The Campagne St Lazare gets its name from the patron of lepers. From the 11th to the 13th century, it was actually a "lazaret," a place to treat leprosy, a disease introduced to France through the Crusades...

From lepers to lavender
A countryside teeming with history.

At the time, lepers were considered to be the walking dead. After a mass was performed in their honour, they were led in a procession to an isolated, closed building that had a chapel devoted to Saint Lazare or Saint Mary Magdalene. Only one window opened to the outside to allow food to pass inside.
Constructed far away from the village along a route of passage - so that passersby could leave their alms - and near a river or a spring, these places were thus called "houses of Lazare." Over time, they became "maisons des ladres" (lazre -> lazdre -> ladre) then "maladre " or" maladrière" and, in Provençal, "malautière".

From "Malautière" to "Battanoux"

The "Malautière" of Forcalquier appears in texts from 1126. In 1274, a priest or canon from the cathedral of Forcalquier was affiliated with it and was called the "leper collector."
At the end of the 13th century, after being defeated in the Crusades, there were fewer pilgrimages to the Holy Land and the disease waned. The St Lazare hospital was still mentioned in 1350, but slowly the traces of leprosy in Saint Lazare disappeared.
In the 15th century, most of the leper houses were abandoned, left in ruins and forgotten. The only ones that survived were those with rich endowments, especially in towns where donations could not be redirected. These revenues, most frequently made in the form of land, were assigned to the Church. This appears to be the case in Forcalquier.
In 1516, Maître Fouquet de Lavertuet was the preceptor at the St Lazare hospital in Forcalquier and owed three florins per year to his bishop from the revenues from the Maladière. In the 17th century the house was reconstructed, undoubtedly to benefit the canon, and subsequently expanded in the 17th century.
The source continued to play an important role in the Saint Lazare quarter, where the women meet to wash their laundry. In 1717, it appeared in the land registry under the name "les Battanoux," which seems to indicate people who did laundry, according to the Mistral dictionary.
In 1787, St Lazare was "albergé," meaning it was leased to Antoine and Anne Vial.

St Lazare after the Revolution

After the Revolution of 1789, at the time of the Constitution, the priests of the area giving a sermon

In the year 4 of the Republic (1796) as national goods were being sold, Honoré Gallet de Mane bought the St Lazare house and rural assets. It is even said that an underground passage joining the priory of Salagon de Mane to the Forcalquier citadel passed through the Campagne St Lazare! In the 19th century, according to the cadastral excerpts, the area belonged to the descendants of the Vials, Mary and Elisabeth, and then Marie-Thérèse. In 1880, Mathilde Auphan was the owner and sold it in 1882.