Heritage plaque "Joseph Toussaint Avril"

Joseph-Toussaint Avril was born, as his first name indicates, on November 1, 1775, in Manosque. His father, François, was a master carpenter, and his mother was Madeleine Eymar. They lived on Rue d'Aubette. Initially a schoolboy in Manosque, he then apprenticed in Marseille in the cloth trade. He became a draper in his hometown. At the age of 27, he married Thérèse Lieautaud, daughter of a merchant from Manosque, with whom he had eight children. In 1808, the family moved into a house on Rue des Marchands.
Alongside his professional activity - which would lead him to become president of the Commercial Court of Manosque at the end of his life - Toussaint Avril devoted himself to writing in Provençal. He wrote and published in 1826 a song describing the Manosque patronal festival, Sant Brancaï, celebrated on May 12. He then turned his attention to the creation of a Provençal-French dictionary. Published in 1839 by a printer in Apt, this dictionary, which was followed by a French-Provençal vocabulary, is undoubtedly his major work.
According to his wishes, this work was intended to be useful to all Provençals, regardless of where they lived. Its specificity is that it includes a large number of terms related to the rural economy "proposing to fulfill the expectations of an agricultural population, which, until now, has not been able to be fully satisfied in any of the Provençal dictionaries published to date." In 1840, he published a collection of Provençal and French Christmas carols, La Lyre de Judée.
Toussaint Avril died on May 3, 1841, at the age of 67.
In 1892, Lazarine Nègre organized the annual banquet of the Provence region of Félibrige in Manosque. It was on this occasion, and to pay tribute to the cloth merchant, that a plaque in his memory was placed on the lintel of the house where he lived, rue des Marchands.