The movement began in the revival of the Provencal language, and was at first a very modest attempt to make it serve merely better purposes than it had done after the eclipse that followed the Albigensian war.  For a long time the linguistic and literary aspect of all this activity was the only one that attracted any attention in the rest of France or in Provence itself.  Not that the Provencal language had ever quite died out even as a written language.  Since the days of the Troubadours there had been a continuous succession of writers in the various dialects of southern France, but very few of them were men of power and talent.  Among the immediate predecessors of the Felibres must be mentioned Saboly, whose Noels, or Christmas songs, are to-day known all over the region, and Jasmin, who, however, wrote in a different dialect.  Jasmin’s fame extended far beyond the limited audience for which he wrote; his work came to the attention of the cultured through the enthusiastic praise of Sainte-Beuve, and he is to-day very widely known.  The English-speaking world became acquainted with him chiefly through the translations of Longfellow.  Jasmin, however, looked upon himself as the last of a line, and when, in his later years, he heard of the growing fame of the new poets of the Rhone country, it is said he looked upon them with disfavor, if not jealousy.  Strange to say, he was, in the early days, unknown to those whose works, like his, have now attained well-nigh world-wide celebrity.

The man who must justly be looked upon as the father of the present movement was Joseph Roumanille.  He was born in 1818, in the little town of Saint-Remy, a quaint old place, proud of some remarkable Roman remains, situated to the south of Avignon.  Roumanille was far from foreseeing the consequences of the impulse he had given in arousing interest in the old dialect, and, until he beheld the astonishing successes of Mistral, strongly disapproved the ambitions of a number of his fellow-poets to seek an audience for their productions outside of the immediate region.  He had no more ambitious aim than to raise the patois of Saint-Remy out of the veritable mire into which it had sunk; it pained him to see that the speech of his fireside was never used in writing except for trifles and obscenities.  Of him is told the touching story that one day, while reciting in his home before a company of friends some poems in French that he had written, he observed tears in his mother’s eyes.  She could not understand the poetry his friends so much admired.  Roumanille, much moved, resolved to write no verses that his mother could not enjoy, and henceforth devoted himself ardently to the task of purifying and perfecting the dialect of Saint-Remy.  It has been said, no less truthfully than poetically, that from a mother’s tear was born the new Provencal poetry, destined to so splendid a career.