Pourrat, Henri (1887–1959), collector‐author of French folk and fairy tales. Born in the town of Ambert, Pourrat spent 50 years amassing regional tales of his native Auvergne. As with Perrault and the Grimms, he wanted to record and preserve folk heritage. But unlike Perrault, who transcribed but a dozen tales for aristocrats of literary salons, Pourrat in his Trésor des contes (Treasury of Tales) passed on 1, 009 rustic stories for everyday readers—an audience somewhat closer to the bourgeois public of the Grimms.
Ironically, it is to ill health that we owe his astounding collection, for tuberculosis at the age of 18 prevented him from pursuing a career as an agricultural engineer. Thereafter, he passed his sedentary mornings resting and writing, with more physical afternoons devoted to walking the countryside and interviewing storytellers. From them he collected some 30, 000 regionalisms, which he recorded in a succession of notebooks and later used to enrich his numerous essays, folk‐tale collections, and historical romances.
Pourrat achieved fame with his first novel, Gaspard des montagnes (Gaspard from the Mountains, 1922–32), which won the Prix Figaro (1922) and the French Academy's Grand Prix for Best Novel (1931). Each of its four volumes spans seven nights in which ‘Old Marie’ tells numerous tales of courageous country folk who outwit Evil. The frame story for this ‘folk Scheherazade’ is set after the French Revolution, and is based on several versions of the folk tales ‘Les Yeux rouges’ (‘Red Eyes’) and ‘La Main coupée’ (‘The Severed Hand’). Alone one night during her parents' absence, Anne‐Marie Grange discovers that an intruder has entered her Auvergne farmhouse. She outwits the thief by cutting off his hand, and he swears vengeance. Seasons later, she is unwittingly married to this violent bandit chief, who eventually steals away their child born of her rape. Throughout a thousand pages of harrowing and melodramatic adventures, Anne‐Marie's cousin Gaspard is her constant support. Chaste, star‐crossed lovers of sorts, this couple's strength, spirituality, and folk wisdom incarnate the ennobling simplicity of rustic life.
After Gaspard, Pourrat continued to write extensively about the Auvergne. Recognized as a major French author during World War II, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1944 for Le Vent de mars (March Wind), an essay concerning wartime Auvergne. But it is The Treasury of Tales (1948–62) that sealed his reputation as a folklorist. Published at a time when post‐war France was battling rising fascism, its 13 volumes incarnate what Pourrat termed ‘the original mythology of the French people’. The tales are divided into categories about fairies, the devil, bandits, village life, the mad and the wise, beasts, and love and marriage. As complete as this thousand‐tale collection may seem, however, the Treasury never attained prominence among the ‘academic’ folklorists. Indeed, it occasioned a rather violent debate. First, ethnologists who had published regional folk tales had commented on the rarity of those in the Auvergne: they were sceptical that ‘new Mother Goose tales’ continued to be told. Pourrat, in his comprehensive picture of regional folklore, did indeed include not only stories, but fables, proverbs, jokes, and songs from oral sources (some 106 storytellers and 86 singers) as well as printed matter (regional chapbooks, almanacs, texts from Rabelais to La Fontaine). Like Perrault and the Grimms, Pourrat thus found himself at the crossroads of the existing traditions of the oral folk tale and literary fairy tale. But in trying to transform these genres through ingenious methods of translating their orality, he committed two major ‘sins’. Unlike the academics who scrupulously recorded and published their sources along with the tales, Pourrat resolutely kept such documentation for his personal records. He hoped this ‘anonymity’ would impart a timelessness to the tales, instead of reducing them to dry accounts told by a certain person of a certain age at a certain time. Secondly, the ethnologists felt he violated the sacred rules of ‘never omit anything, never add anything’ when transcribing sources. This is precisely what Pourrat could not bring himself to do. Rather than strictly recording tales told by, say, ageing lacemakers, Pourrat was faithful to their spirit by inventing an oral, ‘rustic style’ uniquely his own. He recreated the atmosphere of storytelling itself in confidential asides to the reader and reproduction of sounds, smells, and tactile sensations: the clicking of needles or the ringing of the angelus, the aroma of freshly mown hay, the humidity of a late‐summer evening. He would also combine several versions of a folk tale, flesh out psychological portraits, and pepper his stylized narratives with colloquialisms and minute details of local colour. Because of these modifications to original source material, critics regarded him more as an author than folklorist, and felt that his attention to detail worked against his goal of rendering the tales timeless. They also criticized his censuring of data: the devout Pourrat downplayed the bawdy or anticlerical elements of fabliaux‐inspired tales, and eliminated verses of songs when translating from Occitan (a dialect of Provençal) into standard French.
Today, Pourrat's ethno‐literary ode to the Auvergne is undergoing a long‐overdue reappraisal. A journal dedicated to Pourrat studies, as well as new French editions of the Treasury and an English translation, are now available to the public. His celebration of 19th‐century peasant life, with its 20th‐century post‐war agenda of revitalizing the French national spirit, is now universally acclaimed as a milestone in French folklore studies.
Bibliography
- Bricout, Bernadette, Le Savoir et la saveur: Henri Pourrat et Le Trésor des contes (1992).
- Cahiers Henri Pourrat (1981–present).
- Gardes, Roger, Un écrivain au travail: Henri Pourrat (1980).
- Plessy, Bernard, Au pays de Gaspard des montagnes (1981).
- Zipes, Jack, “‘Henri Pourrat and the Tradition of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm’”, in The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988).
— Mary Louise Ennis
