It took around thirty pens, including some (four) from outside the Academy to avoid any collusion with memory, to complete this beautiful book soberly titled “100 years, the Academy of Béarn”. The work is truly a sum, which reminds us how much the now century-old institution has counted in the intellectual life of our small country.
The editorial team advises you
And its first chapter will go to the heart of many students at the University of Pau, but also of academicians, since it opens, in addition to the foreword by President Marc Bélit, with the first posthumous text by Christian Desplat , died this Saturday. The latter also recalls, with the erudition and the pen that we know of him, that before this first academy, many other circles animated the life of ideas in Pau and in Béarn over 500 years of ‘history.
A radiant intellectual life
Because yes, and this is the common thread of this book intended for lovers of history and unique destinies, intellectual life has indeed shined – and still shines – at the foot of the Pyrenees as elsewhere in Paris. You only have to leaf through the book to discover these intellectuals, scientists, historians or linguists, from Simin Palay the father of the first Dictionary of Béarnais and Gascon or even Gustave Schlumberger, specialist in the Middle East and Byzantium, not to mention by the chemist Charles Moureu.
The list of Goncourt and Fémina prizes bears witness to this, Béarn was also this “amazing land of writers” as Patrick Voisin reminds us who lists the greatest like Joseph Peyré, Jean-Louis Curtis, Paule Constant of course, and reminds us also a few forgotten ones like Jean-Joseph Moulié, alias Thierry Sandre, who obtained the Goncourt in 1921, without a quarrel arising in the newspapers around his béarnity!
Pau: the Academy of Béarn and the artists
An exhibition at the André Labarrère media library in Pau from Thursday November 21 to Sunday November 24 and two conferences recall the talent of the painter René-Marie Castaing and the sculptor Ernest Gabard, who were members of the Académie du Béarn.
Through the history of the Academy which unfolds through its great men and women, it is the history of Béarn, the Golden Age of Pau, that of agriculture or economic growth, which appears hollow. A historical and scientific heritage to which the centenary which is ending still bears witness. A book coordinated by Jean Marziou, which deserves its place in every library here!
