Enacting Brittany

Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871–1939

Patrick Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138108837
• eBook ISBN: 9781317144069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Brittany offers an excellent example of a French region that once attracted a certain cultivated elite of travel connoisseurs but in which more popular tourism developed relatively early in the twentieth century. It is therefore a strategic choice as a case study of some of the processes associated with the emergence of mass tourism, and the effects of this kind of tourism development on local populations. Efforts to package Breton cultural difference in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a significant advance in heritage tourism, and a departure from what is commonly perceived to be a French intolerance of cultural diversity within its borders. This study explores the means by which key actors - middle class associations, businesses, governmental bodies, cultural intermediaries - pursued tourist development in the region and the effect this had on Breton cultural identification. Chapters are arranged thematically and consider the rise of rural tourism in France and the preservation, display, and enactment of Breton culture in its most visible locations: the natural landscape of Brittany, Breton dress, early heritage festivals and religious Pardons. The final chapter explores the staging of Breton culture at the Paris World's Fair of 1937 and the roots of state-sponsored mass tourism. Beyond those interested in the history of French tourism, this study will also be invaluable to historians and social scientists concerned with understanding the dynamics involved in the emergence of mass tourism, its causes and consequences in particular locales in the present as well as in the past.

Chapter 1
From Romance to Patrimony: Breton Culture and ‘Originality’ in the Nineteenth Century

It was over the nineteenth century that Brittany first became a place of unrivaled, though also imperiled, cultural originality. That imputation sat at the very heart of the English novelist and travel writer Katherine Macquoid’s 1877 narrative Through Brittany, recounting a summer voyage undertaken along the southern portion of the region in the company of her husband, whose drawings illustrated the text. Following upon the heels of her well-received and similarly titled 1874 travel narrative and guide to Normandy, Macquoid’s volume on Brittany traced a route leading westward from the city of Nantes into the departments of Morbihan, Finistère and the Côtes du Nord, permitting the author to steer well clear of the northern beaches that had become so beloved of her traveling countrymen over the preceding decades. It was, she purported, in these still “Breton” departments, as opposed to the almost fully Gallicized eastern ones of Loire Inférieure and Île-et-Vilaine, that a traveler stood the greatest chance of encountering and experiencing the “novelty and originality” that in her view defined the object of genuine travel. Where the “commonplace, self-centered traveler” in France might be fully content in pursuing the costly pleasures along the more established “Grande Route” leading southward and eastward from Paris to the Côte d’Azur, Switzerland and Italy, Brittany exercised a more powerful allure upon the “real pilgrim in search of new ideas, and of peaceful and often rugged beauty, freshness and originality, and above all constant variety and amusement”. “Every day as one travels in this fresh unspoiled country”, she wrote at the end of her introductory overview of the region, “one is charmed and amused by some beauty of nature or some strange and unusual sight or custom; and one feels that many months could be passed in Brittany before this pleasure could be exhausted”.1

Even before entering into actual description of her travel, Macquoid was marking off a domain of authentic culture and cultural experience in Brittany. As this chapter will suggest, doing so put her on a common ground with Breton social and cultural elites, who had themselves grown more inclined over the course of the nineteenth century to assert the cultural distinctiveness of their region of origin. Macquoid indeed cited the canonical nineteenth century Breton literary works as having been instrumental in the nurturing of her own fascination for Brittany, and recommended them as required reading for anyone traveling in the region and seeking to penetrate its mysteries: the romantic poetry of Auguste Brizeux, Emile Souvestre’s proto-folkloric study Les Derniers Bretons (The Last Bretons), and above all Théodore Hersault de Villemarqué’s song collection, the Barzaz Breiz. For the devotees of Breton culture, whether of native or non-native provenance, to identify with Brittany was to identify with the principle of cultural integrity itself, and to do so in the face of modern conditions seemingly hostile to the archaic, the beautiful, the spiritual and the particular.

Macquoid’s own stake in that identification became fully apparent over the course of her narrative, especially as she departed at various junctures from description of historical and religious monuments in favor of engagement with the Breton population itself, which she encountered as it gathered in local costume for market days, wedding celebrations, religious pardons and other popular fêtes. The retention of a rich “inner life” of custom and belief by the Breton population was for Macquoid the only defense for the “Breton nation” against “the influx of railways and tourists” that was already by the time of her writing beginning to effect subtle and less subtle changes in the region. Evidence of change, and the menace of cultural degradation and loss, recurred throughout Macquoid’s journey and narration: in the surprising modernity of many of the streets of the old city of Quimper, despite its location in the very heart of Brittany’s most tradition-bound region; in the presence of a modern pier and sea wall in the Bay of Audierne at the western peninsular tip of the region, which in her view sadly compromised the picturesque “wildness of the scene”; in the motley array of international travelers she encountered at the inn where she was lodging in the southern port city of Douarnenez, testament to Brittany’s emerging reputation as a destination for tourism. It was in Douarnenez, host to a burgeoning maritime industry of sardine fishing and canning, and a magnet for growing rural emigration, that Macquoid saw the clearest evidence not only that Breton costume itself was undergoing modification in modern times, but also that “many of the old usages (were) becoming obsolete”.2

