ABSTRACT
Together with La Fontaine,1 Cocteau, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Pagnol completes the average American’s ideal of the French Academy. But Pagnol owes his international popularity in the first place, paradoxi cally, to the regionalism of his work. In spite of all Mistral’s efforts,2 the rejuvenated Provencal culture remained a prisoner of its own language and folklore. Alphonse Daudet3 and Bizet4 did indeed win a national audi ence for this culture, but at the price of a stylization that robbed it of most of its authenticity. Later, Giono5 came along and depicted a Provence that was austere, sensual, and dramatic. In between, the Midi6 was hardly rep resented to its advantage by “Marseilles stories.”7 It is from these stories, joined together in Marius,8 that Pagnol set out to constitute his southern humanism; then, under the influence of Giono, to leave Marseilles and go inland, where, in Manon o f the Springs, with his inspiration finally at its peak, he gave Provence its universal epic.
