“And yet, how beautiful the mountains are, how could anyone imagine
Seeing a flight of swallows, that autumn has just arrived?”
“La montagne”, song by Jean Ferrat (1964)
1May 2024, a mountain village in the Soule Valley, Northern Basque Country
- 1 The original first name has been changed.
- 2 This interview was conducted on May 11, 2024.
- 3 Souletin is the Basque language spoken in the Soule valley.
- 4 n French: “hommes” et “bêtes”.
2Alaia, 86, sits at the edge of the automated feeder in a sheepfold capable of housing several hundred ewes1. It’s May, and the sheepfold is criss-crossed at this time of year by flights of swallows. She happily observes them building their nests, telling me that “we don’t hurt them [on the farm]”2. Rolling the “r’s” and sucking in the “h’s” in her Souletin “accent”3, Alaia explains that the swallows are “laborious”, and should be left alone. For Alaia, being “laborious” connotes courage rather than drudgery. In this sense, she continues, swallows are like bees: they are “valiant” animals. While I’ve often noted the use of this adjective to designate a human being held in respect for his or her capacity for work in Soule, Alaia surprised me that day by speaking of bees and swallows in this way. In an unsuspected way, a cosmology unfolds in her discourse—that is, in Charles Stépanoff’s words, “The ways in which human groups conceptualize the architecture of their world and the nature of the visible and invisible beings that populate it” (2021:15)—within which “men” and “beasts” (as Alaia and the people of his age group in Soule put it) work together on an infinite task4, which consists of fighting against the environment to survive. The cosmology that emerges in Alaia’s discourse bears witness to a time when Soule’s agricultural economy was based on a subsistence model specific to peasant societies. The example of the swallow is particularly significant in this respect, for, as Stépanoff has shown, the bird is an “anthropophilic” animal, with “a predilection for environments inhabited by humans” (2021:64). Thus, “the modern ideal of the hermetic and clean dwelling clashes with the obligation of hospitality towards the bird” (Stépanoff, 2021:61). Stépanoff shows that attachment to the swallow stems from this richly described proximity to a “world little known and considered defunct”, “that of oral traditions and popular religion” (2021:63). In this world, the hard-working swallow, so close and yet so distant from human beings—for it remains a wild animal after all, as Stépanoff reminds us—is a good-luck charm: Alaia’s joyful reaction is thus explained by a different relationship to the world, one that can still be found in certain rural environments in France (Stépanoff, 2021:68).
3Although Alaia’s discourse is imbued with the peasant cosmology that structured the Soule of her childhood, this Souletine woman is well aware of the economic, social and cultural upheavals that have transformed collective life in the valley. Like most people who knew the region before these upheavals, she feels a deep nostalgia for a world she describes as having largely disappeared. It is these nostalgic feelings, and the effects they have on young people who are today seizing on the discourse of the “world before” to cope with the upheavals and consequences of modernity, that will be analyzed in this article.
- 5 https://www.communaute-paysbasque.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/mediatheque/kiosque/OBSERVATOIRE-ECONOMI (...)
4This article takes as its starting point the nostalgic discourses of elderly people in Soule, a valley in the Basque Pyrenees. Spending a total of 12 months in Soule, a province of the northern Basque country with a population of 12,0005 , as part of my doctoral thesis in social anthropology at Oxford University, I collected the accounts of some forty elderly people living in the valley. This sample enabled me to identify a common feature in their discourse: nostalgia for what they described as “another Soule”, so different from the contemporary reality of their territory. Through an ethnographic analysis of these discourses, I gradually came to understand that they were historically based on an abrupt passage from the “closed world” to the “infinite universe”, to use Bourdieu’s metaphor in Le bal des célibataires (2002).
5As I demonstrate in the body of this article, Soule opened up to the processes of economic and cultural modernization later than other rural regions of France. Thus, the prevalence of nostalgic discourses among the elderly testifies to the shock of opening up a closed world, structured by a peasant cosmology, of which the story of Alaia and the swallows that introduces this article provides a glimpse. While this historical perspective is essential to understanding contemporary Soule, my work as an anthropologist does not consist in reconstructing Soule’s past from the discourses of the elderly. Rather, I seek to study the effects these may have on the present and on contemporary youth. Indeed, my ethnography has enabled me to gauge the link between the nostalgic discourses of Soule’s elderly and the attempts of some of Soule’s youth to recreate a peasant world in their light.
