François Cadic (1864-1929) Du Pays Vannetais À Paris Breton Oral
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© SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without François Cadic (1864-1929) Du pays vannetais à Paris Breton oral literature as evangelization Fañch Postic I first owe you an apology for not delivering this paper directly to you in English, it’s a language that I do not speak well enough. I therefore thank my colleague and friend David Hopkin for not only translating my contribution, but also for being my spokesman today. I also thank him, along with the other organizers of this event, for having invited me, despite my linguistic handicap, to participate in this workshop. I am particularly pleased because the theme, ‘European clerics and vernacular culture’, relates directly to a project led by my research laboratory, the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique [The Centre for Breton and Celtic Research] at the University of Brest, in collaboration with research institutions in francophone Canada, on the theme of priest-collectors (acronym PRECOL, for prêtres collecteurs). Workshops were held in Brest in 2007 and 2009, and the next will be held at Sudbury in Canada at the end of August. The starting point for our investigations was recognizing that on both sides of the Atlantic clerics (including nuns, indeed particularly nuns as far as Canada is concerned), played a significant part in the movement to collect popular traditions. Before asking ourselves about the reasons for this fact, the first stage of our project, which we planned would be become a permanent and collaborative worksite, consisted of making an inventory, designed to become a database. This inventory allows me to observe that at the end of the nineteenth century in what is known as the Vannetais, that is the county of Vannes, from the name of the town which is the seat of the bishopric, and which corresponds to the western (and Breton-speaking) half of the department of the Morbihan (southern Brittany), clerics were much more involved in the movement to collect oral traditions than elsewhere in the province. In fact there were about 50 Vannetais clerics involved, compared with a total of 80 clerical collectors (or just collaborators) for the whole of Brittany.This figure is all the more remarkable because, up until then, this region had hardly elicited any interest from Breton collectors. I should mention one exception, the Essay on the Antiquities of the Morbihan by canon Joseph Mahé 1 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without (1760-1831). Published in 1825, this text undoubtedly derives from researches made at the end of the eighteenth century. Strongly influenced by MacPherson’s Ossian (which Mahé cites frequently), and by the Académie Celtique, this priest, son of a sea captain from the Isle of Arz in the Gulf of Morbihan, drew up a list of megalithic sites. This led him to touch on a substantial number of beliefs and legends concerning these stones, which [he thought] might interest contemporary scholar s as potential carriers of survivals from a distant, and in particular a Celtic, past: In a treatise concerning the antiquities of a region, popular opinions should not be neglected, however ridiculous they are, because often they got back to centuries very distant from us. The tales that I have just laid out are, I admit, very puerile. However, because they are very widespread in Europe, they inspire a certain interest; and as the Bretons did not borrow them from either the Greeks, the Germans, or the Scots, and as these peoples did not come and take them from us, it follows that both us and them received them from a primitive people from whom we are descended, and that these fables were a part of the mythology of the Celts. Even if they were ‘puerile’ or ‘ridiculous’, the beliefs and popular traditions that he examined did not appear to him to pose any grave risks to religious morale. He therefore adopted an attitude of patient understanding towards a popular culture that he himself had shared in during his childhood : The villagers are obliged, like us all, to live in the flesh in the middle of the sad realities of here below; but in their imagination, they live in an ideal and fantastic world, and there they find their pleasures. It is a satisfaction that one must leave to these people who have so few others. Let them bequeath to their posterity a tradition which they themselves received from their ancestors, a tradition which for scholars is a living book in which they can read of ancient beliefs, but which for simple men, who are its depositaries, is an agreeable manner of passing the time together. Alongside these legends and beliefs, canon Mahé also depicted calendar customs, games, costumes… He was also one of the first to be interested by popular music. He made an appeal on its behalf: “that one make in each department a collection of the principle melodies that composes the repertoire of the people.” He gave the example by himself including in his book forty popular, non-religious melodies. These were only a small part of the two hundred and thirty-two songs he collected, and which are thankfully preserved 2 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without in manuscript. Canon Mahé was, in addition, a founder member and the first president of the Polymath Society of the Morbihan, a scholarly society created at Vannes in 1828 (and which is still existent today). (As far as the Vannetais region was concerned) This appeal did not elicit much response. Emile Souvestre (1806-1854), born in Morlaix but who went to school in Pontivy, did offer some narratives attributed to the Vannes region in his The Last Bretons (1836) and The Breton Hearth (1844), but these did not, in all probability, derive from any real investigations. More interesting are the ‘Studies on Brittany’ by Louis Dufilhol, from Lorient, that appeared in the Revue de Bretagne in 1833 and 1834, and which were accompanied by six songs in the breton of the vannetais, as well as their translations. This articles were reprinted and completed with four more songs the following year in his novel Guionvac’h. In a curious work published in 1840, Lower Breton Ethology , Jean-Jacques Le Maguérèze (1796-1860), originally from Baud, also provided details of a certain number of popular beliefs and practices, but for him their purpose was above all to underline the backward character of his fellow countrymen: Banish from your mind these superstitions which are the daughters of fear and ignorance… and remember that the time of the fairies has passed and we live in the nineteenth century, the century that should regenerate mankind… If you do, you will find that your days brighten, become happier and calmer; you will enter into a new era, and people will no longer say of you this hard truth, that the children of Amorica are four centuries behind in terms of civilisation. It was in opposition to this negative vision, proposed by numerous authors in this period, even Breton authors, that abbé Jean-Marie Le Joubioux (1806-1848) placed himself. Le Joubioux came, like canon Mahé, from the Ile d’Arz. He was close to Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué (1815-1895) whose Bretonist ideas he shared, and which he expressed in 1844 in a poetical work with the significant title Doue ha mem Bro (God and my country) : Since when, Bretons,/ Did the French become our masters? / Lads, will we obey/ People who have no rights/ Neither over our clothes, nor over the hair on our heads/ Nor over our language? Wicked people have thrown into the sea/ broken, the harp of Amorica,/ And they have brought another/ A harp of clay from the country of France/ O my country, put on your mourning clothes,/ For you hard times have come !/ Breton dies/ Alas, killed by the French [language]. 3 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without Secretary to the bishop, writer and composer of both sacred and profane songs, collector of Vannetais proverbs, monseigneur Le Joubioux foreshadowed the Vannetais renaissance of the 1880s, over which he exercised a considerable influence. François Cadic wrote of him: He was a Breton to his very soul, who has left us in our own language some exquisite compositions, and who was a powerful contributor towards the revival of our province. But if one adds to these texts the 1857 publication The Legends, Tales and Popular Songs of the Morbihan by doctor Alfred Fouquet (1807-1875), a work that deals with the whole department including, and indeed mostly with, the non-Breton-speaking part, the final balance sheet still looks thin, and one is forced to admit that the Vannetais was largely ignored by the great Breton collectors of the nineteenth century. This neglect was interpreted by some as a sort of disdain, for example canon Jérôme Buléon wrote in 1905 in the Morbihan Review : The Morbihan is not well known, it is even misunderstood, and because we’ve been obliged to hear ourselves described so many times as inferior to the other cantons of Brittany, we’ve come to believe it ourselves. We speak a separate dialect, and this dialect has for so long been disregarded by our brothers from Tréguier, Quimper and Léon, that they hesitate to recognize us as real Bretons, even in the recent works of Loth and Ernault. La Villemarqué barely mentioned our songs in the Barzaz-Breiz; our legends were completely ignored, and deliberately so, by Luzel and Le Braz in their voluminous collections: no one has bothered to note down our tunes, even up to the time of Bourgault-Ducoudray; the aesthetic value of our costumes has been so disparaged that, in the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-d’Auray, they had to disguise [the statue] of our fellow countryman Yves Nicolazic as a Cornouaillais peasant.