Jean-Marie Déguignet (19 July 1834[1] – 29 August 1905) was a Breton soldier, farmer, salesman, shopkeeper, and writer who is best known for his memoirs illuminating the life of the rural poor of 19th-century France.

[3] His love of learning, and the extensive and eclectic nature of his studies and travel while a young man, led him to freethought and atheism.

[5] He stayed on his farm at Toulven for fifteen years, but was then evicted for his persistent and prominent Republican agitation.

[4] It was these notebooks that languished unknown until their discovery in a farm house, thereafter edited and published in France by An Here in 1998 as Mémoires d'un paysan Bas-Breton [Memoirs of a Breton Peasant].

One reviewer described the Memoirs as "one of the fullest descriptions of nineteenth-century peasant society by one who was born into it, spent his life kicking against it.