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Bernard Le Nail's contribution to the last International Celtic Congress held July 23-28th at Tremough in Penryn, Cornwall.
It is a great pleasure for me to be here in Cornwall once again after having already taken part to two other previous congresses, one in Saint Austell (1975) and the other in Bude (2000). I have kept an excellent remembrance of both congresses and I also came to Cornwall with my family for short holidays in Spring some eight years ago. We Bretons feel very close to our Cornish cousins and, if they allow me, we even feel almost at home in Cornwall.
I wish to thank very heartfully the members of the Cornish branch for their wonderful welcome and their perfect organization. I know how difficult is the situation of the Cornish national movement and that gives them still a greater merit for organizing so well this congress.
I also wish to render homage to the memory of a Cornishman who departed five years ago : Richard Jenkin, who played such an important role in the life ot the Celtic congress and who was one of the great Celtic leaders of his generation. I remember how he impressed me when I saw him for the first time at Nantes in 1974 when I attended a Celtic congress for the first time. I met him later in many other congresses and I saw the amazing work he was doing with his wife Ann for Cornwall and for the Celtic nations.
I have to apologize for my poor English and I really hope that you will not find me too boring because of that. I know that you are educated people and that you will show great patience... Thank you so much in advance !
I must say at the beginning of this contribution that I felt a little puzzled by the theme of this congress. I don't know what did the organizers mean when they spoke of the “world of arts”. Since there has been previous congresses dealing with arts like music and literature and, last year, in Brittany, with visual arts, I have thought that we were not supposed to speak abundantly about fine arts, nor literature. In spite of the fact that we are in Cornwall and also in spite of the fact that there has never been so much talk as at the moment about young wizards and witches with the publication ot Mrs Rowling's last Harry Poter novel, I suppose that the organizers didn't mean “black arts”. It may have been a good idea to attract attention upon the present congress but, unfortunately, there has already been in the past a Celtic congress which had for theme “witchcraft in the Celtic countries”. It was in Scotland many years ago, if I am right....
Another interesting theme would be culinary art and then the Breton speaker could tell you everything about “beurre blanc sauce”, “crêpes dentelle”, “thon au naturel” and “craquelins”, Breton wines and even Breton whisky, but it is such a wide issue that it will require another complete Celtic congress to be dealt with in a satisfactory manner.
Let us be serious. We are supposed to speak about the contribution of arts, science and industry by our diasporas and, then, it seems to me that the first thing to do is to give you a few figures and facts about the Breton diaspora, because it appears to me to be quite different from the other Celtic diasporas.
As you well know, Brittany is the same size as Belgium or Netherlands - 34 000 km2 - that is smaller than Ireland or Scotland, a bit larger than Wales and much bigger than Cornwall or Mannin, but Brittany has been more privileged by nature and most of its territory has been cultivated for centuries and it has been able to support a large enough population and has not known great famines as other Celtic nations. I don't pretend that the bulk of the Breton people have always been properly fed and that there has not been poverty but it can really not be compared with the situation in past centuries in Scotland and specially in Ireland.
Archaeologists estimate that there were about 150 000 to 200 000 inhabitants in Armorica at the end of the Roman Empire when the Britons started to cross the Channel and to establish themselves in what was to be known then as Britannia Minor - Little Britain - Brittany. At the end of the 15th century, when Brittany was conquered by the French army and forcibly united with France, it is estimated that there were about 800 000 inhabitants, and at the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, we have a more solid estimation with a first census done in 1801, showing a population of 2 100 000 inhabitants. Having had a high birth rate till the 50's (I mean 1950's), about equal to the birth rate of Holland, Brittany should have reached a population of 10 to 12 million inhabitants at the present day, but suchis not the case. Our population is 4 200 000 inhabitants today because of the wars, especially First World war that is responsible for the death of more than 180 000 young men, and because of emigration. There was such a poverty and misery in the second half of the 19th century that mass emigration drove more than one million Bretons out of Brittany in about 50 years. It started again in a devastating way after the Second World War with an emigration of 30 000 to 40 000 young Bretons every year in the 50's. It has been estimated that Breton emigration from 1800 to 1960 totalled 1 600 000 persons. We are far from the terrible figures of Ireland but, nevertheless, it was a dramatic situation.
