25AW #17 LOZÈRE Intoroduction

For this season I was looking for a forgotten place in France, a place where nobody goes.I was tired of the sunny Provence, the rural peacefulness of Normandy’s vast landscapes, and the small river flowing past a castle near a quaint village. I wanted something other than the French charm that tourists all over the world dream of.

Lozère is in the south of France, in the Occitanie region, which is the least populated region in the country. Our friend’s family house is there, nestled in the middle of nowhere, on a mountain where you wouldn’t expect to find a single house. 

My friend’s grandfather, who was part of a theater company and aligned with the left-wing party at the time, fled Paris during the 1968 student demonstrations. He came across a deserted house in the mountains, bought it at a low price, and began renovating it himself, gradually turning it into a home through the years. 

With time, the family grew from children to grandchildren. The house keeps evolving with each generation, the children contributing by building walls and refurbishing rooms. They craft stairs from stones gathered near the river below the house, where they play. A long labor completed little by little. Each holiday spent away from their house leaves them longing for it, as if the house held the soul of the family.

Robert Louis Stevenson, renowned author of ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ and ‘Treasure Island’, wrote ‘Travel with a Donkey in the Cevènnes’, a travel diary recounting his journey through Lozère in 1878. Repelled by modern society and looking to break away from its comfort, Stevenson went on a 12-day trip
on the back of a donkey, hiking and camping.

« For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. »

Raymond Depardon’s photobook Rural and his documentary ‘Profil Paysans’ captures the lives and of famers in Le Villaret, a rural area in Lozère. Depardon, born in a farming family himself, left home at an early age. It was only years later that he developed an interest in this culture and decided to return to his roots to document it. Over several years, he visited the farmers, working to gain their trust and establish a connection. Being welcomed into their homes and lives proved more challenging than documenting a remote village in Africa or covering a battlefield. As he puts it, it was the first time he realized he could feel so far from a place that was so close to him.

France lies at the heart of Europe. Throughout history, it has focused on building a strong modern nation among the peoples of Eastern, Western, Northern, and Southern Europe. As modernization progressed, the state further strengthened its centralization and language became an important tool in its process. In an effort to settle an unified image of the nation, the government decided to impose a single national language, the modern French we use today, and silenced all other languages. The dialect used in Lozère, Occitan, came to be forbidden.
Being Protestant, the region’s identity fell away from the ideals of civilization, progress, and the better life that the central government wanted to promote. Over time, it slowly became a hidden place, forgotten by the modern world.

Lozère is not a comfortable destination, carefully prepared like a retreat. Perhaps it is for this very reason that My friend’s family and Stevenson escaped here, and why Depardon returned; striving to build a garden of their own, away from the ideals and values of society.