Simon, known as Felix Arnaudin (May 30th 1844 - December 6th 1921), born and died in Labouheyre (Moors), poet and photographer of the High-Moor.

Profile

Arnaudin was illustrated in the study of the popular traditions of the High-Moor, then in full economic transfer and social. Its work concerned the collection of tales and songs in Gascon, on the photography of landscapes, habitats, shepherds and peasants landais. It devoted its life thus to save this heritage of the lapse of memory. Its native house became a place of photographic exposures managed by the commune of Labouheyre.

Biography

Resulting from a family of land small holders, the Felix young person is a brilliant pupil. Graduate, of return to Labouheyre, it does not find in his medium any use in relation to his level and his aspirations. Living income of some smallholding S, Felix Arnaudin does not occupy any employment durably. At the thirty years age, single person, it decides to devote himself entirely to his passion: to testify to the pastoral culture of the High Moor, that the economic changes make disappear unrelentingly. Passing for an original near its fellow-citizens, it will be called Lou Pèc (the insane one, in Gascon).

It will leave alive sound only three publications to weak pulling:

• Popular Tales (1887)

• Popular songs (1912)
• Things of the Old Large-Moor, printed series little before its death.

But these collections are only the concretization of an immense company of which several tens of thousands testify to handwritten layers and many photographs (shepherds on stilts, peasants with the farm, etc). Impassioned and heirs start, with the beginning of the year 1960, to be interested in this inheritance, of which they draw from new volumes, among which Tales, the dictionary of the Gascon of the Large-Moor, two volumes of songs and proverbs, testimonys single of this disappeared world.

Historical context

Felix Arnaudin is originating in what is today the main forest of the Moors of Gascogne but which, at its time, was a mosaic of forests (resined oaks or pines), fields and of close-cropped moor, grounds of course of some 650.000 sheep which the department counted then. This country lived of a pastoral mode of production, whose balance was going to be broken, in this middle of the 19th century, with the profit of sylviculture. The date symbolic system of this revolution is the Loi of June 19th, 1857 on the development of the Landes of Gascogne, which encourages the communes to sell or sow the communal grounds, condemning the agro-pastoral system in the long term.

See too

External bonds

• village of Labouheyre
• House of the Photography of the moors (House Felix Arnaudin)

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