Felibres

Hence, it is true that the language of the Felibres is a conventional, literary language, that does not represent exactly the speech of any section of France, and is related to the popular speech more or less as any official language is to the dialects that underlie it.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

Since the day in 1862 when the town of Apt received the Felibres officially, organizing Floral Games, in which prizes were offered for the best poems in Provencal, the people have become accustomed to the sight of these triumphal entries of the poets into their cities.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

The people of Provence owe a great debt to the Felibres, who have endowed them with a literature that comes closer to their sympathies than the classic literature of France can ever come; they have been raised in their own esteem, and there has been undoubtedly a great awakening in their mental life.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

The language of the Felibres is based upon the dialect spoken in the plain of Maillane, in and about the town of Saint-Remy.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

The Societe de la Cigale, which had been founded in 1876, as a Paris branch of the Felibrige, and which later became the Societe des Felibres de Paris, organized banquets and festivities in his honor, and celebrated the Floral Games at Sceaux to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the day when Provence became united, of her own free-will, with France.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

In 1868, Garcin published a violent attack upon the Felibres, accusing them, in the strongest language, of seeking to bring about a political separation of southern France from the rest of the country.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

The language of the Felibres is by no means free from the grandiloquence and pomposity that results from the employment of these high-sounding and long terminations.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

Professors and students of literature and philology in France and in other countries began to interest themselves in the Felibres, and the Felibrige to-day counts among its members men of science as well as men of letters.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

Recognized immediately as a master-work, it fired the ambitions of the Felibres, enlarged the horizon of possibilities for the new speech, and earned for its author the admiration of critics in and out of France.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901

The land of the Troubadours is now the land of the Felibres; these modern singers do not forget, nor will they allow the people of the south to forget, that the union of France with Provence was that of an equal with an equal, not of a principal with a subordinate.

Frederic Mistral Downer, Charles A 1901