The great difference is that very few Bretons went overseas, most of them emigrated to France, where the general birth rate was already much lower. According to the research led by Grégoire Le Clech, the main historian of Breton emigration, there were only 45 000 Bretons going to the United States and 55 000 to Canada in the last two centuries. It seems to be quite nothing compared with the emigration from other Celtic nations. If we consider a special event that drew an incredible flow of migrants to the Wild West of North America - I mean the Gold Rush to California between 1849 and 1855 - the figure is not that high for the Bretons : there were about 1300 of them going to San Francisco which is not at all a great amount, and about 700 of them were sailors who had not planned to become gold diggers but who were caught by the gold fever on the spot when they came ashore in San Francisco and decided suddenly to desert their ships...
Most of the Bretons who left Brittany went to France, to Paris where they formed the bulk of the poor people (a kind of lumpenproletariat) at the end of the 19th century living in slums and dying of tuberculosis and other plagues. It is estimated that there are between 1.5 and 2 milion people with Breton ancestors living today in Paris and Ile de France. Many others went to French harbours as La Rochelle, Le Havre, Rochefort, Calais, Boulogne, Dunkerque, Bordeaux, Toulon, Marseille and others. It is still impressive to look at phone directories inthose cities and to see all the Breton names. In La Rochelle, it is estimated that about 15 % of the present population has a Breton origin, and in Le Havre, it is about 30%. In Le Havre before the Last World War the “Quartier Saint François”, surrounded by docks, was like a Breton island in the heart of the harbour with many Breton speakers and a parish church where Breton language was widely use for cathechism, confessions and preaching...
Other Bretons were employed as manual and badly paid workers to dig trenches and tunnels of the subway in Paris or to build the French railways. Others went to work in mines and steel-works in the North and the East of France. Many girls went to work as servants in wealthy French families...
No wonder then if most of those people didn't bring a great contribution to “the arts, science and industry” at first. Most of them were still illiterate and led a terrible and sad life, at least during the first generation. Later on, France imported cheap labour from foreign countries who took little by little the place of the Bretons : Poles, Italians, Portuguese and North Africans.
There has also been a brain drain and many bright young Bretons have gone to Paris to do higher studies and have played a role in the life of France and of the French Empire. Amongst them there have been famous writers, musicians, architects as well as scientists, physicians, engineers and businessmen. I am not going to enumerate them - that would be really boring for everybody and there are many dictionaries and encyclopædias as well as internet sites that could do the job much better than I could do, but I shall try to put the focus on some of them who seem to me of special interest and that may surprise you.
In the field of arts I shall mention three Breton writers : Chateaubriand, Jules Verne and La Villemarqué or Kervarker. In the field of music I shall mention Jacques Collebaud better known as Jacquetto di Mantua who spent most of his life in Italy. In the field of architecture, you will hear about Juan Guas, who is well known in Spain. Since I have also to deal with science and industry I shall tell you about Pierre Bouguer who went to Peru, about Laennec, who invented the stethoscope, about Fulgence Bienvenue the Breton who built the Métro in Paris, about the second largest insurance company in France and about the greatest illustrated magazine for French women during almost a century. And I shall bring my lecture to a conclusion mentioning some present Breton tycoons who belong to the French entrepreneurial elite.
Chateaubriand may not be “the cup of tea” of many of us, but he is unanimously considered as the greatest writer in French Literature and he was a Breton. He was a great traveller, a diplomat and also, in a way, a politician. He was born in Saint-Malo in 1768 and he left at the age of 18 years to enter the King's army. Then the French Revolution began and in 1791 he decided to visit North America. He sailed to the United States where he was received by George Washington. He was impressed by the Indians and also visited Niagara falls. He went to England in 1793 and supported himself by translations and teaching. In London he had a relationship with an Irish girl and she bore a son who was probably his son, his only son since he had no child with his wife . (A few years ago I met one of his descendants who is a very distinguished University teacher in America).
