It was 15:00, and Madame Georgette Bertin-Pourchet, president of the Republic of Le Saugeais, was serving tea in her sitting room in the Haut-Doubs region in eastern France. Suddenly, the large clock in the corner ground into action, marking the hour not with traditional chimes, but a full version of the tiny micronation’s rousing national anthem, reports BBC News.
Does Emmanuel Macron have a clock that plays La Marseillaise on the hour, every hour, I wondered? Or, for that matter, own a cushion with his face on it and an emergency “president” sash that he carries with him at all times? If not, he’s missing a trick, and could perhaps learn a thing or two if he deigned to visit his 85-year-old counterpart. But despite being in power for almost three years, the French leader has not yet had the courtesy to meet Madame la Présidente – the second female leader of this “country”, who rules over just 128 sqare kilometres.
Perhaps Macron does not know of the “joke” that has lasted since 1947, when a visiting official to the Saugeais – a wooded valley running alongside the Swiss border – first declared it a republic. “My father Georges ran a restaurant next to the abbey in the village of Montbenoît,” Bertin-Pourchet recalled. “One day he was cooking lunch for some officials. When the leader of the Doubs region, Louis Ottaviani, arrived, my father, who was a bit of a joker, asked, ‘Do you have a permit to come into the territory of Le Saugeais?’.”
“Louis also liked a laugh, and after asking my father about the history of Le Saugeais, replied, ‘Well, it sounds like a republic, and a republic needs a president, and therefore I name you the President of the Republic of Le Saugeais!’.”
And thus, the Pourchet dynasty was born. Georges became president and “ruled” over his domain of 11 villages and a few thousand inhabitants until his death in 1968. The joke could have died out at that point, but for the determination of the priest of the Abbey of Montbenoît and the village mayor, who, in May 1972, told Georgette’s mother, Gabrielle, that the citizens of the republic, the Saugets, had elected her president – using an applause meter.
The origins of the republic might lie in a jest, but the history of this remote corner of France began 1,000 years ago when the valley, which sits at a high altitude of around 1,000 metres, was an inhospitable region, heavily wooded and frequently impassable due to heavy snowfall. The only inhabitants were medieval hermits – religious fanatics who deliberately sought solitude. One of whom, Benoît, started a hermitage that eventually became the Abbey of Montbenoît.
In 1150, the area was gifted to the bishop of nearby Besançon by the Sire of Joux, a local nobleman. Saint Augustin monks from the Valais region of Switzerland and a handful of workers from the neighbouring Savoie area in France started thinning out the thick forests of spruce and pine. “They made it habitable, built the abbey and the 11 villages grew up around it,” Bertin-Pourchet said.
Thanks to its position on the border, and its natural geographic limitations – the river Doubs and a high line of hills beyond clearly marks the area off from Switzerland – the area soon developed its own personality, distinct even from those two towns that sit at either end of the valley. Harsh weather meant that inhabitants had to be self-reliant, and many of the current residents are descended from the original hardy Savoie settlers, with the same surnames echoing down the generations. “I always tell people the Republic of Le Saugeais is situated between [the French towns of] Pontarlier and Morteau, and Switzerland and France,” Bertin-Pourchet said, laughing.
A massacre at the hands of the Swedes in 1637 further cemented local fortitude – and the abbey still bears the scars, with some of its beautiful carvings hacked away during the attack.
The area had its own patois – a version of the French, Swiss and Italian Alpine language Arpitan – which has since died out, and in 1910, a local canon, Joseph Bobillier, who was born in Montbenoît, wrote a humorous hymn in the local dialect to the accompaniment of music by composer Théodore Botrel. This was later adopted as the republic’s national anthem. “Qu’i n’y a ran d’té qu’ notrou Sadjet/Que stet qu’en sont peuillant se r’crerre/On ptet pô pleu qu’ s’l’érant français!” reads the end of the first verse – “To be Saugeais means you can believe you’re a little bit more than just French.” And woe betide any Swedes who dare return, as the hymn reveals they will be “roasted”!