Controversies and Viewpoints

by Alain de Benoist

In 1929, Breiz Atao becomes a weekly publication. The following year, the PAB participates in partial elections in the second circumscription of Guingamp, receiving 400 votes. Soon, however, it undergoes its first crisis. A ‘Leftist-federalist’ tendency comprising Maurice Duhamel secedes and founds the War Zao movement.

  On 15th August, 1932, Daniel Renoux writes in l’Humanité:

  The fact that the Breton people enjoys its own ethnic particularity is beyond all discussion. Faithful to the right of peoples to shape their own destiny, the French Communist Party shall defend the claims voiced by Brittany’s popular masses. (Mr Marchais608 would qualify this declaration as ‘absolute nonsense’.)

  In 1932, the PAB reorganises itself and adopts the name of Breton National Party (PNB).

  At the end of 1933, it already includes sixty-two active sections. Membership is on the rise, and 6,000 copies of Breiz Atao are published. The party organises some of its meetings on historical sites: at Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier, where the troops of La Trémoille vanquished the Duchy’s army in 1488; and in Ballon, near Redon, where Nominoë crushed Charles the Bald’s ‘Franciens’ in 845.

  The Doctrine of Breton Nationalism

  A few months later, the PNB launches the theoretical journal Stur (‘Helm’), whose very first issue comes out in July 1934. Mordrel is in charge of its management. It is there that, in the space of a few years, the doctrine of Breton nationalism formulated in Breiz Atao finds itself deepened and ‘universalised’.

  Stur strives to achieve the synthesis of Celtic Romanticism and the ethics of old Prussia. In it, R. Glémarec (Roger Hervé) turns himself into the exegete of both Spengler and Brocéliande’s609 enchanted myth. Olier Mordrel writes:

  What we affirm is a new principle, yet one that is as old as our own race: the right of the best to sit at the Round Table and the right of the weak to be granted the protection of the strong.

  Heroism is contrasted with sheer force:

  The notion of absolute force excludes that of heroism, for the latter is nothing but the intervention of superhuman energies that arise to modify the balance of brutal forces in a most unexpected manner. The hero’s presence comes into play and upsets the predictions of the strong. Our vocation lies in countering the prejudice of quantity with our faith in quality.

  Mordrel also writes poetry:

  The motherland does not lie before our eyes,

  To be picked like a blossoming woman that yearns

  And cannot resist;

  Nowhere does she await us today,

  And one shall have to carve her way

  With one’s own fist;

  A queen on the rise

  Is she who loves all places clear;

  We all belong to those that forgotten lay,

  And how we must now struggle and fear

  Until to us she returns!

  Simultaneously, the PNB ‘lads’ target ‘Paris-Babylon’, as Breiz Atao publishes the following headline:

  Paris, a City of Light? Yes, Indeed, Inside a Red Lantern!

  Forty years later, Glenmor, the singer, would express the very same idea through his lyrics:

  So beautiful are our countryside’s maids

  Arriving to Paris in the early morn,

  Their distant Brittany none yet mourn;

  Still their child-like laughter never fades,

  Though by Paris they have been reduced

  To harlots that men have seduced.

  Being moderate regionalists, Le Cam and Yann Fouéré (born in 1910) establish a movement for the teaching of the Breton language known as Ar Brezoneg er Skol (‘The Breton language at school’). The movement has already attracted a certain audience. In June 1937, in the National Assembly, the Teachers’ Commission would choose to support its demands.

  Some cultural journals have also seen the light of day — Loeiz Herrieu’s Dihunamb, Yves Le Moal’s Breiz, Studi hag Ober, and others.

  Violent Actions

  There are, however, other Bretons who prefer rougher means and clandestine struggle.

  On the night of 7th August, 1932, an explosion shakes the city of Rennes. In front of the Hôtel de Ville, the famous monument commemorating the Act of Union that attached Brittany to France had just been blown up. Edouard Herriot was supposed to arrive on the next day from Paris to celebrate the fourth centenary of the 1532 Union Treaty. Talk about a waste of efforts.

  A few months later, the very same Herriot (a ‘symbol of radical, Southern and parliamentary France’) is delayed on his way to Nantes. The railway that his train was meant to take had been dynamited.