Chateaubriand returned to Paris in 1801, worked as a free-lance journalist and began to gather success. He became first secretary to the French embassy in Rome and he was later to be ambassador to Berlin in 1821, to London in 1822 and he even served as minister of foreign affairs. He was elected in 1811 in the “Académie française” and he died in Paris in 1818. His most lasting book is probably his Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Memoirs from beyond the tomb) a captivating account of his life and his travels and also a vivid picture of the events of his time. Chateaubriand has not done much for Brittany but he often brought help to Breton expatriates and he was proud of being Breton and following his will he was buried on a small island in front of Saint-Malo. His glory has certainly contributed to enhance the prestige of Brittany among romantic followers...
Jules Verne was a very different writer. He has been considered one of the founders of modern science fiction (mainly because of his novel From the Earth to the Moon and also a few others like Clipper of the clouds) but above all he was a great writer for children and teenagers in many countries all over the world. He was born in Nantes, our former capital city and greatest town. As many others, he left Brittany at the age of 18 years to study law in Paris in order to become a sollicitor, but his real inclination was for literature and after some difficult years he won fame and his novels soon become enormously popular in many countries and many languages and they still are widely published and read. One of the most famous was Around the World in Eighty Days, first published in 1873. Many of his novels have been transposed to cinema and those films, like Michael Strogoff,20 000 Leagues under the Sea or have also had a great success.
Jules Verne is probably the French writer who has had the greatest audience of all times : one estimates that he has already had more than 500 millions readers ! He also was proud of his Breton origin and he bred much sympathy for the other Celts. At least two of his novels are located in Scotland : Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray) and Les Indes Noires (Black Indies), he sailed to the British Isles and many of the figures of his novels were Scots or Irishmen. Like Chateaubriand he also sailed to America with the Great Eastern in 1867, came ashore in New York city and visited the Niagara Falls. Jules Verne died in Amiens in 1905.
La Villemarqué or, in Breton, Kervarker, also deserves to be mentioned here even if his fame has not been at all as great as to the others. He played an important role in the Breton national awakening of the 19th century. He also belonged to the Breton diapora and was living in Paris and associated with many other young Bretons living in the French capital when he published in 1839 a book called Barzaz Breiz, poetry from Brittany, a compilation of popular songs he had collected in Breton, many of them expressing a strong national consciousness and many of them really beautiful and still popular in Brittany, even among present singers like Alan Stivell or Gilles Servat. Barzaz Breiz was published only 4 years after the first edition of Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot in Finland in 1835. Kalevala was a long epic poem compiled from old Finnish ballads, songs and incantations that were part of Finnish oral tradition.There were 27 songs in the first edition of Barzaz Breiz and 32 in the first edition of Kalevala (enlarged to 50 songs in 1849). A second edition of Barzaz Breiz appeared in 1846 with 45 songs in it and the last and definitive in 1867 with 73 songs. The songs were presented in their original Breton version with a French translation. Translations in other languages soon came : English with A Summer among Boccages and Vines (London, 1841), Ballads and songs of Brittany (London, 1865), German with Bretonisches Volkslieder aus der Bretagne (Tübingen, 1841), Polish with Piosennik Ludow (Posen/Poznan, 1842). There has been since many other editions and translations in other languages : Spanish, Italian, Rusian, etc. Barzaz Breiz has been branded as a “dangerous book” by some enemies of the Breton national spirit and it is a fact that Barzaz Breiz has been and still is a source of inspiration for many Bretons who decide to dedicate theirs lives to the Breton national fight. Many attempts have been done to run down La Villemarqué's work and reputation, but at the end they failed and this wonderful book is still there avaibable and always in print.
I may have been a bit to long dealing with writers. Then I shall keep myself to one sole musician, a Breton componer belonging to the Diaspora and still ignored by too many people in Brittany, Jiaquetto di Mantua. Jacques Collebaud was born in Vitré/Gwitreg in 1483 when Brittany still was a free and independent nation. Like many others at that time he went to Italy and his name appears for the first time in Italian archives en 1519 as a singer and musician in Modeno. He moved in 1526 to Mantua and passed under the protection of cardinal Ercole Gonzaga. He was soon to become one of the most gifted musicians of the Italian Renaissance and one of the masters of Church polyphony between Josquin des Prés and Palestrina. His music was particularly appreciated by two popes, Leo X and Clemens VII. When he died in Mantua in 1559 at the age of 76 years Jiachetto di Mantua (his name in Italy) left behind him 12 masses, 132 motets (religious anthems), 7 Magnificats and many other musical works. His complete works were published from 1971 to 1986 in the USA by the American Institute of Musicology and many of them are now played again and recorded.
