Tribute to Bernard Abel Lesfargues

Jean-Francis Billion
Member of UEF France Executive Bureau, UEF Federal Committee and WFM Council

Bernard Lesfargues was born in 1924 at Bergerac in the Périgord region of southern France. He died at Mussidan, few kilometers away, on the 23rd of February, and even nearer to the house of his maternal grand-parents at Église Neuve d’Issac, where he decided to live after his retirement as Professeur Agrégé in Spanish at Lyons, at the beginning of the eighties. He died almost a year and some days after the death of his close friend from his youth, JeanPierre Gouzy, whom he had met in Paris where he had settled to follow the courses in Khagne. It was soon after, in 1945, that he adhered to the Institute of Occitanist Studies which had just been created after the Liberation. There he got acquainted with the future writer, linguist, University Professor and Occitan autonomist Robert Lafont. On the other hand, it was Gouzy who introduced him at the same time to Federalism, and together they founded a Federalist Action Committee before joining the French section of the European Union of Federalists (UEF Europe, founded in Paris, December 1946).

That period was also, for Bernard, the time of the first attempt to launch a Poetic Review and a Publishing Company, The Notebooks of the blue Triton, and Jean-Pierre would also be one of the contributors. It was also in this endeavor that, with Lafont, Bernard co-published an Anthology of the young Occitan poetry. Without this first venture which ended due to a lack of funds, the Éditions Fédérop would probably not have been founded in Lyons in 1975.

It was in the mid-1950s that Bernard went to set himself up in Lyons. There, he took a large part in Spinelli’s Campaign for the European People Congress, and he got in touch more and more with the Italian Federalists, Altiero Spinelli and then Mario Albertini. With them, he spent himself without counting the cost for the Supranational European Federalist Movement (after the UEF Europe split in the mid 1950’s), where progressively he met locally Bernard Barthalay (about 1963), Jean-Luc Prevel (about 1965) and myself (Autumn 1968), to speak of his youngest friends. During those years, according to the testimony of our Italian friend from Pavia Elio Cannillo, systematically he took up the Presidency at Basel (Switzerland) of the international meetings of the fraction (Federalist Autonomy) founded by Mario Albertini within the supranational MFE, after the end of the European People Congress. Bernard was also in charge of the editing of the Political Review founded by Albertini, Il Federalista, when it was published exclusively in French and under his responsibility from 1962 to 1974 (there would be another attempt for a French edition of the Review from 1984 to 1988, when he was progressively assisted by Prevel). In the summer of 1958 Bernard was also one of the founders of the House of Europe in Lyons, and probably he was his first Treasurer. Bernard was also one of the six candidates presented by the Comité Lyonnais du CPE (Lyonese EPC Committee) to the legislative elections for the Assemblée nationale (lower Chamber of the French Parliament) of 1958 in the constituencies of Lyons and nearby Villeurbanne. In the sixties, he played an important part in bringing closer the two regional branches of the Federalist Movement – the Mouvement Fédéraliste Français – La Fédération and the Mouvement Fédéraliste Européen, and he became one of the four signatories of the agreements after the events of May 1968, signed their re-unification in the Union Européenne des Fédéralistes Rhône-Alpes at the beginning of the seventies, preceding and announcing the re-unification, at the European level, of the Young Federalists in the JEF, and then of the adults movements in the new UEF. We may remember that Bernard was an excellent and sought after translator in many languages, also into Catalan and Italian. Quite recently we discovered that he was interested in Yiddish, and years before my wife Denise and myself were fascinated by his knowledge of Amerindian languages of Central America, when we went together to an exhibition about Mexico in the Petit Palais in Paris. 

So it was in 1968, I was a young and still inactive member of the MFE since 1967, following my parents, that I met Bernard for the first time. On the advice of my Spanish friend, Jean-Paul Cortada, I took the direction of the Rue des trois Maries in Old Lyons, and there, an autumn evening, he appeared to me at the top of a stepladder, disheveled and covered with dust plaster; he was repainting the ceiling of the room that a few weeks later would become the Librairie Fédérop (a bookshop). Bernard was the President of the regional branch of MFE, but also the responsible of the South of France’s (Occitania) Autonomist movement Lutte Occitane, and some of us were marked for life by his double engagement, JeanLuc Prevel and myself especially.

From then on, we never left you, not even after your departure from Lyons at your retirement. You gave me too few lessons of Occitan reading, but you autographed to me your collection of poems Ni Cort ni Costier (published in Nîmes in 1974 by 4 Vertats) with a beautiful sentence “Per Jean-Francis Billion, que non seria Occitan se non voleva l’estre” (“For J.-F.B., who would not be Occitan if he didn’t wanted to be”).

I remembered you this quotation at one of our last meetings in early 2018. After the bookshop, the literary and cultural adventure went on, since with Pierre-Gilles Flacsu, an ex-federalist activist who by chance had to become your brother in law, I was with you one of the three co-founders of the Éditions Fédérop, even if, as you recalled in an interview published in Fédéchoses some years ago, the foundation of the editions was first of all a personal adventure on the line of the foundation of the Triton bleu. The name Fédérop, which was difficult to accept at the beginning for some non-federalists friends, was not hiding our opinions!

Dear Bernard, I have deliberately insisted on our first meetings that preceded so many others, and more especially our weeks of holidays that with our children we regularly shared with Michelle and you at Église Neuve d’Issac, a few kilometers only from Montagnac-la-Cremps, where from now on we shall stay more and more often and for longer periods of time. Unfortunately, we shall arrive there late, too late, and it will be a long lasting reproach for me…

I found it impossible to recall your life as a militant federalist without presenting and insisting at the same time on your life as an author in Occitan and French, as a multilingual and first quality translator, and finally as an editor and a publisher, which for twenty years, due to the geographic distance, kept you away from the life of the tireless federalist you had been in the past. But you had not lost anything of your convictions, as we could see thanks to all the texts you have been sending us from time to time.

Dear Bernard, we shall not forget you and will do our best to go on with your fights and keep in touch with your family with all our affection. Thank you once more for the joy you have given me less than a month ago, when we went to visit you at your home before our last visits at Mussidan, when you expressed your regret because you had not been able to work with me at the revision of the volume about Albert Camus that the Presse Fédéraliste had just published last October; I would have liked so much to read you some extracts, as you had expressed the desire.

Bernard, rest in peace in that Occitan land that you have loved and celebrated so much.