  A mysterious organisation calling itself the Gwenn ha Du (just like the Breton flag itself) claims responsibility for both attacks. No one would ever be arrested.

  The leader of the Gwenn ha Du is a man named Célestin Laîné. He is a member of the PNB and a long-time supporter of violent action. Olier Mordrel, who was involved in sharp disagreements with him, describes him as ‘the prophet of his own made-to-measure Celtic religion’. Soon, he establishes an embryonic Breton army, the Kadervenn (‘Combat Trench’). Military marches, target shooting, and the manufacturing of explosives ensue. Mordrel states:

  With his Kadervenn, Laîné created a new type of man among us — the soldier of the cause, devoted to the death. The obligation of absolute secrecy taught participants never to ask questions, even when something seemed bizarre to them, and exempted the leader from giving any kind of explanation. In this regard, it was quite a big thing.

  In May 1933, a secret meeting is held on the heathland of Bréhec, which overlooks the sea and is located near Saint-Quay. Five men (two PNB delegates, two representatives of the Gwenn ha Du, and a member of the Bleun-Brug) decide to coordinate their activities. They thus form a clandestine council — the Kuzul Meur. The opposition between Laîné’s ‘activists’ and the ‘politically inclined’ members of the PNB would, however, persist.

  As the war draws closer, the authorities begin to feel concerned about the activities conducted by the autonomists. On 23rd May, 1938, a law-decree proclaims that anyone ‘who undertakes to violate the integrity of the national territory’ would be prosecuted. The PNB’s main leaders, Mordrel and Debauvais, are brought before the criminal court of Rennes. Upon hearing the presiding judge remark that he was born in Paris, Mordrel responds by saying:

  I am the son of Bretons. Even if I had been born in China, I would still not be Chinese.

  A few months before war is declared, the PNB is prohibited, as is Breiz Atao.

  When the hostilities erupt, Mordrel and Debauvais make a grave and especially ambiguous decision, crossing the border and travelling to Berlin. On 12th October, 1939, they release a manifesto written in six languages where they proclaim that ‘Brittany must remain neutral in this global conflict’. This declaration would result in their being condemned to death (in absentia) by a French military tribunal on 7th May, 1940.

  Mordrel explains:

  And yet, if there was one thing which we dreaded, it was the fact that we could be passed off in France as the mere agents of a foreign power. In actual fact, what weighed on our minds was the example of Masaryk and Benes, moulding their national government in America and Paris with the help of the enemies of their official fatherland; that of Pilsudski and his Poles, unremittingly attempting to find allies to combat their oppressors; or also that of the Irish and the Scots offering king Louis of France entire regiments to fight against the English enemy. Our people had no fewer reasons and no fewer motivations than they did.

  Their hopes would soon be disappointed. Despite keeping the autonomist card handy, the Reich was reluctant to use it. Rather than a Europe with a hundred flags, what it had in mind was a Great Germany. Having tried, without great success, to rally Breton prisoners to their cause, Olier Mordrel and Debauvais return to Brittany, where, once again, they cross paths with Célestin Laîné.

  The Dramatic Years of War

  On 3rd July, 1940, a Breton National Council (CNB) gathe
rs in Pontivy. It is Debauvais who chairs its executive committee. On his part, Mordrel suggests expanding movement and ‘transcending the Breiz Atao phase’.

  At the same time, the dissolved PNB launches another weekly publication, L’heure Bretonne,610 and proceeds to reorganise itself, with Fred Moyse acting as its Secretary General and Ronan de Fréminville (i.e. writer Jean Merrien) as the journal’s editor-in-chief.

  Four months later, two moderate organisations, the Breton Association and the Regionalist Breton Union, submit to the Vichy Government a Briefing on the Legitimate Demands of the Province of Brittany.

  This reawakening of Breton activities is not met with much appreciation in the higher spheres of the French state. In 1940, Marshal Pétain mentions the ‘thousand-year-old’ French unity (despite the fact that in 940, neither Lyons and Arles, nor Cambrai and Verdun were actually French, and Dreux was but an enclave in the county of Blois). In Paris, the Germans are equally reticent. Otto Abetz,611 who married a French woman, is very hostile towards the Bretons. In Rennes, the ‘Collaboration’ movement is sponsored by a Corsican. And whereas Maurras viewed the Celts as ‘a vague group of root-gnawers and solitary carnivores’, it was Marcel Déat612 who declared:

  The more Breton the Bretons become, the more French they will be.

