BRETON LEGENDS OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN.
The steadfastness of Breton Catholicity is proverbial. From the far-away time when the disciples of the good St. Patrick, among whom, says the Breton legend, “he was like a nightingale among wrens, or a beech-tree among ferns,” first planted the cross in Armorica, up to that last crusade in defence of it wherein only yesterday, as it were, Lamoricière and Pimodan and their gallant comrades sacrificed themselves as chivalrously as any knight of old on the fatal field of Castelfidardo, the Breton has never wavered in his faith. Evil example has not availed to weaken it; persecution has only made it stronger; the poisoned arrow of the scoffer, deadlier than the Moor’s, has fallen blunted on the armor of its tranquil simplicity. When all France beside, with few exceptions, had sunk into indifferentism or infidelity, Breton peasant and Breton gentleman still held fast to their fathers’ creed, still doffed their hats as reverently as of yore to wayside cross or Madonna, still knelt as devoutly side by side in the little rustic chapels which so cover the land “that,” says a sympathetic writer, “it seems fertilized by so many holy shrines.” Some idea may be had of the number of the religious monuments of Brittany from the fact that when, at the Restoration, the proposition was mooted to replace the wayside crosses which the iconoclastic frenzy of the Revolution had overturned, it was found that 1,500,000 francs would be needed to restore those in the department of Finisterre alone.
Indeed, it may be said that the Revolution in Brittany took the form not so much of a political struggle as of a religious proscription. It was not the royalist so much as the Catholic who was there the object of partisan fury. To the butchers of the Temple, the mad idolaters of Reason, religion was a crime even greater than loyalty. “It was,” says the author already quoted,[[134]] “a conflict between the guillotine and a people’s faith—a merciless conflict, in which the guillotine blunted its knife and was baffled.” Catholic Brittany offered but a passive resistance to her persecutors, but it was a resistance none the less stubborn, unflinching, unconquerable. On her knees with clasped hands she defied the noyades of Carrier and the bayonets of Hoche. “Nothing,” says M. Souvestre, “could alter the freshness of her faith. She gave way neither to anger nor to fear. The red cap might be put upon her head, but not upon her thoughts.
“‘I will throw down your belfries,’ said Jean Bon-Saint-André to the mayor of a village, ‘so that you will have no longer any reminder of your effete superstitions.’
“‘You will still have to leave us the stars,’ returned the peasant, ‘and we can see them farther than our belfries.’”
Nevertheless, the threat was carried out, at least so far that the churches were closed, the celebration of Mass was made a crime, the priests were hunted like wild beasts, and the faithful were reduced to much the same straits as their English co-religionists under Elizabeth, or as Irish Catholics under the Penal Laws. Among the many shifts they were put to to evade their savage pursuers, the coast population were often driven to take to their boats and put to sea, where, under favor of the midnight, the faithful pastor offered Mass upon a raft. Surely the people who could resort to such measures rather than forego the exercise of their faith must have been devoted to it.
It may seem strange that so brave and hardy, nay, so fiery, a race as the Bretons should submit so tamely to provocation so bitter. Unlike La Vendée, Brittany never, as a province, made any effectual head against the Revolution, which made so ruthless an onslaught upon all that Breton and Vendean held most sacred. The uprising in Upper or Western Brittany which broke out just as the Vendean insurrection was about being crushed, and which is known to history as the Chouannerie, or war of the Chouans, was but a desultory guerilla warfare, confined for the most part to that division of Brittany which has preserved fewest of the Breton characteristics. The only important engagement which took place in Lower Brittany during the Revolution was the surprise of Fort Penthièvre by Hoche, when “the sickle sweep of Quiberon Bay” reaped its harvest of slaughter; and there the royalists were in the main composed of emigrés, nobles, and Chouans from Western Brittany. Even the brothers Cottereau, nicknamed Chouan,[[135]] who gave its name to this insurrection, were not Bretons, but from Maine. Doubtless had not De la Rouarie’s plot miscarried through treachery and the premature death of that far-seeing and audacious schemer, the result might have been otherwise. As it was, the counter revolution took in Brittany and La Vendée very different directions. In the former it was the hostility of the “patriots” to the church that was most deeply felt and most bitterly resented; while the Vendeans fought for their faith, indeed, and their army bore the name of “Catholic and loyal,” but they fought at least as directly for their king. We have not space to philosophize upon this curious distinction, further than to point out that Brittany, so far as the bulk of its population is concerned, has always been rather Catholic than royalist. It is not so very long ago that a Frenchman was nearly as much of an alien as the hated Saozon or Saxon[[136]] himself to the man of Tréguier or the Léonnais; even two centuries of submission to an enforced and distasteful union scarcely sufficed to make the Breton look upon the French king as other than a usurper. In this, as in devotion to the faith, which the same apostle brought to both, and in readiness to give up all for it, the parallel between Brittany and that other great Celtic colony, Ireland, is of the closest kind. True, the union of Brittany and France, like that of England and Scotland, was effected through marriage,[[137]] and not, as in the Irish union, by force and fraud. But it was none the more popular for that; and though all overt opposition was effectually crushed with the overthrow of the League, headed by the ambitious and self-seeking though gallant Duc de Mercœur, in the early part of the seventeenth century, there still remained a smouldering fire of resentment and dislike which only lately, if ever at all, has been extinguished. And from that time, too, to quote M. Souvestre again, of the two sovereign powers on which the feudal edifice was based, the nobility and the church, the latter alone preserved its authority in Brittany. Deceived and disappointed in his worldly leaders, it seemed as though the Breton peasant turned more implicitly to his spiritual guides. Certain it is that in no Catholic land, not even in Ireland, has the priesthood retained more ascendency, nor, if we may trust writers who cannot be accused of partiality, deserved it more.
The spirit of devotion breathes all through the Breton’s daily life. No important act is begun without its appropriate religious ceremonies. Is it a house or a barn that he has built?—he will use neither till they have been blest, as in Aubrey de Vere’s “Building of the Cottage”:
“Mix the mortar o’er and o’er,
Holy music singing;