The “Republic of the Escartons” (Escarton from the french “escartoner”, to divide ) has been decribed as one of the first forms of democracy : officially born in 1343, with Briançon as the capital in a territory between Turin and Marseille
The Republic of the Escartons or Big Escarton was formed by five territories : Briançon and Queyras, today department of Hautes-Alpes in France, Oulx, Pragela (Pragelato) and Château-Dauphin (Casteldelfino) in the italian region of Piedmont. The Escarton of Oulx included twenty two municipalities even if not so extended ,with about 40,000 inhabitants .
The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 signed the end of the Escartons and of the democratic nation it was . The Escartons of Oulx, Pragelato and Casteldelfino were given to the Duke of Savoy, the others remained to France; in this way the territory was divided in two parts incorporated after in two different countries : Italy and France. The political division is not the same for the habits and cultural traditions that remain intact in this transboundary region: a high level of compulsory education completely managed from the Escarton, the “lingua d’oc”, currently speaken in familiar environnement in different communities, architectural typology in all area with the same typical tower bell at four arrows, the Dolphin and the Lily, symbols of the House of France that gave the administrative independence to those populations are present everywhere on the portals of the church and on the bas reliefs of the fountains . The Occitan language also known as Lengua d’Oc, spoken in these territories is one of the main languages born from the latin as the catalan, the french and the italian, sometimes called “patois” or “provenzale”. It is a part of the group of the Romance Languages. Its name come from the word “oc” that means “yes” in occitan from the latin hoc est. It is the ancient language of the troubadours that in the 12 th century were visiting all the european courts with their stories, their tales transforming it in the cultivate language. From 1999 thanks to the n.482 Law, in application of the article n. 6 of the Constitution, Minority Languages have been recognized, and between them the Occitan language, and a lot of initiatives of protection and promotion of the language have been done to make discover the traditions, -also thanks to the main interest of the Città Metropolitana- in music, dance, theatre and literrature
The Republic of the Escartons and the Oc language
