Tocane Saint-Apre, a village in the Périgord department 1852-2000

How did the people of Togo experience the need to adapt the lifestyles inherited from past generations to the demands of modernity?

This is the questioning of this book, born of meetings and reflections within the association Les Amis du Patrimoine de Tocane Saint-Apre, with as a starting point a collection of testimonies of the inhabitants of the commune. They enthusiastically lent themselves to this exercise of looking back on their past, searched for documents and photos, wrote texts or participated in fascinating exchanges. Without their adherence to this project, the collection of archives would have been very dry!

It has thus turned into an exciting quest for a social but above all a human reality, the testimonies illustrating the archives or the latter compensating for the vagaries of the work of memory.

From the interweaving of all these threads, was born the picture of an adaptation, sometimes slow and painful, sometimes full of joys and dynamism, to the reality of the contemporary world.

Members of the Association Les Amis du Patrimoine de Tocane Saint-Apre and for two of them of the Société Historique et Archéologique du Périgord, the authors of this book, an editor Françoise Aristizabal and two illustrators, Eric Belle and Jean-Luc Doat are Tocanais by origin or adoption. They pooled their skills to carry out the monograph project of their association in the commune of Tocane Saint-Apre.

Their common passion for heritage has led them to collect testimonies and old documents, a rich collection complemented by archival work with the S.H.A.P. and the Departmental Archives.

But the involvement of the Tocanais has made the initial project evolve: it is therefore a collective memorial journey, supported by a polyphonic narration, which allowed an entire village to speak orally and in writing, to evoke, with lucidity and nostalgia, the evolution of a village in Ribéracois during a century and a half of its history.