6Before outlining the methodological path followed in formulating my hypotheses, I will briefly present the geographical context of my case study. As mentioned, Soule is a province of the northern Basque Country, located on French territory. Geographically, it is also a 720 km² mountain valley carved out by the Gave de Mauléon, also known as “le Saison”. The inhabitants of the valley, made up of 36 communes , divide the valley into two parts: Basse Soule, with its industrial past (textiles), and Haute Soule, where mountain-related activities are concentrated. Even today, transhumant pastoralism is the mainstay of the region’s high-quality sheep’s milk cheese, known as Ossau-Iraty PDO. However “high” it may be in comparison with Basse Soule, mountainous Soule is essentially a low- and medium-mountain region. The Pic d’Orhy, which rises to an altitude of 2017 meters, heralds the highest and most spectacular Pyrenean mountains to come.
7The seniors interviewed for this survey (between autumn 2022 and winter 2025) ranged in age from 65 to 102. In retirement, they had worked in a variety of occupations during their working lives: factory workers, livestock breeders, grocers, schoolteachers and butchers were among the trades represented. Beyond these trades, many of the women we met have worked all their lives as housewives on the farm, performing a variety of tasks, from cooking to milking sheep. However, the diversity of these categories does not change the tone of the nostalgic discourse on the Soule of “before”, depending on the emic category they employ. What engages me in bringing these people from different generations together in the same group is precisely these same descriptions of a vanished and regretted world, which they all claim to have known. This can be explained historically by Soule’s transition to a capitalist economy and a French cultural world from the late 1970s onwards, as I’ll explain below. While it is clear that Soule has changed over time, the interviews I conducted as part of my work enabled me to identify an acceleration of the transformations in the 1980s: the last people who knew Soule when it was still a “closed world”, as Bourdieu (2002) puts it, in the 1970s, are now in their sixties.
8During my stays in Soule, I frequented my respondents on a weekly basis. The nature of my interactions with them varied. Some were recorded during interviews whose date and time we agreed in advance. For three of them (a 65-year-old woman, an 85-year-old woman and an 85-year-old man), the interviews lasted several sessions (three or four) of around two hours. A bond of trust had developed between them and me, and they were eager to tell me more about their lives. In other cases, the meeting took place more informally, in a grocery store, along a roadside, at a café. My ethnographic experience had taught me to engage in conversation as much as possible with the people I met in the valley, and I was often rewarded with rich, if short, exchanges. I also practiced participant observation: when I went to visit an elderly person, I often asked them to show me their vegetable garden or their chickens, if I knew they had any. I’d also help out in the kitchen if a meal was approaching, or help bring in the sheep in the evening, for example. After several months of investigation, I had noticed the recurrence of nostalgic motifs in the discourses of the people I met. In January 2025, I tested this observation by conducting group interviews in a retirement home in the valley, where I also carried out a dozen individual interviews. The experience only confirmed the nostalgic mood of the conversations, as well as a strong resurgence of the themes I analyze in this article.
9As an anthropologist, I was trained to conduct semi-directive interviews: a thematic framework was always planned, but room was left for what I couldn’t foresee. This spirit of serendipity enabled me to find what I hadn’t expected, and to open up to realities I couldn’t have known about before meeting the interviewees. The semi-directive interview is the methodological tool of choice for this epistemological posture. As Yvonne Verdier wrote about her fieldwork in the village of Minot in Burgundy:
[…] what led us is less a method than a desire to “take them at their word”: their discourse has its reasons, but these reasons cannot be revealed by the application of an external grid, and what we grasp in this way on the fly, or during more thoughtful exchanges and questioning, takes shape and reveals its logic and coherence in a slow word-by-word ascent to the heart of what is a thought. (2024 :16)
10It was precisely in an attempt to take these elderly people “at their word”, detecting the “reasons” behind their discourse and gradually working backwards towards the “thought” that animated them, that I opted for life story-type interviews (Pruvost 2011; Bertaux 2010). This choice was obvious to me: the elderly people immediately plunged me into their past, evoking memories that were often tender and joyful in tone. So I opened myself up to what they wanted to tell me, simply accompanying them in a process akin to Socratic maieutics. I gradually realized that this irrepressible need to tell me all about their lives represented a major asset for my research: even more than the semi-directive interview, the life story gives substance to a discourse-flow taken in its own coherence, and not that of the researcher. There are no questions to undo what we might call the local logic or situated meaning of their discourse, which I would not have been able to get to know so well with a conventional semi-structured interview.
