Since 1990, noted American journalist, war correspondent, and author T.D. Allman has lived in Lauzerte, a picturesque hilltop town in southwest France with 1,500 residents, about halfway between Bordeaux and Toulouse. The surrounding region was once called Quercy, sandwiched between the better-known Aquitaine and Languedoc. Allman’s heartfelt relationship to Lauzerte is the subject of his new book, In France Profound: The Long History of a House, a Mountain Town, and a People.

The author seeks to persuade readers that his adopted home is more than a lovely and endearing place. With some digging, he contends, one can find within Lauzerte and its environs the full unfolding of the human drama in all its infuriating ambiguity, prone to repeated foibles and failings yet balanced by recurring acts of genuine nobility. Writing in a breezy and informal style, Allman digs deep into Lauzerte’s history and that of Quercy. But he also shows how that history fits into wider geopolitical currents.

In France Profound is also highly personal. Allman continually draws parallels between past and present and offers his opinion on nearly everything, however removed from the book’s main threads. Readers will find digressions on how New York City pigeons differ from those from Lauzerte, for example, and how and why women go bald. All this makes Allman an exuberant and entertaining raconteur.

The epicenter for Allman’s wide-ranging stories is his residence — “the House,” always capitalized — located in Lauzerte’s principal square. Dating from about 1175, its previous occupants have included French and English conquerors, papists, and Protestants. While it’s difficult from his lyrical text to get a sense of what the House looks like (photos would’ve helped), Allman says that within its venerable walls, he has found “magic and madness, joy, folly, good food and good wine, along with every one of the petty vices and a fair number of the civic virtues inherent when human life is constricted to one specific space.”

Well over half of In France Profound treats the late 12th through 16th centuries in Lauzerte and beyond, beginning with the reign of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204). This is the book’s strongest and most systematic portion. Eleanor was heiress to the vast Duchy of Aquitaine, which covered the southwest quadrant of France. Through marriages to the kings of France and England, she became the “most powerful, the wealthiest, and most famous woman on Earth.” The unremitting presence of the English in Lauzerte and throughout France, one of Allman’s major peeves, took hold in no small measure due to her savvy manipulation of dynasties on both sides of the Channel.

The hidden gem in Allman’s story is the Lauzerte town charter of 1241, the work of Eleanor’s grandson Raymond VII (1197-1249), count of Toulouse, whom Allman describes as one of history’s “almost-forgotten protagonists.” The charter, itself one of history’s almost-forgotten instruments, bears similarities to the Magna Carta, executed in Runnymede a quarter-century prior. In an irony of history, that earlier document was forced on Raymond’s uncle and Eleanor’s youngest son, King John Lackland — described by Allman as a “middle-aged incompetent” who remains England’s “most detested king” — by unruly British barons unhappy with John’s efforts to squeeze additional money from them to fight his wars in France.

Many of the 51 articles of Lauzerte’s charter’s reshaped local life in the town. But Article III echoes the Anglo-American concept of due process of law. The charter also contained a no-taxation-without-representation provision and transformed the status of women from “chattels into legal persons.” Article XXVII had the effect of abolishing serfdom within the city’s boundaries, mandating that all who came to live in the town, male and female alike, “shall be free.”

Allman describes the Lauzerte charter as striking for its “modern approach — secular, nonviolent, practical, transactional, and consensual,” marking a “distinct departure from medieval norms.” But unlike the Magna Carta, considered a cornerstone of Anglo-American liberties, Lauzerte’s charter gained little historical traction. Written in Occitan, Quercy’s 13th-century language, it appears to have first been translated into French in 1906. In the time since, its forward-looking provisions for individual liberty have attracted little scholarly attention. By bringing it to a general readership, Allman makes a significant contribution to our understanding of medieval France.

Despite the promise of the 1241 charter, medieval life was arduous, rife with “civic brutality, regional butchery, religious massacre, and recurrent pandemic,” the author notes. It was also an age of seemingly unremitting tripartite warfare among popes, monarchs, and nobles. Allman enjoys skewering some of the best known among them. The famous Richard the Lionhearted, John Lackland’s older brother, for instance, was “one of history’s big losers.” And Allman returns regularly to the folly of the Christian crusades, the most conspicuous manifestation of “papally condoned violence”; to the Catholic Church’s obsession with rooting out heresy, which apparently meant adherence to any views at odds with those of the pope currently in power; and to the gory deaths which befell so many of the movers and shakers of the age.

But Allman doesn’t neglect the everyday folks who constituted most of the era’s population. His favorite is Widow Gandillonne, who, in 1291, set in motion the end to one phase of English occupation of Lauzerte, which lasted off and on from 1259 to 1390. He also provides gripping details of what was probably the town’s darkest moment. In 1562, amidst the brutal religious warfare that accompanied the arrival of Protestantism in Lauzerte, a Protestant-led attack on the town’s priests and suspected Catholic sympathizers resulted in 567 killed, some within the House.

As a loosely chronological history, In France Profound ends with the reign of Henry IV (1553-1614), king of France from 1589 to 1610. He abated decades of religious warfare through the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which established freedom of religion for all, and Allman describes him as the “founding father of the nominally Catholic but practically irreligious modern France.” The power of Paris over the rest of the nation, another Allman peeve, began to take its current form under Henry, who explained his pragmatic conversion from Protestant to Catholic with the famous quip that “Paris was worth a mass.”

After the section on Henry’s rule, the text becomes more meandering, touching only intermittently on the French Revolution, the Bonaparte era, and France’s many 19th-century upheavals. Although Allman provides an overview of how the 20th century’s two world wars affected the region, the book’s latter portions focus more on life in contemporary Lauzerte. The digressions also start coming at a faster pace, which may irritate rather than entertain certain readers. But no matter. Even the best raconteurs sometimes tell a few more tales than their audiences want or need.

Thomas H. Peebles is a retired U.S. Department of Justice attorney living in Paris. For over 20 years, he lived in a small town of 2,500 in rural western France.

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