘‘Dass das Volkslied mit der Volkseele eng verwachsen ist.’’ He also quoted
Puymaigre’s dictum, ‘‘Dis-moi ce que tu chantes, je te dirai qui tu es!’’
130 Louis Pinck, ‘‘La Circulation des chants vue de la Lorraine,’’ Folk-Liv 2–3 (1939): 208–13.
131 François Roth, La Lorraine annexée: Etude sur la présidence de Lorraine dans l’empire allemand
(1870–1918) (Nancy, 1976), 258, 493.
132 Pinck, Verklingende Weisen, 2:i.
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672
his songs be used for cultural propaganda by the Alsatian separatist
organization the Jungmannschaft, a paramilitary group with overt Nazi
orientations. Its leaders, Hermann Bickler and Friedrich Spieser, were
among Pinck’s friends, and Spieser even lived with Pinck for several
months in 1930 while researching his doctorate on the folk songs of
Lorraine.133 Both men were active German agents before the war and
were to become leading collaborators during the occupation.134 These
contacts, and his known links with German academics, allowed French
nationalists to label Pinck as the mouthpiece of German propaganda.
Anticlerical journalists accused him of accepting money from the German agencies to fund his folklore publications. These suspicions were
confirmed in 1939 when Hambach, like all villages in front of the Maginot line, was evacuated into the interior. Officers billeted in the parochial house discovered a secret cupboard containing correspondence
with Robert Ernst and the Töpfer brothers, generous patrons of all
kinds of autonomist propaganda, some of which were signed ‘‘Heil
Hitler.’’ It was only the fact that Pinck was fatally ill that saved him from
prison. Instead, he returned to die in his native Lorraine in December 1940. The occupying Nazi authorities wanted to give him a national
hero’s funeral, but his family refused. However, they were unable to
prevent his work being mined by Nazi propagandists.135
Pinck’s relationship with Germany is still debated in Lorraine.136
That he was a German nationalist seems clear, though always a Lorrainer first. Foolishly, he did not distance himself from his contacts
after 1933, unlike other clerical autonomists. However, because he died
so soon after the invasion, Pinck escaped the taint of collaboration.
His sister was not so fortunate. She publicly welcomed the return of
Lorraine to Germany and contributed articles to Nazi propaganda publications.137 Although her Catholic faith prevented her from getting too
133 Friedrich Spieser, Das Leben des Volksliedes im Rahmen eines Lothringer Dorf (Bühl-Baden,
1934). Despite Spieser’s political bias (he accused the French authorities of trying to destroy the
culture of Lorraine), this volume contains some useful insights on the interaction between community and folk culture.
134 On the autonomist activities of both men see Bankwitz, Alsatian Autonomist Leaders, 50–
63, 90–95, 112–22; and Goodfellow, Between the Swastika and the Cross of Lorraine, 103–18, 149–61.
135 Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 259–61; Karl-Heinz Rothenberger,
Die elsass-lothringische Heimat- und Autonomiebewegung zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen, Europäische
Hochschulschriften 42 (Bern, Switzerland, 1975), 142, 150.
136 While I was working on the Verklingende Weisen in the Nancy Public Library, people would
approach me and offer their opinions about whether Pinck was or was not a Nazi. The discussion
was not made easier by the fact that the actual volumes in the library had been ‘‘liberated’’ from
the private collection of Hermann Göring.
137 Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck, ‘‘Der Lothringer,’’ in Elsass-und Lothringen, Deutsches Land,
ed. Otto Meissner (Berlin, 1941) 183–91. Her collection of folktales, which had been originally
published under the title Volksmärchen aus Lothringen in 1940, was republished in 1943 (with all the
French loanwords removed) as Deutsche Volksmärchen. See Langstroff, Lothringer Volksart, 10.
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673
close to the authorities, her name remains under a shadow.138 Whatever
the Pincks’ allegiances and motivations, however, the quality of their
work as folklorists was high. They were not blinded by their prejudices,
and the songs, tales, and legends themselves are, as far as it is possible
to ascertain, accurate transcriptions from the oral tradition. Since the
war, a younger generation of Mosellan folklorists has worked to save the
reputation of the collections, if not the collectors.