11Although this article focuses on the elderly in Soule, my ethnographic investigation did not concern this section of the population alone. Indeed, it also deals with the way in which the nostalgic discourses of the elderly affect contemporary Soulet youth. I was therefore also interested in young people aged between 18 and 35 who had chosen to stay and live in the valley. My ethnographic work consisted in following different young people in their professional and recreational activities, to understand how they were building their lives. Through participant observation and interviews with young shepherds, bakers, postmen/women, students and nurses, I came to understand the importance of the nostalgic discourses of the elderly on their life choices. As with the elderly, my interactions with young people were varied, involving long periods of participant observation, encounters framed by interviews and impromptu exchanges. Even more than in the case of the elderly, I established strong bonds of trust with around ten of them, which enabled me to gain an in-depth understanding of their conception of life. I estimate that I had around fifty significant exchanges with young people of different profiles during my research visits.
12This article is organized in three parts. First, I’ll look at the historical context, explaining the transition from peasant to market economy in Soule, as well as the francization of the valley. In the light of this history, I will analyze the structuring themes of the nostalgic discourses of the elderly. Finally, I will explain how the nostalgic discourses of the elderly resonate with the valley’s youth. My aim is to make sense of a reversal in the situation: while for a long time Soule’s peasant memory was considered retrograde, the contemporary youth of Soule is now seizing on it to make it an ideal of life. In the third and final part, I’ll show how the nostalgic discourses of the elderly, by evoking a bygone era, affect the present of Soulet’s youth.
- 6 On the question of political resistance in Soule specifically, the scientific literature is non-exi (...)
13One of the characteristics of the Souletin region is that it has undergone a late process of “modernization”: the term is used here in quotation marks to indicate that the notion of modernity is relative, as I demonstrate later in this article. As a valley of Basque culture, Soule belatedly conformed to the cultural homogenization policies implemented by the Republic, which were aimed precisely at making France a “modern” nation (Weber, 2022). This seems to me to be both a consequence of the population’s active resistance to these policies and the fruit of the geographical isolation of a mountain valley that is difficult to access6. Although there are no historical studies dealing specifically with the francization of this remote valley in the northern Basque Country, the ethnographic work carried out by Sandra Ott in the 1970s on a village in Soule (1993), and that of Monique Selim and François Taboury in another village in the valley (1974), suggest that until the 1980s, Basque was the lingua franca of the valley.
14Furthermore, my research has shown that, until the late 1970s, a number of mountain farms in the valley were based on a self-subsistence model that characterized a peasant economy. By peasant economy, I do not mean, following the seminal work of Henri Mendras (1992; 1995), a non-monetary economy. Rather, I am referring to farms that are essentially self-sufficient, and that operate according to a “subsistence” rationality, without, however, completely dispensing with monetary income (Mendras, 1992 & 1995). The preservation of this type of economy in Soule until the 1980s can be explained by the mountainous geography of Soule, deemed too unproductive to effectively “feed” the France of the Trente Glorieuses (Veyret, 1972; Errotabehere, 2011).
- 7 By using the adjective "French", I'm referring to the process of Francization of the Basque Country (...)
