The heritage of the troubadours
Operating in the Middle Ages, between 1000 and 1350, the troubadours were Occitan poets who developed the art of courtly song. At the same time composers, poets and musicians, they interpreted or had their poetic works interpreted by jugglers or minstrels. Written in the common Oc language, their works had two main themes: love, the most prestigious category, and current events, especially treated in "sirventès", protest songs and without detours targeting an enemy or mourning a missing person. After a peak in the 13th century, this art declined little by little in the 14th century with the censorship of certain themes, notably unfaithful love. If the written traces of the texts of the 10th and 11th centuries are rare, some works of the golden age of the troubadours have been preserved: 400 troubadours are known to us, and nearly 2,500 texts offer us knowledge of these poems. Among these most famous artists, let us quote the Biterrois Matfre Ermengau, whose major work, Bréviaire d'amour, is no other than an immense encyclopedia of knowledge for the use of laymen, written in 34 597 verses.
Francophone literature
Occitan authors have greatly contributed to the influence of French literature. The majority of them chose the French language in the 17th century. It is worth noting that in 1639, only four years after the creation of the French Academy whose aim is to encourage the divulgation of the language, Jacques Esprit from Biterrois entered the institution, followed in 1653 by another native speaker, Paul Pellisson, historiographer of Louis XIV. The Occitan culture is still very present in the authors of the 20th century. This is notably the case for Marie Rouanet, from Biterroise and former teacher of classical literature. She devotes most of her writings to the history of Occitan culture, to traditional music and to customs from here and elsewhere. She has written some forty novels, essays and chronicles, and her most memorable work is Nous les filles, in which the writer recounts the joys and misfortunes of a girl born in the 1950s. In a completely different register, Bernard Minier is famous for his detective novels. A senior inspector in the customs administration, this man from Biterrois has a passion for writing. After writing several short stories, he published his first novel, Glacé, in 2011, which was a great success. Translated into twenty-two languages, he will receive the Grand Prix du Polar de Cognac, and his work will be adapted for television in 2017 by M6. Let us also underline the works of Michel Piquemal and Alexandre Sanchez, two Biterrois whose fertile pen enchants children's literature for the one, with among other things his novel L'éléphante qui chantait la pluie (The elephant who sang the rain), and the world of science fiction for the other with his saga Imaginary Rebirth.
