Henri Pourrat

The French writer and folklore collector Henri Pourrat was born in 1887 in Ambert, a town in the mountainous Auvergne region of central France.

Pourrat’s eloquent and very public support of it and of the régime caused him trouble late in the war and beyond, when association with Vichy endangered many.

Thereafter Pourrat turned above all to what he considered his life-work: Le Trésor des Contes (The Treasury of Tales), a collection of over 1,000 folktales gathered over the decades from the region around Ambert.

Pourrat published some 100 works, from Sur la colline ronde (On the Round Hill, 1912, signed jointly with Jean l’Olagne) to Histoire des gens dans les montagnes du Centre (A History of the People of the Central Mountains, 1959, the year of his death).

[7] Pourrat achieved national literary prominence with Les vaillances, farces et aventures de Gaspard des montagnes (The Mighty Deeds, Pranks, and Adventures of Gaspard from the Mountains), a four-volume novel woven from folktales collected by him, and presented as though told evening after evening by a single old woman teller.

In 1921 the first volume won the literary prize given by a major Paris daily, and in 1931 the Académie Française awarded the complete work its Grand Prix du Roman.

[9] In 1941 another major prize, the venerable Prix Goncourt, honored Vent de mars (March Wind), a volume of essays and reflections on the plight of the French peasantry.