26 June 2026

I've been thinking back today to our visit on the France trip this month to Mérindol - the village in the Luberon where some of my ancestors (on my father's side) came from.

Earliest records place people with my father's name in Piedmont, Northern Italy, where they were adherents of an early Protestant movement, the Waldensians or Vaudois.

Many migrated from there to the Luberon (not that far, after all), to settle here in Mérindol and other villages, where they farmed, helping to repopulate and revitalise the region after the plague. 

That is, until the terrible event of 1545, the Mérindol Massacre. On the orders of Francis I of France (the Arrêt de Mérindol), the Vaudois of Provence were to be punished for heresy. 

Papal and Provencal soldiers decimated Mérindol and Cabrières, and devastated surrounding villages. Thousands of Vaudois were brutally killed; captured survivors were sent to forced labour on French galleys.

Mérindol was quite literally burned to the ground. All that remained of it - a couple of crumbling stone walls - can be seen at the top of the rocky hill above and behind where the town was gradually rebuilt, and where we were walking around that day.

We didn't climb the hill (too steep, too hot), but if we had, we'd have seen this plaque - 'En mémoire des Vaudois de Provence morts pour leur foi'.

Some Vaudois who escaped the massacre, including some with my family name, later returned to Mérindol and its surrounds, rebuilt their homes, and were careful to practise their religion covertly. But tensions continued, fuelled by the French wars of religion, and in the 1600s there was another exodus from the south of France of what were now called Huguenots, fleeing persecution.

In 1688, one young French boy of 16 with my father's surname from the village of Saint Martin de la Brasque, not far from Mérindol, boarded a Dutch ship with fellow Huguenots from his region, after a circuitous flight, bound for the new Cape Colony.

With very little money to start with, they did what they knew how to do and had always done - they began working the land, planting vineyards.

No coincidence that the names of some of the Cape's best known wine estates have the names of villages of the Luberon within a shout of Mérindol and Saint Martin de la Brasque - Haute Cabrière (Cabrière d'Aigues), La Motte (La Motte d'Aigues).

Considering the other (German) half of my ancestry (which I wrote about here), and the sprinkling of Scottish and English migrants thrown into the mix ... I'd say that leaving, uprooting, moving and starting over is in my DNA. 

Add to that an upbringing as a diplomat's kid, and it's no wonder that I have a complicated and emotionally conflicted relationship with the idea of 'home' (as I wrote about here).

And perhaps also a slight obsession in later life with planting things.