600 BC
The Bituriges
A powerful people of Celtic Gaul, a territory structured around the Loire basin, with Avaricum as its political centre.
Histoire du Berry
Twenty-five centuries to understand a territory that was never formally a province, yet repeatedly intersected with the decisive turns of French history.
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Paperback · 125 × 190 mm · published 4 April 2024
The Province of Berry
Alexis-Hubert Jaillot · 1707
Alexis-Hubert Jaillot · 1707
Because Berry was never a province in its own right, its destiny is woven into France’s national story.Publisher’s presentation
At a glance
Berry and the book, in three facts.
- The subject
- A concise history of Berry from the Bituriges and Avaricum to the twentieth century.
- The approach
- A regional history told through the major political, cultural and literary turning points of France.
- The edition
- 128 pages, paperback, published in French by Éditions Gisserot in April 2024.
The book
A local history on the scale of France.
The story begins around 600 BC with the Bituriges and Avaricum, then moves through Romanisation, the Middle Ages, struggles for power, the cultural influence of Bourges and the upheavals of the modern era.
Across 128 pages, Emmanuel Legeard shows how Berry repeatedly comes to the foreground at decisive moments: the consolidation of the kingdom, the patronage of Jean de Berry, the Renaissance of law, the Fronde and the French Revolution — followed by the survival of a historic country after its administrative disappearance.
In 1913, Le Grand Meaulnes gave the territory another kind of posterity: a landscape of woods, ponds and memory.
Antiquity
Avaricum and Rome
The Roman conquest brings Berry into a new political order and opens a history stretching across nearly seventeen centuries.
Middle Ages
The kingdom is decided at the centre
Berry stands at the heart of dynastic crises, the unity of France and the survival of royal power.
15th century
Bourges shines
Jean de Berry and Charles VII place the region at the centre of a period of political, artistic and intellectual influence.
Early modern era
Law, power, the Fronde
Legal humanism, Sully’s ambitions and Condé’s opposition keep Berry tied to the tensions shaping the kingdom.
1789 → 1913
From the map to memory
The Revolution erases Berry as an administrative entity; literature revives it as an imagined territory.
A Berry of power and culture
From the heart of the kingdom to the International Gothic.
The book does not treat Berry as a peripheral region. It restores it to the place where events often put it: at the centre of power, art and ideas.
That perspective gives the narrative a scope greater than a conventional regional history — and makes it the strongest way to present the book.
Illustration: The Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, June · Limbourg brothers · Musée Condé · public domain.
Why read it
Short, dense, and written as a narrative.
01
Change scale
See how the history of one territory directly illuminates the history of the kingdom and then of France.
02
Recover the places
Avaricum, Bourges, the countryside and the ponds become landmarks in a continuous story rather than a sequence of dates.
03
Read without a textbook
128 pages: an accessible synthesis for curious readers as well as enthusiasts of regional history.
Éditions Gisserot
Histoire du Berry
Emmanuel Legeard · €8
A concise history of Berry, from the Bituriges to the twentieth century, published in the History collection by Éditions Gisserot.
Order from Gisserot