Avenue du XVe corps
Photo André Abbe The towns of Fréjus, Toulon, Nice and Saint-Raphaël, to name but a few, have an avenue from the 15th century. But what is this...
Author : Claude Boyer
The incredible story of Martin Bidoure, shot twice
Jean Louis Ferdinand MARTIN was born in Barjols, Var, on August 24, 1825. He was the son of François, a pit-sawyer from Apinac...
The conjugal shirt
Cut from a rather rustic fabric, it was not intended to facilitate relations between spouses, such was the barbaric night costume of our ancestors....
PLM employee
Genealogy is full of surprises. Claude Boyer has discovered a family link with Marcel Pagno's childhood friend, Lili des Belons. But the family history...
The strange story of the Cagots
A painful affair Towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV, in 1706, in Lialores, a small hamlet north of Condom in the...
A troubadour is gone
Joan-Pau Verdier was born in Périgueux in 1947. He studied at the Faculté de Lettres in Bordeaux. An activist for Occitanism and libertarianism, he was...
I met a wild child
But I'll tell you about it after the better-known story of Victor, the wild child of the Aveyron popularized by Truffaut. If you're passing through the village of Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance...
The fate of these three Var grandmothers
Three new portraits of women from Provence. "There are only two of them in this photo from Le Méridional, October 1960, but I'm going to tell you about...
Let's play with city names
With 36,000 French communes, it's almost obligatory for French and foreign towns to have the same name. Here are just a few of them, so...
Var: my grandfather was a poilu in 14
At the front from the start of the conflict My grandfather did his military service at Mont Faron in Toulon when war was declared....