The Vikings in Aquitaine, A missing piece of the invasions (2020), 258 pages

The Viking invasions in the West are considered to be an essentially Northern European phenomenon centred on the British Isles. However, this interpretation can only be verified after 867. Before that date, the Viking phenomenon was essentially southern.  Before 867, at least two major expeditions took place in the Mediterranean. During this period, the French region most affected was not Neustria, where Normandy was founded in 911, but the kingdom of Aquitaine between the Loire and the Pyrenees. At that time, the political life of the empire was dominated by a merciless struggle between Charles the Bald and Pepin II for the throne of Aquitaine. In this confrontation, the men of the North took up the cause of Pepin. When Pepin died in 864, the fighting in the south seemed to end. Some deduce that the Vikings have left southern France. But why would undefeated warriors leave one of the most beautiful lands in the world? Another possible interpretation is that if the fighting stopped in the south, it was because the Vikings were the masters of the country.  This interpretation is clearly supported by the texts.
The Viking presence in Aquitaine was strategic: the northerners were looking for safe access to the Mediterranean trade. The route via Gibraltar proved too dangerous, so they took control of the old tin route via Narbonne and Bordeaux, which brought tin from Brittany and Cornwall to the Mediterranean world. The conquest of Aquitaine enabled one clan to overcome the geographical obstacle, but the men of the North were confronted with a second obstacle, of a commercial nature, and it was the elimination of this commercial obstacle that would have caused the conflagration in Europe for two centuries.

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Joël Supéry proposes a renewed reading of the Viking phenomenon. Wondering why French historians never mention the invasion of Gascony in 840, Joël Supéry discovers that in 1911, while celebrating the millennium of the foundation of Normandy, Norman historians are asked to recount "the invasions". However, since the defeat of Sedan in 1870 and the loss of Alsace and Moselle, France has been swept by an anti-Germanic wave. Since the Vikings were Germanic, people turned away from them. The Third Republic wrote a Gallic and Mediterranean national narrative, turning its back on Germanic and pagan influences. By 1911, hardly any historians had been interested in the Vikings for nearly 40 years. Norman scholars turned to the historian Ferdinand Lot, who was writing a history of the invasions, but he explained that he had given up his project because a German, Walter Vögel, had written a remarkable work and that he would not do better. He invited his Norman colleagues to take up Vögel's work. Vögel noted that the Vikings who had taken Nantes in 843 were referred to as Vestfaldingi, men from Vestfold, Norway. Vögel then put forward a hypothesis, suggesting that while the Danes were ravaging the North Sea and the English Channel, the Norwegians, logically from Ireland, were ravaging the Bay of Biscay. The German concluded that there would have been Danes north of the Loire and Norwegians to the south. In 1911, Norman historians were in a hurry. They decided to focus only on the founders of Normandy, the interesting Danes north of the Loire, and to ignore the actions of the Norwegians to the south. A reading that has never been questioned since. However, it is known that Asgeir, who looted the warehouses of Rouen in 841, laid siege to Bordeaux for months in 847.  Asgeir would therefore be a worthy Dane in 841 and become a worthless Norwegian in 847.  It is because Joel Supéry has pointed out the inconsistency of this position that he is accused of denigrating "the entire profession" of historian in France, which is the usual way for researchers who have no answers to avoid discussion.

The author wrote on the same subject "Le Secret des Vikings" (2005), 'Les Vikings au coeur de nos régions' (2009), 'La Saga des Vikings, une autre histoire des invasions' (2018).