Reflections on a Lost Civilization:
Nicole Vaget Brings Her Roots to Life

By Katherine Axt '01

Mount Holyoke has long been known for helping to bridge the gap across cultures for students and faculty alike, and this year is no exception. In her book Saint-Jean-d'Arvey en Savoie (Montmélian, La Fontaine de Siloé, November 1999), Nicole Vaget, professor and chair of the French department and European studies program, offers a unique and personal cultural study of a socioeconomic group of French peasants that no longer exists. Although based on traditional scholarly research, the book reads like a National Geographic magazine. Divided into sections such as religion, agriculture, and education, and with photographs and sidebars abounding, this visually pleasing text has become quite popular in France. The local government of the department of Savoie recently selected Vaget's book as one of the three best books published in Savoie for 1999.

Nicole Vaget is the last living link between Mount Holyoke and this lost civilization of alpine villagers. “I used to be one of these peasants; I belong to the last generation who worked in the fields, and spoke the local Franco-Provencal patois,” Vaget explains. As a teenager she realized education would be her route to escape from the family farm, and she pursued studies that led her to immigrate to the United States at the age of twenty-five. “I wrote this book in memory of my village and its people. I knew them all, they were my community; this work is a tribute to my extended family and to my roots,” she says.

Located in the French Alps, two hours from the Swiss and Italian borders, the community of Saint-Jean-d'Arvey is symptomatic of many villages in France, which have been transformed by the overflow of the urban population. The once open fields around the village are now covered with houses belonging to people who work in the city of Chambéry, a few miles away. All over western Europe, many such former rural communities have become suburbia, and peasants have vanished. In other parts of France, where agriculture is still present, farmers who work the land industrially have replaced them. The old peasants' perception of the world has disappeared, along with their dialect, their beliefs, and their ancient way of life.

This study on Saint-Jean-d'Arvey documents the artifacts left by this lost civilization from prehistoric times through the twentieth century. Since the Middle Ages the village has been self-sufficient, growing its own food and following the religious and moral order of its conservative Catholic priests. Feudal knights maintained two castles, and their families dominated the economic and political scene until the twentieth century. It was a homogeneous community where everyone worked and knew his or her place in society.

France annexed Savoie in 1860, and consequently its inhabitants, “les Savoyards,” are fairly recent French citizens. Since the eleventh century, the region belonged to the dukes of Savoie, who became kings of Piedmont-Sardinia in the seventeen-century and unified Italy in the second half of the nineteen century. At this point, instead of declaring Savoie an Italian province, Vittorio-Emmanuel II, king of Italy, gave it to the Emperor Napoléon III, as a token of gratitude for his political support.

Although Vaget embraces her peasant past, she is also up on technology and helped design her book using PageMaker, Photoshop, and QuarkXpress. However, her fascination with bridging cultural divides through technology is not limited to this book. Last year, under the auspices of the African Virtual University, she taught French to African students in Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Kenya.

A firm believer in “distance education,” she helped reduce the gap between Europe, Africa, and America with the use of satellite technology and the Web. “I like the idea of serving as a cross-cultural link transcending time and space,” she says. “It is a wonderful way for both students and professors to learn about themselves and the world.”

Katherine Axt '01, a former student of Nicole Vaget, recently returned from her junior year abroad in Montpellier, France.