Ph. Tourault: Les rois de Bretagne (Michael Jones)

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Francia-Recensio 2008/4 Mittelalter – Moyen Âge (500–1500)

Philippe Tourault, Les rois de Bretagne. Légende et réalité (IV^e–X^e siècle), Paris (Perrin) 2005, 291 p., ISBN 2-262-01908-8, EUR 20,50.

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Michael Jones, Nottingham

This is a very disappointing book: starting from the observation that from the twelfth century to the mid nineteenth, most historians of medieval Brittany (following in the Arthurian tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth) attributed rule there in the earliest centuries to »kings« who on serious investigation appear to be largely mythical figures, the author sets out to examine why such legendary material was perpetuated and why it took so long for serious scholars to reject manifest historical nonsense; a phenomenon all the more strange because the great Maurist historian of the province, Dom Gui-Alexis Lobineau (d. 1727) had already discounted legends about the supposed fourth-century Breton leader Conan Mériadec at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Tourault then attempts to assess the rule of certain genuine rulers who did enjoy the title rex in Carolingian times. The book thus consists of six main chapters; the first largely discussing the evolving historiography on Brittany’s legendary rulers. Chapters 2–5 are mainly a narrative of political and military events from the days of Nominoë, promoted missus by Louis the Pious in 831, and in those of his three main successors, Erispoë (851–857), Salomon (857–874) and Alan the Great (874–c. 907), while Chapter 6 is an attempt to describe »La vie des rois et des Bretons au temps de Salomon«, a synthesis of what may be discovered about Breton society at different social and cultural levels in the later ninth century. A very brief three-page epilogue tries to encapsulate reasons why, following the return in 936 of Alan Barbetorte (d. 952) from the exile in England into which he and his family had been forced by viking attacks, the rulers of Brittany were no longer styled »kings« but »dukes«. The bibliography indicates the author’s awareness of some important primary sources (not always cited in their most recent or scholarly editions) as well as of some modern secondary literature but is seriously inadequate in many respects. In Chapter 6, for instance, there is no mention of modern archaeological analysis allied to documentary work centring on Nominoë’s abbey of St-Sauveur de Redon (founded in 832) and its famous cartulary by Wendy Davies and Grenville Astill and their students which has since the 1980s been transforming our knowledge of early medieval rural life in Brittany, as well as of structures and exercise of power. Nor is there any acknowledgement of Julia Smith’s important synthesis »Province and Empire. Brittany and the Carolingians« (Cambridge 1992) which re-assessed political relationships in this formative period as »Celtic« Brittany was absorbed into a larger Carolingian polity, changing institutional forms and cultural norms. Similarly, for earlier periods, the author shows little appreciation of the work of Pierre-Roland Giot and his followers on the immigration period between the third and seventh centuries when Armorica was transformed into Britannia minor, a process most recently summarized in a book simultaneously published in English and French: Pierre-Roland Giot, Philippe Guigon and Bernard Merdrignac, »Les premiers Bretons en Armorique (Rennes 2003), »The British Settlement of Brittany. The First Bretons in Armorica«, preface by Wendy Davies (Stroud 2003). Nor does he take account of the remarkable excavations over many years by Barry Cunliffe and Patrick Galliou at the coastal headland site of Le Yaudet, where changes especially from Roman times to the medieval period are being analysed with great finesse and where the evolution of local landscape and society is being set in an even longer historical perspective from remotest times to the present in a major multi-disciplinary study¹. There is no serious discussion of terms used for forms of early medieval rule, nor of problems of ethnicity and ethnogenesis which have recently occupied many leading students of the period. In tracing how nineteenth-century historians finally broke with the long historiographical traditions that the author traces in Chapter 1, there is a surprising absence of reference to the seminal work of Jean-Yves Guiomar, »Le Bretonisme. Les historiens bretons au XIX^e siècle« (Mayenne 1987). The towering figure of the Romantic historian of the province, Arthur de La Borderie (1827–1901), whose work Tourault frequently cites and sometimes tries to re-assess, is naturally a major focus of Guiomar’s attention, while there have also been several commemorations of the centenary of La Borderie’s death which have led to further important re-assessments of his »œuvre« which could have been used².

Throughout there is woefully inadequate discussion of the problems of interpreting difficult sources (e.g. the hagiographical materials which are so important for early Breton history; or the borrowings by Pierre Le Baud (d. 1505) from the anonymous Chronicon Briocense, written about 100 years earlier, commented on by Tourault, but never properly explored). While the author provides no footnotes to show what evidence (whether primary or secondary) he has used in compiling his predominating narrative. Presumably aimed at »le grand public« for whom the discovery that »la remise en cause des mythes est aussi passionnante que le rétablissement de la vérité historique« (blurb on back cover) will be sufficient reward, this work is definitely not to be recommended to those who have serious interests in either the early history of medieval Brittany nor how subsequent generations of historians manipulated fact and fiction for political and many other ends.