The Bordeaux editions and Hervé Chopin love beautiful books, and the France of yesteryear. Told in postcards by authors well established in their sector, Orléans, Tours and Berry are as nostalgic as they are exciting.
By Jean-Luc Bouland
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Founded in 1994, the Hervé Chopin publishing house, based in Bordeaux, is asserting its reputation for quality works thirty years later by notably developing its “Images d'antan” collection alongside art and culture works. Thus, among 150 publications on the France of yesteryear, it lingered in Center-Val de Loire, already offering two works on Tours and Orléans, and a third, more recent one, on Berry. Each time, relying on rare and unusual collections, calling on well-established authors, it offers us large formats of more than 100 pages for less than €30 which should easily find their way into many amateur librarians.
Orleans of yesteryear – Designed by Grégory Legrand, former collaborator of La République du Center, who signs here his first work, Orléans of yesteryear, offers an iconography of 300 postcards brought together by Muguette Rigaud to offer us a commented view of Orléans during the Belle Époque , when, at the beginning of the 20th century, the city was modernizing, welcoming the railway and travelers who discovered its rich heritage. “ Who remembers her in 1900, at the time when you could come across the shoeshine boy on the Place du Martroi, the itinerant butchers or even the ambulance dogs on the Place Gambetta? “. The work is structured around four geographical parts: the historic center, Saint-Marceau, the Mails then the Faubourgs. And a final part relates the daily life and the art of living of the Orléanais at the beginning of the 1900s. And the whole is completed by a bibliography specifying the author's sources, well-known reference works.
Towers of yesteryear – Journalist passionate about his city, signatory of regular articles for NR, the magazine of Touraine, today correspondent for La Croix, Xavier Renard was ideally suited to author this work which also takes us into the Belle Époque experienced in Tours . There too, based on an iconography of 500 postcards concocted by Patrice Martin and Lionel Houis, he offers us in around a hundred pages a visit as nostalgic as it is enriching of “the sleeping beauty” who is also awakened by the arrival of the railway during the Belle Époque. In six chapters, we will stroll through the city center, in old Tours, on the banks of the Loire to the south and in a few neighboring towns, without forgetting the daily life of the inhabitants, barely disturbed by the industrial boom and the arrival of Parisians. “ The historical turning point of the city is especially marked by the drilling of the Trench. For the first time, a road axis advances head-on towards the river. Because the Loire contributes greatly to the wealth of the city. Thus, the city prospers, the districts of the old town remain bourgeois and the standard of living increases. ».
Each time, these works are accessible to all, as is the Berry of yesteryear, rich in 160 pages, signed Patrick Martinat, reporter for Berry republican and correspondent of Le Monde for 25 years in the region. Already the author of several works, including a biography in 1994, on Alain Fournier, this is not his first attempt, relying for the occasion on an iconography of 400 postcards from numerous private collections brought together by the numismatic and cartophilic society of Berry.
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