  In the end, PNB members would not be looked upon favourably in either Vichy or London, nor even in Paris or Berlin.

  On 14th July, 1940, the Bishop of Quimper, Monsignor Duparc, publishes a warning ‘against a Breton separation campaign organised by men that have already been condemned by French courts’.

  Tensions peak at the end of the year, when the Germans order Mordrel and Debauvais to renounce their activities. Arrested by the German police in Quimperlé, Mordrel finds himself being offered the position of Celtic language lecturer at the University of Tübingen. Forced to accept the offer, he returns to Germany.

  Mr Paul Sérant613 writes:

  This German intervention undoubtedly stemmed from the political orientation that was decided upon following the meeting between Hitler and Pétain in Montoire. (La Bretagne et la France.614 Fayard, 1971)

  Neither Célestin Laîné, the hard-line member of the PNB, nor brothers Yves and Raymond Delaporte, who represent the ‘Rightist’ tendency within the party, are not upset by Mordrel’s departure. They even make the most of his absence to trigger a ‘palace revolution’ that crystalises an already old rivalry. It is Raymond Delaporte, the former president of the Bleun-Brug and the Catholic students of Angers, who is then entrusted with running the PNB, thus bestowing upon the movement a more traditional sort of orientation.

  Morvan Marchal remarks:

  What happened in Brittany was the same as in Vichy — the Church took over the movement.

  In order to avoid a wait-and-see attitude, the PNB creates some Bagadou Stourms (‘Combat Groups’), which are then placed under the authority of Yann Goulet, the head of the party’s youth organisations.

  The ‘Bagadou’ would end up recruiting more than 500 people, who would periodically be involved in physical clashes with both French police and fascists.

  In the meantime, Breton cultural life remains active. In November 1940, linguist Roparz Hémon, who had already become the director of the Arvor weekly, takes charge of a Celtic institute known as Framm Keltiek, in which he would do a considerable amount of work (especially through his successful creation of a unified form of Breton spelling that would later impose itself within the Emsav). While Robert Le Helloco proceeds to publish Galv (‘The Appeal’), Yann Fouéré launches the La Bretagne615 daily, while also taking control of La Dépêche de Brest,616 which would soon print as many as 110,000 copies. He additionally serves as the secretary of the Breton Advisory Council, under the authority of the regional prefect, Jean Quénette, originally from the Lorraine region.

  Olier Mordrel spends five months in Germany. Having been allowed to return to Paris in May 1941 (under the condition of not establishing any contact with the PNB and ‘not entering Breton territory’), he exerts himself to have Stur published again, an endeavour he would not be granted permission for until June 1942.

  Dedicating himself henceforth to theoretical tasks, he publishes a series of essays in which he denounces the ‘myth of the Hexagon’. In contrast with the ‘soft separatism’ advocated by the ‘rump PNB’, he simultaneously adopts a resolutely European position. The Franco-Breton conflict is, in his eyes, ‘outdated’ (Stur, July–August 1942). He thus writes:

  The impassable divide dug by intolerance between the Parisian Region and the Peninsular Armorican Massif is not a natural law. … It is not a matter of “freeing” Brittany, but of asserting its presence. (Stur, autumn 1942)

  That is when blood began to flow in Brittany. On 4th September, 1943, Yann Brickler, the head of Stur and the Emsav’s pillar in Quimper, is assassinated in his office by three members of the Maquis Resistance. On the 12th of December, having celebrated Mass, sixty-six-year-old Abbé Perrot, the founder of Bleun-Brug, is shot dead by unidentified assailants while traveling on foot to an isolated chapel, five kilometres from Scrignac. ‘They had been granted permission by the radio of London’, Robert Aron would state in his Histoire de l’épuration617 (Fayard).

  The death of Abbé Perrot, considered one of the most striking figures of the Breton Movement, arouses considerable emotion. It triggers a new crisis within the PNB, one which, this time, involves a face-off between the Delaporte brothers and Célestin Laîné.

