This week the new book “Proud to be Agenais” comes out

When you “come from Agen”, you don’t come from anywhere. Just as in rugby we have been able to overcome the biggest teams with the lightest attacking line in France, we must continue to cultivate our art of living, to nurture our legitimate ambitions without fear of those who are more difficult in any field…” So he put it – not without reasons – former mayor Paul Chollet in a letter to the newspaper Agen in 2014. This sentence fits perfectly with the editorial “Proud to be Agenais” and appears in the preamble of this new book of archival photos, which will be published this week.

After the huge success of the first vintage photo album in 2021, readers quickly asked to “learn more”. This book about Agen in pictures was really only “the first of a series to come”, if it was written then. The promise was therefore kept with “Proud to be Agenais 2”.

From private collections

True to the spirit of the weekly of the same name, which is published every Tuesday in Le Petit Bleu: the advantage of the image, always unpublished because it comes from private collections. These documents, trusted by readers, have been sleeping in attic boxes or in old family albums for decades, and when they were published, they finally came out of oblivion.

The images are always accompanied by short texts, based on the reader’s memories and research in period documents or bibliographic sources.

This second book (available from Thursday, November 10 in bookstores and kiosks, but also by mail) presents 74 documents, the oldest recorded at the end of the 19th century and the latest from 1970. We will find scenes of everyday life in Agen, with especially shops, the canal, sports and entertainment (including rugby, Of course), the floods of the Garonne, streets, squares, boulevards of Agen, etc. All these black and white pictures illustrate the life of the past and point to the present: look at the current Place des Laitiers, it has changed little in a century. Rue des Cornières and rue Beauville also seem frozen in time. Other pictures show, on the contrary, that Agen had to follow the course of time: the old slaughterhouses became a university center; the former covered market was turned into a market-parking lot. The city was thus composed in the 20th century between loyalty to the past and evolution towards the modern.

Read, and offer

Presented in a large format, to better enhance their narrative power, these images are not classified in chronological or thematic order – which distinguishes “Proud to be Agenais” from other works about Agenai. The reader can also randomly “choose” pages, move from one document to another and discover the talent of amateur photographers whose pictures pass here to posterity. That talent in framing or choosing immortalized themes, and the quality of documents that sometimes date back more than a century, comes to the fore again. We have also remained faithful to our printer from Agen (Imprimerie Grafic Sud), and he can be “proud” of his reproduction.

This second album, like the previous one, offers a benevolent return to the past. It stems from an attachment to the city that spans generations. “Proud to be Agenais” will therefore seduce those who lived through these past periods, but also all other, young or new Agenais: the story continues for them too…

A book to be discovered, read for pleasure and offered as a 100% Agenais Christmas gift. Good reading!