In the field of architecture, one could mention many Breton architects, one of them at present being Christian de Portzamparc who has worked in America, in Japan, in Germany and in other countries but I have choosen to tell you a few words about a Breton architect of the end of the Middle Age. You will remember his name if you happen to travel to Spain.
Yann Gwaz (Jean Goas or Le Goas) or Juan Guas was born at Kastell-Paol (Saint-Pol-de-Léon) between 1430 and 1433 and his father was a stone sculptor). He went with his family to work to Flanders and then about 1450 to Spain where there were many cathedrals under construction. In 1458 Yann was working with his father and brothers in Toledo on the site of the future cathedral. Then from 1461 to 1463 he went to work to Avila. He came back to Toledo as the great master of the building site of the cathedral. In 1476, he became the great master of the royal works and was to work for the Castillan Kings end Queens during the following 20 years. He received the commission for building a new monastery at Toledo, San Juan de los Reyes, the masterpiece of gothic architecture in Spain. He also worked on the nice castle of Manzanares el Real near Madrid, on the Palacio del Infantado in Guadalajara, on the Cathedral of Gualdajara and in many other places. Juan Guas died in Toledo in 1496 and he was buried in the litle church of San Justo y Pastor where you may see the grave where his wife Marina Alvarez and their children were also buried...
We have now to come to the field of science and industry and I shall start with a physician. Every day, all over the world, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of physicians, hospital attendants and nurses who are using an instrument that was conceived by a member of the Breton diaspora : René Théophile Laennec. He was born in Quimper in 1781 and he spent most of this youth in Nantes where his uncle, Guillaume, was a respected physician himself. He left for Paris in 1800 to carry on his medical studies and he became a doctor in 1804.
He invented the stethoscope about 1819 and his regarded as the father of chest medicine. He died himself from tuberculosis at the age of 45. He died in Brittany since he decided to come back to Brittany as soon as he realized that he only had a few weeks left to live. He died in the Kerlouarnec Manor, in Ploaré, near Douarnenez. Laennec spoke Breton and was very attached to his mother language and always glad to speak Breton with his patients in Paris, many of them being soldiers injured during the Napoleonic wars.
At about the same time, a young man who was his cousin, was to become the pioneer of embryology. Louis Sébastien Trédern de Lézérec was born in Quimper in 1780. His father was a naval officier in the French Navy and he had gallantly fought during the American Revolution under admiral de Grasse and had been received a membre of the Order of Cincinnatus with a very laudatory letter by George Washington himself. He welcame the French Revolution with much enthusiasm but later on he was disgusted by the violence of the so-called “friends of the people” and he decided to leave France. He went to Russia and lived in Saint-Petersbourg with his family, doing technical research in connection with the Russian Academy of Sciences.
His young son who was a brilliant student specially interested in medicine became at the age of 18 years teacher at the Russian Naval Academy at Saint-Petesbourg. His father came back to Brittany in 1892 and was to die in Quimper in 1807, but Louis Sebastien remained in Northern Europe and in 1807 he submitted at Iena University in Germany a thesis about Ovi avium hisoriae et incubationis prodomum, that is about the chickembryo development. Doing so, he was opening the way to a new science : embryology. Karl Ernt von Baer, born in Livonia (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1792 and known today as the “father” of this new science, was much interested in that thesis in 1816-1817, when he resumed work on the chick embryo and throughout his life he wanted to pay homage to the young Breton researcher. In 1811, Louis Sébastien Trédern de Lézérec had gone to Paris and he defended there a second medical thesis, the value of which is also considered, but unfortunately his trace has been lost after that... One has recently realized that Tredern's thesis has been completely overlooked by historians of embryology during the 20th century...
