Abstract:

The gneiss dome of the Montagne Noire (southern France) is very fertile ground for controversies. The centuries-old vineyards on the rolling hills of its sunbaked Versant Sud may have something to do with this. Nevertheless, we express our appreciation to our colleagues Jean Van Den Driessche and Pavel Pitra for continuing this tradition in a welcomed provocative fashion. In their Comment, Van Den Driessche and Pitra (2012) dispute the existence of a double dome of foliation and a median high-strain zone in the Montagne Noire; and state that we should first disprove the structural data published in Van Den Driessche and Brun (1992) and Brun and Van Den Driessche (1994) before proposing any new models. We disagree with this way of framing the debate because we actually agree with the structural data of Van Den Driessche and Brun (1992) and Brun and Van Den Driessche (1994), which largely confirmed that of Beaud (1985). The essence of the debate is not these data, but the interpretation of the data.