Rural Inventions by Farmer Sarah;

Author:Farmer, Sarah; [Farmer, Sarah;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190079079
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Émilie Carles

Two years after the publication of Le cheval d’orgueil, the memoirs of a retired schoolteacher became a bestseller. In Une soupe aux herbes sauvages, Émilie Carles, described growing up as one of six children, raised by their widowed father on an isolated family farm in the Clarée Valley of the Dauphiné region, near the Italian border. Like Hélias, Carles was a child of the Third Republic; public schools offered her the means to social advancement and access to the wider world. She spent three years in Paris employed at boarding schools and studying for her teaching credentials, but came home in the summers. Frequenting libertarian circles introduced her to the pacifist and anarchist ideas that stamped her lifelong political beliefs. Carles married a worker-intellectual from the south of France who shared and strengthened her pacifist and leftist convictions.

When Carles returned to work as a schoolteacher in her home region, and ultimately in her home village, she brought these views to her teaching. “Above all,” she wrote, “I had to open their [the students’] eyes, topple all those old customs to teach them to lead a different kind of life, release them from alcoholism, and alert them to the lies and foolishness of church and state.” Carles’s final battle started in 1974 when, at the age of seventy-four, she led local peasants in demonstrations against the construction of an autoroute through the Clarée Valley that would have damaged the region’s natural beauty. In the final chapters of their books both Hélias and Carles reckoned with the forces that threatened the worlds they had described. Hélias lamented the commercialism, tourism, and lure of cities that had shattered Breton peasant culture. For Carles, on the other hand, the danger lay in threats to the natural environment. Like many, she considered peasants stewards of the natural world and, in her new role as environmental activist, she called on them to defend their patrimony.

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