Celebrities in Aquitaine

Names which ring a bell and snatches of history…

Aquitaine is a land where illustrious women and men were born or lived – some in houses that can be visited today, sometimes as part of a themed tour.

First of all, a queen: Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine. In 1137, she married Louis VII, future King of France, in Saint André Cathedral in Bordeaux. They divorced twelve years later and Eleanor remarried with Henri Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and duke of Normandy and future King Henry II of England. Their third child was to earn the name Richard the Lionheart. 

Then there were the Kings. The Château de Pau and more generally the region of Béarn – not to say the whole of Gascony – are strongly marked by the imprint of Henri IV, King of France and Navarre, born in Pau in 1553.

Another son of Pau was to become King – but of Sweden in this case - in 1818, after serving in the armies of Napoleon: Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. The family home has become a museum.

We stay in the Pyrenees with the Musketeers… Did you know that Athos and Aramits are actually villages in Béarn? They gave their names to two of the musketeers immortalised by Alexandre Dumas.

On the subject of writers, here are three more. Have you heard of the “three M’s”? Montaigne (1533-1593), Mayor of Bordeaux and author of the Essays, Montesquieu (1689-1755) who wrote his masterpiece The Spirit of Laws at his home, Château de La Brède, and lastly, Mauriac (1885-1970) who regularly stayed at Domaine de Malagar.

Leaping forward in time, we come to the 20th century with Maurice Ravel, composer of the internationally famous Bolero. He was born in 1914 in Ciboure, close to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The house where he was born had already played host to a celebrity in the person of Cardinal Mazarin, for the wedding of Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse of Spain.

A musician who has written all his own songs and had a whole host of hit albums is Francis Cabrel, who has never left his birthplace, the village of Astaffort, in the Lot-et-Garonne.

Who else? A Pope (Bertrand de Got, future Clement V, Pope from 1305 to 1314), a sculptor (Charles Despiau from Mont-de-Marsan), a French President (Armand Fallières, the centenary of whose election is celebrated in 2006), rugby players (the Moga brothers, Serge Blanco, Pierre Albaladejo), footballers (Christophe Dugarry and Bixente Lizarazu), a lord, diplomat and excellent hunter (Gaston Fébus, 1331-1391), an architect (Jean Nouvel, designer among other things of the new Vésunna Museum in Périgueux), an opera singer (Béatrice Uria-Monzon was born in Agen), a yachtsman (Titouan Lamazou is from Béarn), cartoonists (Jacques Faizant and Jean-Jacques Sempé), a poet (Francis Jammes from Orthez), a sociologist (Pierre Bourdieu), etc…