Franc Comtois

The Franc Comtois are the people of the Free County of Burgundy, the country around Besancon between the Jura and the Saone, its Oïl Romance vernacular bordering Bourguignon and Franco-Provencal.

Formed in 982, the county passed with the Kingdom of Arles into the Holy Roman Empire in 1032; Besancon became a free imperial city, and the German title Freigraf gave Franche-Comte, the free county, its name. Long tied to the Duchy of Burgundy under a personal union from 1405 to 1477, it was briefly seized by France on Charles the Bold's fall, passed to the Habsburgs in 1493 and ruled from Spain for nearly two centuries.

France took Besancon in 1668 and conquered the county in 1674, confirmed by the Treaties of Nijmegen in 1678. Franc-Comtois remained chiefly the speech of ordinary people, its oldest surviving text the 1525 peasant ballad Chant du Rosemont.