How France Made Me Forget I Wasn’t French

What rediscovering my Occitan-Waldensian lineage taught me about modern conformity.

Yesterday, I thought I was completing a jigsaw of a vivid hot-air balloon, only to have a single puzzle piece transform it into a Clydesdale horse. Genealogy often does this: one discovery can wipe the chalkboard clean and render the stories of dead relatives bunk. This is no small tragedy. To me, at least. Some people shrug their shoulders at the idea of whakapapa, and I get it: discovering an ancestor who captured a Chinese emperor or invented the Kazoo won’t excuse this week’s mortgage payment. But I’ve always felt the earth move under me when hidden truths about who I am come into focus.

For years – forever - even on this very blog - I have claimed to be of French ancestry. I now know that was only ever a bureaucratic truth. My people lived in what is now southeastern France, but when they fled as religious refugees, French was merely the language of edicts, courtrooms, soldiers, and kings. It was not the language spoken in their homes, in prayer, or over the graves of their dead.

Their language was Occitan - one of the oldest Romance languages in Europe and, for centuries, the literary equal of Latin and Italian. While French was reshaped by Germanic Frankish invasions and Spanish evolved alongside Visigothic and Arabic influences, Occitan remained closer to classical Latin in its vowels and cadence. Dante himself – no slouch with a quill - called it “the language most suited to poetry”. Occitan was the language of the troubadours, the first great lyric poets of medieval Europe - the language that carried love songs, political satire, scripture, and memory.

And yet this language was almost wiped out by the very state that claimed cultural hegemony over the region. France did so deliberately, systematically, and with pride. In fact, to create a greater sense of national pride. When the modern French state began to form, unity was exalted above all, and one way unity was to be defined was linguistic sameness. In the sixteenth century, royal decrees pushed French into law courts, displacing every “patois” beneath it. By the Revolution, the rhetoric hardened: Abbé Grégoire famously declared that France must “annihilate” regional languages for the good of the nation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, children caught speaking Occitan at school were humiliated, beaten, and even forced to wear tokens of shame. By the mid-twentieth century, even sympathetic linguists described the language as “diseased.” France did not merely neglect Occitan. It sought to erase it.

All of this means that I have been mispronouncing my own name. We’ve always used a Frenchified “Zhee-row”. But my ancestors would have spelled their name Giraut – and pronounced it Jee-RAOW – (closer to Wow than Row), the r tapped like Spanish or Italian. We didn’t forget this by accident. We forgot because forgetting was the point.

Yesterday’s revelations didn’t stop with language. I had long assumed that my ancestors from this line were Huguenots - French Catholics who converted to Calvinism around the time of Luther. The truth is older and more unsettling. My family were Waldensians: Europe’s oldest surviving dissenting Christians, founded in the 1170s under Peter Waldo. Arriving on the scene 300 years before Luther, the Waldensians are some of the earliest proto-Protestant thinkers, though they differed from the eventual Protestant movement in interesting ways too: they believed women could preach (Rome and many Protestants rejected this), they placed a strong emphasis on voluntary poverty (closer to Franciscan ideals), had decentralised, egalitarian leadership structures, and a quasi-ascetic ethic. For this, they were hunted down and brutally suppressed. How bad did it get? Well, let’s put it this way: Jews would often hide Waldensians. That bad.

My ancestor, Jean Élie Giraud - or Giraut - was born into this persecuted, trauma-scarred world. He lived in La Grave, an Alpine Waldensian village in the Oisans. By his birth in the 1650s or 1660s, his people had endured five centuries of harassment, fines, burnings, imprisonment, and forced conversions. Yet they survived by clinging to their faith, their valleys, and their language.

In 1655, yet another wave of massacres forced Oliver Cromwell to essentially threaten war, turning an obscure Alpine sect into a defining Protestant cause. Military preparations were undertaken, and John Milton was commissioned to write letters and a sonnet that went viral in 17th-century terms:

“Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold…”

An English envoy, Samuel Morland, sent back details like:

“little children were ripped open in their mothers’ arms.”
“Old men burned alive in their houses.”

Cromwell’s pressure worked, for a few decades anyway. When Louis XIV outlawed non-Catholic worship in 1685, the Waldensians of the Dauphiné were given a choice: convert or disappear. Villages were again surrounded. Churches went up in flames. Children were taken from their parents to be raised Catholic. The people of La Grave were forced to flee over the Alps with their infants, blankets, and Bibles. French dragoons fired up the slopes in the dark. Many died. Jean Élie survived and eventually reached Geneva, where he penned a journal fragment that accounts for much of the research in this blog: a stark account of cold, hunger, prayer, and death. But the image that stays with me is the scene that spurs the journey - of Jean Elie stepping out of his home one morning to be greeted by a trio of heads familiar to him, on pikes. This, unsurprisingly, was the final straw.

The Waldensians later dispersed across Europe - to German states, the Netherlands, England, Ireland - and eventually across the Atlantic. And, in my case, New Zealand, where many details were clearly forgotten. Which is strange, considering my own grandfather was named Herve Bing Giraud, which demonstrates a commitment to our family’s ethnic history.

What has struck me most, in the past twenty-four hours, is the recognition that religious or ethnic intolerance and linguistic suppression are not really separate projects. To purge a people’s beliefs, it follows that you would purge their tongue - and once these people are hollowed out, you can refill them with new state-sanctioned myths. Cohesion, a word even contemporary political leaders like Jacinda Ardern (another type of religious leader) love to invoke, is a euphemism for coercion in the same way that utopia and dystopia, in essence, mean the same thing. Cohesion means sameness. Sameness requires erasure. And erasure requires violence, be it physical, cultural, or linguistic.

France did it to Occitan speakers - to the Waldensians, to Bretons, to Basques, to Catalans, to Alsatians. New Zealand did it to Māori. In some cases, speakers were physically beaten (this was certainly the case with speakers of Occitan). In some cases - as in New Zealand - Elders may have encouraged - or felt pressured - not to pass the language on. But this choice is often made for them. Assimilation is much easier than working against the grain. Whatever the reason, the very medium of their ancestors’ thought was soon cleansed from their souls, in the name of unity, progress, modernity, or the “public good.”

Even in recent years, our own political leadership has spoken reverently of cohesion and the need to “manage harmful speech,” as though diversity can exist without difference, or difference without dissent. I recognise the impulse too well. It is the same instinct that haunted Jean Élie’s world: the conviction that a healthy society must speak with one voice – figuratively and quite literally - and that those who don’t are a threat.

So, where does all this leave me? With a new history, a new language, and a new understanding of what was taken from my ancestors and what survived. I am also left unsure if I can continue to call myself French considering that for 500 years this entity treated my ancestors as a tumour to be extracted.

Perhaps I will try using Giraut (Jee-RAOW) now, as we once did, with the r tapped lightly like a struck match. A personal act of defiance, if a little late in the day, and at risk for my being mistaken for a Mexican. But I do plan to make a point of remembering now, for no other reason than they didn’t want me to.