Read an Excerpt
THE PARIAHS OF YESTERDAY
Breton Migrants in Paris
By LESLIE PAGE MOCH
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5169-6
Chapter One
Contexts
Although Paris is the focus of this book, it was not the sole destination of Breton émigrés. Bretons had a history of departures abroad and a shorter but important history of moving within France, which along with Brittany itself provides a crucial context for the late-nineteenth-century mass movements to Paris.
BRETONS IN THE WORLD
The people of Brittany had long moved over ocean and sea to the western and southern hemispheres. Although Bretons represented insular provincials to Parisians during the Third Republic, international contacts and emigration have marked this region since late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Bretons from Saint-Malo and Nantes were among the medieval navigators who traded with northern Europe. The sugar and slave traders of Nantes and the coastal traders faded in the nineteenth century, but fishing remained important; men fished for cod and tuna on the high seas, for sardines off the south coast, and for local fish along the west and north coasts of Brittany, where fisherman and peasant were not entirely separate. In addition, over three-quarters of naval officers and sailors in 1890 were Breton, not counting apprentices and cabin-boys. In the words of the historian Gérard Le Bouëdec, "the sailor belongs to global society." The maritime traditions of Brittany directed emigrations from France across the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many parts of coastal Brittany were part of a maritime culture and economy that lined the Atlantic and North Sea coasts, essential to the history of Breton mobility. These areas "belonged to an outwardly turned and mobile sector of French society" that sent men abroad.
Yet the history of emigration from France is less clear or complete for the French than for other Europeans. This is partly because French emigration was neglected by historians until recently. Publications since 1985 include case studies of the French in Algeria, the United States, and Canada, as well as Annick Foucrier's study of the French in California and a history of Alsatians in the United States. In addition, the "administrative construction of the émigré reveals that the French state long discouraged emigration and was somewhat hostile to those who chose to leave for the New World. It promoted and encouraged migration to Algeria, however—without great success. Finally, in the old regime émigré were understood by the French to be criminal and immoral, "a random sweeping of rogues and sluts." This reputation persisted even though only a small proportion of émigré were criminals and France did not export prisoners on a large scale as did the British, for example.
Some Bretons went to the West Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaving via Nantes or Saint-Malo after having journeyed from a smaller town or village. Migration to the West Indies carried the possibility of quick fortunes, and to be "rich as a creole" was a byword for splendour in France. In the century after 1632 the vast majority of emigrants departing from Nantes were headed for the Caribbean. The most fortunate, like the family of Pierre Dieudonné Dessalles that left Brittany in the mid-seventeenth century, became successful sugar planters and notables while some, including Dessalles, took on a creole identity. Men like Dessalles were few among Bretons, since Breton ports turned to the Atlantic more than to the Caribbean; moreover, the Haitian revolt of 1791 severely attenuated these fortunes.
In the eighteenth century northern Brittany sent many men abroad as fishermen and sailors for the merchant marine, which depended on the market for salted cod. They quickly turned to Canada, where the small French settlement on Île Royale (now Cape Breton Island) was over one-quarter Breton in 1734; these were fishermen and navigators, but also men in the building trades, commerce, and the priesthood. In the 1750s many Malouins moved into the Acadian settlement. The northern Breton port of Saint-Malo was more oriented toward New France in Canada than toward the Mediterranean, unlike La Rochelle and Bordeaux to the south. Nonetheless, the number of French settlers in the eighteenth-century colonies was relatively small; in 1754 there were only 55,101 French inhabitants in the most populous colony, Canada.
Leslie Choquette has demonstrated that French migration to Quebec was far different from what scholars had thought, because it was not the movement of permanent settlers who arrived from their home village. Rather the Breton migration to New France was seasonal, temporary, and often part of a series of moves from villages to port towns and on to Quebec—and then back to France. Choquette and Peter Moogk concur that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the work of overseas Bretons was part of widespread French temporary and seasonal migration both within France and beyond its borders, and that the unemployed in port cities were most likely to sign on for trips to North America. Bretons figured heavily among the thirty thousand or more Old Regime French migrants who went to Quebec and most of all among those who did not stay. Many had already moved within Brittany, to Nantes or Saint-Malo. And these were men: bretonnes rarely made this trip, since the women who settled in Canada, the filles du roi who were sent to provide brides for French men, were recruited primarily from the H?ital Général of Paris. Recruitment and labor contracts were necessary to get the French to Canada, and even this movement was cut off by the British victory in the French and Indian War of 1754–63.
