Fashioning heritage: regional costume and tourism in Brittany, 1890-1937.

In her 1906 travel narrative Picturesque Brittany, the Englishwoman Nancy Bell gives voice to an enduring inclination among outsiders to the region to read desire and their own social and cultural preoccupations onto Breton regional costume. Making their way along the venerable course of the elite English and American cultural traveler from St. Malo and the abbey at Mount Saint Michel to the fishing towns and beaches of the northern coast and then onward to the more traditionally Breton areas of the Finistere, she and her illustrator-husband turn inland at Roscoff and head for the departmental capital of Quimper by way of Morlaix. Having encountered in the latter city only a rather indifferent celebration of the Fete of the Republic and no native costume whatsoever, the pair takes a carriage southward to Plougastel, in hopes of seeing there the costumes said to be "the most remarkable in Brittany." After nearly giving up the search to catch an earlier train to Quimper, they suddenly see coming into view almost deus ex machina "an old country cart" crowded with peasants in glorious Breton costume. As they pass by other groups of similarly-attired peasants along the road to town, Bell recounts, the guidebooks seemed to have been proven right after all: "the men, women and children of Plougastel (did) still wear costumes such as were in vogue in the sixteenth century" (see image one). (1)

The detail and the subtle but discernible variation in the costumes they are viewing fully enraptures the pair, to the extent that they are scarcely able to fix their attention upon the famous 17th Century calvary (large sculpted stone crucifix) in the village, as their eyes are drawn continually back to the outfits of the "living groups ... gossiping together" beneath it. Their pleasure is redoubled upon witnessing crowds of costumed children whose surprise--and it is intimated, discomfort--at being observed by the outsiders provides the latter with an even more sustained view of their remarkable dress. Though bound to the exigencies of their train schedule, Bell and her husband repair immediately to a nearby village emporium in hopes of purchasing "some specimens" of the outfits they had just viewed. That theirs had been a privileged and precarious encounter with an authentic Brittany Bell affirms for her readers, congratulating herself and her companion for having "caught them on this occasion living their simple every-day life in their far from simple every-day clothes." (2)

While serendipity, authenticity and exclusivity are the main touchstones of the narration here, the account provides indication as well that the contexts in which Breton costume was being both worn and appropriated were shifting. For what Bell had to pursue so doggedly was by the date of her account becoming the object of a new effort of preservation and display--one which would increasingly crystallize folk costume and other aspects of Breton culture into a patrimony or (in more contemporary Anglo-American parlance) "heritage" to be performed and consumed by Bretons and non-Bretons alike. (3) It was a shift that directly challenged the authority of privileged intermediaries like Bell, who now found themselves trying to lay exclusive claim to "authentic" Breton culture within a fast-changing social and cultural field. Indeed, Bell herself recounts having come unwittingly upon the Fete des Fleurs Ajoncs in Pont-Aven, the first of the Breton festivals that would become commonplace in the region during the interwar period. Her assessment of the event, the purpose of which was to encourage Bretons to retain their customs and costumes, is not surprisingly a critical one; the cultural singularity of this uniquely picturesque people, it seemed, was becoming a matter of mere reconstitution and staging, and was being made perhaps a bit too readily available for the elite traveler's taste. (4)

Considered in historical perspective, these tensions in Bell's narration begin to suggest some of the knotty social and cultural dynamics that attended the long-term conversion of rural cultures into subjects of preservation and tourism in France. This article will examine more specifically how traditional Breton costume came to be reframed as part of a regional patrimony in the period running form the end of the nineteenth century through the 1930's; and focus in particular on the social and cultural impact of that reframing within a changing region and a changing tourism. While the effort to address a perceived crisis in Breton costume led a coterie of actors of develop new contexts for its preservation and display, I argue, the larger ambition of securing regional costume's meaning and value ultimately proved elusive in practice. As these early heritage efforts provided new kinds of access to costume, they also left it a far more fluid possession for tourist hosts and guests alike.

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The 'Crisis' and Reframing of Breton Costume

A renewed scholarly attention has accrued over the last generation to the role of local identities and histories, and of the very notion of locality, within French history and politics. If an older conceptualization of essentially an tagonistic local and national moorings--of the petite and the grande patrie--has been supplanted within French historical studies by a less deterministic and even reciprocal one, there remains a need for richer understanding of the new exchanges occurring at local places as they fell more fully within the purview of larger political agendas and forces of economic change. (5) Tourism is highly instructive on this score and not least in the case of Brittany, where the visible endurance of a distinctive regional culture in the nineteenth century made the interface of metropolitan and rural cultures in the region a particularly lively and sometimes charged one. (6) Thus could a cultural marker like traditional Breton costume come over time to be a point of convergence for multiple political and economic investments. (7) Long conceived as an uncommonly stable and enduring cultural possession of the Bretons, that costume was by the turn of the century attracting a new solicitude as a fragile inheritance requiring protection and advocacy; and becoming as well an iconic attraction within an ever-growing and socially diversifying international tourist commerce.

What outsiders to the region commonly understood as "authentic" Breton dress was the clothing worn principally during communal and religious occasions ranging from markets and fairs to Sunday mass, weddings and religious pardons. Pierre-Jakez Helias' childhood memoir of life in the pays Bigouden in southern Finistere in the early twentieth century begins with a description of the hemp clothing Breton peasants wore for work and the heavy, gray, absorbent and rarely-laundered garments that bear precious little resemblance to the "charming" and "infinitely varied" dress beloved of artists, tourists and other outside admirers of the region (and of Helias' corner of it in particular). (8) The often-enthralled attention of these latter fixated in particular upon the black and dark blue outfits worn most commonly in the Finistere and Morbihan departments: the women in some combination of long skirt, blouse and apron, the men in trousers, vest and coat and wide-brimmed hat. Keenest interest attached as well to the ornamentation in the costumes, via ribbons, embroidery and lacework; and even more to the Breton coiffes (hairstyles) worn by the women, an often painstakingly elaborate preparation of hair and embroidered lace or bonnet. While retaining these basic common features throughout those parts of the region in which it continued to be worn, Breton costume also comprised countless local variations from one town or area to another, and varied palpably even at the parish level. (9)

The relative isolation of the region, particularly in its three outermost coastal departments (Cotes du Nord, Morbihan and Finistere), contributed to enabling costume and certain other aspects of traditional culture to endure longer in the region than they did elsewhere, though historical and ethnographic accounts of Breton costume have robustly challenged the stock assumption of a timeless Breton traditionalism in dress. (10) Much as it would come to be the privileged marker of Breton cultural continuity, the region's costume was in fact every bit a modern and evolving phenomenon. It had been the relaxation of sumptuary laws during the revolutionary period that first allowed rural populations to be more expressive in their dress, incorporating formerly restricted luxury items like silks, ribbons, lace and jewelry into what had been a more or less uniform peasant dress across France. Likewise the mechanization of fabric production in the nineteenth century made cloth more cheaply available to local populations in the region, and expanded commerce and communication did bring contact with the materials and styles of Roubaix, Lyon and Paris, at least in the larger towns in the region. (11) Innovation and even fashion shaped the forms of this purportedly traditional costume; in the spirit of a chacun sa mode (to each his or her own style), residents of different areas initiated local variations, which would then become accepted as conventional and representative of that particular locality.

If for many Bretons then traditional costume served principally to delimit communal identifications and could in that role be highly mutable, outside admirers of the region tended over time to view it through the prism of an ever more conventionalized "Breton picturesque" as a legible marker of cultural cohesion and continuity. (12) Thus was it largely writers and artists, elite French and foreign tourists and amateur folklorists who played the leading role over the nineteenth century in brokering its meaning and value for larger non-native audiences. (13) Yet a perceived crisis in the wearing of traditional dress at the turn of the century rallied new actors behind the aim of Breton regional costume and cultural preservation. (14)

Discussions of the issue yielded multiple explanations. Even the most fervent admirers of traditional dress had to acknowledge that it was often rather poorly suited to modern conditions favoring great mobility in work and everyday life. Changing social and economic circumstances in the region also spurred the emigration of rural Bretons to larger towns and cities within the region as well as to Paris and other parts of France--where they were often less inclined to don traditional dress. (15) Most who addressed the issue agreed as well that the war and the conditions of the postwar period were instrumental in prompting the flight from costume in particular areas, as from traditional folkways more generally. (16) Even in the pays Bigouden in southern Finistere, where traditional costume tended to have its most visually arresting and tenacious foothold, Pierre-Jakez Helias recalls his father wearing a blue cotton suit with single-breasted jacket and peaked cap after returning from the war, and describes his own trip to Quimper to purchase trousers (considered an important masculine rite of passage) as evidence of how "little Bretons were no longer dressed in scaled-down versions of their fathers' clothes." (17) Much as Brittany was commonly seen by many as remaining aloof to the economic integration and commercialization of the French Third Republic, the penetration of magasins (large retail stores) and mail order catalogues into the larger towns and cities of the region spread modern tastes and ready-made fashions, and further pressed upon the local urban and rural artisanat traditionally charged with producing Breton costume. (18) Not surprisingly, it was in the more Gallicized eastern departments and urban areas of the region, and among men more than women, that this retreat from costume tended to announce itself most visibly to observers.

