FELIBRIGE

association organized in the 19th century for the maintenance of the Provenal customs and language that stimulated the renaissance of the literature, language, and customs of the whole of southern France. The Flibrige was founded in 1854 by seven poetsJoseph Roumanille, Frdric Mistral, Thodore Aubanel, Anselme Mathieu, Jean Brunet, Alphonse Tavan, and Paul Girawho took their name from a Provenal tale in which Jesus is discovered in the temple disputing with Seven Doctors of the Law (li st felibre de la li). The group met near Avignon under the guidance of Roumanille, who, since the mid-1840s, had produced secular verse and delightfully humorous prose works in his native Provenal dialect. In 1852 he had collected and published Li Prouvenalo, an anthology of writing in Provenal; he also made the first attempt at regulating the orthography of Provenal in the introduction to his play, La Part dou bon Dieu (1853). Mistral was inspired by Roumanille to devote his energy to restoring the glory of the Provenal region, and he became the most powerful personality of the renaissance. He worked with Roumanille on standardizing the Provenal grammar and in 1855 co-founded with Roumanille the Armana Prouvenau (Provenal Almanac), an annual periodical that for eighty years published the best contemporary Provenal writing. Later, Mistral compiled a huge Provenal dictionary, Lou Tresor du Flibrige (1878); in 1905 he established a museum of Provenal culture in Arles, France, which is still in existence. Of the other members of the original Flibrige, only Thodore Aubanel proved himself worthy to rank with Mistral and Roumanille. The Flibrige grew considerably in the period after Mistral, attracting followers not only from Provenal but also from other southern provinces, such as Gascony, Languedoc, Limousin, and Aquitaine, as well as Catalonia, Spain. The vigorous regional movement that resulted exerted a strong influence well into the 20th century.