Brittany, 1750-1950

The Invisible Nation

Sharif Gemie

Brittany presents a paradox. The region was incorporated into France in 1532, and has never known a substantial nationalist movement. Yet in recent years, signs of a sense of separation from France are growing clearer. This paradox raises some fundamental questions about the processes of nation formation. This work provides an introduction to identity politics in Brittany, analysing its special status within France – the region forms at once a western border and a potential rival centre to Paris. This second aspect of Brittany remains important today, and is exemplified by the major festivals which take place in the region every summer, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from France and indeed Europe.

Concepts of ‘Celtitude’ have both sustained and limited the region, functioning in a manner similar to the romantic Orientalism as critiqued by Edward Said. While attracting interest in the region, encouraging first ethnographers and secondly tourists, stimulating writers and artists, Celtitude has also hampered the development of an autonomous Breton identity.

Brittany became famous – or notorious – as a particularly fervent Catholic area during the nineteenth century. Hostile Republican commentators often demonstrated Brittany’s cultural backwardness by reference to its Catholic culture. This work considers Breton Catholicism, analysing the manner in which this religious culture became firmly rooted in the region’s landscape, and considers the response by the French state administration.

The marginalized nature of Breton nationalism is demonstrated by an analysis of the group Breiz Atao [Brittany Forever], which was active in the period 1920–45. While more than capable of infuriating the conservative notables and authoritarian administrators who ran the region, the group at best attracted a few thousand supporters, and eventually declined into an introverted, fascistic political culture, revived only through collaboration with the German Occupation in 1940-44. A political failure, Breiz Atao did however achieve some cultural successes. It inspired a rethinking of the quality of celtitude, expressed in modernistic, Celtic designs, and the group did popularize the argument that Brittany should be understood as a colonial subject, with its economy exploited by an imperialist French state and its identity threatened by French culture.

The book examines the topic of the Breton border, noting the current Breton obsession with the ‘real’ Brittany, variously defined by the Breton language, by an historical legacy, by Celtic characteristics, by its rural nature or by some spiritual quality. It goes on to consider that this search for a ‘real’ Brittany has functioned as a poor substitute to a truly postcolonial project to establish cultural autonomy.

Dr Sharif Gemie is Deputy Director of the Centre of Border Studies, University of Glamorgan.