Gérard Tautil
Robert Lafont et l’occitanisme politique
Gardonne, Fédérop, 2011
Robert Lafont was a writer in the Occitan language (spoken in the South of France and some tiny parts of Spain and Italy), a poet and an academic who spent his life fighting for the cause of cultural and political Occitanism. He died in June 2009. We belonged to the same generation. By chance, we met, for the first time, in Paris, just after the Second World War, at a time when, with our common (federalist) friend Bernard Lesfargues, he presented the “young Occitan poetry”. Then we met again in 1964, when he took part in the constitutional debates organized by François Mitterrand. Lafont represented the Occitan Committee of Study and Action (COEA) while, on the ground of a so called “new left”, I was standing up for a Democratic Front for a Federal Europe whose model was Etienne Hirsch. But, more especially, we were led to work together in the wake of the events of May 1968, when Henri Cartan, Claude Chevalley, Henri Jeanson, Alfred Kastler, Guy Michaud, Jacques Monod (to name only a few) took the initiative to promote the CLAF (Committee of Liaison and Federalist Action) whose Manifesto was in particular published in the review L’Europe en formation; at the same moment he wrote in that publication an outstanding article devoted to his own true mother-country, “l’Occitanie”.
In fact, after the ebullient years of De Gaulle's Bonapartism, French society felt the need that it had to re-discover itself and try to retake possession of its future beyond the itinerary that the “providential man” of the 18th of June, 1940, had plotted for it on the ruins of the “regime of the parties” and an ephemeral and transient republic. Indeed, Robert Lafont was one of the first gifted intellectuals to notice the relation that had to exist between the new idea of supranationality, the rejection of authoritarian centralism, the denunciation of what he called “colonialism at home”. Like the new trade-unionism which was in those days represented by the CFDT (Confédération Française des Travailleurs) and the alma-mater University, the regionalist vanguard was trying to emerge in a new era. Robert Lafont had just then published his La Révolution régionaliste (The Regionalist Revolution) and his essay Sur la France (On France) with the Editions Gallimard, in the collection Idées. These two books marked the turning point of an epoch.
But let us come to the book that Fédérop publishes today in their collection “Minorités nationales”. It is composed of two distinct parts. The first part presents the author, his thought and his action. It is written by Gérard Tautil, who tries to define Lafont's concept of ‘global Occitanism’: “a modern humanism which rejects the separation between cultural and political domains, as well as the blocking of inter-regional dynamics imposed by the States”. Obviously, the titles of the various works by Robert Lafont, as well as the two volumes mentioned above, allow us, as soon as one reads them, to follow the development and progression of his thought. I think, in particular, of the texts in which he expressed his opinion on the “autonomy and self-government of the region”; “the de-colonization within France”; “the Nation, the State, the Region”, or “The State and the Language”.
In fact, “the Occitan post-'68-period is on the same wavelength as the social and political crisis of the central State, whether it concerns the Larzac plateau struggle (against the expansion of an Army Camp) or the criticism of a certain globalization”. Robert Lafont did not espouse the “micro nationalist” tendency of the Occitan movement. He envisioned a self-governing socialism, as hinted by the struggles which could be observed in the French “Hexagon” in the years 1960-1970. He minutely describes the events which marked the Occitan political struggle, especially in the sphere of the Clubs of the Convention des Institutions Républicaines (CIR, founded by Mitterrand) and the disappointments and letdowns that followed. It is true that “once in power, the Left will never go beyond a shy and modest de-centralization, without giving real budgetary means and without sufficiently increasing competences”.