15This chronological shift has produced an unprecedented situation of telescoping, explaining why peasant memory, and the Basque cultural world associated with it, is still alive and well in Soule. What the nostalgic voices of the elderly testify to is precisely the awareness of a late—and, perhaps for this reason, more brutal—transition to a capitalist economy and a French cultural universe7. If the Soule of the 1970s does not suddenly emerge from an immemorial past where it would have been frozen for centuries, this historical moment seems to be that of a push that upsets the order of things. An analysis of the actual content of these speeches has enabled me to identify a number of salient themes, the three most important examples of which are outlined below.
16The disappearance of community life is the number one source of regret among Soule’s elderly. The stories we heard evoked a time when farm work was done in common with the neighbors, who were once numerous in number. Such work was carried out together through the seasons: in the interviews, for example, we spoke of harvesting ferns in autumn for mulching, killing pigs in winter, herding sheep together in the mountains from spring onwards, and harvesting hay in summer. These tasks were described as both physically demanding and almost always associated with festive moments. Collective corn-shucking in autumn, for example, was described to me as tedious work, but offset by the joy of being together in a barn and the pleasure of eating roasted chestnuts while chatting.
17These stories of collective moments are corroborated by Sandra Ott’s ethnography of the Souletin village of Sainte Engrâce. She described a neighborhood mutual aid system based on a carefully thought-out and practiced logic of give-and-take (1993). Without the help of neighbors, and in particular the “first neighbor” on whom they relied, the farm work on which people’s survival depended could not be accomplished. Thus, the Souletin neighborhood constituted a group with mutual interests, made up of members who were “obliged” to one another. In a small society, where it was difficult to circulate (no roads, no cars), the bond of neighborliness was therefore more important than that of family members who didn’t necessarily live under the same roof. However, Ott’s ethnography shows that the difficulty of manual labor is not the only reason why neighbors bond. The neighborly relationship also serves ritual functions (e.g., when someone in a household dies, the first neighbor will perform a certain number of codified tasks, such as carrying the coffin to the altar), or more simply symbolic ones (e.g., the bond with the neighbor is renewed by the mutual gift of apples that women make to each other in autumn, without this corresponding to any real need, since all farms have their own apple trees). Following the theory of Marcel Mauss in his famous Essai sur le don, the gift to neighbors was thus indeed a total social fact, in the sense that it fulfilled a diversity of intertwined functions (political, religious, economic, etc.) (Mauss, 2012).
- 8 See: https://zabal-agriculture.opendata-paysbasque.fr/pages/fermes-pays-basques/, consulted on Marc (...)
18However, the transformation of the agricultural economy from a self-subsistence model to a capitalist model has transformed these links. Now oriented towards a productivist model and transformed by the automation of tasks (the most emblematic example of which is the milking machine), farms have been profoundly transformed (see Welch-Devine and Murray, 2011). In Soule, less than half of the farms that existed in 1970 still exist8. Henceforth, farms are centered on a single economic activity (most often dairy sheep farming), dependent on inputs from elsewhere, and greatly expanded by the construction of new buildings over the years, as well as the purchase of abandoned land. These new farms operate as independent economic units. It’s also worth noting the decline in the number of working men and women on the same farm, who used to benefit from a large family workforce. As a result, intergenerational cohabitation on farms is now the exception rather than the rule. This is having a considerable impact on the “old age” of these elderly people, who no longer benefit from the support it once provided.
19In addition to this emotional and geographical isolation, the elderly express regret for a vanished landscape. When they speak of the Soule of today, they point to the old meadows in the surrounding area, overgrown with ferns, brambles and young trees, growing in the absence of livestock to graze them. The metaphor of “dirtiness” is constantly used to evoke this landscape transformation. The Edenic Soule of the elderly people’s childhood was thus characterized, in their discourse, by the “cleanliness” of its landscape.
- 9 For a broader perspective on the changing living environment from which older people feel excluded, (...)
