On May 6, 2024, La Poste issues a stamp on the Academy of Floral Games of Toulouse which celebrates 700 years of poetic jousting. In the outlines of the sheet are indicated the names of prestigious Games Masters and winners. There are also the different categories of this poetry competition, the Violet, the Marigold, the Narcissus, the Carnation, the Lily, the Primrose, the Marguerite, the Orchid and the Pastel.
On November 2, 1323, in Toulouse, seven notables met in a garden to launch a call for poetic jousts which were to be held six months later, for three days. For these lovers of beautiful verse, it is a question of reconnecting with the spirit of the troubadours so present at the court of the counts of Toulouse and, while the tutelage of the King of France extends over the region, of affirming their attachment in the langue d'oc. At the beginning of May 1324, poets from the south of France and elsewhere flocked to Toulouse to compete. To celebrate the event, a piece of goldwork, a Golden Violet, is offered to the winner by the seven notables and, from 1325, by the city administrators: the Floral Games were born. Over the years, they continued, under the watchful eye of the maintainers who succeeded the founders and, from the 16th century, under the patronage of Lady Clémence, a perhaps imaginary tutelary figure, whose legacy would have made it possible to finance flowers.
The festival also has rites. The trophies – the Violet, but also the Marigold and the Rosehip – are blessed and carried in procession, a generous banquet closes the festivities. Subsequently, the Games calmed down: the ode to the beautiful lady was replaced by a hymn to the Virgin, and food expenses, considered excessive, were reduced; they nevertheless existed and, in 1694, Louis XIV increased their prestige by creating the Academy of Floral Games before the number of maintainers was increased from 36 to 40 by Louis XV. During the Revolution, although imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment (Voltaire was a major figure), the Academy disappeared, however it was reestablished by Napoleon in 1806. From then on, its competitions (in French exclusively since the 17th century, then in French and in langue d'oc from 1895) will never stop revealing or devoting the greatest poets of their time, such as Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Frédéric Mistral, Marie Noël or Léopold Sédar Senghor.