Henri Hiegel: Folklore and European Union
Not surprisingly, Pinck’s Société du folklore lorrain de langue allemande was not revived after the Liberation, but Westphalen’s Cercle
folklorique de Metz did make a brief reappearance. In 1948 one of its
members, René Schamber, returned to the issue of the language barrier that had so exercised Pinck. In an article on the migration of songs
he noticed ‘‘des similitudes assez nombreuses entre des chansons françaises et allemandes.’’ The famous French song ‘‘Malbrouk s’en va-t’en
guerre’’ had an exact counterpart in Pinck’s collection; many tunes,
phrases, and motifs were found among both communities. Lorraine
was not, therefore, divided into two cultural areas by the impassable
obstacle of language, but rather united by a common folk heritage.139
This argument was taken up by Pinck’s friend, Henri Hiegel. Hiegel
had helped Pinck with his fieldwork in the years before the war and in
1961 still referred to him as ‘‘mon maître.’’ 140 His concept of folklore
was, however, quite different. Whereas Pinck seemed to believe that
Lorraine was an enclosed community, cut off from the rest of Europe,
Hiegel considered it as a zone of transition. Not only was French influence readily apparent in the Verklingende Weisen, but songs from Italy,
Belgium, Switzerland, and Scandinavia all met there.141 The same was
true of the tales and legends collected by Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck;
they had some local characteristics, but the basic themes were common
to both language communities in Lorraine and could also be found in
the Ardennes, Luxembourg, the Saarland, and Alsace: ‘‘La compari138 Her entry in the bibliography of French folktales contains a little warning note suggesting readers should consult Langstroff as to her probity. The collection of folktales she amassed,
surely the one of the largest made in France this century, still awaits translation into French (Delarue, Conte populaire français, 1:83).
139 René Schamber, ‘‘Migration de la chanson populaire,’’ Nos Traditions, n.s., 1 (1948): 80–
82.
140 Henri Hiegel, ‘‘Bibliographie du Folklore mosellan,’’ Les Cahiers lorrains, n.s., 16 (1964):
113.
141 Hiegel, ‘‘L’Œuvre du folkloriste lorrain Louis Pinck,’’ 256–57. For an authoritative overview of the relationship between French and German folk songs see Heinke Binder, ‘‘Deutschfranzösische Liederverbindungen,’’ in Handbuch des Volkslieder, ed. R. W. Brednich, Lutz Röhrich,
and W. Suppan (Munich, 1975), 2:285–337.
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son de ces légendes, recueillies entre le Rhin et la Meuse, permet
d’établir la communauté indiscutablement européenne des légendes
allemandes et françaises.’’ The people of the Rhine-Meuse-Moselle
basin may have spoken different languages, but their stories, and the
desires expressed in them, were the same. Theirs was a history of conflict, and the tales they told were of the horrors of war and the consolation of religion. In particular the legends of Saint Oranne, the
former patroness of germanophone Lorraine but also honored in the
Saarland, ‘‘montrer la profonde aspiration des habitants des pays sarrois à l’établissement d’une paix durable et de la communauté européenne.’’ 142
Hiegel’s was only one of a number of postwar attempts by the folklorists to encourage a rapprochement between both language groups,
and both states, represented in Lorraine. In 1950 some Verklingende Weisen were translated into French by the local poet Adrien Printz.143 In
1961 Marie-Louise Tenèze, whose career as a folklorist started in the
Moselle, published a collection of folktales from France and Germany,
translated into each other’s language: it was called Rencontre des peuples
dans le conte.144 Even Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck altered her view of germanophone Lorraine as an introverted community. In the postwar edition of her collection, for each tale she gave comparative references
drawn from both Cosquin and the Grimms, demonstrating the links
to both French and German folk cultures.145 The moral of all these
initiatives seems clear: whether French or German, Lorrainers were
first and foremost good Europeans. It is surely no coincidence that
the Moselle was also the constituency of Robert Schuman, architect of
Franco-German reconciliation and the founding father of the European Community.
Conclusion: Does Lorraine Exist?