Let us go now to South America and mention one of the greatest Breton scientists of the 18th century who is remembered as one of the founders of photometry, the measurement of light intensities. Pierre Bouguer was born in 1698 at Le Croisic and was a prodigy trained by his father, Jean Bouguer, in hydrography and mathematics. Upon his father's death, Pierre, at the age of 15 (!) succeded him as royal professor of hydrography. During the 1720's he made some of the earliest measurements in astronomical photometry, comparing the apparent brightness of celestial objects to that of a standard candle flame. (In 1729, he published The Optical Treatise on the Gradation of Light). In 1735 he set off as a member of the French Academy of Science on an expedition with La Condamine to measure an arc of the meridian near the equator in Peru. They spent eight years in this region, mainly around Quito. He used the results obtained to make a new determination of the Earth's shape. He gave a full account of his research in La Figure de la terre (The Shape of Earth) in 1749. Bouguer measured gravity by pendulum at different altitudes and was the first to attempt to measure the horizontale gravitational pull of mountains... Bouguer also devoted most of his life to the study of nautical problems. He wrote on naval maneuvers and navigation and, in ship design, derived a formula for calculating the metacentric radius, a measure of ship stabibility (Traité du navire, de sa construction et de ses mouvements, 1746). Pierre Bouguer died in Paris in 1758.
In the field of technology, the contribution of Breton expatriates has also been important in many aspects but I shall mention only one name :
Fulgence Bienvenüe. He was the man who built the Métro, the French “Tube”, the Underground railway system in Paris. Fulgence Bienvenue was born at Uzel in 1852 and he was the thirteenth child of a notary (local lawyer). He was a brilliant pupil at school and he was admitted in 1870 tothe famous military engineer school Polytechnique in Paris. Then he became a civil engineer and worked on building new railways lines. In 1881 he was badely injured in an accident on a working site and he lost his left arm. In 1884 he entered into the technical services ot the city of Paris and in 1891 he was put in charge of the water supply for the Paris area. The idea of creating an underground railway was then much discussed and London had already opened a first line in 1863 with steam engines and in 1890 the British opened the first electric underground railway. In the United States, the first subway line had been constructed between 1895 and 1896 in Boston. The French decided to follow and Fulgence Bienvenue received the commission of studying such a project in 1896. Work began in 1898 and the first line (10 km or 6,25 miles) was opened to passengers on July 19th 1900. Fulgence Bienvenue had devised an original cut-and-cover method still in use today in France, and progress was very rapid. When Fulgence Bienvenue retired at the age of 80 (!) in 1932, there already were 138 km of Métro lines in use in Paris. He died in 1936 and, the following year, one of the main stations of the metro was named after him “Montparnasse Bienvenüe”.
There also were great companies created by Bretons in the past and I have chosen two instances : one in the sector of insurances and another one in the field of the medias.
Maritime insurance as well as general insurance was not really developed in France before the French Revolution, especially when compared with Britain, Netherland or Germany. About 1797 - 1798, a young Breton who was born at Quimperlé in 1780 and who had left Brittany with his parents because of the Terror, Auguste de Gourcuff, was living in Hamburg and working there in maritime insurance. He came back to France in 1802 but his family was dead “broke”, so he had to work very hard in a business house in Paris and, in 1818, he went into the insurance business and developed a company that grew fast, especially in the 1840's and the 1850's under the clever management of another Breton (a cousin), Alfred de Courcy born in 1816 in Landerneau.
He was himself a very gifted organizer and the company - Assurances Générales (later Assurances Générales de France A.G.F.) became the second largest insurance company in France. Most of the administrators were Bretons and they practised mutual aid, providing jobs to other Bretons in want. People like Jean-François Le Gonidec and Jean-Marie de Penguern for instance worked once for the Assurances Générales. Alfred de Courcy was a philanthropist and he was deeply moved by the fate of dead fishermen's widows and children. He created relief funds known as “Société de Courcy” that were of great help for the families in a time when there was no social security.
In 1936 the leftist government of the Front Populaire decided to nationalize the main banks and insurance companies in France and then the Assurances Générales de France ceased to be a Breton owned company as it has been during a century and was to be State owned... (It was privatized a few years ago and bought in 1997 by the German firm Allianz after an agreement with Generali, the great Italian company).