The drama of possession and loss that played out in the pages of Macquoid’s and other travelers’ narrative accounts made Brittany a bellwether of the uncertainties of cultural value in modern times. This chapter will trace the changing investment in Breton cultural particularity and “originality” over the course of the nineteenth century, in order to establish historical context for the emergence of modern tourism in Brittany. As I will demonstrate, notions of bretonnitude (Breton cultural distinctiveness and identity) were the product mainly of Breton and non-Breton elites, outsiders for the most part to the popular traditions they were identifying and celebrating. The dilemmas of Breton cultural originality with which Macquoid grappled became even more acute ones over the years following her account, as the French Third Republic brought new currents of change to Brittany and to rural France more generally, and engendered new expressions of regional and national identification. If by century’s turn a discrete and purportedly distinctive Breton cultural inheritance had been consolidated, the claims upon it were multiple and conflicting ones.

Celtisme and the Romantic Vogue for Brittany, 1789–1840

The attribution of Breton cultural difference, and even remove, became fully possible only within the historical conditions introduced by the French Revolution. In advancing the claim to sovereign nationhood, and effecting the territorial and administrative reconfiguration of France, the Revolution provided impetus to the development of new identifications of nation, pays, and, later, region.3 Neither the inhabitants of Brittany themselves nor outsiders to the region had viewed it in terms of cultural particularity during the Old Regime. The continued existence in Brittany of a provincial estate or parliament, guaranteed by the 1532 treaty of union formally integrating Brittany into France, certainly accorded the region in theory a special status among the French provinces—and provided the basis for later conservative and proto-nationalist claims to precedent for Breton autonomy. But the province as such functioned neither in Brittany, nor in other parts of France, as a pole of loyalty or identification prior to 1789. Knowledge of the region beyond its borders, even within the precincts of the monarchical administration, remained highly limited, at a time when sporadic inquiries by state officials and a limited number of Enlightenment-era travel accounts were the sole means by which description of provincial conditions reached broader audiences. It was only in the aftermath of the Revolution that there emerged an intellectual and political framework within which regions of France could come to assume characteristic “personalities”, ones believed in many cases to be fundamentally different from, and even at odds with the capital.4

The Breton case was exemplary in this regard, as the events of the Revolution themselves were instrumental in effecting what became an enduring symbolic divide between Paris and Brittany. The region’s notoriety as a site of counter-revolutionary insurrection and of some of the very worst violence of the revolutionary decade persisted well into the nineteenth century, shaped principally by the memory and mythology of chouannerie. These recurrent outbreaks of popular guerilla warfare under the First Republic, Empire and early July Monarchy marked not only the most sustained current of armed popular resistance to the French state, they also did much to earn the region its enduring reputation as a last bastion of loyalty to the Old Regime. Indeed, the region was far more than any other enveloped in rival revolutionary and counter-revolutionary mythologies that developed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with these casting the region as alternately an irrational and superstitious political backwater or an heroically intransigent avatar of local popular resistance to the Jacobin state. Both tendencies found expression in Balzac’s popular 1831 novel, Les Chouans, which depicted a world of superstition and primitive recalcitrance both frightening and fascinating to its metropolitan reading public.5

The enduring hold that mythologies of Breton primitivism and resistance exercised over the course of the nineteenth century should not however obscure the new engagements between Paris and the region that arose in the aftermath of the Revolution. In line with its spatial and administrative reorganization of the country, the Revolution spurred new efforts of inquiry into the national territory and national past that made Brittany and other French regions for the first time the object of detailed study. The governments of both the Directory (1795–1799) and the Empire (1801–1815) compiled and published departmental statistiques profiling each of the newly constituted administrative territories, a project that represented the beginnings of modern state practices of information gathering vis-à-vis the citizenry and territory, and of formal historical preservation.6 As much as it was driven by new state agendas, early French antiquarianism was also often rooted in residual counter-revolutionary sentiment and/or reactionary Catholicism. Stéphane Gerson has most thoroughly analyzed the early descriptive and proto-ethnographic voyages undertaken in the French countryside in these years by traveling littérateurs, a diverse group of elite administrative and literary figures traveling in, and writing about provincial France. Across the variations in geographic focus and authorial perspective in these accounts, Gerson identifies a shared ambition to recover the bases of an order deemed to have been sundered by the revolutionary upheaval. Elaborating the geographic, historical and cultural specificity of provincial areas was, along these lines, part of a larger imaginative reintegration of the country—albeit one premised mainly upon a developing “Paris-province” binary that proved highly resilient over the course of the century. The littérateurs played a key role in helping construct the provinces as an internal other, against which an always fragile and contested French national unity could be imagined.7

