ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about a composer, scientist, inventor, philosopher and Rear-Admiral Jean Cras was a French musician. But this French musician was also Proper Breton. No comprehensive biography of Jean Cras may be complete without an overview of the composer's military career and the intertwined evolution of French domestic politics, colonial expansion and, by extension, military technology. At the time of Cras' birth in 1879, France was approaching, both domestically and internationally, the apogee of its political complexity, a period which historian Eugen Weber has qualified as an 'endless crisis'. Blatant favouritism accounts in great part for the all-too-slow advancement of Jean Cras' naval career, as he, for one, never concealed his piety. Cras' observance of one time-honoured Breton sea-faring tradition, inherent to the harbour of Lorient, must be noted: upon departure, ships fired their cannons thrice as a symbolic and affectionate salute to the homeland.