20As the anthropologist Adel Selmi has shown, the valorization of a “clean” landscape is not exclusive to Soule: in the Southern Alps, alpacists also value a landscape “gardened by man”: “Worked meadows are considered ‘clean’, ‘beautiful’, ‘well-kept’, ‘well-ordered’, etc.” (2007). Thus, in the Alps as in the Pyrenees, the supposed “dirtiness” of the landscape is synonymous with absence, desertion and agricultural decline (Selmi, 2007). In the same vein as the “clean” meadow, some elderly interviewees deplore the disappearance of the fruit trees—apple, walnut, pear, etc.—that used to be planted around farmhouses.—which used to be planted around farms. These trees are associated with the memory of their fruit: I was told how apples were kept in the hayloft all winter, then baked in the bread oven after a batch, or walnuts eaten as a dessert on winter evenings. While some of the farms I visited during my work still have orchards, the work demanded by these often delicate trees has become difficult in the absence of sufficient manpower on the farm. What’s more, farms are now anchored in a commercial approach, which requires them to focus their activities on the production of sheep’s milk and eventually cheese. Other workshops that once provided income in kind (beehives, henhouse, vegetable garden, etc.) have gradually been abandoned. Far from being the backdrop to a life, the landscape is for these elderly people the very stage of their lives. For them, their mutations constitute a cosmological upheaval: to use Stépanoff’s definition of a cosmology, it is the very “architecture” of their world that has been transformed (2021:15).9
Figure 2: Map showing the current distribution of Basque dialects according to Koldo Zuazo
Western dialect (dark green), Central dialect (red), Navarrese dialect (blue), Navarro-Labourdin dialect (light brown), Souletin dialect (light green), Spanish-speaking areas that were Basque-speaking in the 19th century (grey)
Map created with gvSIG, ArcGIS and The GIMP
21The final theme in the nostalgic discourses of the elderly concerns the disappearance of the Basque language. The testimonies we gathered showed that most of them only learned French when they went to school, at the age of six. Thus, the “closed world” of childhood was “named” in a language other than French (Bourdieu, 2002). A language, Basque from Soule, whose grammar and vocabulary have no connection with French (Basque being a non-Indo-European language), thus gave consistency to beings and things in their childhood. Gradually, however, French began to make inroads into this linguistic microcosm.
22During interviews, I sometimes received apologies from elderly people for their “bad French”. In other cases, I was told of a dislike of French, a language whose grammar was unnecessarily complicated and certain words impossible to pronounce. This can be explained by the physical and moral violence suffered at school: for example, the traumatic memory of violence at the hands of the teachers who taught French to schoolchildren was recounted to me by the vast majority of those interviewed. Certain scenes made me understand the sometimes painful lack of the native language, as shown by a discussion between two childhood friends aged around 80 who met one Sunday afternoon at a farm where I had come to investigate. As they ate their snacks, they began to speak in Souletin in a very cheerful effusion. It seemed to me that I was witnessing a scene of a different kind: immigrants, struggling to adapt to a foreign world by speaking a language that is not their own, finding compatriots with whom the mother tongue can be loosened at ease. Here, there had been no forced physical displacement, and yet it had become necessary to learn to express the world differently. The exile of these people was, in this sense, an inner one.
- 10 In this respect, see Vincent Caradec's article on "l'épreuve du grand âge", which draws very simila (...)
23The experience of a world that has to be told in another language explains the feeling that Soule’s elderly have of facing a world that is both known and unknown. Borrowing a concept dear to the German Romantics, it’s possible to say that the elderly people interviewed here face the Unheimliche (Royle, 2003), i.e., a familiarity that has become disquieting, or a familiar strangeness10 , where relationships with others, landscapes and ways of saying things are no longer the same. This explains the turmoil and lamentations of the elderly in Soule.
24Now that the three main themes of nostalgic discourse among the elderly in Soule have been presented, I’ll explore how they resonate with some of the valley’s youth.
