L'accent De Ma Mere

by Michel Ragon

Rien mieux que le téléphone ne fait surgir les accents.
Un jour, l'auteur de ce livre entend ainsi la voix de sa mère et découvre qu'elle a un accent...
Si l'accent lie profondément cette femme à la terre qui est la sienne, s'il atteste viscéralement son origine, par contre, l'auteur-narrateur, intellectuel requis par la ville et les livres, constate du même coup que lui, cet accent, il l'a perdu.
Tel est le motif, le moteur de sa quête : il doit remonter à ses sources, rechercher son identité ancestrale et culturelle et tenter de faire revivre cette mémoire du peuple, cette expression populaire qui se trouvait derrière l'accent de sa mère.

Une gigantesque balade dans notre passé, c'est de la nouvelle histoire écrite avec le coeur sans cesse ému, sans cesse touché par une telle douceur et pureté d'écriture. Que c'est beau un livre vrai. Françoise Xénakis Cosmopolitan

255 pages, Pocket Book

First published March 1, 1983

Reviews

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michel Ragon is an autodidact who grew up in almost abject poverty in the sole company of his widowed mother in and around Nantes. This book gives a touching portrait of the rather quirky old lady, alternating with facts and reflexions about the history of the part of rural France known as Vendée. The Vendéens fought against the French king in the XVIIth century and many of them emigrated to Canada between 1605 and 1628, when the troupes of Louis XIV took the citadel of La Rochelle. Hard luck for them, these emigrants were in their turn persecuted by the British who kicked them out and resettled them by force in various other locations (Virginia, Maryland, England etc). Ragon was struck by how close the dialect spoken by his mother (and himself as a child) was to the dialect of the descendants of the Acadians. During the French Revolution, the Vendéens rebelled again, and Ragon gives his own take on this particularly violent page of French history. According to him, it's a myth that this uprising was lead by the local nobility, loyal to the crown and opposed to the Republic. He believes that this rebellion was largely a popular, headless movement, which accounts for its random actions and ultimate defeat. Whether he is right or wrong about this, he writes very well and made me want to find out more about the history of the Vendée.