As growing numbers of Bretons desisted from regular wearing of traditional dress and regional advocacy became a newly compelling cause in the French Third Republic, many concerned and well-placed individuals found it no longer sufficient merely to value Breton costume as a picturesque remnant of former times; nor to leave its fate entirely in the hands of Breton peasants. A convergence of largely bourgeois regionalists, artists and cultural authorities, local elites and organizers of the emerging French tourist industry made Breton costume for the first time an object of formal defense and promotion. (19) Undertaken at a historical juncture when the political and cultural destiny of the region was in some dispute, their new preservationist initiatives became part of an ongoing and sometimes conflicted discussion over the true meaning and value of Breton dress. The main fault line in that discussion--one that continued to shape appropriations of Breton costume into the Vichy period and even beyond it--was between a view of costume as a marker of enduring Breton national culture and particularism resistant to French republican identity, and a second inclined more toward seeing it as a component of French regional patrimony. (20) Professed admirers of costume likewise divided over whether it was to be understood principally as a form of "peasant" or of "Breton" dress. (21) While there were multiple investments in Breton costume, the coterie of actors listed above was the one ultimately most successful in attracting resources and institutional alliances behind the cause of preserving Breton costume as a valued regional patrimony. For this group, supporting patrimonial efforts and even actively encouraging cultural tourism was a means both of blunting separatist sentiment in the region and galvanizing new sources of support for traditional Breton culture. (22) Thus for example did a new and influential generation of Breton cultural intermediaries come to prominence in the twenties and thirties, most visibly around the revue La Bretagne Touristique, and embrace the project of interpreting and making available Breton cultural traditions for expanding public audiences. (23)

The new effort to value, preserve and display Breton culture took shape most concretely in the establishment in Brittany, as elsewhere in the country, of museums to house traditional costume, as well as folk and religious art and artifacts of everyday life like furniture and faience (Breton pottery). Tourist and regionalist advocates in the national Touring Club de France and the Fedration Regionaliste Francise (FRE) used the example of the Breton Museum in Quimper (established in 1846), as well as that of Frederic Mistral's Musee Arlatan in Provence, to push for provincial museums across France that would house local costume alongside other artifacts of traditional life. (24) In a climate increasingly hospitable to this sort of folkloric display, the Breton museum was able after the turn of the century to consolidate its importance as a central repository for Breton patrimony and a key regional attraction. (25) Making its case for departmental support, the museum's leadership appealed specifically to fears of the disappearance of Breton costume in everyday life, and held out the hope of "fixing the image of what is disappearing, so that it can remain present in the minds and spirits of Bretons of the future."(26 By the interwar period, Brittany had become one of the more richly endowed regions in terms of its formal and less formal collections of popular and religious art, folkloric materials and costume; these "artifacts" were often culled from local areas and assembled into collections for public display either in museums or in parts of churches and chateaux. (27)

Intended for audiences both internal and external to the region, these new displays from the outset stirred questions of cultural value, authenticity and change among the growing ranks of self-designated admirers of the region. One concern especially common among regionalists was the risk of reducing costume to mere museum piece, and giving sanction through exhibition and encouragement of traditional costume to contrivance, nostalgia or petrifaction. (28) FRF president jean Charles Brun's perspective would prove especially influential in its reconciliation of regional interests with modern economic and political realities; far from seeing costume as merely a holdover from an earlier age, the regionalist emphasized its evolution and adaptation over time. It was preferable in his view to undertake an active work of advocacy and preservation to make regional costume sustainable, as against treating it as an artifact or as fodder for mere "reconstruction". (29) Throughout the 20's and early 30's, Charles-Brun returned frequently in his writings and speeches to the question of regional dress, and how best to ensure its authentic preservation and even--he hoped--continued vitality as a living thing. "Let us preserve of the past that which is living", he argued in the pages of the Touring Club's Revue Mensuelle, urging that costume could be at once both authentically regional and modern, were it to be effectively modified to modern usages.

What that meant for Charles-Brun as for many other Breton and regional advocates was embracing tourism. (30) As they pushed for the recognition of tourism as a vital national interest and industry after the turn of the century, leaders of the Touring Club and of the numerous local and regional syndicats d'initiative (tourist development associations) made themselves leading advocates of regional cultural expression, including costume. (31) Their case for tourism as a strategy of regional raise en valeur and development became a good deal more compelling in the aftermath of the war, as French inflation and the revival of international tourist commerce (with middle class Americans an especially coveted market) prompted a more coordinated effort to draw tourists to the French countryside. In line with this aim, the work of preserving traditional costume as part of an ensemble of defining regional attractions took on a new urgency, particularly for the syndicats that were entrusted most directly with what tourist industry leaders termed tourisme receptif, or the systematic outfitting of their respective areas for tourist commerce. These groupings drew together local elites from business, government and culture to promote their town or region to broader audiences, marrying tourist development to the goals of Breton cultural preservation and civic revival.

Speaking at the fete Bretonne at Huelgoat in September 1921--a key point of origin for subsequent efforts in the interwar period to value and display Breton culture for both native and non-native audiences--the President of the Federation des Syndicats d'Initiative de Bretagne Georges Bahon-Rault urged that preserving traditional costume was vital both to the "moral health" of the Bretons themselves as well as to the cause of attracting a continuing stream of tourists to the region and bolstering its economic prospects. "It isn't merely a matter of sentiment or aesthetics," he claimed, "but rather one of patriotism and elementary good taste." (32) Leaders of the syndicats in Brittany and elsewhere advocated similarly throughout the twenties and thirties for regional costume as being essential both to a region's patrimony as well as to its overall economy of attraction. Leon Le Bondidier was surely doing so at the 1924 General Assembly of the national Union des Syndicats d'Initiative de France in urging groupings across the country to act aggressively on behalf of traditional dress, cautioning that its disappearance, even if gradual was" ... as upsetting as the destruction of a beautiful old mansion or the drying up of a cascade". (33) Costume preservation was wholly of a piece with ongoing campaigns of local beautification and landscape conservation initiated by the syndicats and the Touring Club, as support(and sometimes direct subsidies) for local dress aimed equally at securing a peasant population in what was deemed its natural and necessary picturesque milieu. (34)

Thus preserved and displayed as museum artifact, valued as a vital part of an authentic regional decor, and offered as a prop for regional and national political identification, Breton costume was clearly being made available in the early twentieth century for new kinds of appropriation. The specifically tourist encounter with that costume was changing significantly as well, unfolding as it now did within a more commercially and visually mediated field that actively framed it as an object of desire and consumption for a socially and nationally diversifying tourist clientele. (35) Bell's account suggests that certain Breton towns had for some time enjoyed a privileged reputation for striking and enduring dress: not only Plougastel, Quimper and the pays Bigouden in Finistere, but also Vannes and its surrounding area in Morbihan. As the wearing of costume continued to decline in other areas, the syndicats, guidebooks and tourist publicity tended even more to highlight areas where it endured, promoting them ever more insistently as bastions of Breton traditionalism. Tourism indeed added ballast to the notion of a Bretagne bretonnante ("Breton Brittany"), comprising areas of the region (mostly in lower Brittany) that better represented an enduring Breton cultural essence. Joseph Gautier's 1926 guide for Finistere, the first of a series of French departmental guides for automobile tourism, vaunted that department expressly as the only one in France where traditional costume truly persisted. (36) In its own guides, the Syndicat d'Initiative of Cornouaille cast its section of the Finistere as the last great stronghold of Bretagne bretonnante, foregrounding the costume of the region as a visual shorthand for the picturesque integrity of the region as a whole. (37)

