ABSTRACT
Composer, scientist, inventor, philosopher and Rear-Admiral Jean Cras were a French musician. At the time of Jean Cras' birth, Breton identity and nationalism were approaching the crest of their modern resurgence, their roots steeped in antiquity. From 1792, the new French Republic, with its self-ordained mission civilisatrice underway, began to impose a single language, a lingua franca, literally, and not only as its conduit toward 'mutual understanding'. The Breton educated class was often bilingual, and in the Breton cities and towns, most less-than-well-educated understood french. Whenever Breton was overheard, even spoken accidentally, corporal punishment ensued. In the workplace, resistance to the French language met with widespread public humiliation and discrimination. Cras' Breton library discloses not only his close attachment to the great classics of his native province, but also a close personal identification with their authors, many of whom had also suffered the vicissitudes of social and cultural alienation.
