PIGEONNIERS
What on earth are those strange, imposing, rural buildings you see scattered all over southwest France? Often on stilts or pylons, but sometimes built into an ancient village wall, or even incorporated into a tower overlooking an old farmyard, they look just like sentinels waiting for something to happen.
In French they’re called pigeonniers and it was the Romans who originally brought them to France.
Well, they’re to promote the breeding of pigeons, and in France they played a particular social, economic and historic role, and, before the French Revolution in 1789, the keeping of pigeons was a complicated privilege restricted to the ruling classes in a complex, hierarchical display of wealth and power. Up to this date, only the king, the clergy and the nobility were allowed to have anything to do with pigeons, which had acquired an important place in French cuisine.
After the Revolution the keeping of pigeons was universally permitted and in many cases pigeonniers were then incorporated into all kinds of architecture, whether over gatehouses, in courtyards, lofts, buttressing the village walls, or even in the roofs of domestic dwellings.
More noticeable, however, are the stand-alone pigeonniers like the one you can see in my painting of Armand Fallieres.
IMPORTANT NOTE: ALL PRICES INCLUDE DELIVERY TO YOUR ADDRESS (PACKING, POSTAGE AND INSURANCE)
In French they’re called pigeonniers and it was the Romans who originally brought them to France.
Well, they’re to promote the breeding of pigeons, and in France they played a particular social, economic and historic role, and, before the French Revolution in 1789, the keeping of pigeons was a complicated privilege restricted to the ruling classes in a complex, hierarchical display of wealth and power. Up to this date, only the king, the clergy and the nobility were allowed to have anything to do with pigeons, which had acquired an important place in French cuisine.
After the Revolution the keeping of pigeons was universally permitted and in many cases pigeonniers were then incorporated into all kinds of architecture, whether over gatehouses, in courtyards, lofts, buttressing the village walls, or even in the roofs of domestic dwellings.
More noticeable, however, are the stand-alone pigeonniers like the one you can see in my painting of Armand Fallieres.
IMPORTANT NOTE: ALL PRICES INCLUDE DELIVERY TO YOUR ADDRESS (PACKING, POSTAGE AND INSURANCE)
