The Basques of Lapurdi, Zuberoa, and Lower Navarre

Philippe Veyrin wrote Les Basques de Labourd, de Soule et de Basse Navarre: leur histoire et leurs traditions during an extraordinarily tumultuous period in French Basque history. He started the manuscript in 1941, one year into the German occupation of the Basque coast when Vichy propaganda about regionalism gave some Basques hope for a new ethnic status and a restoration of ancient rights. The director of the Basque Museum (Mus?e Basque) in Baiona urged Veyrin to "write a new book about the Basques . . . and to make a portrait of the Basques available to all those who are curious to know more about or who love the most interesting, albeit smallest, pays in France, known throughout the world for its language, traditions, and virtues," a region that "arouses intellectual interest and commands respect." As the leading institutional base for Basque ethnic identity in 1942, the Mus?e Basque was ideally placed to publish the first four hundred copies of Les Basques. The museum brought out the second edition of Les Basques in 1943, with a print run of two thousand copies that sold out almost immediately. In his foreword, Philippe Veyrin explained that he sought not so much to describe as to explain the Basques and their land and, at every turn, to link the present with the past. The CBS Press is proud and pleased to publish Veyrin's classic work, The Basques of Lapurdi, Zuberoa, and Lower Navarre: Their History and Their Traditions, in English translation for the first time.