Tightly connected to the rediscovery of troubadour literature, interest in the Occitan Middle Ages forms part of Romantic historicism. In 1821, Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, from Geneva, started publishing his monumental Histoire des Français (31 vols, 1821-44). In the fourth volume, about the reign of Philippe Auguste, chapter 24 was exclusively devoted to the crusade against the Albigensians (1209-29), the Cathars of the region around Albi. Catharism had officially been condemned by the Church in the Third Lateran Council (1179). The crusade launched by Pope Innocent III against the Albigensians was long and bitter, marked by massacres and devastations. Following the conquest of Béziers, Carcassonne and Albi, the campaign ended in 1229 with the annexation of southern France to the French monarchy. Sismondi considered the crusade as a key episode exemplifying three fundamental conflicts: that between north and south as the motor of European history, between despotism and freedom, and between rational progress and religious fanaticism. Within the Midi, Sismondi’s account, following as it did on the preparatory work of Henri-Pascal de Rochegude, triggered the historical myth of Albigensianism.

Romantics placed the Albigensians among the heroes of freedom. By the end of the 1860s, the legend of the Cathars (which never involved any endorsement of the actual religious tenets of Catharism) was already established and had considerable political, religious and social resonance, especially through its literary treatments, celebrating 12th-century Languedoc as a tolerant country where freedom of conscience was in force, as well as a federation of city republics ruled by democracy and social mobility. This view was propounded specifically by Napoléon Peyrat (1809–1881), a Protestant clergyman from Ariège and passionate anti-Catholic. Much as his Histoire des pasteurs du désert (started in 1831, published in 1842 and favoured by Republican historians like Henri Martin and Michelet) established the historical myth of the Camisards (Huguenots from the Cevennes region resisting the persecutions under Louis XIV), so too his Histoire des Albigeois: les Albigeois et l’Inquisition (3 vols, 1870-72) marked the apogee of the Albigensian myth. It summarized all the constituent elements of the Cathar legend that had meanwhile become established tropes in the celebration of heterodoxy and free thought: it turned the medieval events into an epic story, and fixed the reputation of heroes, villains and holy places (e.g. the fortress of Monségur and its siege of 1244).

Sismondi’s schematization of a north-south antagonism was to remain a fixed trope among historians. It characterizes Augustin Thierry’s Lettres sur l’Histoire de France (1827), which, emphasizing the persistent element of conquest in the history of France, highlighted the fate of those who had suffered occupation and assimilation, from the original ethnic clash between conquering Franks and defeated Gallo-Romans to the history of the subjugated south. Another example is Claude Fauriel’s Histoire de la Gaule méridionale sous la domination des conquérants Germains (1836) and his Histoire de la Croisade contre les hérétiques albigeois en vers provençaux par un poëte contemporain (1837). A long-time student of ancient and modern literature and a close friend of Thierry, Fauriel identified from literary and historical sources a complex entity he referred to as “southern France”, which, in his view, had been the cradle of European civilization, since it was from here that “the ideas that ruled the Middle Ages, finding their social form in chivalry and their first expression in Provençal literature, governed […] all the nations of Europe”. Fauriel denounced the “monstrous war” against the Albigensians that destroyed this southern civilization and struck a mortal blow at its literature. In his Histoire de la Croisade contre les hérétiques Albigeois écrite en vers provençaux par un poëte contemporain, Fauriel edited a contemporary account of the crusade, narrated in Provençal verse. In Fauriel’s presentation, this account testified to the two main characteristics of Midi society, “the energetic tendency of cities to democracy” (already celebrated in Sismondi’s work on medieval city-republics) and the “chivalry of the feudal classes”, both united in harmonious solidarity resisting the onslaught from the north. This allowed Fauriel to establish a direct link between the Albigensians and troubadour literature, the study of which had been prepared by Sismondi’s De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813) and placed on a firm footing by Fauriel’s direct inspiration, the philologist François-Just-Marie Raynouard.

From Sismondi, Raynouard and Fauriel, the second historical myth of the Languedoc emerged, that of the troubadours. These poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries had used the vernacular to express a new sense of “courtly love” according to the conventions of feudal ethics: the poet as the vassal of the adored, commanding woman, who, often married, was frequently addressed in coded terms. The troubadours’ persona was soon mythologized and, following the rediscovery of their verse around 1800, became a prototype of the Romantic poet’s self-image: errant, cosmopolitan, amorous and nonconformist. The invocation of troubadours as Romantic-poetic role models was as strong throughout the Romance lands as that of the bard or the minstrel was in northern Europe. It spawned, among other manifestations, a medievalizing style in French history painting (the style troubadour); a Spanish historical play (El trovador, by Antonio García Gutiérrez, 1836), turned into Verdi’s opera Il trovatore (1853); and, in Toulouse, Barcelona and elsewhere, the medievalizing taste, including the notion of the cour d’amour, of the poetic contests known and revived as “Floral Games”.

The historiographical rehabilitation of the Occitan past is most explicitly linked to Bernard Mary-Lafon (1812–1844). A Romantic soul, he followed the trend set by Walter Scott and wrote a novel about the southern Middle Ages, Mœurs du Midi (1835), whose protagonist was Bertrand de Born, one of the best known troubadours. Mary-Lafon was also the author of a Tableau historique et littéraire de la langue parlée dans le Midi de la France (1841) and an Histoire politique, religieuse et littéraire du Midi de la France (4 vols, 1842-45). In his introduction to the latter work, Mary-Lafon deplored the fact that no one had written a proper “history of France”, which, under its totalizing name, should encompass the coalescence of various countries, all of which had a past of their own prior to the arrival of the Franks. In order to counterbalance an exclusively northern-French perspective on the history of France, Mary-Lafon undertook a historical work for the Midi, eschewing, in Romantic fashion, the earlier organization by kings, reigns and hierarchies, and focusing instead on the history of the popular struggle for freedom in the Midi. His originality lay in the fact that his history of the south did not commence or conclude with the medieval period, but went back to antiquity and took the account up to the end of the 18th century, thus converting the Midi of France into a long-term polity and agency with its own history, and surviving the shock of the French annexation (which he viewed as a northern, feudal crushing of the civil, municipal liberties flourishing in the south). A Protestant, Mary-Lafon, also wrote a satirical history of the papacy (Pasquin et Marforio, 1861), and in 1868 published a new translation of the Croisade contre les Albigeois.

In the later decades of the century, the Romantic mode of historical idealization faltered. Academic, archive-based and factualist history-writing (institutionally consolidated in the 1868 foundation of the École Pratique des Hautes Études) moved away from colourful rhetoric, Romantic narrative and ethical moralizing. Moreover, following the events of the years 1870-71 (French defeat against Prussia and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine; the civil war that followed the Paris Commune), it became impossible to continue the nostalgic discourses carried forward by southern authors like Mary-Lafon and Peyrat. When Ernest Renan, in Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882), stressed the need for nations to transcend and forget the blood-stained inner divisions of their past, he was obliquely, yet influentially, denouncing the Cathar and Albigensian myths.