The longer-term retreat in many parts of the region from everyday wearing of traditional costume meant as well that its display came even more than in the past to be reserved for festive and ceremonial occasions. Once again, tourist representation bolstered this tendency, in cuing tourists ever more directly to seek out displays of costume at communal rituals. Gauthier laments in his guide how even in the pays Bigouden traditional costume was losing its expressive originality and tending toward "banalization", and that the preferred way to get any idea for "this curious population" was to witness it exiting from mass on a Sunday, or attending a Thursday market or a religious pardon in July or September. (38) While these latter events were much desired in and of themselves as picturesque performances of a sincere and enduring Breton piety, they also took on added value as privileged occasions for communal display of traditional dress, and for its consumption by tourists. (39) The 1923 guidebook of the Syndicat d'Initiative de Cornouaille recommended the Pardon of Notre Dame de Rumengol as a place where a tourist stood the best chance of seeing "reunited, in living and vibrant tableaux, the varied and gracious costumes of the region." (40) The 1929 Ward Handbook for English travelers asserted even more categorically that the pardons and other festive occasions were really the only place where a tourist could any longer view Breton costumer authentically. The guidebook offers a strangely emotive (for a guidebook) description of an archetypal pardon from the imagined perspective of a peasant participant, with particular attention paid to the enduring and evocative power of Breton dress:

  ... when the day of the Pardon comes round, with indescribable joy he
  dons his best clothes, which may have been those of his grandfather,
  and off he goes. It may be that it is he who, as the strongest man in
  the parish, will carry the banner, and that is something worth living
  for. If he has a daughter, she may be one of the communicants,
  dressed in white raiment trimmed with Breton lace which has been
  handed down from generation to generation. The sight of her will he
  an additional delight for him and for his wife, whose daily lot is at
  least as hard and as drab as her husband's, and with pleasure even
  greater than his will she seize the occasion to lay aside her poor
  workaday clothes and put on her treasures, kept in the family chest
  under the closed-in bed. (41)

The description shows that tourist culture still sustained well into the interwar period the fantasy of undisturbed Breton cultural possession and integrity, even as it was simultaneously offering growing ranks of outsiders a readier access to it. It is indeed revealing that the guidebook offers in this description a moment of authenticity unavailable to the reader-tourist, or to the peasant himself for that matter, in everyday life. Breton costume was clearly becoming a more mediated thing: "preserving" this ostensibly popular and traditional cultural expression now hinged not only on new efforts of advocacy, but also paradoxically on a more deliberate tourist framing and commercialization.

Costume as Heritage and Performance

The new cultural space into which costume was moving--one circumscribed by time and place, accessible to Bretons and non-Bretons alike, and entailing new efforts of staging and performance--is what scholars working in multiple disciplines on contemporary tourism have tended to term "heritage". While this body of work too often treats heritage tourism as a recent development, its analysis of how the past is repackaged and made available for multiple and sometimes conflicting appropriations can be of great value in understanding the historical evolution of Brittany as a modern tourist ground. (42) In her influential book Destination Cultures for example, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has shown that "agencies of display" such as museums, festivals and tourist sites serve to fragment and reconstitute culture as performed heritage. (43) Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's analysis of how local cultures and populations, in order to remain economically viable, must often convert into representations and performances of themselves for outsider audiences is one that is wholly relevant to the Breton case, as is her critique of the staging of cultural difference at folk festivals. (44) Hers and other kindred recent studies make it possible to move beyond reading heritage tourism and festivity as either the distillation of a unitary and enduring folk culture on the one hand, or as merely commodified (and thus by definition highly inauthentic) cultural expression on the other. Instead, this literature has suggested, heritage initiatives usually arise from, reflect and respond to ongoing social and cultural change, and so are most fruitfully read as "social relationships mediated by images". (45) What that will mean for the analysis at hand is attending principally to how the multiple parties to the tourist exchange sought to negotiate continuity and change at the new heritage events at which Breton costume came more conspicuously to be staged.

The impetus for these events came from bourgeois elites both within the region and beyond it, who sought in organizing them to realize the interlocking objectives of Breton cultural preservationism, civic revival and regional tourist development that were weighing more heavily in the region after the war. The 1890's had seen some scattered costume competitions--initiated, like comparable efforts to stage performances of popular song or to revive the tradition of popular theater, most often by prominent writers, artists and antiquarians. (46) It was the renowned Breton poet and singer Theodore Botrel who, in cooperation with the municipal council of Pont-Aven, organized the first of the new Breton cultural festivals in 1905 in that town. The "Fete des Fleurs Ajoncs" (Fete of the Flowering Bushes), held on July 13 during the high tourist season, involved a recreation of the peasant veillee (the tradition of evening story-telling and singing) with group singing of popular songs and Botrel's own compositions, and the election and crowning of a "Reine des Ajoncs" (Queen of the Ajoncs). The success of Botrel's initiative led local notables and businessmen in Concarneau to organize a "Fete des Filets Bleus" (Fete of the Blue Fishing Nets) two years later, as a Breton Charity fete to aid local fisherman suffering through the dire crisis besetting the sardine industry upon which the town was largely dependent. Here again, the event culminated in a contest of Breton costume, already clearly the centerpiece of this new type of fete. These two events signaled a significant departure from indigenous traditions of popular festivity: the fete populaire, grounded in shared communal experience and transmission, was giving way to the fete folklorique, an event based more in the affirmation of heritage, accommodating mixed audiences of locals and outsiders, and more actively mediated by political and cultural elites and by commercial concerns.

Modern tourist commerce and the emerging tourist industry were indeed vital in abetting this shift toward heritage-based festivity. The Touring Club had already begun before the war to call upon local municipalities across France to organize fetes and contests of local art, costume, music and dance to draw attention to and garner support for regional cultural patrimonies. It also proposed the holding of rotating weeklong "Grandes Semaines de la Vieille France" ("Old France Weeks") throughout the country to provide a setting for display of traditional dress and other forms of cultural expression. (47) These proposals came to fruition largely in the aftermath of the war, as a succession of quasi-touristic fetes Bretonnes took place across the region, usually during the summer months of the high tourist season. Organizers commonly referred to these as fetes retentissantes, aimed at encouraging the Bretons to "remain themselves." The largest of these at Huelgoat in September 1921 drew a large and mixed crowd to the town for displays of artisanally produced Breton costume and performances of local music, dance and other "traditions locales". (49) At this fete, as at the subsequent semaines touristiques (tourist weeks) held in various parts of the region to call attention to Brittany's tourist assets, the French tourist industry--the Touring Club de France and syndicats d'initiative, as well as the governmental Office National du Tourisme--played a leading role, seeking to accommodate both heritage affirmation and tourist consumption in the invented ritual space of the event.

The most important and instructive of the new heritage festivals for the purposes at hand was the Fete des Reines de Cornouaille, an annual pageant and competition of feminine Breton costume and beauty taking place in Quimper. (50) Quimper had been through the nineteenth century a great center of popular festivity, but its emergence as the principal centre de tourisme (tourist hub) in Cornouaille meant that festivity would look a bit different in the twentieth. The Fete des Reines had its origins as a 1922 promotional effort by an enterprising local cafe and cinema owner, Louis Le Bourhis, who invited elected beauty queens from surrounding areas to march from the train station through town in the traditional costume of their communes. The following year brought a more ambitious effort, with 11 reines and their ladies of honor led through the streets of the departmental capital by 5 "knights", as well as Botrel and two other poets and a troupe of Breton dancers from Pont-Aven. The Fete unfolded as a cortege led by Breton music on both ends filing through the streets of the town and past the Mayor and other government officials and local notables assembled at the Hotel de Ville, before giving way to a banquet and staged entertainments in the afternoon and early evening. In addition to electing "the ideal young woman of the most beautiful of regions", the event also raised money for area war veterans, for local anti-tuberculosis efforts and other local charitable causes (see image two). (51)

For Bourhis, who would remain the animating force behind the Fete as President of its organizing committee, commercial objectives remained always in the foreground and were wholly compatible with seemingly more high-minded ones relating to civic attachment and the cultivation of Breton pride. Bourhis' own movie theater, the Odet-Palace, commonly hosted the first evening's entertainments, and Bourhis used the commercial benefit of the events to support his annual requests for municipal funding. Appealing to the mayor for funds in the run-up to the 1924 Fete, for example, he vaunted the event as "a felicitous means of fostering affection for Cornouaille and for attracting to it and retaining foreigners." His language in another of these appeals ten years later was even more forthrightly promotional, affirming that because the costumes of Cornouaille were the most beautiful of France, their possession "is for our area a treasure that must not be left unproductive. ... (and is) from a touristic point of view an excellent form of propaganda for our region." (53) The Fete served as well to solidify further the status of Quimper as the principal centre de tourisme in Southern Brittany, a locus of attraction for tourists and hub for transport and excursion in the surrounding region of Cornouaille. (54) The Quimper municipal council, for its part, repeatedly affirmed the commercial import of the event in offering continued subsidy for it even in difficult financial times, and lauded it for managing both to "provide the city with choice attraction, vital to commerce in bringing a great affluence of foreigners to the city" while remaining agreeable to the population of the city itself. (55) Thus was the Fete des Reines instrumental in helping mark off the city as a site of newly-concentrated Breton cultural display, as well as one of readier exchange--economic, cultural, social--for the multiple audiences the event attracted.

