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Obstacles to Economic Recovery in Central Brittany

Up until recently, Central Brittany was a prosperous region, situated in the heart of Europe with its own language and distinct culture. Like many parts of rural France, however, it suffered a catastrophic economic decline after the French Revolution. This article investigates why this decline has not yet been reversed.

Historical Reasons for the Economic Decline

There is no intrinsic reason why Central Brittany should be poor – the climate is milder than most parts of Europe, there is plenty of rainfall, conditions are good for agriculture, it is on mainland Europe, and close to a coastline which has an abundance of harbours and ports. Indeed, up until 1789 it was a very prosperous, semi-autonomous region of France with a variety of well-established trading links with other parts of Europe. Exports included butter, timber, horses and cattle, linen and hemp products, slate, and quarried granite. The region was almost completely self-sufficient in terms of food, fuel, textiles, and building materials, and had a stable social structure based on small-scale farming, quite different the feudal heritage of other parts of France.

Revolution

Everything changed in the Revolution: for the rest of France the change of government may (or perhaps may not) have brought greater liberties, but as far as Central Brittany was concerned the French Revolution caused local, Breton institutions to be destroyed and, effectively, the occupation of Brittany by a foreign power. People in Central Brittany actively fought against the revolutionary army in a civil war that was only brought to an end when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power.
The system of administration imposed on Brittany during the revolution was particularly detrimental to the central region. The revolution had had many fervent supporters in the major Breton cities, and when the Revolutionaries re-drew the administrative map of the region, they set up departmental headquarters in these cities – Rennes, St-Brieuc, Quimper, Vannes, and Nantes. The centre of Brittany, was carved up, and distributed amongst them. As the revolution progressed, decision-making powers shifted from the inhabitants of Central Brittany’s small market towns into the hands of officials in the large centres of population around the coast.

Power Transferred Out of Brittany.

In the long term, it was not so much the shift of power to the coast that proved disastrous for Central Brittany – it was the fact that Breton institutions as a whole were dismantled and that Brittany came under the direct control of Paris: in particular the ancient Breton parliament in Rennes was disbanded, and the Breton church was deprived of its traditional independence. Successive regimes in Paris had little or no sympathy with the concept of a Breton-speaking community existing within the borders of France, and they could not see any economic advantages to France in allowing the small-scale, self-sufficient farming methods practiced by the majority of the Breton population to continue. Whereas, in the past, representatives from Central Brittany had been able to lobby successfully for their region in Rennes or Nantes, their voices went unheard in the new corridors of power in Paris.

Educational and Administrative Policies

From 1800 onwards, the Breton-speaking culture of Central Brittany was, therefore, under constant threat. The area had been left devastated by the civil war between forces for and against the revolution, and was then drained of men and resources to help fuel Napoleon’s disastrous military campaigns. After the fall of Napoleon, the region was never given the investment needed for re-building, mainly because it too remote, both culturally and geographically, from the centre of power in Paris. Governments came and went in rapid succession during the first half of the nineteenth century as France sought to find a new role for itself in post-revolutionary, post-Napoleonic Europe, and none of them had time to spare particular attention to a strategically unimportant area, such as Central Brittany. Consequently, even though France as a whole gradually returned to prosperity, Central Brittany slipped into a period of serious economic decline.

The response of the administration was to try to ‘Francisize’ the region. At the time it was still taken for granted by most people in the higher echelons of French society that there was something inherently superior about being French. It was therefore assumed by people in the government that if the inhabitants of Brittany could be made to speak, write and read French fluently, (and adopt French customs), then their material condition would improve, and they would be able to take their place as proper citizens of France.

Schools were selected as the primary instrument for introducing Bretons to French culture, and children were beaten, mocked, humiliated, and bullied, if they dared to speak a word of their mother tongue whilst in school. This shameful policy remained in place until quite recently, and there are still many thousands of people in Brittany who have vivid memories being punished in school because they spoke Breton.

A few Bretons did succeed in gaining a recognised French qualification that allowed them to work in the administration, but the overall effect of the policy was to reduce Breton-speakers to a sub-class in their own country, being ruled over by fluent French-speakers imported into the region from other parts of France. Largely as a result of this, the local economy collapsed, and over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, huge numbers of young Bretons migrated to Paris in search of work. In the early 1900s Paris had the largest Breton-speaking population of any city in the world.

Agricultural ‘Reforms’

Agricultural reforms associated with the Industrial Revolution came particularly late to Central Brittany. Even up until the 1960s it was common for people to use horses for ploughing and cows were still milked by hand.

For as long as farms were small and unmechanised, large numbers of people were able to live in Central Brittany; each family was almost self-sufficient and markets were laden with locally-produced crops and products. In the 1970s, however, the long term impact of schooling policies finally started to hit home: children stayed on at school after the age of fourteen, and when they finally left school, no longer thought of working on the family small-holding but, instead wanted a job with proper wages and more status. People who did want to go into farming were encouraged to go to agricultural college, to get grants and loans to redevelop their farms, to buy up neighbouring farms to make their holdings more ‘economically viable’ and to produce large amounts of produce for sale through commercial channels of distribution.

The result of all this was that over the space of a few years in the 1970s and 1980s, whole villages lost their inhabitants and tens of thousands of houses, that had been occupied for hundreds of years, were suddenly standing empty – exposed to the rigours of the Breton weather, and soon in a dangerous state of disrepair.

Following on from this, in a process that is still unfolding, local towns found themselves bereft of their purpose: most towns in Central Brittany are essentially market towns, and once the small farms disappeared, one disaster followed close on the heels of another – first animal markets closed, then local businesses, and finaly the weekly markets wound down to almost nothing.

Key Elements of the Decline

One of the striking features of this economic decline is the way in which even though it is plainly visible for everyone to see – it is rarely commented upon, and, for most of the time, local media pretend that everything is normal. However, it is still true that every town in Central Brittany has a significant number of empty shops and business premises – and that a significant number of businesses that try to start up fail within the first two years.

Even more significantly, it is still the case that the majority of young people going through the education system are channelled away from their home communities first to lycées, where they may have to board from Monday to Friday, then to college or university in Rennes or some other large city, and finally to work in a centre of population which, these days, may not even be in France (many young Bretons now travel to London or other English cities in search of work.)
The only industry that has invested significantly in Central Brittany is agriculture – but modern agricultural units create very little employment and have a negative impact on the local environment and the overall quality of life of people living in the region.
The key element in the economic decline of Central Brittany is the fact that people have left the region, and, so far, no one has succeeded in persuading them to return.

Obstacles to Recovery

It almost goes without saying that the reason why people have left the region is because they cannot find work – and, in the modern world, if there are no jobs, it is almost impossible to persuade people to move to an area. It is true that people of independent means may choose to live in a place where work is scarce – but in itself their presence does not represent a sustainable economic revival.
Thus the overriding question is why are jobs so scarce. Central Brittany is historically a prosperous region, it is well-situated geographically, its climate is mild, and its soils are fertile, and yet its towns remain empty and its villages crumbling into the ground, whilst other parts of Europe are almost bursting at the seams with millions of people cramped into houses estates in bleak, industrial areas. Why don’t people simply move to Brittany, start businesses, create wealth, and enjoy a better standard of living in an area of extraordinary natural beauty?
Obviously, there is some aspect of life in the region that is preventing this from happening, and if it was recognised, perhaps something could be done to set it right. The factors that people return to again and again when discussing this subject can be summarised as follows.

Taxation

The total average figure for taxation in France, including social charges, income tax, and VAT is estimated to be over sixty percent of what people earn. It is widely accepted that this is to high – it removes the incentive for people to start businesses and create jobs, for local people it is often just simpler to claim benefits, and other people don’t fancy all the risk and hard work involved in starting a business if, when they are successful they have to pay over most of their profits to the government, but if they fail they are expected to return to the country from which they have come.

Regulation

Even more off putting than taxation for a lot of people is the regulation. In most parts of the world, a substantial proportion survives for a substantial part of the time through impromptu economic activity and simple exchange of goods and services. In France at the present time much of this activity is outlawed and prosecuted with as much diligence as criminal activities: it is not possible, for example, to go to just turn up at the local market and sell something that you have made or grown; it is not possible to just put up a card in a newsagents window to advertise a skill that you possess; if you go to more than a set number of car-boot sales you will be prosecuted for trading without a proper licence; you are not allowed to bake cakes and sell them, unless you are certified to do so; you are not meant to charge people for cutting their hair unless you have a recognised qualification (and are registered as a hairdresser); you are not allowed to give people a massage unless you have been to massage college; and so on and so forth, the list goes on and covers almost every aspect of life.

Language

Breton was the predominant language of Central Brittany up until sixty years ago, but it was always a language that people spoke amongst themselves, on their farms and in the market place. It was never a language of the office, or of the world of work. When the traditional, rural way of life disappeared, so did the usefulness of Breton – when people were looking for work, the single most important question they had to answer was how well they spoke French.
The remarkable thing is that the same still holds true today. At a time when everything is changing in the world, employers in Central Brittany still expect their workers to speak only the classical sort of French that has been taught in French schools since the early 1800s. In this regard, no concession is made to the technological revolution that has created millions of jobs around the world, and people that come to Brittany with the most-up-date skills in website design, software development, or multi-media technology find it impossible to find work unless they also speak fluent French.
The inflexibility of the official attitude to language undoubtedly makes it difficult for Breton businesses to exploit their traditional links with the UK, and the fact that Brittany is the closest region of mainland Europe to the United States.

Fear of Change

Nationalist – or perhaps one could say racist to cast the problem in a clearer light – run through almost every aspect of European life. In the United States if opportunities to start a business existed in the state of Ohio, it would not cause outrage if people from the state of Kentucky moved to fulfil them. In Europe, on the other hand, bitter controversy is aroused if people from Poland move to the UK to work, or, basically if anyone moves anywhere.
This is no less true of Central Brittany. For some reason it seems that people in authority, especially the newspapers, are happier to see houses falling down than to see them occupied by people that they consider to be foreigners.