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
Since Jack Zipes attacked Robert Darnton for the lack of ‘‘depth’’ of his
scholarship, historians have been wary of folklore, particularly when
any issue of identity has been concerned.146 Darnton’s argument, that
142 Henri Hiegel, ‘‘La Compréhension européenne dans la collection des légendes et contes
de M. Loymeyer sur les Pays Sarrois,’’ in Festschrift für Karl Loymeyer, ed. Karl Schwingel (Saarbrucken, 1953), 274–79.
143 In a letter dated 1940 from Pinck, reproduced by Printz, the former had given his blessing to the project (Anthologie de la poésie populaire de langue allemande, d’après ‘‘Verklingende Weisen’’ de
Louis Pinck [Metz, 1950], 68–69).
144 Marie-Louise Tenèze and Georg Hüllen, eds., Rencontre des peuples dans le conte I: France/
Allemagne (Münster, 1961).
145 Angelika Merkelbach-Pinck, Lothringer Märchen (Cologne, 1961), 319–22.
146 Jack Zipes, ‘‘The Grimms and the German Obsession with Fairy Tales,’’ in Fairy Tales and
Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, ed. Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Philadelphia, 1986), 273.
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
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folktales contain evidence of ‘‘the existence of distinct cultural styles,
which set off the French . . . from other peoples,’’ has been much criticized.147 According to James Fernandez, ‘‘In our generalizations about
the folklore of nations . . . we oversimplify the complexities of folklore dynamics. . . . The rising nationalisms of the nineteenth century
made much use of folklore to typify and thus create new national identities around new national boundaries, but there is no reason for the
folklorists to be the acquiescent agents of such nationalisms.’’ 148 Zipes
and Fernandez were particularly concerned about the use of folklore
to make assertions about ethnicity, which they associated with the Nazi
abuse of Volkskunde.149 But ethnicity is only one element in the formation of national identity. If the inhabitants of a particular nation (whatever their ethnic origin) share common experiences (for example,
through interaction with the state), it is not unreasonable to expect
that these might be incorporated into their narratives. This is demonstrable in germanophone Lorraine, where many of the tales collected by
Merkelbach-Pinck were originally learnt while on service in the French
army. The characters, language, and concerns of these tales are very
similar to those told by veterans from every region of France and reflect
their experience of this national institution.150
But this argument is difficult to apply to the region of Lorraine,
which has seldom shared any institutions. Regionalists and folklorists
argued that it should because of its cultural homogeneity, but as they
often had other axes to grind, it is possible that the unity they sought
existed only in the Lorraine of their imaginations. Folklorists may have
approached their subject loaded with ideological baggage that influenced the way they arranged the material they collected, but this does
not mean they ‘‘invented tradition’’; rather, they manipulated it. The
147 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), 70. There is a potential flaw in Darnton’s comparisons of tales, because his examples
were drawn from collections already edited with the intention of demonstrating ‘‘national character,’’ but his conclusions are in keeping with the work of some of the leading postwar scholars in
folklore including Paul Delarue, Elisabeth Koechlin, Marianne Rumpf, and Lutz Röhrich, not to
mention Karl-Heinz Langstroff ’s study of the Merkelbach-Pinck collection.
148 James W. Fernandez, ‘‘Folklorists as Agents of Nationalism: Asturian Legends and the
Problem of Identity,’’ in Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales and Society, 235. Several other items in this collection take up the polemic with Darnton. For a more general critique of historians’ use and misuse
of folklore see Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ‘‘Fairy Tales, Folk Narrative Research, and History,’’ Social
History 14 (1989): 343–57.
149 James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld, introduction to German Volkskunde: A Decade of Theoretical Confrontation, Debate, and Reorientation (1967–1977) (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 7–14. See also
Dow and Lixfeld, The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich (Bloomington,
Ind., 1994).
150 Merkelbach-Pinck, Lothringer Märchen, no. 35, Le Vieux La Ramée; and no. 38, Pipet, ein
alter Franzos. See David Hopkin, ‘‘La Ramée, the Archetypal Soldier, as an Indicator of Popular
Attitudes to the French Army,’’ French History 14 (2000): 115–50.
