François Rabelais
It is before becoming the father of Gargantua and Pantagruel that François Rabelais (1494-1553) enters the convent of the Cordeliers of Fontenay-le-Comte. There he discovered humanism and developed what was to become his trademark, namely his truculence and his joie de vivre. In 1523, it is in the abbey of Maillezais that he leaves to take refuge, under the protection of the father abbot and bishop Geoffroy d' Estissac.
Michel Ragon
Michel Ragon was born in 1924 into a peasant family in the Vendée and spent his entire childhood in Fontenay-le-Comte. In 1945, he moved to Paris and began publishing novels and poems, as well as articles and essays on themes he loved, such as proletarian literature, anarchism, abstract art, architecture... In the 1960s, he became an esteemed critic and historian of art and modern architecture. In 1976, the death of his mother led him to refocus on his roots in the Vendée region and to write several novels and essays, including Les Mouchoirs rouges de Cholet, La Louve de Mervent, Le Marin des Sables, 1793 L'Insurrection vendéenne et les malentendus de la liberté.
Georges Simenon
Another great writer is also associated with the town of Fontenay-le-Compte. Georges Simenon, a prolific Belgian writer made famous in particular by his "Maigret", lived in Terre-Neuve between 1941 and 1943 where he wrote many novels. He received his friends there: Jean Tissier and the painter Maurice de Vlaminck.
Jean Yole
His real name was Léopold Robert, and he adopted this pseudonym as a tribute to the Vendée region, the yole being the name of the flat-bottomed boat used in the Breton marshes where he was born. Doctor, writer and politician born in Soullans in 1878, he was particularly noted for his political commitment to Marshal Pétain and his appointment by the latter to the National Council in 1941. Jean Yole is a writer of the soil who liked to speak in his novels about the peasant world and its difficulties. La Servante sans gages (1934) is one of his best known plays. As for his essays, let us quote Le Malaise paysan (1929), La Population et l'habitation rurale (1929) or La Vendée (1936).
Yves Violier
Yves Violier, a successful contemporary author, was born in 1946. He is a French teacher in Poiré-sur-Vie and a literary critic for La Vie, a Christian weekly. He is a writer of the popular soil, attached to the new school of Brive, a contemporary current "novel of soil". In 2001, he received the Charles Exbrayat prize for Les Lilas de mer. He pays tribute to the Vendée in several of his works, such as Quatre Saisons en Vendée. His latest book, published in August 2011, La mer était si calme, refers to the Xynthia storm that severely hit La Faute-sur-Mer in February 2010.
Napoleon and comics
Finally, a comic book released in 2013 and created by the scriptwriter Jean-Blaise Djian and the illustrator Damour, Et Napoléon créa La Roche-sur-Yon, illustrates the evolution of the city between 1804 and 1870. This comic book tells the story of this period through the life of an illustrious character, Jacques-Philippe Gozola, a soldier, tanner, city councilor and prominent businessman born in the 1770s in Alexandria. A name intimately linked to La Roche-sur-Yon since the Gozola tannery was the most important establishment in the city.
Fairs and festivals
The Montaigu Book Fair is a cultural and popular event that aims to make literature accessible to as many people as possible. For 32 years, writers and readers have met for three days to celebrate literature in all its forms.
The Simenon festival in Sables-d'Olonne. Another unmissable cultural event created in 1999 to highlight the immense work of this popular novelist.
