FRANCE: Toulouse, la ville rose

From Paris, David Pike reports: "I have recently returned from Toulouse, one of my ten (10) hometowns, and I find that the changes there take some getting used to. Call it the triumph of Occitant, that its flag (yellow on red) now flies on the Capitolium besides the Tricolor and the flag of the European Union. The streets in the city center now read Carriera del marques Lafaieta, Carriera Sant Roman, Carriera Leon Gambetta, ome politic. The private courtyards in the old center of this prosperous city have been wondrously transformed, and yet if you were to take aviation out of this French Seattle it would be a market town.

Occitan nationalism is not without its critics. The University of Toulouse was due to celebrate its 750th anniversary in 1979 when Occitan extremists made it impossible, denouncing the university as the cradle of the Inquisition that destroyed the Albigensians. The growth of regionalism throughout Western Europe raises the question of what the future Europe is likely to be. Some 25 years ago, when I first joined the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris, our breakfast guest one day was the Gaullist minister Alexandre Sanguinetti. It was the only time I can remember that a guest lost his temper, and he lost it when I suggested that Europe a century from now would be a federation of provinces, each more or less equal in size and population, whether Wessex or Upper Saxony or Tuscany or Galicia or Brittany. One element may remain constant: football hooliganism".

RH: This whole business is very serious.The French government will not allow France to be other than one and indivisible. The same goes for Spain. The proliferation of languages like occitant will introduce chaos in Europe. Children will grow up not knowing how to write good French, indispensable for success in life. Brussels is encouraging the trend to weaken "l'Europe des patries", and some people (among them I believe George Sassoon), view it as a plot.

Ronald Hilton - 11/20/02