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| Southwest of Paimpol, pleasure boats in Concarneau, Brittany, share in the region's seafaring history. Andy Nelson – staff |
Sea-shanty festival a porthole on Brittany's mode de vie
An annual festival revives old Breton music – one aspect of the region's burgeoning cultural pride.
By Susan Sachs | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the August 16, 2007 edition
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Paimpol, France - "The wind laughs in their eyes, these men with the scent of the ocean," sings Hervé Guillemer. "They have eyes that cry waves, these men on the jetties who yearn for the past, when life was as wide as the sea."
Mr. Guillemer has a white beard, a sun-blistered face, and the broad, calloused hands of a laborer. In fact, he is a storyteller who works a burnished yellow concertina in wheezy complement to seafaring tales from his native Brittany.
His songs and poems are inspired by a sense of history and his inheritance – specifically, the 5,000 weathered postcards that his Breton grandfather sent home from all points of the compass over a lifetime of whaling and sailing.
But being Breton is not all about old sailors' songs and salt-caked memories, Guillemer insists to me later, in a stern effort to correct an outsider's thinking. "Breton culture is alive, and it's always being revised."
Apparently, it is. In an increasingly standardized France, where more people buy their bread in supermarkets than at the corner boulangerie, that dose of fierce regional pride is as refreshing as an ocean breeze – and something locals relish.
Over the past 20 years, Brittany, once derided as the unruly stepchild of France, and still considered one of its more obstinate family members, has declared its singularity proudly. An explosion of new bands has rediscovered Breton music, much of it similar to sea shanties of the British and Canadian coasts. Classes in Breton dancing and the Breton language are now common here.
At the Sea Shanty Festival earlier this month, just one of the cultural celebrations that bloom every summer weekend across Brittany, that pride was on full display. For three days, piers were crowded with men dressed as pirates, women in homely linen caps, and musicians singing sailor songs. Couples danced on docks; great circles of people stamped jigs.
Many regions of France were once, like Brittany, fiercely independent kingdoms in a Medieval patchwork, and still boast of distinct cuisines and costumes. One or two nurture the memory of languages long fallen out of use. But few embrace their difference as ferociously as Brittany, which revels in its own music, legends, and a certain swaggering pride.
These days, in fact, the revived identity is so strong that Brittany has splintered into micro-identities. Northern Brittany claims bragging rights over southern Brittany; coastal towns bicker over whose oyster beds are best.
Bretons insist they are made of different stuff than anyone else in France. And woe to those who venture to suggest that Breton culture might exist more in the realm of nostalgia than in daily life. "To be Breton is to embody the best of France," says Loïc Pinçon, a retired handyman from Tréguier, a port town west of Paimpol. It is hard to miss the sneer in his voice. "We are not a museum," he adds. "But if you're not one of us, you won't understand."
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Brittany is the broad thumb of land in northwestern France that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. It abounds with legends of sorcerers, wind spirits, and fairies from the days when English kings controlled the region. Inland from Paimpol, for example, are the remains of the dense Brocéliande forest, reputedly the stomping grounds of the Knights of the Round Table and Merlin the Magician.
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