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Organizers and supporters of this and other ritualized displays of Breton costume indeed occupied themselves expressly from the outset with their potential benefit to Breton populations, intending that the events aid directly in countering the retreat of Bretons from traditional dress by providing a more affirmative context for it. This was an ambition harbored not only by Breton republican regionalists and tourist organizers, but also more surprisingly by many leading Breton nationalists. Where one might expect them to have decried an event like the Fete des Reines de Cornouaille as the worst sort of contrivance, a mere "exhibition of pretty girls for the edification of tourists passing through" as one common complaint ran, many nationalists in fact overcame initial skepticism about the event. The most important Breton nationalist paper Breiz Atao commended the organizers of the Fete after its third annual passage for having successfully "Bretonized" the event's program, such that all the contests, confetti, raffles and cross-dressing balls hadn't compromised its identity as a celebration made "by and for the people of the area." (56) Indeed, while acknowledging the implausibility of Bretons adopting traditional costume for everyday usage, the paper did urge that it become instead a kind of "national uniform", to be worn at fetes or at any other gatherings possessing of a "national character". (57)

The view of the Breton nationalist paper La Bretagne Integrate that local Bretons might need an "education in taste" in order to fully comprehend the worth of their traditional costume and the urgency of preserving it, and that elites in the region had to do more to model the wearing of dress and create contexts for communal display was one most regional and tourist advocates shared. (58) As president of the Breton Federation des Syndicats d'Initiative, Leon De Bondidier called specifically upon upper class women in the region to set an example by themselves donning adapted versions of Breton costume particularly on public occasions, in order to dispel the notion that traditionalism in dress might be irreconcilable with the pull of modern fashion and social mobility. A perceived benefit of the new Breton festivals, in the estimation of De Bondidier and others, was precisely that they lent to traditional dress a cross-class legitimacy, making it seem the costume of a pays, entire region, rather than a particular social class. (59) In this way, seemingly opposed republican and nationalist actors shared an interest in redefining the social constituency for Breton costume; it was wholly in line with their assertion of a new kind of cultural stewardship that these elites promoted the milieu of the fete as one in which Breton peasant dress might seem a collective inheritance worn and/or honored by all.

The Value of Heritage

But what value did Breton costume still have when displayed in this fashion, and to whom did it any longer truly "belong"? The resituating of costume as a more available and more mediated possession could have quite different implications for the different participants at these events. It was for example inescapable that concerns over authenticity would weigh particularly upon those self-designated elite arbiters of Breton cultural value with the greatest stake in retaining it as a privileged expression, as the new availability of a formerly exclusive Breton popular "possession" threw its value into question as never before. (60) For the air of contrivance in the Fete des Reines could be still more pronounced at other heritage events taking place in this period, and all of these carried with them the risk of an unintended cultural degradation. Consider for example the "Fete des Cormorans" held at Penmarch in the pays Bigouden just south of Quimper in 1922, organized by a local committee to convey all "the character and cachet of a Breton regional fete" of the pays. The event unfolded as a staged reconstitution of a traditional Breton wedding in the open air, with three different couples joining in the cortege leading from an old farm at Pors-Lambert into the town of Penmarch. Led by bagpipes, the "golden" wedding party proceeded on horseback and in ancient costume, followed by the "silver" couple in more recent but still distinctively Breton costume, and then the "modern" couple on foot and in contemporary garb. After filing past carefully designated markers of the area's ancient past and then beneath the gaze of the town's mayor, the cortege gave way to singing, dancing, games and feasting on crepes and milk, with a market of Breton products and a reconstitution of a traditional Breton farmhouse. In its careful choreography, the event contained many of the components that were becoming standard in these new festivals: foregrounding of traditional music and costume, a full procession of varied composition, the blessing and participation of local political authorities, and a post-processional celebration. Yet the committee also felt compelled in its planning to shore up the event's integrity, specifying that no amusement rides or fair merchandise were to be permitted for the duration of the fete, a gesture aimed clearly at safeguarding its seriousness and ostensibly local quality (even against the predilections of many in the local population). (61)

Indeed throughout this period, organizers of such events regularly undertook precautionary measures to enforce the boundaries of legitimate display. Charles-Brun and leaders in the Touring Club repeatedly voiced the worry that regional costume would come to be something trotted out only for the occasional fete or for display before visiting tourists, and warned against allowing its more superficial aspects to be the ones defining its value. (62) In its own planning of the costume contest for its Semaine Bretonne ("Breton Week") in the summer of 1923, the Federation Regionaliste Bretonne sought both to allay concerns about inauthenticity and to encourage modern adaptation by stipulating two categories of competition, one for old costume, and one for modern. (63) The rules for the Fete du Costume at the 1922 Congress of the Union Regionaliste Bretonne likewise stipulated that participants had to be known, regular wearers of costume, as against locals merely donning it for the competition. (64) When advocates across the country assembled at the 1934 Congress of Regional Costume in Nice they agreed not only on the need for promotion of fetes de costume by tourist bodies and publications, but also on the need to eliminate all dubious manifestations, parades and pageants, fantaisies and cross-dressing games that had arisen over the years and threatened to degrade the costume. It required as well that only natives or current residents of the region in question be allowed to don traditional costume during these events, to avoid "masquerades". (65)

For their part, Breton cultural authorities and elite tourists could be still more apprehensive in attempting to shore up (and often to cordon off) value and authenticity in a fast-changing social and cultural field. Even those Breton cultural authorities--a growing number in the twenties and thirties--who tended to embrace tourism as a strategy of Breton cultural preservation often voiced dire worries over what seemed a drift toward performed heritage in the region. The preeminent example would have to be Auguste Dupouy, perhaps the leading authority and advocate of Breton culture in the interwar period, and an individual who moved freely between the work of patrimonial conservation and tourist promotion. (66) With regard to the new tendency to ritualize and display costume, Dupouy expressed his concerns very frankly in one of the earliest issues of La Bretagne Touristique in 1922, just as heritage festivity and formalized display of costume were becoming commonplace in the region. "We do not see the need", he asserted on behalf of the revue, for the tendency "every season, in every commune of any importance to elect the queens of this or that in order to display them all dressed up on a float." The only real impact of these efforts, he suggested, was "to provide journalists with subject matter for their so-called humorous chronicles and occasions for ridiculing the Bretons." (67) Dupouy's 1935 guide to the region of Cornouaille returned to this theme, with its author lamenting juried beauty contests like the Fete des Reines taking place in Quimper; these events were typical, he suggested, of the new traditionalist spectacles emanating not from the people but rather from the efforts of local "bonnes volontes bourgeoises" (bourgeois good intentions) or even tourists and tourist organizations. He records the president of the organizing committee of one such contest telling the participants, "you are the brilliant harbingers of tourism; remain, then, faithful to the Breton costume," a remark he says makes his heart bleed. (68)

Tourists themselves, particularly those keenest on situating themselves within the elite tradition of tasteful literary and cultural travel in the region, gave voice as well to worries over the "loss" of Breton costume and cultural value as those were becoming more available in less exclusivist contexts. As the beaches of lower Brittany tended on the whole to attract a far less socially exclusive clientele than did those along the "Emerald Coast" of upper Brittany, the presence of new tourists (petit bourgeois fonctionnaires and employes, most notably) at Breton cultural festivals could often be especially striking--and troubling to elite travelers. The tension between survival and loss is one that runs throughout and animates the prodigious travel literature dedicated to Brittany, and indeed was a principal convention of the medium. (69) That such travel writing could still sustain an older investment in the evocative singularity of Breton costume and culture is apparent in Elizabeth Shackleton's 1925 account of her automobile travels through Brittany and rural France. Shackleton marvels at the utter lack of modern self-consciousness or rudeness in the costume-clad girls she is viewing during a stop in Quimper, and wonders whether it wasn't the costume itself that had brought forth this too-rare demeanor. With its residents "dressed to suit their environment", Quimper could still for this travel writer deliver the sense of picturesque harmony and determinate place that elite outsiders had for so long been seeking in the region and its costumes, even as it was becoming a tourist hub and principal Breton heritage ground. (70)

Yet such accounts equally acknowledge in places the growing difficulty of arriving at a secure sense of value and authenticity in the encounter with Breton costume and culture. Paul Gruyer's 1925 Hachette guide to the region, for example, freely acknowledges the drift toward "modernism" in Breton costume, to the extent that even the celebrated coiffes of the Bigouden women were "in full transformation". (71) As regarded the famed costumes of Plougastel, of which Bell and so many other travelers had through the years been enamored, Gruyer laments the near disappearance of costumes "of lively colors, green, red, blue and yellow, the women with vests and skirts carefully layered in such fashion as to suggest great wealth." (72)

