Désert

Also known as El Portero

1889. Having come to France as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show Tour for the Paris World Fair, Rahimé Valladier, known as the Mexican, sets off in search of the Holy Spirit, a treasure supposedly left behind by his ancestors, Protestants from the Cévennes who had fled Catholic repression following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Back on his ancestral land, and despite the new-found freedom of religion, he discovered the Cévennes people's struggle to survive: after the boom in silkworms and mining, the Cévennes became impoverished from the mid-19th century onwards. At the same time, a law imposed the French language on schools, to the detriment of Occitan. A culture was dying.