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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.
from the August 16, 2007 edition
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The region has its own Celtic language, Breton – or Brezhoneg in the vernacular – which now appears on street signs along with the French names of towns. It also has a tiny separatist movement, its own black-and-white-striped flag, and a history of hostility to state interference.
Evidence of its stubborn distinctness jumps out everywhere. Take the highways. Throughout much of France, toll roads crisscross the countryside in a vast network leading, usually, to Paris. Not in Brittany. The locals claim they are exempt from "road taxes" because of a deal worked out in 1499, when Duchess Anne de Bretagne married the French king Charles VIII.
If you want to drive to Paris, you need a map. There are no signs on Breton highways indicating the way to the capital – as if no one would really want to go there. The first sign for Paris appears when you enter Normandy, the next region over to the east.
The prickly Bretons have fascinated the rest of the French for hundreds of years.
"Brittany is an old rebel," wrote Victor Hugo in the 19th century, one of a pantheon of French literary figures who used the region as an emblem of French otherness. Hugo was no fan. He described Bretons as rustic contrarians clinging to a "dead language" and rejecting any ideas emanating from Paris. Even the invigorating ocean wind only "irritates" them, he complained.
The Bretons of the interior, the peasants, have typically been portrayed as the rubes of France, fanatically Roman Catholic and condemned by their poor inland soil to a plebeian diet of potatoes. The popular children's storybook character, Bécassine, is the ultimate caricature, a bumbling rural cook in a flapping traditional white cap.
Many Bretons still resent the old image of themselves as an obstinate people clinging to a language no one else speaks. "The people of the Brittany coast were more cosmopolitan than much of the rest of France," says Olivier Blaizot, who plays guitar for Cap Horn, one of the region's more popular sea-shanty bands. "The fishing fleets went to Newfoundland, Iceland, Canada, Mauritania and all over the world."
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Whether manifest in squabbles over Bécassine's Breton adventures or the relative merits of coastal oyster beds, it's a tangled web of legacy, lore, and fierté that can make the region snub the most admiring outsiders – even one who thought she had a certain Breton claim.
In these parts of Brittany, I quickly learn that my French in-laws are not considered real Bretons, as they and I have always assumed they were. They live in Guérande, a medieval town south of the shipbuilding center of St. Nazaire. All the street signs there are in French and Breton; the black-and-white regional flag flies from sailboats. And a family party is sometimes announced as a fest-noz, its Breton name.
But during World War II, the French Vichy regime redrew the regional boundaries within occupied France. The southern portion of historic Brittany, including Guérande, was placed in another region called Loire-Atlantique.
"It sounds like you met up with the real irredentists," said Philippe Vandunberghe, the triangle player in the group Cap Horn, when I tell him of my in-laws' newly contested roots. As a native of Dunkerque, at the northern tip of France, he's sympathetic: "I know what it feels like. I've lived in Brittany for 40 years. It's only with the passage of many years that I've been accepted."
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