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Compte rendu : Vie et mort d’un berger

In French Studies, 79.1 (2025)

Alain Viala was a literary critic. He was also, as his friends knew, a man from Saint-Affrique in southern Aveyron. In this compelling account, Viala pieces together the life of his uncle Émile Lourmel, whose local story gives a surprising perspective on history across many places and at many scales. Reading it, we stay close to the land — and to those who work it — but we are not far, either, from the literary games Viala deciphered in his work on the seventeenth century. The staging of conversations between ‘l’Émile’, an Algerian aide-soignante Samiha, her daughter Nadia, and a nephew of Émile’s —known here as Bernard — feels richly familiar to the early modernist, as does the modest nod to how Émile, who didn’t like to ‘faire l’intéressant’ (p. 25), came to talk about himself. This twentieth-century tale begins via a stroke not a shipwreck, but we know ourselves to be in the company of a master storyteller just the same. The literary bergerie, writes the editor Michel P. Schmitt, is full to bursting (p. 213), but this is a new kind of shepherd and a new kind of shepherd’s tale. We hear a deep history of the non-human Aveyron, one attentive to change at many scales; we learn about its geology, its poor soils, eventually its railways which brought lime to amend them, so that wheat could flourish where formerly only rye could grow; this change brought some people to move in and others, poorer, to move on. That might be a move of only thirty or forty kilometres — small on a national scale, notes the narrator, but a movement which ‘décidé ainsi d’existences entières’ (p. 34). It is a deep history, but a light one, punctuated by a dry wit shared between Émile and his nephew. We see how a relation to land is about both economics and emotion, and how those things cannot be separated. We see the young Émile go off to ‘faire l’active’ in 1936 (p. 63), and working as a prisoner-of-war for a Prussian farmer, to whom he gives his name as ‘Pauvre con’, echoed back to him as ‘Poffkon’. Freed by the Russians, Émile makes a long, hard journey to Crimea, seeing dreadful things on the way, and sometimes not seeing them but knowing they are happening anyway.

The war accounts are extraordinary writing. Schmitt comments on the author’s love of and dialogue with Céline; the text would stand up well to teaching in a pair with the Voyage au bout de la nuit. Then we return to the Aveyron, and Poffkon’s terrible movements across Europe are counterpointed by the small negotiations of those who stayed, whose comings and goings between pasture and dairy and warehouses were necessary to the local Roquefort production but also provided cover for the work of refuge and resistance. This is a local story that ranges over all Europe and beyond: imagining Émile’s return to find his sister now owning the family land, Samiha tells the story of her own father’s post-war joy and his disappointment in returning to Kabylie. The text is shaped by these large histories, but the prose holds them quietly: ‘Un grand livre, qui s’impose à bas bruit’, writes Schmitt in his postface (p. 213). (Schmitt also gives us a ‘Petite Encyclopédie pour traverser le court vingtième siècle aveyronnais’; useful, but also a good read in itself.) In retirement, Émile and his sister weed their mother’s grave together, and eat soup, and he helps her out cutting back the brambles. She dies, and our nephew-narrator steps in to buy the house and land, aided by Émile who in his last years treats himself to a mobylette and a Macfarlane coat, and swoops around Saint-Aff in a final movement of joy shared by the reader. A careful account of his final days places his death in June 1989.

Alain Viala, the nephew, died in 2021. Of the Spanish flu the narrator notes ‘les pandémies créent la peur qui engendre le secret’ (p. 42). This book was written in a pandemic, but it makes brave moves and in its elegantly discreet sharing of secrets is a delight to read. Émile tells us that ‘Un paysan qui peut faire toutes les façons de ses terres, il ne doit plus rien à personne, il peut pisser devant sa porte’ (p. 62). Alain Viala owed us nothing, but I’m glad he gave us this.

Katherine Ibbett, Trinity College, Oxford