Imago 4.Indb 373 08/06/2011 13:02:42 374 Pilar Jiménez
THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY: THE CREATION OF THE “AUDE, PAYS CATHARE”. AN EXAMPLE OF THE MANAGEMENT OF AN HISTORICAL AND Cultural Patrimony? PILAR JIMÉNEZ SÁNCHEZ UNIVERSITÉ DE TOULOUSE - LE MIRAIL FRANCE Date of Receipt: 4th of March, 2010 Date of Acceptance: 16th of April, 2010 ABSTRACT This article proposes a study of one of the groundbreaking programmes for managing historical and cultural heritage in Europe, the one known as “The Aude, Cathar Country”. Driven by the first decentralisation policies initiated in France in the early 1980s, after the socialists had entered the government of the Republic, this heritage management programme wagers on the use of the History of Catharism as an economic booster for a heavily depressed territory. As well as studying the process of creating this programme and emphasising the lack of knowledge of Ca- thar history among the local population, mention will be made of some of the most relevant problems that arose during construction of the programme. Its mercantilist drift, preferring to use the myth rather than the history of Catharism, and alongside this the marginalisation of the historians of Catharism have been some of the er- rors in the application of the programme wich have provoked its discredit and/or the exasperation, of both the local population, and the tourists who discover this magnificent territory in the South of France. KEY WORDS Aude, Cathars, Catharism, Management, Myth, Country. CAPITALIA VERBA Atax, Cathari, Catharismus, Administratio, Mythus, Terra. IMAGO TEMPORIS. MEDIUM AEVUM, IV (2010): 373-398. ISSN 1888-3931 373 Imago 4.indb 373 08/06/2011 13:02:42 374 PILAR JIMÉNEZ How does a territory reconstruct its history with the intention of creating an identity? At the time the construction of Europe and its attendant risks of a de- rivative identity, the creation of a “Cathar Country”, (Pays Cathare), began in the South of France at the beginning of the 1980s, the time of the first political moves toward decentralization in France.
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