ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the case of Counter-Revolutionary singing in Brittany, drawing on the idea that if historians can and should use these sources, they must, in the words of Patrick Cabanel, work out the '"traceability" of traditions'. It considers a variety of sources, and in particular judicial sources, in order to sketch out the contours of the repertoire and the functions of political songs at the very moment they were being composed, during the revolutionary years. The chapter then shows that the repertoire of political songs, as it survives today, is the result of the commemorative efforts of local clerics, who shaped the songs that survived in the service of what could be called a political agenda. Finally, it explores what conditions permit oral political songs in local vernaculars to survive long periods of time. The publication of songs from the Revolutionary period was, then, part of a process of commemoration that was equally a project of counter-commemoration.
