Yale Professor Looks at French Village Life through the Ages

In his new book “The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time” (W.W. Norton), Yale professor John Merriman presents a portrait of a tiny medieval town from its prehistoric origins through its heyday as a producer of silk to its reincarnation as a tourist destination.

Perched on a limestone cliff overlooking the Ardèche River in southern France and settled in the Middle Ages, Balazuc is distinguished by the particular ways in which its citizens have responded to changing conditions around them while retaining continuity from generation to generation. Through extensive archival research and close personal contact with its people, Merriman explores Balazuc’s historical adaptation to climatic, economic and political circumstances and the adherence to tradition that define the town and set it apart from any other in the region.

Merriman, who is the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale, became interested in following the history of the remote village after spending many years there with his family, first as a tourist and later as a homeowner and resident, now fully integrated into local municipal affairs. As a parent whose children attend the local public schools during part of every year, Merriman takes a particularly active role in matters concerning education.

Balazuc’s most salient physical features-namely, its isolation from other towns; dry, rocky soil; and the harsh Mistral wind that frequently blows through it-are conditions that have beset the town throughout time. Plagues, droughts, floods, blights, wars and exploitation by the Church, local nobility and royalty have added to its perpetual adversities. How its citizens have contended with those hardships is a key to understanding their character, Merriman argues. “Balazuc is a village where routine survival took on heroic dimensions across the ages,” he says.

Though according to legend founded by Saracens in the eighth century, Balazuc was most likely settled in the late 10th or early 11th century, Merriman contends. Its principal, if not sole, industry was subsistence farming for the greater part of its history, from its founding throughout most of the 18th century. Despite the 16th-century advent of Protestantism in the region and the religious wars that raged around, and occasionally within, Balazuc has remained Catholic to this day.

Merriman is able to relate much of Balazuc’s present to its past: from extant stone structures that tell of the religious wars to his many neighbors whose ancestors, records show, inhabited the village as early as the Middle Ages.

Of the late 17th-century struggle by the Catholic Church to reestablish its primacy, he writes: “Signs of the Catholic Reformation … may still be seen in stone crosses, or, in places, only their bases, that were erected following missions, several days of dramatic fire-and-brimstone sermons and flamboyantly theatrical religious services that swept across much of France.”

Whether writing about mulberry tree cultivation during Balazuc’s golden age of silk production or the daily bustle of village life today, Merriman’s account of the town is always vivid and, amply referenced with footnotes at the end of the text, a fascinating story for scholars and general readers alike.

Merriman has written many acclaimed books on 19th-century France and is the author of “A History of Modern Europe,” a leading college textbook.