The 19th century abounds in historical writings which in a regionalist or nationalist vein highlight an idealized Brittany. Precursors from earlier periods (the Maurist Benedictine scholars Dom Lobineau and Dom Morice, authors of Breton histories from 1707 and 1736 respectively) still inspire the early-19th-century historians with their careful source-gathering and thoroughness; an enduring source (reprinted in 1843) was also Jean-Baptiste Ogée’s Dictionnaire historique et géographique de la province de Bretagne of 1778-80, which carried a dedication “A la nation Bretonne”, addressing those readers as “Très-illustres con-citoyens”.
These forerunners merge with an antiquarian interest in the “ancient Celts”. Celtomania, the uninhibited etymological and antiquarian speculation about the origins of Gauls, Bretons and other ethnic groups vaguely classified as “Celtic”, was replaced by a new question: the place of the Celtic languages and antiquities in an Indo-European model. An Académie celtique was founded in Paris in 1805 by Jacques Cambry; its ambivalence between a new philological thoroughness and old-school Celtomania (then most prestigiously and notoriously represented by Théophile-Malo de La Tour d’Auvergne) is exemplified in the names of its two members Jean-François Le Gonidec, the great lexicographer, and Eloi Johanneau (1770–1851), friend and adept of La Tour d’Auvergne; the Académie celtique also co-opted the Parisian visitor Jacob Grimm, as yet an obscure junior scholar, into its ranks. Although it foundered after 1814 under accusations of Celtomania, it left the legacy of six volumes of Mémoires and an influential questionnaire for fieldwork on folk beliefs, popular customs and archeological remains; it inspired folklore studies and archeography well beyond Brittany.
New work on the Breton past was inspired by the periodical Le lycée armoricain in 1823; in 1830 it merged with the Revue de l’Ouest. Scholarly societies and periodicals were formed in Brittany throughout the century: the Société polymathique du Morbihan (established 1826), the Association bretonne (as re-constituted in 1843), the Société archéologique du Finistère (established 1844-45), the Revue de Bretagne et de Vendée (1857) and the Annales de Bretagne (1886).
Given the tight interconnections between literature and history-writing at the time, the appearance of Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué’s Barzaz-Breiz was important also in its historiographical repercussions. This first anthology of oral literary traditions in Breton had been compiled by a friend and collaborator of historians like Augustin Thierry, schooled at the prestigious Ecole des Chartes. It was intended to illustrate Brittany’s history from Roman times until the French Revolution and thus greatly influenced Romantic visions of the Breton past.
In the mid-century decades, dominated by the writing and activities of Aurélien de Courson and Arthur de La Borderie, a trend known as bretonnisme established itself in the national histories of Brittany, emphasizing early settlements and the ethnic origins of the population, the ethnic difference between the Bretons and the French, and Brittany’s pre-Revolution glories. The historical narrative hinges on an ethnotype of the national character. While, as such, it reflects the Romantic history-writing prevailing throughout France (e.g. in Michelet), the Breton ethnotype is deeply distinct from the French one, involving a visceral attachment to king and religion.
After 1867, the querelle du Barzaz-Breiz over the contested authenticity of that book in its three different editions (1839, 1845 and 1867) divided Breton historians and folklore scholars. In addition, a republican and liberal historiographical tradition emerged with Armand Duchatellier, Prosper Levot and René Kerviler, who challenged the Bretonist particularism of earlier Romantics.
At the close of the century, the study of the Breton past became a topic for professional, academically-trained historians: positivist, fact-based and anti-Romantic men like Marcel Planiol, Ferdinand Lot and Armand Rébillon. However, while academic historiography turned away from the Romantic idealization of the Breton past, that vision continued to exert a powerful grip on the historical imagination of regionalist and nationalist activists in the early half of the 20th century, and even later.
