Nos villages Au cœur de l’histoire des Français by Jean-Pierre Rioux

Nos villages Au cœur de

l’histoire des Français  Our little towns, The Heart of French People is a book just published by Tallandier written by Jean-Pierre

Rioux. I live in a countryside and I am surrounded by little towns. I found this book, starting from its cover  absolutely wonderful. I didn't have doubts that the reading would have been engaging. Villages involved captures all the French territory.

Villages: preserved by time because of their ways of re-reading reality, french villages have been largely represented in movies and books. Let's just imagine Vianne Rocher and her arrival at Lansquenet, in Chocolat by Joanne Harris  

A little village is synonime of culture, traditions, policy, bad or good that it is.

But why during our times are so important little villages?

For their vivibility: because they can be the proper answer at the modernity,  at the progress and at the same time at the disillusion and broken dreams brought by it, with too much reality and too much disenchantment.

These villages with the time, centuries, accumulated an amount of material made by history, traditions, legends. Let's remember what happened also in Ireland and other countries as well; it is thanks to an erudite monography, articles, books, that the society discovered more about these realities.

What villages give back is an idea of petite patrie.

Wagons of material have been accumulated in this sense for not lose the meaning of a world that meant and that still means a lot in terms of traditions and specific role in a social tissue biggest and more complicated.

This book, explains the author, was also born for thanking all that scientists, and erudites who kept traces of villages during the centuries. 

Many villages taken in considerations, most of them with few souls, 20 or so, other ones with an interesting number of people, but all of them with an intense, old past and recent history that in a way or in another changed the face of their reality.

Personal and collective histories, human and divine nurtured and mixed together for fascinating portraits is what we will read in these pages.

In villages people live of the rhytm of time, seasons, labour, harvesting, and this time timeless knows the passage of the time because of festivities, liturgic calendar. Every village will be analyzed reconstructing its birth, main facts occurred in the good and in the bad during the centuries, curiosities, traditions, legends, rituals.

Highly recommended.

I thank Editions Tallandier for the copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori