ABSTRACT
During the war, and over the decades following it, shifting political circumstances in France, an economic and social transformation of equally seismic impact, and new currents of French, European and global integration engendered new contexts for the assertion of Breton cultural particularity. Analysis of Brittany’s contemporary evolution lies outside the main temporal and thematic parameters of this book. 1 What can be said more provisionally though, by way of closing, is that notions of bretonnitude continued over that span of time to inspire political (and sometimes militant) claims, and also to help broker significant regional change. In addition to bringing foreign occupation and significant population displacement to Brittany, the French defeat of 1940 brought a playing out of the internal politics of Breton autonomism that proved deeply divisive in both the near and longer term. Prominent Breton nationalist leaders in the PNB and Ar Seiz Breur, such as Olier Mordrelle and Fanch Debauvais, welcomed German occupation as an opportunity for the realization of separatist designs, mistakenly viewing the occupier as sympathetic to the eventual prospect of an independent Breton nationhood. The genesis of the collaborationist Vichy Regime quickly subordinated Breton national aspirations to the larger end of Franco-German cooperation. 2 As hostile to such ambitions as its predecessor, the new French state administration nevertheless provided active encouragement to Breton regional and cultural identifications. The century-old conservative valorization of the peasant and peasant village as the backbone of French social and moral order became under the new regime an ethic of state, and a means of (at least rhetorically) renouncing the “cosmopolitan” tendencies of the republic and in particular the Popular Front. Even more than had been the case in 1937, the symbolic capital of the French countryside was now directly mobilized in official culture and ideology.