All of these migrations were, however, small in number. It was not until Bretons joined the well-known emigrants in French political history, the Royalist "émigré" who were enemies of the government during the revolutionary period, that they departed in large numbers. Because Brittany is bound by the sea and emigration requires no border crossing, and because of the state of revolt and civil war during the Revolution, it is difficult to know the precise volume of political emigration. Nonetheless, Donald Greer's tireless research of every département of France demonstrates that Breton départements were among those that sent many émigré abroad—the Côtes-d'Armor (over 2,500), the Finistère (2,000), Ille-et-Vilaine (2,000), the Loire-Atlantique (1,700), and the Morbihan (1,300).
In the nineteenth century Bretons were attached to the mission of the church worldwide. As James Daughton has pointed out, "a century after the Revolution had inflicted a dizzying blow to Catholicism, the Third Republic boasted an apostolic system with the recourse to recruit, train, place, and support missionary work on six continents"—and Bretons were crucial to this effort. The primary fundraising organization was the Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi, whose Annales gave the faithful a missionary's-eye view of the world; notably, 6,500 copies a year were published in the Breton language in the 1890s, a figure that only dipped slightly by the time of the Great War. Breton priests were important among the settlers in Canada, and they were also key to France's mission in nineteenth-century Africa. Orders such as the Frères de Ploëmel "assured public instruction to Senegalese youth in contact with French colonial authorities." According to a history of the order, "State employees, the brothers were nonetheless, first and foremost, missionaries of the gospel and men of the church, with an open attitude and in dialogue with Islam, the primary religion of their students." In 1836 the minister of the colonies contacted the prefect of the Morbihan, who wrote to the founder of the order, brother of the famed Catholic author Robert de Lammenais from Saint-Malo, to suggest that the order take on primary education in the colonies. Thus began the engagement of the order in the Antilles, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, St. Pierre and Miquelon, and then Senegal. Between November 1841 and 1904, 174 brothers worked in Saint-Louis and the Island of Goré—and then other coastal towns of Dakar and Rufisque—beginning with the arrival of Brother Euthyme, a thirty-year-old Breton, and Brother Heraclien, a creole from Martinique. By April 1842 the two had 110 students. Over the course of the nineteenth century the Frères de Ploëmel sent over eleven hundred priests abroad, among which Bretons were eager participants. For example, when eight teachers were called for to replace those killed by the epidemic of 1867 in Saint-Louis, four hundred Bretons volunteered.
Regular orders, missionary orders, and smaller orders of every kind recruited successfully in Brittany and sent members to China, Indochina, South and North America (including the United States), the Caribbean, South Sea Islands, and Africa. Many of the Jesuits in China were from Brittany, for example, and Bretons accounted for over half the Trappists who founded a monastery in Algeria and planted the first French vines there in the 1840s. The Soeurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny, who taught with the Frères de Ploëmel in Senegal, worked as teachers and nurses in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Among them was the nurse and administrator Marie Dédié from near Brest in the Finistère, who arranged marriages for her charges in Brazzaville; described as a "valiant little Breton" and the "little mother of the Congo," Dédié was honored by the Académie Française in about 1913 and the Legion of Honor in 1927. The Filles de la Charité de Saint-Vincent de Paul sent 245 bretonnes to Asia, Africa, and the Americas between 1850 and 1910, among them Hermine Simon-Suisse, sister of the statesman and reformer Jules Simon; born in Lorient in the Morbihan, she died in Lima, where she worked in a mental hospital between 1856 and 1880. In all an estimated twelve thousand Bretons worked abroad as missionaries for the Catholic church between 1800 and 1990. As important as these men and women were to their families, the church, and French colonial efforts, they were few in number compared with those who went to Paris.
Bretons also supplied bodies to the imperial settlements in Algeria, although considerable efforts to recruit fishermen and farmers to North Africa (not simply Algeria, but also Tunisia and Morocco) did not have great success. Like the seventeen boatloads of Parisians sent to Algeria as part of the relief of the economic and political crisis of 1848, Bretons met with a hard reality that contradicted any ideas of a tropical paradise. The founding of the Société Bretonne de Colonisation en Algérie by M. Auguste Roncière of the Cötes-d'Armor was among the efforts to attract Bretons. Roncière's idea was to recruit rural religious families, with the goal of implanting Catholicism in North Africa. The deputy from Saint-Brieuc, le Comte de Champagny, had the same idea when he declared in 1853 that "no emigrant can over greater aptitude for colonization than the Breton farmer. A Breton colony would carry to the African soil the image of the fatherland and its simple and religious ways." These schemes did not enjoy significant success, and perhaps for this reason, in the 1890s the state tried to lure settlers with free passage and one hundred francs per man (two hundred per household), plus ten francs a month for lodging. Bretons moved to the coastal towns of Annaba, Skikda, and Collo; in 1891 an entrepreneur in Concarneau opened a sardine cannery and curing facility in Skikda. Most successfully, just afterward the governor general opened three seaside villages within thirty-five kilometers of Algiers. Finally, after 1904 free lands were offered to poor French settlers who would live on and farm the land, and similar efforts were made to settle Breton fisherman.