676
songs really were sung, the tales really were told in Lorraine, and if they
have features in common then one might, following Gennep, argue for
a folkloric community. It is therefore time to take issue with Carnoy’s
assertion: ‘‘Il n’y a donc pas de Folk-Lore provincial.’’
At first glance folk songs and tales are poor vehicles for assertions
of local identity. Similar tales have been collected from Vietnam to
Morocco and all places-in between.151 There is a potential contradiction
manifest in the work of Cosquin and Puymaigre—that although they
defined their collections as belonging to a particular province, they
both went to great lengths to demonstrate that similar items could be
found in many other regions and countries. As Puymaigre’s folkloric
studies matured, he was astonished to discover that ‘‘on rencontrait une
ballade entendue en Champagne, sur les bords de la Moselle, sur les
rives de la Loire, sur le versant des Alpes italiennes, dans les vallées des
Pyrénées . . . on retrouvait les mêmes données en Castille, en [sic] Portugal, en Catalogne, parfois en Allemagne et en Hollande, en Angleterre et en Grèce, partout pour ainsi dire.’’ 152 No location could claim
to be the birthplace of a song; they were the common inheritance of
all. Both men used these international comparisons to justify their folkloric activities: in this context they could not simply be dismissed as
‘‘niaiseries’’; rather, they were participating in the scholarly apparatus
of an international art form.
Subsequent generations of folklorists were concerned with the
continent-wide uniformity of tales (which would seem to obviate the
need to look for national or local characteristics), arguing that they had
traveled with the Aryan populations on their migrations from Asia to
Europe and beyond, or that they were survivals from a pre-Christian
religion practiced over a wide area.153 Yet within a single tale-type no
two narratives are exactly the same, and even the same person telling
the same tale on two different occasions may give different renditions.
Since 1945 folklorists have been more interested in the variable elements of folktales, showing how individual narrators altered stories to
fit their own personalities and the expectations of their audience.154 Try151 Stith Thompson, ‘‘The Folktale from Ireland to India,’’ in The Folktale (New York, 1946),
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13–293.
152 Théodore de Puymaigre, Folk-Lore (Paris, 1885), 7–8.
153 The Grimms believed that tales contained the remnants of the beliefs of their Teutonic
forebears. For other examples of scholarly belief in ‘‘survivals’’ in folklore see Max Müller, Comparative Mythology, An Essay (London, 1909); Paul Saintyves, Les Contes de Perrault et les récits parallèles:
Leurs origines (coutumes primitives et liturgies populaires) (Paris, 1923); Vladimir Propp, Theory and
History of Folklore (Manchester, 1984), 100–123.
154 A model study in this vein (and particularly useful for historians) is provided by Bengt
Holbek, Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a European Perspective, Folklore Fellows Communications 239 (Helsinki, 1987).
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ing to reconcile both uniform and variable elements in folktales has
proved complicated, but a possible solution is offered by the concept
of ecotypes.
The term was coined by the Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow to
help understand why there are such marked differences in national
canons of tales. He explained these in terms of tradition regions with
definite boundaries; only one variant of a tale would be at home in any
tradition region.155 The concept was eagerly taken up by the American
folklorist Alan Dundes: ‘‘In folklore, the term refers to local forms of a
folktale, folksong or any other folkloristic genre . . . defined with reference to either geographic or cultural factors. Oicotypes could be on
the village, state, regional, or national level.’’ 156 In other words, folklore
adapts to particular cultural milieus, and we can expect that a comparison of oral traditions will highlight cultural differences. Any new
oral narrative would either be rejected by a community satisfied with its
existing ecotype or, by altering its motifs, style, or meaning, be changed
to fit its new cultural context. The process of ecotypification, described
by Roger Abrahams for the urban ghettos of North America, is a valuable way to connect the tradition with its specific social base, for similarities across tale-types (and even across genres) can be related to the
particular environment.157 Ecotypes help explain the distinct regional
patterns in the almost universal distribution of folktale motifs.158
If Darnton’s conclusions are reliable, then he has identified national ecotypes for France, Germany, Italy, and England. In terms of
national ecotypes Lorraine appears to be a zone of transition, as Hiegel
suggested.159 However, the existence of national ecotypes does not prove
the existence of distinctive regional cultures. What we need to know is
whether Lorraine possessed its own ecotypes.