That this guidebook author would, like many others in this period, offer a fully detailed recounting (indeed, really a momentary resuscitation) of what had been or was being lost suggests a conflicted claim to cultural value--one in which the signaling of loss and lament served to affirm the traveler's distinction and fragile possession amidst changing conditions in the region. Many were the instances as well in personal literary travel narratives of an author referencing earlier trips to the region as a means of taking stock of just how much had changed, and often how much had been lost. Doing so was partly about asserting an individual relationship to Brittany, in the face of modernity's (and modern tourism's) pull toward impersonality and commercialism. (73) As tourist commerce and heritage efforts more fully framed the region for encounter and tourists arrived in ever growing numbers, securing a sense of original and unimpeachably valuable experience became for tourists more problematic. Self-consciously elite travelers were trying still in the interwar period to cordon off a domain of authentic culture and cultural experience in the region, though now within a shifting tourist context that no longer accorded them the same latitude and authority as claimants to Breton cultural value. Increasingly, the only way for them to feel they had succeeded in truly securing authenticity in Breton culture--and with it their own sense of cultural status and possession--was to evoke it in terms of loss.

The available historical evidence suggests that authenticity concerns tended to weigh less heavily on the whole upon many of the Bretons participating in these events, though it also shows that the new conditions for costume display contributed to a significantly changed dynamics of Breton cultural identification within the region. A full and systematic consideration of the changing Breton relationship to traditional costume in this period lies beyond the scope of this essay, though it is possible here to identify some of the complex ways in which Bretons themselves could broker continuity and change at these events. It is clear for example that the above-mentioned "masquerades," fantaisies, and other inventions so anathema to many authenticity-obsessed tourists and cultural authorities could and often did look quite different from an inside perspective. Scholarly analysis of contemporary heritage and folk performance has demonstrated that the participants in these events often devise ways of adapting them to local needs, and so commonly present different cultural "faces" to outsider and insider eyes. (74) The recurrence of playful and/or unauthorized displays of Breton costume in archival and newspaper accounts of these events suggests that even amidst new pressures to codify Breton costume there still existed considerable space for self-fashioning among participants, and even for the assertion of a kind of possession at variance with the new norms of patrimonial and touristic display. Memoirs and ethnographies of Breton costume confirm that the principal intended audience for costume display at important gatherings in the region, even into the post-1945 period, was most often other Bretons, with the stylized and always evolving variations of one's costume a way of demarcating connection to a specific pays. (75) Thus while visiting spectators often sought out exterior traces of preservation and an aestheticized "harmony in variation" in their encounters with the new Breton costume displays, Bretons themselves could use these events differently as occasions for self-representation, distinction and adaptation. As a point of convergence for the surrounding region, an event like the Fete des Reines offered some space for an ongoing negotiation of continuity and change that was becoming more essential to many Breton lives in the interwar period. (76)

It must be quickly added that of course not all in the region readily embraced the new conditions for Breton cultural display, and that ambivalence at the growing presence of outsiders in the region even at times flared into open resistance. The archival records of municipal and departmental authorities and of tourist organizations show that by the twenties and thirties the Touring Club, Michelin Company and departmental syndicats were receiving letters from tourists to the region recounting in great detail experiences of "defiled" picturesque views, unscrupulous guides, and unruly youths that were at odds with the longstanding tourist expectation of a fully welcoming and available Breton population. (77) With regard to costume specifically, some Bretons in certain regions (including the picturesque and much-represented Bigoudens, most notably) adopted the practice of charging to be photographed or painted. Resistance among Bretons to prying tourist eyes was indeed such as to prompt the 1929 sixth edition of Sabine Baring Gould's widely used pocket guide to Brittany to include an admonition to readers not to "snap" locals in costume "without having courteously asked and obtained their permission." (78) Such episodes affirm that tourism and heritage display could have the impact in specific places of hardening the lines between the presumed viewers and occupants of culture, particularly for those peasants and fishing families most disadvantaged by economic and demographic shifts in the region.

Yet I would argue that overall the main impact of the display of costume was to render more fluid the lines of Breton cultural possession, in line with the new conditions of geographic, economic and cultural mobility that were beginning to touch Breton life more directly in this period. This was perhaps most strikingly the case for many in the burgeoning ranks of Breton emigres in the capital, who in this period came to mount their own ritualized displays of Breton culture, which made costume a key touch point for Breton identification outside of the region. (79) Already before the war, Paris-based organizations and newspapers catering to the Breton community began holding Breton fetes and costume pageants within the city itself or on its outskirts. One early Fete Bretonne took place in the Bois-Colombes just outside the city, bringing together 40 couples dressed in costumes from Pont l'Abbe, Concarneau, Respordean, Quimperle, Douarnenez, Auray and other localities in the region where costume still tended regularly to be worn. By the interwar period, events combining social, benevolent and ethnic functions were even more common, and groups like the Association des Bretons de Paris and the Association Amicale des Bretons de Paris, the Societe La Bretagne and the newspaper Le Breton de Paris urged participants to wear traditional costume at the events to bolster Breton pride and propagandize on behalf of their projects. (80) La Bretagne even organized summer pardons, reworking the traditional Breton saint-day processions into a far more secularized celebration in Paris which predictably culminated in a full-dress parade through the streets of the capital. (81)

Members of this growing population of emigres would often find themselves as well among the crowds of spectators attending Breton heritage celebrations in the region itself during the summer months. As natives of the region returning to it as both transplants and as tourists, they had a somewhat complicated relationship to heritage and heritage events. Reporting on the 1920 Fete des Cormorans for Le Breton de Paris, Georges Le Bail recounts having taken his car from Paris to Quimper, then joining the ranks of others making their way by car, bicycle and foot to Penmarch. The native son is especially enraptured by the outfits of the Bigouden women, since they are those of nearly sixty years earlier, worn for special display on the occasion of the fete. As he watches the bagpipe-led dancing, Le Bail rhapsodizes in the description about "the moving and beautiful" spectacle of these "authentic peasants of this old land, decked out in costumes (first) viewed in my youth", a "momentary rebirth of a vanished past." (82)

If this language seems to be veering rather closely toward the conventions of tourist description, the impression is reinforced by the author's resort at the beginning and end of his account to the paintings of Bigouden costume (Lemor-dant's in particular) that had been such a staple of nineteenth century artistic Bretonism as points of reference. Le Bail is conveying here a very mobile and fluid relationship to Breton costume and culture, one that would have resonated with his largely Paris-based and bourgeois readership. In its air of nostalgia, its lament of loss and its explicit distancing of the Breton peasantry, the description is a reminder of how reinforcing of bourgeois cultural positioning the emerging Breton heritage could be. Le Bail's reaction was indeed precisely the one for which organizers and supporters of the events were hoping. The newspaper Le Progres du Finistere characterized the Fete des Reines as an event capable of speaking to multiple audiences, including Bretons themselves: "Fete of youth, grace and beauty, of the tourist eager for the old customs one must know in order to understand Brittany, this event will not leave unmoved Breton families who will have the pleasure on that day of reliving the emotions of their tradition-bound youth and all that evokes in them the memory of a happy and comforting past." (83) Thus were the Bretons, or rather implicitly certain Bretons, imagined as a people that had to consume its own culture and past as performed heritage. Clearly, the pathways to Breton costume and culture had multiplied, complicating claims to cultural possession that were now coming from very different quarters.

Indeed the main impact of the new heritage-based regional culture that was emerging in the interwar period, I would argue in conclusion, was precisely to enable more multiple, and less authoritative claims to Breton costume--by political and cultural elites, by tourist organizers and tourists, by the Bretons themselves. The effort to preserve Breton dress in the face of a perceived crisis in its everyday usage had stirred key bourgeois actors both within the region and beyond it to assert a more decisive stewardship over its value and historical evolution. As this article has shown, their efforts to preserve and revalue an ostensibly popular cultural expression like Breton costume as heritage wound up producing a costume more mediated by gestures of display, promotion and performance. One impact of this shift was to help consolidate a certain bourgeois viewing position vis-a-vis the region's costumes and culture, one that made distance and fragmentation the necessary conditions of cultural identification. It also sparked acute dilemmas over cultural value and authority, evidence that Breton costume remained a valued "possession", though one now with far more claimants than simply the Bretons themselves. Indeed even for these latter, traditional costume could now often as well be a medium of exchange, through which lived and ongoing experiences of continuity and change were symbolically enacted.

