His father, François, and his mother, Rosalie le Gac, were peasants, but Luzel had a peaceful childhood in his home town, making friends (including the future painter Yan Dargent, and attending many veillées, which were traditional parties held after dark where the villagepeople would assemble and pass the long winter nights in one another's company, often listening to ancestral stories.

An encounter with Adolphe Orain, a folklorist of Upper Brittany, gave him some direction, and, with the support of Ernest Renan, he managed to obtain from the Minister for State Education the means to go search for old literary texts in Basse-Bretagne.

At the 1872 Congress of the Breton Association at Saint-Brieuc, Luzel read a text that he had prepared, in which he raised suspicions about the authenticity of the songs included in the Barzaz Breiz, which was published by Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué 33 years earlier.

In 1989, the musician and linguist Donatien Laurent demonstrated, in a thesis based on the manuscripts of La Villemarqué, that even if the author had revised the lyrics, he still nearly always relied upon the versions that he himself had collected or transcribed.

There, he encountered Anatole Le Braz, who would become his disciple of sorts and would continue his work in finding stories and making an inventory of pieces of Ancient Breton theatre.

Luzel was elected as a Republican to the municipal council of Quimper, and was later, in 1883, made Vice-President of the Archeological Society of Finistère, a group in which he participated for quite some time, and which La Villemarqué founded.