I have choosen another example in the field of medias. The first great women magazine published in France was a Breton creation. A Breton gentleman born at Lannion in 1832, Charles-Marie Huon de Penanster, became an influent politician in the seventies and became a member of the French parliament in 1871, a senator in 1886 and he was elected mayor of Lannion in 1888. He founded a political newspaper L'Indépendance bretonne and later on, in 1880, in order to create jobs for the Bretons, he launched a magazine specially designed for women and families Le Petit Écho de la Mode (the little echo of fashion). His brilliant idea was to put in each issue a paper pattern for women clothes. There was no ready-to-wear at that time and most of the housewives were making up their own dresses at home. So they were very happy and even excited to received patterns giving them the opportunity to be fashionable. Charles-Marie Huon de Penanster died in his castle, Kergrist, near Lannion, in 1901 but his son Charles-Albert created printing works at Chatelaudren, in Brittany, and developed as well in Paris a printing and publishing company that was known as Éditions de Montsouris.
The founder's grand-son followed and received great help from another Breton : Jean des Cognets (born in Saint-Brieuc in 1888) who was very good in advertising and who gave a new momentum to the magazine. In the 1920's, Le Petit Écho de la Mode was by far the first women magazine in France and the group launched other titles like Rustica, Pierrot and others. During a long time it was a very busy and profitable group. It started to decline in the 1960's for different reasons : bad management, deep changes in society, competition from new groups, rapid technical changes. The printing works in Massy, near Paris, had to be sold. The works at Châtelaudren had to be closed. New shareholders have taken over the group that doesn't exist anymore...
The most striking fact in the field of business in the last 30 or 40 years has been the emergence of many gifted and very clever Breton businessmen in France who have conquered strong positions in many sectors. Their success stories have been related (recounted) in many business magazines and intenational newspapers and many books, mainly biographies, have bee devoted to these men. They have created thousands and thousands of new jobs for Bretons in Brittany but almost all of them have once been Breton expatriates. Édouard Leclerc, Jean-Pierre Le Roch (Intermarché) and, during a shorter time, people like Jean Cam (Rallye supermarkets and hypermarkets)) or Michel Decré (Record) have brought a real revolution in France in the field of commerce. Yves Rocher did the same in the beauty products business with franchised shops all over Europe. Louis Le Duff has become a sort of “king” in France for fast-food restaurants La Brioche Dorée (in North America “Paris Croissant”). Daniel Roulier has created a small empire in fertilizers. Marcel Braud, from Ancenis, has become the world specialist with his brand “Manitou”, for fork-lifts and other machines for handling and lifting solutions adapted for building, agriculture and industry. It has become an equal partner with Toyota for that type of machines. I also have to mention the four Guillemot brothers, from Carentoir, who have created Ubisoft and Guillemot corporation (a designer and manufacturer of interactive entertainment hardware and accessories for PC and consoles). Vincent Bolloré who has been nicknamed “the little prince of cash-flow” has an incredible flair for finance and, from an old family paper mill near Quimper, he has created a little empire, present in many fields, from trading in Africa to free daily newspapers and electric cars...
The most impressive success was François Pinault's. He started in the early 60's from a small saw-mill and has become now one of the richest men in France. He is also well known as one of the greatest art collectors in Europe. He wanted to give his collection to the French people and to create for that a great museum near Paris but, since he was not happy with the procrastination of the French administration, he decided rather to go to Venice, where he bought from Fiat the Palazzo Grassi on the the Gran Canal. If you go there you will see no French flag on the Palazzo Grassi, but a huge Breton flag, the “Gwenn ha Du” (black and white).
The well known Breton philosopher and historian Ernest Renan wrote once about his compatriots : “Le trait caractéristique de la race bretonne, à tous ses degrés, c'est l'idéalisme... Jamais race ne fut plus impropre à l'industrie, au commerce”. The most distinctive character of the Breton race (kind) is idealism. There has never been another race so unfit to industry and business”.
I hope that I have convinced you how wrong he was.
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