Frédéric Mistral

Frédéric Mistral was born in 1830 at Maillane, near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, to a prosperous family of landed farmers, and grew up among the language and customs he would spend his life defending. After boarding school, a baccalauréat at Nîmes and law studies at Aix-en-Provence, where he also immersed himself in the history of the region, he resolved to raise Provençal, the old tongue of the troubadours, back to the rank of a literary language. In 1854 he and six fellow poets, among them his former teacher Joseph Roumanille, founded the Félibrige, the movement that led the revival of the langue d’oc.

Mirèio (1859), twelve cantos on the thwarted love of a wealthy farmer’s daughter and a poor basket-maker, was the fruit of eight years’ work. Lamartine greeted its author as a new Homer, Gounod made it into an opera, and Mistral’s own French version carried it across Europe. Further narrative poems, Calendau (1867) and Lou Pouèmo dóu Rose (1897), and the lyrics of Lis Isclo d’or (1875) deepened his portrait of a landscape and its people. His great scholarly labour was Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige (1878–86), a dictionary embracing all the dialects of Occitan that remains a standard reference.

The Swedish Academy honoured him in 1904 both as poet and as philologist, dividing the prize with José Echegaray. Mistral spent his share on the Museon Arlaten in Arles, a museum of Provençal life and folk art. His memoirs appeared in 1906. He died in Maillane, the village of his birth, in March 1914, and the Félibrige he helped found survives him.