25The interest in nostalgic stories told by the elderly goes beyond the circle of the elderly themselves. In the course of my fieldwork, I became aware that these discourses took on a particular meaning among young Souletines who had decided to stay and live in Soule. For young people, their grandparents’ world of farming is a model that they seek to reproduce in Soule, which has become what we might call a “haven” away from the major contemporary crises of a troubled era. A repertoire of ideas is thus drawn from these speeches and their descriptions of what I tend to perceive as a “lost Eden”, perfectly happy and orderly. Many people (re)learn Souletin Basque at the local evening school, if they couldn’t learn it at home, in order to express the world of their grandparents. Similarly, some people are seeking to develop non-monetary exchange systems, based on barter (honey pots for cheese, etc.). Self-subsistence, unattainable in practice because lives are so caught up in capitalist mechanisms, is an ideal towards which they are nevertheless striving as far as possible. Certain subsistence practices, such as slaughtering pigs, home-canning and vegetable gardening, are claimed by these young people as forms of resistance to capitalism. The very word “peasant” is also reclaimed, becoming a source of pride rather than shame: the peasant makes the landscape, and the “country”, by extension.
26So, for the first time in Soule since centuries of emigration to the city or the Americas, young people want to stay and live and work “back home”. Suddenly, Soule has become the place where everything is possible, far from an urban area described as “hell”. The order of discourse is thus reversed: from a “retrograde” valley, Soule becomes an avant-garde place at a time of “re-localization” of alternative practices and imaginaries. However, a closer look at the discourses of these young people reveals that their necessarily fantasized vision of the farming world is not fed solely by the nostalgic discourses of their elders. In calling for a Souletin future based on the idea of a peasant past, these young people reflect anti-capitalist, ecologist and regionalist values gleaned from a global culture to which they have had access precisely because the Soule Valley is now part of an infinite universe (Bourdieu, 2002). It’s worth pointing out that these young people, who advocate a return to the peasant microcosm, are most often educated and well versed in travel. As a result, Soule is the land of their ancestors, where they choose to come and live after having been “educated”—in the broadest sense of the term—elsewhere. This rereading of the ancestors’ farming past is therefore carried out in the light of external references, and hybridizes with new themes, such as the rights of migrants and LGBT+ people.
27These phenomena show that “nostalgia is not simply the acknowledgement of a disappearance without return, [but it] opens up imaginaries beyond a shrunken present to drive a force of reinvention” (Stépanoff, 2021:17). It is in this sense that the peasant memory of the elderly in Soule has an impact on the present. Thus, by conceiving chronology in the mode of “simultaneity”—rather than “succession”, as historians would do—anthropologists can observe how the past leaves “traces, real and symbolic, which, superimposed on present figures and moments, give them their full relief” (Abélès, 1988:14).
28The surprising return to Soule of a section of the youth of Soule can be understood in the light of what Bruno Latour has called a need to “land” and find an orientation in a world where “the very notion of soil is changing its nature” (2017:13). The crisis of migration policies, the explosion of inequalities and “the New Climate Regime” explain a need to find a “habitable ground” (Latour, 2017:27). In search of orientation and habitat, part of the valley’s youth therefore imagines a re-landing on “ancient” soil, reinvented in the light of new values. In this way, a damp, isolated mountain valley, with relief shy of its Béarn neighbors, becomes a haven where a happy future can be imagined.
29Born, for the most part, on very small, self-subsisting farms, where “nothing came out but smoke”, according to an expression used locally by my interviewees, Soule’s elderly people end their lives speaking a different language, in heated houses where a dishwasher and washing machine rustle in the background. All around them is a landscape they describe as “dirty”, with countless abandoned houses. Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that their stories would interest young people from the valley, who have gone off to study “in the city” and travel to the ends of the earth?
- 11 Read, for example, the much-discussed recent work by Genviève Pruvost (2024). In mountain contexts (...)
30This article shows that in uncertain times, the discursive matrix developed by Bourdieu in Le bal des célibataires (2002) in a valley in the Basque Pyrenees very close to the sociologist’s native Béarn seems to have been inverted. As a result, the nostalgic discourses of older people recounting the peasant world of their childhood have become a source of inspiration rather than a repellent. Not all of Soule’s young people value this peasant memory, but the fact that some of them do is a new fact worthy of the researchers’ attention. While this work is in the vein of recent research on new peasants seeking to live a self-subsistent life in the countryside11, it also differs in that the young people from Soule met in the course of this survey do not fall into the category of “neo-rurals”: they grew up in Soule and want to build their lives there. It is in this sense that the link between ageing, the mountainous geographical context and local youth seemed to us particularly rich to study.