Breton nationalism and World War II
Long before World War II, the various Breton nationalist organizations were often anti-French and anti-colonialist, opposed to the Central Government's policy of linguistic imperialism, and critical to varying degrees of post-French Revolution-style Republicanism.
[1] The extent to which this led Breton nationalists into collaboration with the Axis Powers and their motivations, remains a matter of often bitter historical controversy and debate.
Having broken in 1931 from regionalism, its founders (Olier Mordrel and François Debeauvais) were inspired by the success of the Irish War of Independence and played the secessionist card.
On 22 January 1941, the Vichy government named Hervé Budes de Guébriant President of the National Commission for Agricultural Cooperation.
Like other adherents of the deposed French Monarchy, La Bretagne favored the restoration of Brittany's pre-1789 regional autonomy and opposed the secessionist policies of the Breton National Party.
"An organization of study and work", according to Yvonnig Gicquel, it did not wield any executive or decisive powers (against the wishes of the provincial parliament which conceived the adoption of a Breton cultural and regional autonomy doctrine).
The projects to undermine France were abandoned and the support for the nationalists disappeared (in particular it was formally forbidden to proclaim a Breton state or to harm public order).
Other Nationalists, such as Perrot, adopted a more conservative-Catholic stance consistent with longstanding Breton anti-radical ideologies that had emerged among the Royalist-Catholic "Whites" during the French Revolution.
Nazi scholar Rudolf Schlichting toured the region and sent the following comment to his superiors: "from a racial point of view there would be no objection to a Germanization of the Breton population.
"[5] Important members of the Breton National Party including Morvan Lebesque and Alan Heusaff began collaborating with the Germans to one degree or another.
Recent studies have shown the close links that Breton separatist leaders such as Célestin Lainé and Alan Louarn had with German military intelligence (the Abwehr), going back well before the war, to the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.
With his revolver in plain sight on the hip of the black uniform he wore as chief of the Youth Organizations, he left no doubt as to his intentions.
A number of Breton nationalists choose to join the Bezen Perrot organization, a German militia led by Célestin Lainé and Alan Heusaff.
Earlier, on the 3 September, Yann Bricler had been shot in his office by three FTP members, and similarly Yves Kerhoas was killed by the Resistance when leaving a fete in the village of Plouvenez.
Jeanne Coroller-Danio, the Breton historian who worked under the name Danio, was beaten to death along with her brother-in-law, Commander Le Minthier.
[8] The Breton nationalists sought to defend the fact[citation needed] that their widespread image as an overtly fascist, even Nazi, movement had nothing to do with the actual political backgrounds of their activists, as varied as the Action française (royalist), the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO, socialist), the separatist Breton National Party (PAB), or the French Communist Party.
Activists like Francis Gourvil, Youenn Souffes-Després and Jean Le Maho had before the war been members of minority separatist or federalist movements such as the Parti Autonomiste Breton (PAB) or the Ligue fédéraliste de Bretagne.
However the post-war nationalist movements will tend to minimise the collaboration with Nazi Germany and will create the myth of the separatists' repression by the French government.
[citation needed] Still today, some people[10][11][12][13] are worried by the "collective amnesia" of the current Breton autonomist movement about World War II or by their attempts to rehabilitate the nationalist collaborationists.
