Pêr-Jakez Helias

[3] Pierre-Alain Hélias had previously served at Vannes in an artillery unit of the French Army and, upon the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, he was recalled to active service.

Pierre-Jacques Hélias later recalled that, during his father's combat duty as a Poilu on the Western Front, he and his mother were given, "twenty sous a day... to keep ourselves alive".

Nor were the dead left alone and forgotten after their burial, for Hélias recalled the sight of groups of women moving around the graveyards after Mass in their white coifs, murmuring paters and aves [for] the deceased.

Despite the deep religious piety of his mother, Pierre-Alain and Marie-Jeanne Hélias were "Reds" and, against the opposition of their parish priest, they chose to enroll their son in a secular and state-run school, in the hopes that he would learn French and move up in the world.

[8] After a career in the French Resistance during the Second World War, in 1946 Helias was appointed as director of a weekly programme in Breton on Radio Kimerc'h.

At the same time, thanks to the persistence of a few pioneers, other young people began to take lessons from the last of the professional bagpipers and oboeists, who were ending their lives in a state of melancholy...

A mevel bras (majordomo) was the most important farm worker, a man who might enjoy many privileges, but who was not of the landowning class and it was inconceivable in traditional Breton culture that he could aspire to marry into it.

[7][12] His best-selling work is his memoir Le cheval d'orgueil, or The Horse of Pride, rooted in his native Bigoudenn district south of Quimper.

He became a major figure in Breton literature during the last third of the 20th century[7] and the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1997 says of him, "Per-Jakez Helias as poet, playwright, and radio script writer has been both prolific and popular.

An older Helias was particularly annoyed at this because French-speaking children in working class urban neighborhoods spoke with very similar turns of phrase.

"[16] In contrast, ever since Pope Gregory XI issued the règle d'idiom ("the rule of idiom") in 1373, Roman Catholic clergy were commanded to learn how to preach to and communicate with their flocks in the vernacular.

[14] Furthermore, John Ardagh commented in 1982, "Brittany's two writers most famous in France as a whole, Per-Jakez Helias and Jean-Edern Hallier, are regarded with some scorn by the Breton zealots.

[22] According to Marcus Tanner, despite the controversy that greeted him upon their release, Hélias' memoirs are still used very successfully to attract tourism to the region of Brittany where he grew up and whose threatened culture he immortalized in Le cheval d'orgueil.