With the deployment of the great Breton flag of the world in Nantes, on this Sunday February 20, a large Gwenn-ha-Du, at the foot of the castle of the Dukes of Brittany, the militants of the association “A la Bretonne”, intend to defend the belonging of Nantes and Loire-Atlantique to Brittany, which is not the case today. And no more, after the last reform which took us from 22 to 13 major regions.
franceinfo: Jean Viard, here, Brittany, but the question also arose for Alsace. Are there regional identities asserting themselves and expressing themselves today?
John Viard: I understand the Breton question well, my grandmother was Breton. There are territories in France where traditional affiliations are very strong, the Basque Country, Corsica, etc. What is true is that France is a country that was built by a state that imposed itself little by little, taking scraps through marriages, buyouts, wars from countries that asked for nothing.
The Bretons never asked to be in the same country as the Niçois, etc. And when you look around us, we are the only state to have been built by political imposition over 1000 years. It was true under the monarchy, under the Republic, and it is still true. We broke local identities. Remember what they used to say about children who took the hits of the ruler on the fingers if they spoke in patois.
And so, in 1789, departments were drawn up on mathematical bases. They were given names of places, rivers, mountains, to erase local cultures. And this era lasted two centuries. Today, we are in a new era where French unity is extremely strong, and at the same time, we are in an era where we are magnifying heritage. We visit a lot, we restore the castles. We have built a heritage setting which is also the basis of our tourist economy. And in this heritage setting, there are obviously differentiations.
Everyone sees the differences. And as we have restored these differences enormously, somewhere, they are more visible than before and it is very present. I don’t think you should mix it up. I am very favorable to local languages, to local cultures because it is a plus. He who has a local culture has more wealth than he who does not. We must not begin to break up the territories by remaking them into small identity territories. Do not mix up cultural affiliations and political and administrative management tools.
The largest Breton flag in the world unfurled this Sunday morning in front of the Château des Ducs de Bretagne in #Nantes pic.twitter.com/fEFGF1ygB5
— France Bleu Loire Ocean (@bleuloireocean) February 20, 2022
We remember the very strong mobilization of thousands of people for the defense of the teaching of regional languages, a little less than a year ago, in Brittany, in the Basque Country, in Alsace.
You, what you are saying is that the regions are no longer anything more than administrative entities, that it is perhaps fine like that, because they do not necessarily have to carry cultural values, identity values which could endanger a form of unity?
No, but they don’t need to overlap. Territories that have identities, there are many, including very small ones. Do not mix levels. There is a level of regions which are administrative entities, but also political. It is basically the place of political debate and then you have these cultural entities, the immigrant populations from the Maghreb in particular, but also from Africa or elsewhere, from Italy, from Spain. We have identities linked to traditional places. Then we have the identities of the people who arrived, the Armenians, for example.
An administrative region, it must articulate all that. 50% of French people live in the department where they were born, so there is already half of the population that does not belong to these local cultures. So you have to be very careful that it stays open. Local cultures should not be closed, otherwise they become exclusionary. There are cultural heritages which are complex and this is a richness. There are political and administrative territories. There is no reason for it to overlap.