Emigrants saw more promise in the western hemisphere, so despite government discouragement hundreds of thousands of French departed in the nineteenth century, especially to Argentina (the destination for nearly 227,000 between 1857 and 1924), the United States (nearly 492,000 between 1820 and 1924), and Canada. Others went to Mexico. The nearby sea offered an exit to adventuresome Bretons. When the handloom weavers of Brittany lost the New World market for their goods in the face of competition from Silesia, Saxony, and England and high tariffs in the early nineteenth century, one of their choices was to join the crews of whaling boats. It was by this means that Joseph Leroy from the Morbihan got to Monterey, California, in the 1830s, where he abandoned ship, along with the weaver's son Vincent Louis Saget from the Cötes-d'Armor. Bretons in early California like these two—each born near a port town—seem to have sold their labor at sea as part of a young man's way out, rather than part of a collective movement. Small groups of Bretons from the Finistère set out for Montevideo, at the mouth of the Plata River in Uruguay, including a young hat maker and a sixty-four-year-old merchant with his wife and two daughters in March 1854. The same year five men in the building trades sailed for Lima. The following year a group of fifteen men in all trades, the majority in their twenties, left for Tova Island off the coast of Argentina. A pharmacist and a propriétaire set out to do business in New York, a teacher to Boston. Destinations were scattered from New York to Patagonia for these small groups of emigrants.
This was true at least until news of the California Gold Rush reached France. Coming in 1848, at a time when the European economies were at a nineteenth-century nadir, the Gold Rush brought Europeans, men, in the main, to the West Coast of the United States, which also attracted men from China, Mexico, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. The French, by and large in their twenties and thirties, numbered over ten thousand. These included some three thousand out-of-work Parisian men and women transported in a shadowy lottery scheme—or at least those who survived the long journey around Cape Horn in seventeen sailing vessels. By 1860, when they first appeared in the U.S. federal census, nearly 8,500 French remained in the state. A good number of Bretons came along, like the cultivateur Jean Le Berre from the village of Plogonnec in the Finistère, twenty-four, who declared himself an emigrant and struck out for California in 1856.
Canada remained a privileged destination for Bretons into the twentieth century, offering an attractive alternative to the poverty of Brittany. The islands of St.-Pierre and Miquelon, just south of Newfoundland, continued to be destinations after Argentina faded as an attraction at the end of the 1880s. The French increasingly headed west, especially to Manitoba and after 1900 to Saskatchewan. The parish of Saint-Brieux was founded north of Saskatoon in Saskatchewan by Bretons in 1904, when twelve hundred seasonal fishermen and three hundred other emigrants made a forty-three-day trip from Saint-Malo to Prince Albert. But as the dire warnings to prefects in correspondence from Paris indicated, life across the Atlantic was fraught with danger and the threat of failure. Thus the sudden death of the pioneer Joseph Bélébuic after two years in St.-Brieux, Saskatchewan, for example, necessitated help for his widow and four young children (one born after his death), who could only survive if they returned in 1912 to Douarnenez, where the widow could open a maison des modes and work with her three nieces and the help of a faithful maid. Madame Bélébuic, like many Bretons, had relatives who had left for other shores; she had a brother in the colonies, a Père du St. Esprit who had officiated at her wedding in France in 1907 and was in the French colony of Gabon when she returned to France. Bretons continued to come to Canada throughout the twentieth century: during the interwar period, when the United States closed its doors almost completely, Canada was where most of the 16,200 French emigrants settled.
Thus Bretons, as part of an outward-looking, mobile sector of French society, participated in France's global activities—as seamen in early North Sea trade, as sailors and aspiring planters in the Caribbean, as settlers in what would become Canada's Maritime Provinces and prairies, and in Latin America and the United States, from coast to coast. Bretons were part of the civilizing missions of the French state and the Catholic church, as well as of fishing and whaling fleets, worldwide.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE PARIAHS OF YESTERDAY by LESLIE PAGE MOCH Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
