ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter would suggest Brittany and the Celtic languages, rather than the ancient Gauls, to the contemporary French public. The success of the Asterix books (Goscinny and Uderzo 1960), which portray an idealized world peopled by very conventional Gauls with characteristics inherited from the Age of Romanticism, has only marginally increased the interest of the public in these obscure periods: the concepts of ‘the Iron Age’ and of ‘protohistory’ remain completely unknown to them. French archaeological research has concentrated on the Palaeolithic and on Gallo-Roman antiquity, the latter considered to be the principal source of French culture. Historians of the medieval period have failed to consider the protohistoric substratum of the country’s occupation and it fell to F. Braudel, a modern historian, to suggest the development of a ‘long-term history’ in which the contribution of these far distant times might be taken into account.