Department of History

Lowell, MA 01854

ENDNOTES

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2007 Social Science History As sociation Conference in Chicago as part of a panel entitled "Where City and Country Meet: Tourist Exchanges in History and Anthropology", and the author wishes to thank fellow panelists and the commentator Suzanne Kaufmann for their reactions. Stephen Harp, Sally Charnow, Philip Whelan and Maura Coughlin read earlier drafts of this article and offered valuable responses and suggestions. The Scholarly Research Forum of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell also provided a timely grant to support archival research during the summer of 2007.

(1.) Nancy Bell, Picturesque Brittany, illustrated by Arthur Bell (London, 1906), 77-9.

(2.) Bell, Picturesque Brittany, 80-82.

(3.) The French patrimoine and English "heritage" are not exact equivalents, though the two terms came into broader currency at roughly the same time in the 1970's to characterize a new wave of efforts to consolidate and commemorate local pasts. Patrimony generally refers to cultural repertories that have been formally constituted and/or recognized by the state, whereas heritage has come to connote cultural production linked not only to state initiatives but also to commercial and touristic interests. For that reason, even as I will be discussion early patrimonial efforts of preservation in this article, my overarching concern with tourism justifies having recourse to the latter term for analytical purposes. The argument here attempts to move beyond the "producerist" or statist orientation of most studies of patrimony to incorporate changing contexts and audiences as well, and for that the recent cross-disciplinary literature on heritage has been particularly useful. See below, notes 43-46.

(4.) Bell, Picturesque Brittany, 171.

(5.) For an overview of recent work on local history, see Stephane Gerson, "Une France locale: The Local Past in Recent French Scholarship," French Historical Studies, 26:3 (Summer 2003): 539-559. See also the concise encapsulation of Brett Bowles in "La republique regionale," French Review 69 (1995): 103-17. Anne-Marie Thiesse was one of the first to suggest the interdependence of regional and national agendas in her study of literary regionalism, Ecrire la France: Le mouvement regionaliste de langue francaise entre la Belle Epoque et la Liberation (Paris, 1991); see also her Ils apprenaient la France: L'Exaltation des regions dans la discours patriotique (Paris, 1997). Gerson examines the interface of local and national political identities in The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 2003); other important studies include Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989); Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, 1993); Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity (Ithaca, 1992), chapter four, "Identity Conflicts: Folklore and the National Heritage".

(6.) There has as yet been no full-length scholarly consideration of tourism in Brittany, though key themes are addressing in the short essays of a 1996 exhibition catalogue dedicated the subject, Nathalie Richard and Yveline Pallier, eds., Cent Ans de Tourisme en Bretagne (Rennes, 1996). While historical accounts of the role of tourism in the "invention" of regions and regional identities in France and Europe have been rare, American historians have demonstrated the importance of tourist economies and representations to the emergence of regional entities like New England, the West and South. Representative works include Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth. Century (Washington, 1995); Scott Norris, ed., Discovered Country: Tourism and Survival in the American West (Albuquerque, 1994); Richard D. Starnes, Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina (Tuscaloosa, 2005).

(7.) For a related and valuable study of the role of tourism in reshaping conceptions of place in the Breton islands, see Karine Salome, Les iles bretonnes: Une image en construction, 1750-1914 (Rennes, 2003). My study is also of a piece with recent scholarship focusing on how regional products have mediated cultural value and regional and national identifications; see in particular Kolleen Guy, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (Baltimore, 2003); for comparison with the case of Burgundy, see Gilles Laferte, "Folklore savant et folklore commercial: reconstruire la qualite des vins de Bourgogne. Une sociologie economique de l'image regionale dans l'entre-deux-guerres" (Ph.D. Thesis, EHESS, 2002); also on the folkloric construction of Burgundian terroir, see Philip Whalen, "'A merciless source of happy memories': Gaston Roupnel and the Folklore of Burgundian Terroir," Journal of Folklore Research 44.1 (2007): 21-40; and "'Food palaces built of sausages and great ships of lamb chops:' The Gastronomical Fair of Dijon as Consuming Spectacle," J. Davidson and P. Scranton (eds.), The Business of Tourism (Philadelphia, 2007), 56-82.

(8.) Pierre-Jakez Helias, Le Cheval d'Orgeuil (Paris, 1975), trans. the Horse of Pride (New Haven, 1978), 1-4.

(9.) It is notable on this score that the Breton words "bro" and "kis", corresponding to pays (locale) and mode (style) in French, are synonyms. Auguste Dupouy, Au Pays Breton: La Cornouaille (Paris, 1935), 121. The relative importance of identifications, pays, department, region and nation (French or Breton) was, of course, a particularly charged one in Brittany in this period, and influenced discussions of Breton costume in ways I will analyze below.

(10.) The most important historical ethnography of Breton costume is Rene-Yves Creston's Le Costume Breton (Paris, 1978). Malcolm Chapman has most extensively discussed Breton dress within the larger context of Celtic identification and representation; see "'Freezing the Frame': Dress and Ethnicity in Brittany and Gaelic Scotland," in Eicher, ed., Dress and Ethnicity (Oxford, 1995), 7-27; "A Social Anthropological Study of a Breton Village, with Celtic Comparisons, unpublished D.Phil thesis, (Oxford University, 1986); and The Celts: Construction of a Myth (London, 1992).

(11.) Creston, Le Costume Breton, 42-3.

(12.) For a short overview of the broad shift in representations of Brittany over the nineteenth century, see Catherine Bertho-Lavenir, "L'Invention de la Bretagne: Genese sociale d'un stereotype," Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, no. 35, November 1980; see also Salome, Les iles bretonnes; Alain Corbin more expansively discusses changing mentalities and practices regarding the sea and seashore, from threatening to recuperative broadly speaking, in Le territoire du vide, tr. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840, tr. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley, 1994). Jean-Yves Le Disez offers a thorough and systematic consideration of the overall patterns of British travel writing on Brittany in Etrange Bretagne: Recits de voyageurs Brittaniques en Bretagne, 1830-1900 (Rennes, 2002).

(13.) The most influential folkloric account of the region, particularly for its early registering of decline and loss in the depiction of traditional Breton culture, is Emile Souvestre's Les Derniers Bretons (Paris, 1843). Renowned literary accounts of Brittany include those of Gustave Flaubert, Par les champs et par les greves, (Paris, 1897); Stendhal, Memoires d'un Touriste (Paris, 1891); Jules Michelet, Carnet de Bretagne (Rennes, 1997). For a brief overview of artistic representations of Brittany, which enjoyed a great Salon vogue in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, see D. Delouche, "La Bretagne et ses peintres au XIX siecle," Memoire de la Societe d'histoire et d'archeologie de Bretagne, 54 (4) 1977, 5-30. The region attracted a great early wave of photography as well beginning in the 1850's, with traditional costume a fixture in the representation; see La Bretagne en Relief: Premiers Voyages Photographiques en Bretagne (Quimper, 2000).

(14.) Jesusa Vega portrays a similar dynamic of metropolitan (and especially artistic) valorization of regional dress at work in Spain over roughly the same time period in "Spain's Image and Regional Dress: From Everyday Object to Museum Piece and Tourist Attraction," in Susan Larson and Eva Woods, eds., Visualizing Spanish Modernity, (New York, 2005), 207-227.

(15.) The Union Regionaliste Bretonne estimated at 131,000 the number of Bretons leaving the province from 1871-1896, according to a statistical study by J. Choleau; Bulletin de l' Union Regionaliste Bretonne, 1923, 32. The main newspaper for the Breton community in Paris, Le Breton de Paris, estimated that there were approximately 300,000 Bretons living in the Department of the Seine in 1920; Le Breton de Paris, July 24, 1920.

(16.) For one of the more influential examples of this line of explanation, see Andre Chevrillon, La Bretagne d'hier: L'Enchantement Breton (Paris, 1924), iii-viii.

(17.) Helias, The Horse of Pride, 48, 51.

(18.) The Breton poet and president of the Societe de l'Histoire du Costume Georges Toudouze speculated that the death of 250,000 Bretons in the war had made the donning of festive dress far less seemly, and that the profusion of mail order catalogues and the decline of a local artisanat in the region had turned many Bretons toward more modern sensibilities in dress; Victor Lhuer, Le Costume Breton de 1900 jusqu'a nos jours (Paris, 1943), preface by Georges Toudouze (unpaginated text).