We should give all our attention to the chapters dealing with the 1980s, with transnational capitalism, or the notion of “neighbourhood democracy”, and more especially about the “citizen and “the d' Oc” [of the Oc country] territory”, or the part played by Robert Lafont in rethinking the notion of citizenship and in “rebuilding an Occitan space”, with the refusal of “the straight jacket of State capitalism for the benefit of a Europe of the Peoples and Regions”. These themes should lead Occitanists to conceive the Occitan idea itself in parallel to the idea of a European construction; but once more hope dwindles into disappointment… “The Europe which looms over the horizon is one of the States who intend to give up nothing of their prerogatives. One must recognize that the inter-governmental logic always presides over the decisions of institutions. Indeed, if there exists an undeniable complementarity between the struggle for the European Federation and the struggle of the Regions to achieve their autonomy, we must not delude ourselves: the State will not accept to put away its sovereignty into the prop-room of history without putting up a fight.
Of course, it is in the role of the architects of the Europe of Regions to privilege the discreet but efficient method of proposing “policies of proximity” and “inter-regions” of various scales. Indeed, the subsidiarity principle is written in the Treaty of Lisbon, and there do exist (whatever some people may say) representative and democratic authorities in Brussels (European Parliament, Social and Economic Council, Committee of the Regions), but they remain conditioned by one logic: the “logic of the States”, whose “golden rule” continues to restrain European society, and is embodied in the international society. As it is well expressed in the first Document extracted from the website of the Partit Occitan (Occitan Party), “the UN is the incarnation of the inter-governmentalism of the Planet, and it is, so to speak, its guarantor”.
Robert Lafont well expresses the dialectic of “Global and Local”. The Occitan Party wants to be the party of “altermondialisme” (a different globalization) or, more exactly, it dreams of another mobilization which would pass through a return to listening to local demands, or its necessary corollary: to give priority to productions which are “socially useful and necessary for all”. It is also a federalism aiming at the geopolitical re-composition of the European space, beginning with the transgression of borders, which would allow, for instance, the Occitan-Catalan ensemble to affirm itself as a Euro-region.
We must then thank Gérard Tautil, who has been able to gather and to sum up in a few dozen of pages the essential theses which characterize and define Lafont's thought and concepts, heretical and scattered in more than twenty books and hundreds of varied publications. Far beyond the “Felibrist quest”1 by the number of its aspirations, “global Occitanism” evokes to us the “global Federalism” of Alexandre Marc, which also integrated the concepts of “massification and standardization of social and cultural behaviours”.
The second part of this book presents documents that, Tautil writes, “have been displayed and circulated on the website of the Occitan Party within the framework of the debates that Robert Lafont animated”. In the first one, Lafont recalls the history of “committed Occitanism” since 1907, in the light of the great changes which marked the French political life. In the second text, he invites the “Occitan Convention” to consider and evaluate the consequences of globalization; it is the Manifesto proclaimed on the Larzac Plateau on August 9th, 2002, “Gardarem la Terra” (“We shall guard the Earth”, in Occitan). A third text presents his proposals for an Occitan Programme - the date is January 1st, 2006; it develops an interesting critical summary which successively concerns Europe (whose “project of hope born just after the War has been burdened by so many counterfeits and perils…”); France, “intoxicated with herself”, with a “hyper-archaic state”; the world (“the world empire of the US”; “the over-exploitation of the planet”; “cultural uniformity”; “Mankind under the threat of becoming an indistinct mass”). After the publication of an answer by Gustave Alirol (President of the Occitan Party) and Gérard Tautil to Robert Lafont's “Programmatic Proposals”, the last two documents, written and published in the Occitan and French languages, recount in three parts the history of the Movement since the beginning of the twentieth century (from Frédéric Mistral and the Félibrige (an association of poets) to Mitterrand's Convention des Institutions Républicaines in 1964; from the events of 1968 to the more recent fights). Robert Lafont never changed his course. He was convinced that “The historical emergence of Occitania is concomitant with the weakening of the fate of centuries-long centralism in France”.
The future of political Occitanism largely depends on the one which has tried and still tries to live and embody itself in the European Federalism. The crisis which today shakes the Nation-States which constitute the European Union will not change this essential fact.
1 Felibrism is a literary movement of the 1800s aiming to revive old dialects in Provence and Southern France