ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on one part of the world which has long gathered a reputation for merriment and festive excess. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French politics played an important role. The 1789 Revolution, and events which followed, helped to give Brittany an enduring image of difference, a more robust tradition of oddity and resistance to change than, say, Normandy. The riotous Bretons already constituted a conceptually ripe category then for a place in any table of social problems. It was bound to be the Bretons who were downing alcohol in a country beginning, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to problematize certain modes of drinking. Several modes of drinking now co-exist in Brittany, with features of older modes of drinking persisting alongside newer modes, or with the older structure taking on new content.