(19.) References to a French tourist "industry" became commonplace after the turn of the century, particularly in the rhetoric of the Touring Club de France, a national voluntary association of travel enthusiasts and advocates. Over time the loose coalition of parties working to promote and develop tourist commerce in the country--The Touring, Automobile and Alpine Clubs, the major train companies, hotel owners and syndicats, Michelin and other private companies, the government's own Office National du Tourisme and interwar tourist bureaux, and local, regional and national syndicats d'initiative--would seek to better coordinate their activities behind the shared aim of national tourist development. On the origins of the French national tourist industry, see Patrick Young, "The Consumer as National Subject: Bourgeois Tourism in the French Third Republic, 1880-1914", PhD Dissertation, (Columbia University 2000).

(20.) For a concise analysis of the attraction of folk cultures to right wing integralist French nationalism, see Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity (Ithaca, 1992), chapter four, "Identity Conflicts: Folklore and the National Heritage." On Vichy's later folkloric initiatives, see Christian Faure, Le Project culturel de Vichy: folklore et revolution nationale: 1940-1944 (Lyon, 1989).

(21.) As a socialist who commenced his ethnographic studies of Breton costume in the 1920's, Creston was the most insistent in arguing against the notions of a "Breton race" or "national costume" and in favor of the idea of Breton costume being a class-specific peasant inheritance that was later generalized; Creston, Le Costume Breton, 16, 31.

(22.) On Breton separatist political movements, see Alain Deniel, Le mouvement Breton, 1919-1945 (Paris, 1976); Jack Reese, The Bretons Against France (Chapel Hill, 1977); a retrospective account by the principal Breton nationalist leader of the interwar period is Olier Mordrel, L'ldee Bretonne (Paris, 1981).

(23.) Charles Le Goffic, one of the leading Breton cultural authorities throughout the interwar period, cast this project as one expressly opposed to Breton separatism in the inaugural issue of La Bretagne Touristique, No. 1, April 15 1922.

(24.) See J. Plantadis, "Le Musee regional," L'Action regionaliste, August 1905, cited in Jean Charles-Brun, Le Regionalisme, 170-1. Materials on the provincial museums can be found at the Touring Club Archive at the Archives Contemporaine, AS 53 2000028, article 92.

(25.) The museum had added Breton costumes early, in 1874, and then expanded the display space for costume considerably in its move to the Episcopal Palace next to the Cathedral of St. Corentin in the heart of Quimper. The aim of this exhibition strategy was to present the costumes in their natural "cadre de vie", as against displaying them in the abstracted fashion of artifacts. Archives Deprtemental du Finistere, 4T5/Musee Departemental, 1872-1940/"Conseil General, Extrait du Proces Verbal des Deliberations, September 2, 1911."

(26.) Archives Deprtemental du Finistere, 4T5/Musee Departmental, 1872-1940/"Rapport port of Conservateur of the Museum to the Prefect, March 31, 188; "Conseil General, Extrait du Proces Verbal des Deliberations, September 2, 1911."

(27.) Archives Departementales du Finistere, 4T7, "Museums".

(28.) Regionalists did argue that one vital role folk museums could play was in preserving older examples of costume, the better to facilitate adaptation of those costumes to modern conditions in the present. "Est-il Possible de Creer un Costume Regional?," Comoedia, May 16 1928, MNATP, Fonds Charles Brun, Boite 14, Dossiers Divers: Le Costume Regional, "Articles de Journaux de 1914 a 1937."

(29.) "Manuscript of Costumes des Provinces Francaises," MNATP, Fonds Charles Brun, Boite 14: "Dossiers Divers: Le Costume Regional," 1.

(30.) On the linkages between tourism and regionalism, see Charles-Brun's statement in the Revue mensuelle du Touring Club de France, September, 1910, 387. On Charles-Brun' regionalist thought more generally, see Julian Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France, 1890-1914: Jean Charles-Brun and French Polictical Thought (London, 2003).

(31.) On the prewar "turn to the regions" within French tourism see my article, "La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire: The Touring Club de France and the French Regions, 1890-1918" in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford, 2002), 169-189.

(32.) Le Breton de Paris; Organe des Interets Bretons, April 15, 1922.

(33.) "Assemblee Generale extraordinaire de L'Union des Syndicats d'Initiative, Lille 19-20 Sept. 1924", MNATP, Fonds Charles Brun, Boite 14, Dossiers Divers: Le Costume Regional, "Articles de Journaux de 1914 a 1937".

(34.) The Syndicat d'Initiative de Cornouaille for example offered 150 FF in prizes for notable folk costumes in the region in 1929, as well as 1200 FF for the decoration of building facades; Syndicat d'Initiative de Cornouaille, Bulletin Trimestriel, (Quimper, 1930).

(35.) While it is conventional to date the formal transition from "elite" to "mass" or popular tourism in France to 1936, and the Popular Front's leisure initiatives, preceding decades witnessed a considerable widening of the French and foreign clientele for tourism--particularly within the middle and lower ranks of the bourgeoisie. Catherine Bertho-Lavenir offers an overview of the historical evolution of tourism in France from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries in La Roue et le Stylo: Comment nous sommes devenues touristes (Paris, 1999).

(36.) J. Gauthier, Guides Touristique Departementaux: Guide du Finistere (Nantes, 1926), 15. The Comite de la Service Tounstique du Finistere similarly foregrounded traditional costume in its own guide, "Bretagne, Le Finistere: Guide du touriste, ses costumes, ses sites, la mer" (Brest, 1924).

(37.) "Guide du Syndicat du Initiative de Cornouaille", ed. by Louis Le Guennec (Quimper, 1923), i.

(38.) J. Gauthier, Guides Touristique Departementaux: Guide du Finistere. (Nantes, 1926), 50. The 1925 Hachette Guide authored by Paul Gruyer similarly noted the intrusion of "modernism" into Bigouden costume in the aftermath of the war; Paul Gruyer, Un Mois en Bretagne (Paris, 1925), 174-5.

(39.) On the Breton pardons as tourist attractions, see my article "Of Pardons, Loss and Longing: Tourism and Cultural Value in Brittany, 1900-1937," French Historical Studies, Spring 2007. Breton weddings were also highly valued moments of encounter within tourist culture, not only for their display of traditional dress but for the opportunities they often provided to cross the cultural threshold and join in the festivity.

(40.) Guide du Syndicat d'Initiative de Carnouaille, ed. by Louis Le Guennec, (Quimper, 1923), 80.

(41.) A New Handbook to Brittany and Adjacent Parts of Normandy, 31, 36.

(42.) For a richly suggestive collection of essays exploring how heritage constructions help represent and reinvent nationhood, see David Boswell and Jessica Evans, Representing the Nation: A Reader: Histories, Heritage and Museums (London, 1999), esp. Part Two: "Representing the Past as Heritage and its Consumption," pp. 109-232. Other works within the abundant interdisciplinary scholarship on heritage and heritage tourism that have been most important in shaping my analysis are: David T. Herbert, ed., Heritage, Tourism and Society (New York, 1995); G.J. Ashworth and P.J. Larkham, eds., Building a New Heritage: Tourism, Culture, and Identity in the New Europe (London, 1994); Rachid Amirou, Imaginaire du tourisme culturel (Paris, 2000); Bella Dicks, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability ( Berkshire, 2003); and Nezar AlSayyad, ed., Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism (London, 2001).

(43.) Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Cultures: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley, 1998).

(44.) Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Cultures, pp. 57-74. On tourism and heritage in the French countryside in more recent years, see Susan Carol Rogers, "Which Heritage: Nature, Culture and Identity in French Rural Tourism," French Historical Studies, 25:3 (Summer 2002): 475-503.

(45.) David Picard and Mike Robinson, eds., Festivals, Tourism and Social Change: Remaking Worlds (Buffalo, 2006), 17; the anthropological and sociological studies in that collection have been most influential in shaping my thinking on Breton heritage performance. See also David M. Guss' influential ethnographic study of contemporary Latin American national and ethnic festivals for its analysis of these as highly contested events in which participants often challenge the "ideology of tradition"; The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley, 2001). Kevin Meetham offers a useful overview of recent debates over heritage and authenticity within tourist studies in Tourism in Global Society: Place, Culture and Consumption (London, 2001), chapter 5, "Authenticity and Heritage," 90-113.

(46.) Marie-Anne Thiesse, Ecrire la France, 41-2. Le Braz himself had earlier turned to tourists as a means of resuscitating popular theater in Brittany in the late 1890's, after it had fallen dormant in the preceding decade; LcGoffic, L'Ame Bretonne, 293-4, 312. On the influence of regional theatre populaire on Parisian modernist theater, see Sally Charnow, Theater, Politics and Markets in Fin-de-Siecle Paris: Staging Modernity (New York, 2005).

(47.) Revue Mensuelle du Touring Club, October 1909, 454-5.

(48.) MNATP, Fonds Charles Brun, Boite 14, Dossiers Divers: Le Costume Regional, "Articles de Presse divers sur le costume regional avant 1935," Union Regionaliste Bretonne, "Pour Nos Costumes Nationaux," 1-2.

