I have focussed most of this trip on smaller towns and villages and staying in B&B’s off the beaten track. But I must say that a break in a city (the 10th largest in France, population 700,000) has been a nice change. I took advantage of the fitness room at my hotel, and then pretended to be French by heading to the laundromat and post office and picking up a baguette for lunch. Not exciting, but worthwhile.
Rennes is not a tourist town, so while there is some rich history (some described yesterday), the plaques and signs at the sites are generally only in French. I can get the gist of what they say, but no great detail. With the Universities on summer break and many of the French on extended August holidays, there is none of the tourist rush that I experienced on my tour of Normandy and in St. Malo. The city does seem a bit run down, but I understand that it is a digital innovation center for France, and with 63,000 college students, one of the largest university towns in the country. It’s been called a very livable city, but my limited exposure to it wouldn’t allow me to judge.
After my errands I went to Les Champs Libres, which houses the Science Museum, an enormous library and the Musee de Bretagne, which is where I focussed my time. There’s evidence that the region of Brittany, or the Armorican peninsula overall, was settled in prehistoric times, 700,000 BC. There were ancient megalith cultures in the area and Celtic tribal territories that existed before Roman rule. This is the part that fascinated me — I was trying to figure out why there were shops selling Celtic stuff. Apparently, after the collapse of the Roman empire, large scale migration from Great Britain led to the foundation of British colonies in Brittany linked initially to homelands in Cornwall, Devon and Wales. In the museum, some of the infomation was offered in three languages — French, English and Breton. It continues to be considered a language in its own right, but it spoken by fewer than 240,000 people today.
The people of Brittany resisted attempts to be incorporated into the French kingdom, and held of attacks from the English and others. The towns benefitted from the seaports, and the trade they allowed, and huge salt mines. The independent Breton kingdom later developed into the Duchy of Brittany, before it was unified with France to become a province in 1532. After the French Revolution Brittany was abolished as an administrative unit, but continued to retain its distinctive cultural identity. Its administrative existence was reconstituted, in reduced size, as the Region of Brittany in the mid-20th century. It’s a pretty interesting history, and reminds me of other regions, such as Catalonia and Basque in Spain which work hard to maintain independent identities yet benefit from the national programs and scope of Spain.
So that’s the history lesson for today. No churches or religion. And only one photo from the museum — it’s a plate from the 18thC whose motif represents the three orders of the Third Estate (spade), Clergy (crook) and Nobility (sword), topped by the royal crown. The estates of the realm were the broad orders of social hierarchy used in Christian Europe from the medieval period to early modern times. Also translated as those who work, those who pray and those who fight. Sometimes further interpreted to the modern separation of powers — something our current #notmypresident may want to review. Or not. He may think the royal crown would sit nicely on his combover.
