Jean-Marie Deguignet - Memoirs of a Breton Peasant

English translation 2004 by Linda Asher

Originally published in French as Mmoires dun paysan bas-breton 1998 by ditions An Here.

First English-language trade paperback edition October 2012.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dguignet, Jean-Marie, 1834-1905.

[Mmoires dun paysan bas-breton. English]
Memoirs of a Breton peasant / Jean-Marie Dguignet ; translated from the French by Linda Asher.
p. cm.
First published by Seven Stories Press in 2004.
eISBN: 978-1-60980-259-2
1. Dguignet, Jean-Marie, 1834-1905. 2. PeasantsFranceBrittanyBiography. 3. PoorFranceBrittanyBiography. 4. SoldiersFranceBiography. 5. FarmersFranceBrittanyBiography. 6. Church and stateFrance. 7. Brittany (France)Rural conditions. I. Asher, Linda. II. Title.
HD1536.F8D39713 2011
305.5633092dc23

[B]
2011030657

v3.1

CONTENTS

THE STORY BEHIND THIS STORY
Bernez Rouz, editor

In the late 1970s, it became apparent that the population was growing and changing rapidly in the village of Ergu-Gaberic on the outskirts of Quimper in Brittany. New settlers had come to outnumber the native-born residents, and it seemed urgent to gather what recollections and historical records might preserve the sense and artifacts of the old rural commune. The local historical society, Arkae, set out to establish an archive for that purpose.

The easiest way to begin was to find and inventory the few existing studies on the commune or on notable figures who came from it. Researchers turned to The Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Finistre as a major avenue for these first steps into the byways of the collective memory. And there, on page 83 of a grayish, unprepossessing volume of issues from 1963, they came across an article by [historian] Louis Ogs introducing a humble bouquet of ancestral blossoms sprung from the folk soul of Breton Cornouaillefifty pages of tales and legends. Routine enough, it would seem, in that heyday of interest in regional traditions, but the writer of these tales detonated off the page: The informants made fools of the scholars in exchange for a glass of brandy, those men and women invented legends out of whole cloth. That set the tone. And Ogs went on to say that this sharply opinionated character wrote his whole life story with that same caustic vervetwenty-six notebooks of a hundred pages each.

Unbelievable! But the delight of the discovery was followed by long nights of discussion and puzzlement: where had those sulfurous manuscripts got to?

The quest led us to La revue de Paris, a literary magazine that published work by such well-known writers as Renan, Loti, Barrs, DAnnunzio. And in the issue of December 1904 there appeared an excerpt of Mmoires dun paysan bas-Breton by Jean-Marie Dguignet. The folklorist Anatole Le Braz, who prepared the text, described the author in dithyrambic terms:

It was in 1897, an evening in June.

In comes a man of about sixty years, still very lively in appearance and manner, fairly small, short-legged with hulking shoulders, the classic type of the Quimperois peasant, dressed in the local style and bearing all the external markers of such a man, except for one detail: instead of the shaven face of his fellows, he let his tow-colored beard grow freely, and it bristled his face with its abundant, untended brush. He wore wooden clogs. His clothes were worn but clean.

I saw in short order that he knew French very well, and even used it, mostly with a precision of expression that a good many bourgeois would envy.

There was a certain bitter harshness to his tone. Great was my surprise to hear a peasant of Lower Brittany speak with such casual disrespect about beliefs that may be the most profoundly rooted in the heart of the race. He saw my amazement, and, levelling upon me the clear gaze of his gray eyes hooded by a canopy of thick brows, he said:

Ah! well, you seeI am a peasant who has moved about a good deal, whereas the others stayed put.

And the excerpted Mmoires tell us that this Dguignetin turn beggar, cowherd, domestic servantlearned French on his own. As a soldier, he fought in the Crimean campaign; on furlough in Jerusalem, he lost his faith, revolted by the commercial practices around pilgrimage. Promoted to corporal, he took part in the Italian campaign for liberation. Thennothing more: La revue de Paris ceased its publication of the Mmoires.

Those one hundred-thirty pages in La revue de Paris, largely on his military campaigns, gave us a taste for this wild honey mead. We had those first clues, but the Grail itself remained to be found.

A few soundings of the familial history left us skeptical as to the continued existence of the notebooks, for no one had heard of them. Then a journalists newspaper appeal for the manuscript bore fruit: the precious writings lay sleeping in a public housing project in Quimper. Thanks to the kindness of Jean-Marie Dguignets descendants, and the diligence of the municipality of Ergu-Gaberic, forty-three notebooksnearly 4,000 pageswere photocopied.

The saga of Jean-Marie Dguignet could now be made whole. He left the army after the Italian wars; he looked in vain for work in Brittany; he re-enlisted. His new military career took him to Algeria and then to Mexico to help shore up the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian. Discharged in 1868, he came home to work as a peasant farmer, insurance agent, tobacco-seller; his republican, anticlerical views got him hounded by the church party. He spent his last years destitute in various Quimper slums. There, in the 1890s, he wrote his story, his account of his ninth-class peasant life.

But the Story of My Life that we have in hand is not the same one represented by La revue de Paris text. On page 1467 of the newer manuscript, Jean-Marie Dguignet explains that [back in 1897] Anatole Le Braz paid him one hundred francs for the rights to publish his Mmoires, and took away the original writings. Several years later, when neither publication nor money had turned up, Dguignet cries thief, imagines a conspiracy of the Breton nationalisto-clericocos, and sets about writing his life story all over again. What we have is that new version.

Now, to put it before the public.