Alan Heusaff - Youth in Brittany

Youth in Brittany

Heusaff was born in 1921 in Sant Ivi, near Rosporden, now in Kernev (Cornouaille, Department of Finistère). His family originated in nearby Toulgoat and his parents, Sébastien and Mari Heusaff, were native Breton speakers. Heusaff spoke only Breton at the time he was sent to school. (1) When Heusaff was growing up it was estimated there were well over a million native speakers of this Celtic language. In 1925 the French Minister of Education, Anatole de Monzie, made clear the Government policy: "For the linguistic unity of France, Breton must be exterminated". Now banned by law was the teaching of language, literature, history, folklore and anything interpreted as "nationalist". (2)

Arriving in a French-speaking school in these circumstances profoundly affected the young boy. His community's language was openly vilified and children were punished if caught speaking it. Nevertheless, Heusaff had a good ear for languages and eventually joined the École Normale in Kemper (Quimper, Finistère) where he trained as a primary-school teacher. He continued to be acutely aware of the state's policy on Breton. Most native speakers, under these conditions, were made illiterate in their own language by the state. Yet Breton was an old literary language with the first manuscripts in it surviving from a century earlier than such manuscripts in French. (3) To teach himself literacy in Breton, Heusaff sent for a correspondence course from Skol-Ober founded in 1932 by Marc'harid Gourlaouen (1902–1987). As it was not politic to do so openly, he found help from a native speaker who offered the use of his address as a post-restante to receive the lessons. In an interview in 2005 with the historian Daniel Leach, his widow, Bríd Heusaff commented on the effect of his school experience on his life: "I'm fairly certain that if Breton had been taught at school when Alan went there… and if there had been some respect for it, that he would never have become involved in the Breton movement at all. Because his main interest, really, was the language". (4)

In 1938, still a teenager, Heusaff joined the Parti National Breton (PNB) which sought to re-assert Breton independence. The crowns of Brittany and France had become unified by the marriage of Anne of Brittany to Charles VIII of France, as a condition following the defeat of the Breton armies at the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier in 1488. Following the death of Charles VIII in 1498, Anne was forced to marry his cousin, Louis XII of France, to ensure the French crown's continued control of Brittany. Under the Traité d'Union de la Bretagne à la France, September 18, 1532, the Breton Parliament remained in being until the French National Assembly, following the French Revolution, arbitrarily abolished it in 1790. This caused a complicated situation in Brittany as many Bretons had spearheaded the Revolution as a means of overthrowing the centralist politics of the French monarchy. (5)

Heusaff stated in 1970: "From 1938 onwards I shared the conviction that Brittany could never regain her freedom "by consent"; the French state would use all its strength to prevent that ever happening. I agreed that we should seek external support, wherever it came from, because we were too weak to attain our aims alone. Why should we not do what all free countries do when their freedom is threatened; seek alliances? By doing so we were affirming that we were already free". (6)

Heusaff joined the PNB's uniformed but unarmed Bagadoù Stourm and then gravitated to the Kadervenn group of PNB, which believed in direct action. He became convinced that only separation from France would save both the language and the cultural identity, which he believed was dependent on its survival. Like many other Breton nationalists, he was greatly influenced by the Irish example of the 1916 Easter Rising, and particularly by the account of it given in Louis Napoleon Le Roux's La vie de Patrice Pearse (1932). From the experience of their fellow Celts of Ireland during World War I, many young Bretons came to believe that if war were to break out again in Europe, then France's difficulty would be Brittany's opportunity.