Brittany

BRITTANY

BRITTANY. Jutting into the ocean, far from Paris's central state, Brittany had close economic and cultural ties to its Atlantic neighbors. Until 1550, when larger and more efficient Dutch ships displaced them, Breton fleets swarmed European coastal waters, carrying salt, linen, hemp, hides, grain, and wine to distant ports. They returned with oranges, leather, and silver from Spain, with herring, cheese, and naval stores from Holland, and with cloth from England, Holland, and Flanders. Brittany remained a bustling manufacturing power until 1680: its two million inhabitants gave it a population density matched in Europe only by the urban regions of the Low Countries.

In western Brittany, war between France and England disabled the manufacture of linen, crucial to the region's economy, at the end of the seventeenth century. This region lapsed into an enduring poverty, and became a leading center of emigration to Paris in the nineteenth century. Nantes followed a different path: it prospered mightily in colonial trade, becoming the largest French slaving port, and reexporting West Indian sugar and coffee throughout Europe.

Brittany enjoyed a quasi-independent status until 1491, when the last Breton ruler, Duchess Anne (1477–1513), married Charles VIII of France (ruled 1483–1498). He died childless; she then married Louis XII (ruled 1498–1515). Their eldest daughter, Claude, married Francis I (ruled 1515–1547); Claude's son, Henry II (ruled 1547–1559) inherited the duchy, making it the personal property of subsequent kings of France.

Brittany until 1790 preserved its provincial Estates, which met annually until 1626 and biannually after 1630; a full complement of local courts, headed by the parlement at Rennes; its customary laws; and its tax system, run primarily by the Estates. These local institutions enabled the Breton nobility to maintain unusually tight control over the province: alone among early modern French peasant rebels, the Breton bonnets rouges ('red caps') in 1675 targeted noble landlords, rather than royal taxes.

Western Brittany stood out culturally because its inhabitants spoke Breton Gaelic. Many French speakers shared the views expressed by the marquis of Lavardin, lieutenant general of Brittany, in 1675: Celtic Brittany "is a rude and ferocious country, which produces inhabitants that resemble it. They poorly understand French and scarcely better reason." The Catholic Church sent out "missionaries," led by the Jesuit Julien Maunoir, to "convert" the nominally Catholic Bretons, whom it viewed as pagans. One of his hymns set forward the church's view of peasant sociability: "Listen all of you [Bretons]/The evil of your veillées,/And your savage dances/That the mad devil/Has brought here/To plunge young people/Into eternal torments . . . From these dances/Come lewd thoughts!" (The veillées, evening village gatherings, for storytelling, matchmaking, and general socializing, remained a staple of Breton life into the 1930s.)

Bretons left a visual legacy of their remarkably rich civilization in parish closes, ensembles of churches, Calvary scenes, and ossuaries. The wealth produced by linen and livestock enabled the peasant-merchants of a St-Thégonnec or a Pleyben to commission magnificent statuary, often created by the workshop of Jean Dauré (1706?–1736/1747?) of Landerneau. Artists richly decorated the interiors of the rural churches, either with imaginative paintings on ceilings and pillars, or with stunning altars, as at Lampaul-Guimiliau, whose gilded fallen angels are based on a painting by Rubens (1577–1640). These masterpieces show the European dimension of early modern Breton civilization, and offer some of the richest rewards rural France has to entice the twenty-first-century visitor.

See also Anne of Brittany ; Charles VIII (France) ; France ; Louis XII (France) ; Provincial Government.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, J. B. Classes, Estates, and Order in Early-Modern Brittany. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.

Croix, Alain. L'âge d'or de la Bretagne, 1532–1675. Rennes, France, 1993.

Tanguy, J. Histoire de la Bretagne et des pays celtique: La Bretagne province 1532–1789. Morlaix, 1986.

James B. Collins