page_title: Pyreneism
section_title: Looking for pyreneism
hierarchical_section_title: Pyreneism / 20th century pyreneism / Looking for pyreneism
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Vu depuis la Grande Estibère
context_page_description: Although the term "alpinism" has become synonymous with sporting achievement, pyreneism, appearing in the 19th century, distanced itself from it by considering the physical experience of the mountains as inseparable from the aesthetic and cultural emotion.
  We cannot mention the word "pyreneism" without speaking about its inventor, the historian and geographer Henri Beraldi. Indeed, as the origin of the word alpinism goes back to 1876, we find the term pyreneism for the first time in the foreword of his Excursion biblio-pyrénéenne that introduces volume 1 of 100 years in the Pyrenees in 1898:
  The picturesque knowledge of the Pyrenees - not to be confused with the scientific knowledge - is today complete.This required centuries of efforts, traced through a series of writings forming the Pyrenees' history - one says pyreneism like one says alpinism [...]
  Contrary to what one may think, when the word "pyreneism" was launched by Henri Beraldi in his 7-volume authoritative book, it was not meant to stand opposite to the word "alpinism".
context_section_description: The idea by which there exists a pyreneist specificity has always been subjected to debate.
  In the line of Beraldi one may find typically pyreneist arguments:
  For J.C. Tournou-Bergonzat:
  The source that originally brought pyreneism to existence justified itself in a scientific exploration where usefulness superseded feelings.   But at time passed, as the knowledge on Pyrenees increased, the human overwhelmed by the soul it lends to these mountains will progressively, with an all-Lamartinian sense of poetry, animate the last stage of the land and transform it into an ecumene.   In this, he created his Pyrenees.   He measures its summits, then in turn the summits exalt beauty in Man, rapture, contemplation (see "One hundred years of mountain painting").
  Lastly the pyreneist claims for himself to be an alpinist such as Henri Beralsi, Ramond, la Pléiade prepared us to be, but also the shepherds who became guides and authentic mountain amateurs.   The historian-geographer and other pyreneists gave us a fervour, the taste for faithfulness to a mountain, a passion characteristic of the alpinistic practice, often with elegance. But after two centuries of exploration, conquest, invention, desire that everyone carries within, pyreneism has reached a natural as well as cultural apex of references that make the Pyrenees into a word: pyreneism, with its pyreneist literature, pyreneist iconography, in the natural high-ground of an occidental landscape civilisation. And from that, pyreneism and its diversity of actors can pretend to the universal.
  But the question, laid by the editor of the "Dictionnaire des Pyrénées", brought about two opposite answers.
  For Hélène Saule-Sorbé, "to go make a mountain is also to travel across its history", thus meeting with Jean and Pierre Ravier who use the expression "enter into pyreneism" or Joseph Ribas for whom "the pyreneist integrates the living and the cultural in the landscape, to his eyes a meeting place, a place of exchange".
  For Renaud de Bellefon, pyreneism is "a dumping ground devoid of meaning, because its sensitive and scientific approaches, sometimes opposed to the sport reference, come from all over" and "its invention is primarily efficient in the field of bibliophily (it creates a space for a collection)".
caption: Le Montaigu
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