ABSTRACT
“I don’t know why, but it was on that very day, looking at the Bay of Audierne, in a place called Penhors, that I saw the dawn of a new age.” Appearing near the end of his famed memoir of life growing up in the Pays Bigouden area of France’s westernmost region of Brittany during the interwar period, Pierre Jakez-Helias’ avowal was one that followed logically from the intimate detailing over the preceding pages of the slow but irreversible changes the author had seen making headway in his area of origin since the mid-twenties (see figure i.1). Remaining relatively aloof to French influences prior to this time, the inland agricultural parts of the Bigouden began thereafter to reveal many of the same embryonic modern tendencies that had already become more apparent over preceding years in other parts of Brittany: social and political diversification, greater influence of the republican school and the French language, and freer mingling of traditional and modern habits and preferences among younger, and even some older Bretons. Map of Brittany, taken from ‘Sites et Monuments de France: L'Amorique' (Touring Club de France, 1906), 75. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315579429/d235de56-d226-416f-8083-3e201acbf880/content/figi_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
