Olier Mordrel - Early Life

Early Life

The son of a Corsican woman who had married General Joseph Mordrelle (died in 1942), Olier Mordrel was born in Paris and spent most of his childhood there (paradoxically, the place where he also learned Breton). After studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, he became an architect in Quimper for ten years.

He joined Breiz Atao in 1919, and became president of Unvaniez Yaouankiz Vreiz ("Youth Union of Brittany") in 1922. Together with Roparz Hemon, he created the literary magazine Gwalarn (1925), and was included in the Breton delegation to the First Pan-Celtic Congress in Dublin (alongside François Jaffrennou, Morvan Marchal, and Yves Le Drézen). Subsequently, Mordrel became co-president of the Breton Autonomist Party (Parti Autonomiste Breton, or PAB), and then its secretary for propaganda. During the same year, he started mixing his political and aesthetical ideals, adapting Art Deco to Breton themes, and aligning himself with the Breton art movement Seiz Breur.

In 1932, he created the Breton National Party (PNB), a nationalist and separatist Breton movement that would be outlawed by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier in October 1939, for its connections with Nazi Germany. In an article he contributed to the December 11, 1932 Breiz Atao, Mordrel launched an anti-semitic attack, one aiming to add National-socialist rhetoric to his discourse against French centralism: "Jacobin rime avec Youppin" - translatable as "Jacobin rhymes with Yid". The same year, he conceived the Strollad Ar Gelted Adsavet (SAGA, Party of Risen Celts) and its Nazi-like platform - which included Bretons in the Nordic "master race".

Mordrel also launched Stur, a magazine which displayed the swastika in its title, and the 1936 Peuples et Frontières (initially titled Bulletin des minorités nationales de France), which served as the voice for separatist minority ethnic groups throughout Europe. A noted contributor was the Alsatian Hermann Bickler, who later became a Gestapo commander. On December 14, 1938, Mordrel and François Debeauvais were each sentenced to a one-year suspended imprisonment for "attack on the nation's unity".