Chapter one. Contexts

Contexts[ Although Paris is the focus of this book, it was not the sole destination of Breton migrs.Bretons had a history of departures abroad and a shorter but important history of moving within France, which along with Brittany itself provides a crucial context for the late-nineteenth-century mass movements to Paris. bretons in the worldThe people of Brittany had long moved over ocean and sea to the western and southern hemispheres.Although Bretons represented insular provincials to Parisians during the Third Republic, international contacts and emigration have marked this region since late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.Bretons from Saint-Malo and Nantes were among the medieval navigators who traded with northern Europe.The sugar and slave traders of Nantes and the coastal traders faded in the nineteenth century, but fishing remained important; men fished for cod and tuna on the high seas, for sardines o the south coast, and for local fish along the west and north coasts of Brittany, where fisherman and peasant were not entirely separate.In addition, over three-quarters of naval ocers and sailors in 1890 were Breton, not counting apprentices and cabin-boys.In the words of the historian Grard Le Boudec, ''the sailor belongs to global society.'' The maritime traditions of Brittany directed emigrations from France across the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Many parts of coastal Brittany were part of a maritime culture and economy that lined the Atlantic and North Sea coasts, essential to the history of Breton mobility.These areas ''belonged to an outwardly turned and mobile sector of French society'' that sent men abroad

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