What is now known as the University of Rennes was styled merely the "college" in the days of Foch's residence there. But it did substantially the same work then as now, and among its faculty Foch undoubtedly found many who could give him able aid in his perpetual study of the past.
Rennes especially cherishes the memory of Bertrand du Guesclin, the great constable of France under King Charles V and the victorious adversary of Edward III. This brilliant warrior, who drove the English, with their claims on French sovereignty, out of France, was a native of that vicinity. And we may be sure that whatever special opportunity Rennes afforded of studying documents relating to his campaigns was fully improved by Captain Foch.
In that time, also, Foch had ample occasion to know the Bretons, who are, in some respects, the least French of all French provincials—being much more Celtic still than Gallic, although it is a matter of some fifteen hundred years since their ancestors, driven out of Britain by the Teutonic invasions, came over and settled "Little Britain," or Brittany.
The Bretons maintained their independence of France for a thousand years, and only became united with it through the marriage of their last sovereign, Duchess Anne, with Charles VIII, in 1491 and—after his death—with his successor, Louis XII.
And even to-day, after more than four centuries of political union, the people of Brittany are French in name and in spirit rather than in speech, customs, or temperament. Many of them do not speak or understand the French language. Few of them, outside of the cities, have conformed appreciably to French customs. Quaint, sturdy, picturesque folk they are—simple, for the most part, superstitious, tenacious of the old, suspicious of the new, and governable only by those who understand them.
Foch must have learned, in those seven years, not only to know the Bretons, but to like them and their rugged country very well. For he has had, these many years past, his summer home near Morlaix on the north coast of Brittany. It was from there that he was summoned into the great war on July 26, 1914.
In 1885 Captain Foch was called to Paris and entered the Superior School of War.
This institution, wherein he was destined to play in after years a part that profoundly affected the world's destiny, was founded only in 1878 as a training school for officers, connected with the military school which Louis XV established in 1751 to "educate five hundred young gentlemen in all the sciences necessary and useful to an officer."
One of the "young gentlemen" who profited by this instruction was the little Corsican whom Ferdinand Foch so ardently venerated.
The building covers an area of twenty-six acres and faces the vast Champ-de-Mars, which was laid out about 1770 for the military school's use as a field for maneuvers.