ALBERT

Description: INTRODUCTION Uzège, or Pays d’Uzès, is the name of the area surrounding Uzès, a town in the administrative department of Gard (southeastern France). Uzès, which stands on a hill towering over the banks of the small river Alzon, approximately 20 km northeast of the department capital, Nîmes, is very ancient. The Romans settled there around the 1st century BC and, not long after, they started building a 50-km-long aqueduct intended to supply the town of Nemausus (now Nîmes) with water tapped from the nearby Eure springs (Provost 1999). By the 5th century AD, the original Roman camp had grown into a town, an important stop on the Lyon-Nîmes roadway and—Christianity in the meantime having become the established religion— a bishop’s seat. In the Middle Ages the bishop of Uzès was a powerful dignitary, and his diocese was one of the largest in southern France. Uzège was a thriving district renowned for its pottery and weaving factories (Pélaquier 2007). During the Renaissance, many Uzètiens turned to Calvinism and Uzès became the fifth-largest Huguenot town in France. The religious wars of the late 1500s caused much devastation to local churches and their archives; further destruction, both of buildings and historical records, occurred at the end of the 18th century during the French revolution (Dumaine 2008; Venturini 2006). In 1801 the French Republic and the Papacy resumed diplomatic relations after the revolutionary upheavals by stipulating a concordat under which the Uzès bishopric was suppressed; the town then dwindled into a provincial backwater, from which fate it has been rescued in the past few decades by French and foreign visitors attracted by its natural and man-made beauties and laid-back lifestyle (Susplugas 2010). The Gard department is part of the Languedoc-Roussillon region of France. According...