Hale Sturges II
Interest in French village life was originally inspired by Laurence Wylie who was one of his mentors and teachers when a student
at Harvard. Wylie's Village in the Vaucluse was the primary source for a course on French village life that Sturges taught at
Andover for twenty years. The People of Pleure: Portrait of a French Village is the outgrowth of a winter sabbatical spent in a
little-known part of the Jura. Pleure is France. It is a village like so many others, with real people of all ages who struggle to
survive. The People of Pleure is the story of Sturges' life among these people.
Hale Sturges has devoted his life to the teaching of French. The former chair of the Division of Foreign Languages at Phillips
Academy, Andover, has been teaching French language, literature and civilization courses for over thirty years. Named in Who's
Who Among Amencan Teachers he has co-authored three books that have been standards in French language classrooms: Encore
une fois, Partout le monde francophone and Une fois pour toutes.
The People of Pleure is at once a personal chronicle, a series of portraits and a sociological
analysis. Pleure is a small town of 364 inhabitants located on the Bressan plain in the western part
of the Jura. I consider Pleure a community that could provide the answers to a number of
questions relevant to the socio-economic status of France today.
France has over 30,000 villages with a population of under 1,000 inhabitants. In an era when
these rural centers were at the heart of an agricultural economy one could easily talk of a nation
of shopkeepers, a thousand types of cheeses, a wine for every village. To study a village was to
study a microcosm of French society. In 1999, agriculture represents a much less significant role
in the nation's economy. What then is the fate of these villages? How do they survive? Will they
survive? With no tourist appeal, Pleure is an authentic paradigm for this investigation.
This is a book, written in English, destined not necessarily for students but for a wider
Francophile public. The primary organizing principle of the book is the sequence appropriate to a
sociological analysis that can be seen in the accompanying table of contents.
Into this fabric I have interwoven both my story and anecdotes of townspeople in order to create a
living portrait of a rural town struggling to survive.
