Catholic Renewal and Education

The 17th century marked a clear return of Catholic momentum in the valley. In 1646, La Grave saw the construction of the Chapel of the Penitents, as part of the broader Counter-Reformation movement. As elsewhere in France, the local confraternity devoted itself to prayer and charitable works, asserting the Catholic presence after the troubled decades of the Wars of Religion. Barely twenty years later, another remarkable sign appeared: in 1663, La Grave established a school, financed thanks to the bequest of Jean Arthaud, an inhabitant of Les Hières. A priest taught children prayer, reading, writing, grammar, and catechism. In the same century, other schools opened in Le Chazelet and then in Villar-d'Arène. For an isolated valley, this was exceptional: at that time, more than 75% of French people were illiterate. Here, education was already organized and lasting. This cultural advance would later strike the ethnographer Hippolyte Muller, who wrote in 1913 that the valley had a “cultivated, obliging population, more educated than mountain populations usually are”.