Terre et Foi

Joël Robin, un écrivain paysan au soir d’une civilisation catholique

Abstract

The crisis and the disappearance of the traditional peasant world are dealt with in many ways in contemporary French literature. In contrast to the works of the new regional novel, the regionalist works from the perspective of the writing peasants themselves affected by structural change are hardly known, if at all. With Joël Robin, the article presents a writing peasant from the French West who relates the decline of peasant culture to increasing secularisation. Understanding his writing as a “peasant testament” and documentation of peasant virtues for city dwellers and subsequent generations, his regionalist texts are both a praise of creation and the merits of French small farmers as well as a nostalgic transfiguration of the good old days and a culturally pessimistic social analysis, and finally culminate in a plea for Christian-motivated sustainability and ecology.