“Big daddy Louis XVIth”: On the Reception of the French Revolution in Breton Literature
This paper is based on a class I taught during the autumn of 2023 for the Celtic literature class of the Licence Breton-Celtique. Charles Fortin. Chouans (Royalist Insurgents in the Western Provinces during the French Revolution) . oil on canvas, c. 1853; Salon des artistes français, Paris, 1853. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille, JSTOR , https://jstor.org/stable/community.15672964. Accessed 21 Feb. 2024. Even if the vast majority of the Breton literary production from the end of the XVIIIth century that has reached us is made up of songs printed on follennoù-nij (lit. flying papers), a few later works surely deserve our attention. For Breton publications, the XIXth century is a century in which changes happen to the printed material. Before, the literature that got printed was meant to be read in numbers, namely songs, religious or profane. Throughout the century, with the growing number of readers and the bourgeois culture, we see the appearance and take-over of works meant to be read o