This was indeed the spirit informing the first major project of inquiry and description dedicated to Brittany, undertaken by the Breton-born administrator Jacques Cambry in the region’s westernmost department of Finistère. A native of the Breton town of Lorient and governmental Commissioner of Arts and Sciences, Cambry was enlisted by the French Republic to perform a survey of property and art either damaged or confiscated in the Finistère department during the civil war of the 1790s. He ultimately moved beyond the official charge of his assignment, traveling across the department and making direct appeal to local notables throughout Finistère for aid in collecting stories, legends and popular beliefs from the peasant and artisan populations. His 1799 Voyage dans le Finistère was equal parts official inquest and travel narrative, comprising both a statistical compilation of the department’s resources and existing institutions and narrative description of the area and its population. Like other littérateurs, Cambry viewed provincial cultural difference mainly through his metropolitan preoccupations and frames of reference, resulting in a depiction of the lower Finistère in particular as a place of largely undisturbed cultural tradition, and an at-times startling primitivism.8 Steering a course between revulsion and fascination in his descriptions, Cambry set forth the parameters within which subsequent encounters with Brittany unfolded over much of the century.

The project of generating a fuller knowledge of provincial France, and of Brittany more specifically, took on greater momentum with the awakening of interest in France’s Gallic history and origins. As precursors to the Romans and the Franks, the Gauls were at the time comparatively absent from French historical consciousness and identification, nurtured as that had long been by classical texts depicting Roman victory over scattered primitive tribes. The new celtomanie (“Celtomania”) of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries announced itself first and most fully in Great Britain, where writers and travelers generated a substantial body of narrative description on the populations and landscapes of Ireland, Scotland and Wales prior to 1800. Within France, the turn to the Celtic past was driven more directly by the need to establish new historical and affective bases of national identification following the revolutionary upheaval. The rediscovery of “nos ancêtres les gaulois” (our Gallic or Celtic ancestors), as Eugen Weber has suggested, was part of a new search for foundation myths for the French nation. Greater familiarity with France’s Celtic past and its identifiable remnants within the country, as too with its new panoply of heroic figures and resonant sites, provided a thread of connection to the deeper, even primordial sources of French civilization and the French state. Where Greco-Roman historical referents proved most useful in providing institutional models for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic French state, Celtic identifications continued to carry a more emotive value in the imagining of a shared French national lineage and inheritance well into the Third Republic and even beyond it.9 The main institutional expression of the new interest in France’s Celtic origins was the Académie Celtique (1804), co-founded by Cambry and others to provide support to projects of scholarly investigation of Celtic history and cultural artifacts in various areas of the country. One of the Académie’s first projects was to distribute questionnaires to notables in each department of the country, requesting information about historical remains connected to the pre-Roman past of their respective areas. Already at this relatively early date, provincial France was being reconceived as a repository of knowledge, artifacts and sites valuable to the nation.10

Interest in Gaul and France’s Celtic cultural inheritance fostered a special solicitude for Brittany, as the region of the country bearing the most visible and enduring traces of Celtic history and culture. Cambry’s and other early descriptive accounts of Brittany characterized it as a region that had managed in large measure to remain aloof to the Latin influences that prevailed elsewhere in the country, and of course above all in the capital. Though it came later to be a matter of historical dispute, t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 From Romance to Patrimony: Breton Culture and ‘Originality’ in the Nineteenth Century
• 2 Tourism, Culture and Place in a Changing Brittany, 1860–1914
• 3 “La Bretagne, au sein de son passé”: Dilemmas of Tourist Modernity in the French Countryside
• 4 Refashioning Breton Costume
• 5 Of Pardons, Loss and Longing: Breton Religious Processions in an Age of Tourism and Cultural Change
• 6 A Tasteful Patrimony: Landscape Preservation and Tourism in Brittany
• 7 From Terre du Passé to Modern Leisure Ground? Brittany in an Age of Mass Tourism
• Epilogue: Changing Contexts of Bretonnitude, from Vichy to European Union and Globalization
• Bibliography
• Index