Abstract

La bouche rouge (red mouth) is a type of chestnut common to the French Alpine region of Cevenne. It is also the name of a magazine founded in the same region in the mid-1970s. The trees were threatened by a disease eating its way through the forests from East to West and from top to bottom. The journal set out to expose environmental pollution and took a militant stand against centralism for neglecting the peripheral regions of France. Similarly, the idea of regional autonomy was idealized in terms of a distant past when the South was not yet part of France, still spoke its own Occitanian language, and its troubadours founded their own courtly culture.