  Indeed, the latter believed that the hour of reprisal against ‘terrorists’ had come. For this purpose, he proceeded to form a new paramilitary group, the Bezen Perrot (‘Perrot Formation’), in which one encountered the former members of the Kadervenn, which had, in the meantime, been transformed into ‘Special Services’ and subsequently into a ‘Breton Army’.

  Used by the Germans, this small-sized militia would participate in the battle against the Maquis before being placed under the command of the Sicherheitsdienst.618 The result was an infernal circle of vengeance and hatred. And yet the Bezen Perrot would never comprise more than seventy people.

  Olier Mordrel writes:

  It was still too much, because this formation allowed Brittany’s enemies, who had returned to Paris in full force, to crucify the movement with the support of the Breton people.

  Following the Liberation, passions are indeed unleashed, and around a thousand summary executions are carried out in Brittany. Some people attract suspicion for having merely played the bagpipes. On their part, most former members of the PNB proceed to disperse or escape.

  Fransez Debauvais dies in Colmar in March 1944, following a prolonged illness. His brother-in-law, Jos Youénou, is shot dead by a commander of the Alsatian gendarmerie at the Struthof concentration camp. Mordrel, Goulet and Laîné are all sentenced to death in absentia, with Yves and Raymond Delaporte respectively given a ten- and twenty-year hard labour sentence. Having been acquitted by the Court of Justice of Rennes, Roparz Hémon would go on to become a professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Dublin. Laîné also moves to Ireland, as do Yann Fouéré and Yann Goulet, while others choose to leave for Italy, Spain, Brazil and Canada.

  Popular Art and Music

  In his book entitled Au village des condamnés à mort,619 Ronan Caerléon describes the case of a Breton militant named Geffroy, who remained shackled in his death row cell for a period of 618 days.

  Olier Mordrel, who decides to present himself to the Anglo-American authorities in an effort to initiate a procedure in favour of Breton nationalists, ends up incarcerated in the English prison of Cinecitta, near Rome, from which he would then escape before being transferred to Rennes. Later on, he would be located in Argentina.

  The Resistance comprised some autonomists as well, of course. Alongside the more famous figures such as Henri d’Estienne d’Orves, whose deeds would be recounted by Mr Christian Durandet in Les maquis bretons620 (France-Empire, 1973), there were also others, including Jacques Le M
aho, a member of both the PNB and the Bagadou Stourm and a man who would first shine in the French Forces of the Interior621 and the Rhine and Danube army before moving on to a militant role in the ranks of the Breton Liberation Front (FLB). The Breton association of the FFL,622 Sao Breiz, includes several hundred adherents; and yet, in 1945, of the eighty members appointed under the Resistance at the Provisory Consultative Assembly, not a single one was a Breton.

  Following the Liberation, the Breton Movement thus found itself dismantled. A new beginning was in order, one that would essentially concern the cultural domain, impacting both the Breton language and popular music.

  It was a time when authors such as Youen Olier, Alain Guel, Pér Denez, and Ronan Huon all attained fame, but also one when various brotherhoods of ‘music players’ flourished. In 1954, Brittany comprised more than a hundred Celtic Circles, as well as some 2,000 bagpipe players gathered around the Bodageg ar Sonerion (BAS) and its Ar Soner (‘The Player’) newspaper.

  Culture and Songs

  Around thirty new ‘Bretonising’ publications surface between 1946 and 1950, of which Ar Vro623 must be mentioned in first place. Lay teachers publish Skol Vreiz,624 as Al Liamm625 continues the efforts undertaken by Gwalarn. Children read Wanig ha Wenig626 and l’Appel d’Ololé,627 run by Henry Caouissin (Ololé had already been one of the newspapers that enjoyed the greatest number of readers during the war).

  1963 sees the birth of the Strollad Deskadurezh an Eil Derez (SADED), a secondary level teaching organism which offers correspondence courses and commits itself to translating the faculty’s main courses into the Breton language, while relying on a journal entitled Preder (‘Reflection’).

  In 1965, the Celtic League — an inter-Celtic organisation headquartered in Dublin and represented in Nantes by Mr Jakez Derouet — sends the United Nations a memorandum on ‘the rights of three Celtic lands to self-determination’: Brittany, Wales and Scotland.