Few great writers have so intimately tied their name to a single region as Jean Giono did. For him, it was Provence—the land that saw him born in 1895, where he died in 1970, and which provided the horizon for his body of work. From Colline (1929), his first novel—describing peasant life at Bastides Blanches, a hamlet high in the Lure mountains— to his major literary successes (notably The Horseman on the Roof whose plot unfolds between Aix-en-Provence and Manosque), the native son has continually set his stories in this austere and rugged backdrop, which holds wonders for anyone who knows how to look with eyes unclouded.
Beyond the Terroir
Naturally, the critics of his era made him a champion of the terroir, a regionalist writer to be counted among Frédéric Mistral. But Giono rejected that label. What interested him was not folklore, but the major existential themes that thread through his books: the power of nature, the tragedy of living, and the way in which man learns to cope with forces that exceed him. The writer, who described himself as a “stationary traveler,” hardly traveled far. He made occasional trips to Paris, a few visits to Italy, brief escapades to Scotland toward the end of his life. Yet he was an indefatigable walker, who tirelessly roamed the countryside of Haute-Provence.
Sylvie Giono, his younger daughter, now 91, who welcomes us at her home on the heights above Manosque, very near her father’s house, recalls: “Rather than a hiker obsessed with athletic feats, he was a walker, attentive to the landscape. He always had something to tell about a flower or a tree. And when he did not know, he would invent.”
Giono’s Paths
Thanks to his notes and the guidance of the Friends of Jean Giono, an association that preserves the writer’s memory, GEO has imagined four walks between Haute-Provence and Drôme, along the paths where the novelist loved to stroll. It is an opportunity to look beyond southern stereotypes to grasp the land dear to Giono, where the wind blows so hard “it scratches the eyes with its nails”, where the soil is unforgiving but the sky is vast.
👉 “In the Footsteps of Giono: four hikes along the thread of his writing to follow the writer in his country of the heart,” an article to be found in the GEO Special Issue no. 133 for June-July 2026, “France, our favorite summer walks,” on newsstands ✨
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