There are some tales that reflect the violent history of the province.
In one of Merkelbach-Pinck’s tales, for example, a shepherd boy defeats
an army of invading Swedes because during the battle he gets caught
155 Carl W. von Sydow, ‘‘Geography and Folktale Oicotypes,’’ in Selected Papers on Folklore
(Copenhagen, 1948), 44–59. Von Sydow borrowed the idea from botany where the term is used to
describe native variants. One may also see oikotype, but ecotype is the commonly accepted spelling
and already familiar as a concept to historians of the family.
156 Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture through Folklore
(New York, 1984), 2.
157 Roger Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago, 1970), 173–74.
158 Lauri Honko, ‘‘Methods in Folk Narrative Research,’’ in Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies, ed.
Reimund Kvideland, Henning Sehmsdorf, and Elizabeth Simpson (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 38.
159 Montiers-sur-Saulx was the furthest extension into France of several tale-types whose
principal home lay across the Rhine; for instance, AT530 The Princess on the Glass Mountain or AT533
The Speaking Horsehead (Delarue and Tenèze, Conte populaire français, 2:309–15, 338, 514–29).
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
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on a wayside cross that thereafter he carries on his back. The Swedes
think Christ himself has joined the battle and flee. This is a local version
of what is usually a humorous motif in which an unlikely hero routs an
army by accident. In this case, however, it is not a joke, for the memory
of the Swedes’ rampage across Lorraine in 1635, and in particular their
sacrilegious destruction of shrines, was still alive in the oral tradition
three hundred years later. This tale exhibits two features that might be
considered typical of germanophone Lorraine, deep religiosity and a
legendary quality, that is to say a tale ‘‘contaminated’’ with history and
therefore passed from the status of fiction to that of believed legend.160
A clearer example of an ecotype, because it occurs more than once,
may tell us something about the distinctive character of francophone
Lorraine. A popular tale (forty-seven versions have been collected from
France) concerns The Maiden without Hands. It can be found in Cosquin’s
collection and is also one of Sadoul’s surviving tales.161 In the typical
French version the daughter of a king is mutilated and expelled from
her father’s house by the machinations of her stepmother, is restored
to health by miraculous intervention, marries a prince to whom she
bears children, is again expelled from the marital home by the machinations of her mother-in-law, and is finally reunited with her husband.
Both Cosquin’s and Sadoul’s versions follow this basic outline but with
the addition of one significant motif: each heroine escapes from misery
by dressing as a soldier and serving in her husband’s army. This motif
is borrowed from another tale-type, The Innocent Slandered Maiden. This
mixing of tale-types occurs in Lorraine and nowhere else. Songs about
military maids were also extremely frequent in Lorraine, and it would
seem that the motif of the cross-dressing she-soldier had particular
resonance there.162
This is just one example of the kind of regional ecotypes that
folklorists have uncovered for both language groups (and occasionally
across the linguistic divide) in Lorraine; others can be demonstrated
160 Merkelbach-Pinck, Lothringer Märchen, no. 7 Der wilde Mann und der Königssohn (AT502
The Wild Man, develops as AT314 with elements of AT1640).
161 Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine, 2: no. 78 La Fille du marchand de Lyon; and Charles
Sadoul, ‘‘Contes de Lorraine,’’ Revue des traditions populaires 19 (1904): no. 4 La Fille aux mains coupées ou l’hôtesse du Dragon Vert. Finding ecotypes that straddle the language divide is more difficult,
which suggests that Pinck’s view of the linguistic frontier was closer to the mark than Hiegel’s.
162 Explaining the significance of this ecotype in Lorraine would require a separate article.
Although Lorraine has produced more than its fair share of militarily active women, from Joan
of Arc through Madame de Saint-Baslemont to Louise Michel, the motif of the cross-dressing
she-soldier in folklore may have more to do with the distribution of authority within the domestic sphere than with public displays of power. It might, for example, be significant that it was
in Lorraine that the anthropologist Susan Carol Rogers conducted the fieldwork for her seminal article ‘‘Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance: A Model of Female/ Male
Interaction in Peasant Society,’’ American Ethnologist 2 (1975): 727–56.
