Occitania / Death of a major figure of the Occitan movement

Obituary

Death of a major figure of the Occitan movement

Jacques Ressaire, born in 1940, died on Tuesday June 8 in Montpellier.

He was a teacher, a bookseller in Bagnols sur Cèze and a bee-keeper in St Michel d'Euzet (Gard). He became chairman of the Occitan Nation Party on the death of its founder, François Fontan, in 1979 and resigned in 2009 for health reasons. He remained its honorary chairman.

With François Fontan, he was an activist for the independence of Algeria in the 1960s and had a brush with the law at the time.

He is one of the fathers of the Occitan nation and of Occitan nationalism of which Fontan had shown the way. His objective was to secure the independence of Occitania, piecemeal, and its reunification within the framework of an Occitan federal Republic encompassing the Southern third of France (with the exception of the Basque country and Roussillon) the Valle de Aran (currently part of the Spanish state) and the Occitan valleys of the Piemonte region in Italy.

He was an internationalist nationalist, that is to say an ethnist.

He was in favour of the emancipation of all the world’s stateless nations according to the principle established by François Fontan: the existence of a specific language is the synthetic marker of a nation.

He also was a former minister of the Provisional Occitan Government.

The funeral took place on Thursday June 10.

Occitan Nation Party
June 12, 2010
Felip Bonnet, chairman
F - 31440 Marignac (Occitania)
+33 6 81 37 81 14
philippe.bonnet89@wanadoo.fr