(49.) Le Breton de Paris; Orange des Interets Bretons, October 15,1921.

(50.) The Fete has been the subject of a number of French memoires de Maitrise. The most useful of these for me has been Audrey Bodere, "Un evenement culturel: les Fetes de Cornouaille, 1923-1955," Universite de Rennes 2, 2002; see also Jeanne Jourdren, "Les Fetes des Reines de Cornouaille 1923 a 1948: Contribution des fetes traditionelles au maintien de l'identite regional en Bretagne," Universite du Maine, 2002; and Sylvie Lecrivain, "Histoire des Fetes des Reines de Cornouaille 1923 a 1958: Une contribution a la renaissance de la culture bretonne," Universite Catholique de l'Ouest, 1997.

(51.) Archival materials on the Fete are available in the Archives Municipales de Quimper, 51-8, Police, Hygiene and Justice: Fete des Reines.

(52.) Archives Municipales de Quimper, 51-8/Police, Hygiene and Justice/Fete des Reines, 1924, letter from Le Bourhis to the Mayor of Quimper, August 11, 1924.

(53.) Archives Municipales de Quimper, 51-8/Police, Hygiene and Justice/Fete des Reines, 1934, letter from Le Brouhis to the Mayor of Quimper, June 26, 1934.

(54.) The Syndicat d'Initiative de Cornouaille promoted this notion most aggressively; see its guidebooks, Guide du Syndicat de L'Initiative de Cornouaille, ed. by Louis Le Guennec (Quimper, 1923) and Quimer et sa Region: Le vrai guide du touriste (Quimper, undated, c. 1912-1919).

(55.) Archives Municipales de Quimper, 51-8/Police, Hygiene and Justice/Fete des Reines, 1925, Quimper Municipal Council Seance of August 12, 125.

(56.) Breiz Atao, no. 9-10: Sept.-Oct, 1925, 605.

(57.) Breiz Atao, no. 11: November, 1924, 490. The 1924 Fete was deliberately scheduled to coincide with the final day of the Pan-Celtic Congress (the first such Congress) being held in Quimper from September 6-14; Archives Municipales de Quimper, 51-9/Police, Hygiene and Justice/Congress Panceltique, 1924, programme. The assertion that this dress constituted in effect a Breton "national" costume is one that twentieth century social scientists have robustly disputed, most notably Rene-Yves Creston in Le Costume Breton.

(58.) La Bretagne Integrale, April-June 1925, MNATP, Fonds Charles Brun, Boite 14, Dossiers Divers: Le Costume Regional, "Articles de Journaux de 1914 a 1937."

(59.) "Assemblee Generale extraordinaire de L'Union des Syndicats d'Initiative, Lille 19-20 Sept. 1924," propos of M. Le Bondidier, MNATP, Fonds Charles Brun, Boite 14, Dossiers Divers: Le Costume Regional, "Articles de Journaux de 1914 a 1937."

(60.) Such concerns were in fact intrinsic to the emerging culture of spectacle and incipient mass tourism, and scholarly literature on late nineteenth and twentieth century Universal Expositions in particular has shown how the display and staging of provincial and colonial cultures at those events uneasily balanced ethnographic concerns for fidelity with the need to appeal to mass audiences. See for example Shanny Peer, France on Display: Peasants, Provincials and Folklore in the 1937 World's Fair (Albany, 1998); and Sylviane Leprun, Le theatre des colonies: Scenographie, acteurs et discours de I'imaginaire dans les expositions, 1855-1937 (Paris, 1986).

(61.) Archives Deprtemental du Finistere, 8M106, "Fete des Cormorans," article from Le Petit Breton, July 9, 1922.

(62.) Revue Mensuelle du Touring Club, February 1928, 27.

(63.) The organizing committee likewise limited participation in the concours de danse to only residents of the arrondissements of Quimper and Quimperle, in order to safeguard the local quality of the event. Archives Municipales de Quimper, 51-9/Police, Hygiene and Justice/Semaine Bretonne, programme, notes of FRB on the Semaine; Bulletin de l'Union Regionaliste Bretonne, 1923, 5.

(64.) Bulletin de L'Union Regionaliste Bretonne, 1923, 5.

(65.) "Voeux du Congres du Costume Regional a Nice," MNATP, Fonds Charles Brun, Boite 14, Dossiers Divers: Le Costume Regional, "Articles de Journaux de 1914 a 1937."

(66.) Dupouy's vast oeuvre includes translations of Breton literary works and songs, histories and biographies of notable Bretons, as well as tourist guidebooks. He was also one of the founding editors of La Bretagne Touristique, and wrote one of the authoritative postwar studies of Breton costume, Costume Breton (Paris, 1951)

(67.) La Bretagne Touristique, no. 6, September 15, 1922, 5-7.

(68.) Dupouy, Au pays Breton: La Cornouaille 102, 120. Dupouy notes as well that the complet tanne, a weathered fisherman's suit that first appeared in 1904 in Dournenez, had by the interwar period come to be available for purchase at beach resorts and in the more touristed towns, and was even being made in Paris, Toulon and Marseilles. Ads for hats and bonnets, embroidery as well as Breton furniture, faience and other "curiosites locales" took up a growing space in the back of guidebooks by the twenties, especially for Cornouaille and the Finistere. In some areas--Quimper and other cities, most notably--the tourist market was helping to keep these artisanal sectors afloat.

(69.) James Buzard explores this tension in his excellent The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918 (Oxford, 1993); see also Le Disez, Etrange Bretagne; two other works that have shaped my thinking on discourses of decline and loss in tourism and travel writing are Michel de Certeau, "The Beauty of the Dead: Nisard," in Heterohgies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis, 2000); and Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago, 1995).

(70.) Elizabeth Shackleton, Touring Through France (Philadelphia, 1925), 94-99.

(71.) Paul Gruyer, Un Mois en Bretagne (Paris, 1925), 174-5.

(72.) Gruyer, Un Mois en Bretagne, 127.

(73.) The tradition of cultural and literary travel had always defined itself against rationalization and standardization in travel, as augured by the guidebooks, brochures and tourist circuits of the modern tourist industry. See, Buzard, The Beaten Track.

(74.) My thinking on the competing identity claims at tourist sites has been shaped by the sociological essays in Marie-Francoise Lanfant et. al., eds, International Tourism: Identity and Change (London, 1995), particularly Michael Picard's discussion of cultural tourism in Bali, "Cultural Heritage and Tourist Capital: Cultural Tourism in Bali," pp. 44-66; for a case study of how folkloric spectacles have accommodated the assertion of local identities at the Swiss resort of Interlaken, see Regina Bendix "Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom?," Journal of American Folklore 102(404), (April-June 1989): 131-146. see also Sharon Macdonald's analysis of the balancing of local and touristic imperatives at the Aros heritage center on Scotland's Isle of Skye, "A People's Story: Heritage, Identity and Authenticity," in Chris Rojek and John Urry, Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, (London, 1997), pp. 155-175.

(75.) Creston indeed suggests such continual adaptation as being key to the historical survival of Breton costume in certain areas over others; Creston, Le Costume Breton, 50-1; Jakez-Helias, Horse of Pride.

(76.) Audrey Bodere emphasizes the importance of the Fetes de Cournouaille as a site for tourisme familial or family tourism, and suggests that the Fete served to celebrate "Bretonness" in "all of its complexity and ambiguity"; Bodere, "Un evenement culturel: les Fetes de Cornouaille, 1923-1955," 26,85.

(77.) These letters are housed in the Archives departemental du Finistere, 8M 106.

(78.) Sabine Baring Gould, Brittany (London: Methuen, 1929), sixth edition, vi.

(79.) There were approximately 300,000 Bretons living in the Department of the Seine in 1920, according to Le Breton de Paris; July 24, 1920. On the Breton community in Paris, see Leslie Moch, "Networks among Bretons? The Evidence for Paris, 1875-1925," Continuity and Change 18 (3), (2001): 431-455; and "Bretons in Paris: Regional Ties and Urban Networks in an Age of Urbanization" (in translation as AI bretoni a Parigi: legami regionali e reti urbane in un epoca di urbanizzazione), in Quaderni Storici, 106: 177-199.

(80.) Le Breton de Paris; Organe des Interets Bretons, July 6, 1913; June 26, 1920; July 10, 1920.

(81.) La Bretagne Touristique, May 15 1923.

(82.) Le Breton de Paris; Organe des Interets Bretons, October 2, 1920.

(83.) Le Progres du Finistere, July 14, 1934.

By Patrick Young

University of Massachusetts-Lowell