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for songs, rituals, and even house-building styles. The existence of these
ecotypes can sometimes be linked to the existence of an independent
duchy, but they often spread beyond the boundaries of ducal Lorraine
to include the entire ‘‘espace lorrain.’’ 163 Yet although ecotypes give
indications of distinct regional cultures, they should not necessarily
be considered as proof of identity that demands an awareness on the
part of participants in that distinctive culture. Did Lorrainers recognize
each other as belonging to a single cultural community because they
sang the same songs or told the same tales?
Historically, the study of folklore has been bound up with nationalism. However, the actual material under scrutiny—songs, dances, tales,
traditions—displays what some readers may find a refreshing apathy
concerning identity politics. In Lorrainer folklore collections, for example, there are very few references to the existence of a place called
Lorraine, and hardly any to the dukes. The people and places most
frequently named were either national (the king of France, Jean de
Calais) or international (Amsterdam, England, Australia). Despite the
national references in the tales, they give little indication that France
was a locus for loyalty; rather, it provided an exotic ‘‘other’’ to the
purely local knowledge and concerns of the narrators. It would have
been interesting if the folklorists had questioned their informants as to
their thoughts on the origins and value of their repertoires, but as most
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century collectors were working within
the paradigm of communal creation, the views of the actual narrators
and singers were not considered significant. When the informants offer
a description of their material, it is usually as ‘‘old tales’’ or ‘‘old songs,’’
rather than something specific to Lorraine. What for folklorists was an
expression of a particular identity was, for their informants, part of a
way of life that, inasmuch as they were aware of its limits, was time specific and local rather than regional.
The folklorists’ awareness of the regional distinctiveness of this culture necessarily involved taking a wider view than did their informants,
and having an alternative to judge it against. Folklorists almost invariably came from a wealthier, more educated background than those
who supplied their material. It was because folklorists participated in
national politics and international debate that they felt able to distinguish folk culture from elite culture. They could only establish the existence of ecotypes through comparative study, an opportunity not available to most of their neighbors. Folklorists were, therefore, faced with a
163 The example of the distinctive rural settlement pattern in Lorraine, propagated by the
dukes, is discussed by de Planhol (Historical Geography of France, 194–96).
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paradox: while presenting their material as evidence of a regional identity, they nonetheless had to accept that that regional identity was not
clearly articulated in the texts themselves. Most folklorists recognized
this and avoided placing too much ideological weight on their material;
their identity politics were implied through the titles and organization
of their collections, rather than openly flaunted. Although there clearly
was a connection between the folkloric and political activities of Cosquin and Puymaigre, they usually avoided the temptation of explicitly
linking one to the other. Their belief in ‘‘fidelity to the oral tradition’’
as the cornerstone of their discipline prevented them from dressing up
their material for political ends. Even Pinck did not blanch at including
anticlerical or French patriot songs. The one exception to this rule was
Louis Marin.
Louis Marin was the first professional anthropologist to write about
his native Lorraine, and one might expect that he would bring a vigor
to his studies that was lacking among the amateur folklorists considered here. Indeed, his Contes traditionnels en Lorraine, written immediately after the Second World War, is the one work of Lorraine folklore that has become widely known among historians because both
Eugen Weber and Edward Shorter have quoted from it.164 Unfortunately, Marin presents an object lesson in the dangers of professionalization. Both when doing his fieldwork (before the First World War)
and when he came to write up his notes, he viewed all information
through ‘‘bleu-blanc-rouge’’ glasses. His nationalist intentions are evident throughout. His main thesis, that veillées in Lorraine were not primarily occasions for amusement or courting but for patriotic education, is contradicted by every single one of the score or more folklorists
and anthropologists who have studied this social institution locally.165
The text is littered with inconsistencies, and where Marin’s assertions
can be checked, they are often wrong.166 Marin, of course, was also an
164 Louis Marin, Les Contes traditionnels en Lorraine: Institutions de transfert des valeurs morales et
spirituelles (Paris, 1964). Published posthumously, this work is based on two articles that originally
appeared in 1946.
