Frédéric Mistral is the author who stands at the top of 19th-century Occitan letters. His work, which bears the hallmark of French and European Romanticism, defined a linguistic and cultural specificity for the Midi and its language and culture, which was stubbornly denied by French centralism. Moving between the real Provence and a wider, less tangible Provence of dreams and memories, the notion of the homeland is omnipresent in Mistral’s works. It is conceived as a moral entity, a treasury of virtues, and a legacy to maintain and transmit to future generations. Mirèio (1859) is set in the rural Provence where Mistral was born; in Calendau (1867) he celebrated the coastal and mountainous areas between Aix-en-Provence and Barcelonnette, Marseille, and Nice.

The success of Mirèio inspired the writers of the Catalan Renaixença, with whom Mistral became friendly. In the Odo i Troubaire Catalan (1861), he invoked the myth of the medieval liberties and glories of the Occitan lands, reviving memories of an ancient Catalan-Provençal brotherhood, and recalling the splendour of the troubadours’ language and the terrible Albigensian Crusade. Yet it was in Calendau that the Albigensian issue returned with force, drawing on the antagonism between two different “races”. The Mistralian epic evoked the halcyon days of medieval Provence, when the troubadours had prospered, and only the merest vestige of which remained by the end of the 18th century (when royal decrees were only valid if the king specifically use his title of “Count of Provence”). In Calendau, Mistral took an unequivocally “national” stance: his condemnation of the Crusade was outspoken, and his call to defend the Provençal language and homeland was vehement. In the explanatory note to the second stanza, after referring to the Albigensian war and the sieges of Toulouse and Beaucaire by northern invaders, Mistral did not hesitate to speak of it as a race war. In 1866, Mistral had also written La Coumtesso, an allegorical poem. The countess of noble blood was no other than Provence. France, its half-sister, trapped the countess in a convent with the aim of stealing her inheritance; but the countess/Provence, Mistral claimed, would not have to wait long for her liberation, thanks to those who “remembered”.

Unlike the “literary regionalism” of Mirèio (which was made into an opera by Charles Gounod and earned Mistral the Nobel Prize in 1904), the regionalism of Calendau was overtly political in nature. As an epic poem, Calendau contained many references to medieval Provence and to its linguistic and cultural autonomy. Here, too, the allegory is unmistakable: Provence, personalized as Esterello, is chained to France, i.e. the Earl of Séveran. The valiant fisherman Calendau, the embodiment of Provençal masculinity, devotes himself to the national cause regardless of sacrifice. As Mistral himself would later write in a letter to the félibre Jean-Baptiste Marius Gaut, Calendau was the result of seven years’ work and observation, and the product of his opposition to centralism and uniformity.