Gens de Bauduen – Avant la naissance, en 1973, du lac de Sainte-Croix, en Haute-Provence - Éric Schulthess

Gens de Bauduen – Avant la naissance, en 1973, du lac de Sainte-Croix, en Haute-Provence - Éric Schulthess
(People of Bauduen. Before the birth of Lac de Sainte-Croix in Haute-Provence in 1973)

These people from Bauduen, a Provencal village in the Haut-Var, spent most of their lives before the birth of Lac de Sainte-Croix, which was impounded just half a century ago after the construction of an EDF dam.
Most of these men and women grew up in farming families, just a few kilometers from the Verdon, which marked the border with the Basses-Alpes and feeds the lake. For these people attached to their land, the impoundment of the lake - even if it spared Bauduen from being swallowed up - sounded like the end of a happy era.
Provençal was the mother tongue of almost all these characters. It was in this magnificent language that they named the world and exchanged ideas with their parents and classmates. But once at school, only French was allowed.
The Provençal translation of these portraits represents a small reparation for the injustice experienced by these children of Provence, as indeed of so many other regions of France.

Provençal translation by Céline Magrini. Preface by Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus.

Collection Littérature et régions Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, L’Harmattan.

The author:

Éric Schulthess was born in Marseille in 1954. A street educator, then a radio and TV journalist, he draws from his multiple origins - Swiss, Corsican, English and Provençal grandparents - a passion for living languages. Provençal was the language of his Mémé de Bauduen, where the twenty characters in this book lived.