165 For a summary of work that contradicts Marin see Colette Mechin, ‘‘Les Veillées,’’ Le
Pays lorrain 58 (1977): 199–205.
166 For example, Marin asserts at one moment that oral memory only went back as far as the
eighteenth century but a page later that the hostility of Lorrainers to the division of Charlemagne’s
Empire (‘‘notre Empire’’) had been passed on from generation to generation since the Dark Ages
(Contes traditionnels, 19–20). Later Marin states that the schoolmaster of his home village (Faulx)
had, with the help of locals, included in a report for the minister of education on the occasion of
the International Exposition of 1900 ‘‘une moisson prodigieuse’’ of tales, legends, proverbs, and
other forms of oral literature (Contes traditionnels, 95). In fact, the schoolmaster wrote precisely the
opposite, that no locals knew any interesting local stories, and that to fill in the space he included a
couple he had found in the margins of the parish records from previous centuries (‘‘Monographes
des communes de Meurthe et Moselle rédigées en 1889 par les instituteurs pour l’exposition de
1900,’’ Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy, MS. 354 [1662]).
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active politician, the leader of the conservative Fédération républicaine
in the interwar years, and infamous for his obsessive nationalism.167 As
Herman Lebovics has shown, ‘‘Marin saw his methods of anthropological inquiry . . . as tools to render architects’ drawings of conservative
moral orders.’’ 168 He bent his folklore research to his political purposes,
and in so doing transgressed ‘‘the limits of historical invention.’’
It may be the unwillingness of the other Lorrainer folklorists to invent that limited their appeal. Had they manufactured a national epic
of independence like the Kalevala, it might have helped them achieve
their wider political objectives by convincing their fellow inhabitants
that Lorrainer folk culture constituted a distinctive identity. But the
effort to popularize their subject could have resulted in compromising their scholarly standards, which most proved reluctant to do. Cosquin and Puymaigre published their folklore in academic (sometimes
foreign-language) journals, which were unlikely to have a large readership in Lorraine. Even those folklorists, like Sadoul and Pinck, who did
try and reach a broader public, imposed strict discipline on their use
of the material. Pinck, for example, avoided the well-stocked genre of
‘‘Heimatlieder’’ when compiling his collection. These songs answered
his political intentions very well, but they did not fit his other criteria.
Thus his collection cannot help but highlight the historic and cultural
divisions within the region, rather than reconcile them. Unlike Alsace,
therefore, where large-scale opposition to both German and French
governments was organized around a sense of local identity, regional
culture never became a major political issue for Lorraine as a whole.169
Although they had some influence with a succession of mainly rightwing or nationalist politicians from Lorraine, the folklorists never sufficiently roused the majority of Lorrainers to line up behind a regionalist
political agenda. Even in germanophone Lorraine the interwar autonomist movement received little support, compared with Alsace. Regionalists argued that Lorraine existed because it possessed ‘‘une âme commune faite à la fois des souvenirs collectifs d’un long passé de joies ou de
douleurs, et d’une communauté toujours actuelle d’idées, d’habitudes,
d’intérêts,’’ but they proved unable to communicate this awareness to
the broader public, or at least without at the same time focusing attention on the issues that divided them, such as language, religion, politics, history.170 The warnings of Sadoul and others that the assimilation
167 For details of Marin’s political career see William D. Irvine, French Conservatism in Crisis:
The Republican Federation of France in the 1930s (Baton Rouge, La., 1979), 7–11.
168 Lebovics, True France, 27.
169 Wilkinson, ‘‘Uses of Popular Culture in Alsace,’’ 605–19.
170 L. Bardedette, ‘‘Lorraine ou Comté?’’ Le Pays lorrain 17 (1925): 123.
Tseng 2000.11.20 15:01 DST:103
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of regional culture would lead to a dull, national mediocrity were not
heeded. When the region was finally reborn, in 1982, it owed its origin not to concerns about traditional culture but rather to a left-wing
government influenced by the experience of decolonization. It is probable that the folklorists considered in this article would have felt this
was too late to preserve the âme commune that was their justification for
regionalist politics.

6217 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES 23:4

Transcription

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