A hike through the Cévennes with Robert Louis Stevenson

DThe poet Robert Louis Stevenson probably never dreamed that a hiking trail would one day be named after him. And the fact that he would receive this honor not in the Highlands of his Scottish homeland, but in the Cévennes would probably have seemed completely absurd to him. But this is how it happened: now a Stevenson path leads through the southeasternmost tip of the Massif Central, through this wild highland with its domed plateaus and dense forests, with its rocks and gorges through which rivers like the Tarn and the Jonte meander. It is a world away from the world, a universe of solitude, and to this day the Lozère department, in which the Cévennes are located, is the least populated region in France.

Distraction from the beloved

This was exactly to Stevenson’s taste, who was looking for solitude and distraction in the summer of 1878, because his lover Fanny Osborne had just returned to America to live with her husband and was undecided whether she wanted to divorce him and marry Stevenson – which she did for two years later finally did. He was also interested in the rebellion that the Protestant camisards in the Cévennes had waged against the crown between 1702 and 1715, a little-known episode in French history, the name of the insurgents being derived from “camisa”, the Occitan word for simple shirt they wore in battle. As the grandson of a Presbyterian pastor, he was impressed by the religious fervor, truthfulness and uncompromising nature of the Camisards and wanted to trace their daring at the sites of ancient events.

In August 1878, Stevenson traveled to the town of Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille north of the Cévennes, spent a month among the villagers, bought a donkey, which he named Modestine, and set off on August 22nd. Twelve days later he arrived in Saint-Jean-du-Gard, 190 kilometers further south. To cover such a distance in such a short time is remarkable, especially since he had to deal with an extremely stubborn donkey who could only be persuaded to go along with the ups and downs of the hill country hike with the help of a cane and later a spiked stick. And he also wrote his diary, which was to appear the following year with more than a hundred pages under the title “Travel with a Donkey in the Cevennes”.

In Monastier people were still surprised about the Scot. Not only about the fact that he voluntarily stayed here for so long, but above all about the fact that he wanted to cross the Cévennes: “A traveler of my kind had never been heard of in this area before,” Stevenson wrote in his diary. That has changed radically in the meantime. Today the Cevennes, which were declared a national park in 1970 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011, are one of the most popular hiking areas in France – and one of the long-distance hiking trails, the Grande Randonnée No. 70, bears the name of the Scottish poet.