We present the article “Ambivalent ghosts and toxic cocktails: being a woman in Breton music today”, which we did not write. It is the work of the remarkably talented and thoughtful singer Marthe Vassallo, taken directly from her lovely blog The Kerbiquet Wheneverly News, here translated into English for your reading pleasure. This piece is particularly apt for us since one of the oddballs providing this site to the public is, you know, a woman… a female musician. Footnotes are in blue.

“Ambivalent ghosts and toxic cocktails: being a woman in Breton music today”

That's it, here it is! Eagerly awaited by, oh, at least three of you! the text of my intervention, last October [2019], at the conference “Orfeas Orfanèlas, Orphees orphees or feminine music” organized by La Talvera in Albi, in complicity with Dastum Bro-Dreger. The complete proceedings of the conference will be published within a few months, and I highly recommend them to you, ladies and especially gentlemen!  This text above all sets out a reflection in progress: many points would benefit – will benefit, I hope – from being spun and unraveled better than they are here. But that's the rule of the game: here, just a little straightened out, are my notes for this intervention. 

I am only talking here about a daily, diffuse, often unconscious machismo and its possible historical roots; following my usual formula, for me, Breton music is a much more macho than misogynistic environment. As the conference was largely focused on the presence of women on both sides of the collection microphones, I also developed this aspect at greater length than others. The news being what it is [Editor's note: this post was published in January 2020], some of you may be surprised that I do not address the issue of sexual assault. The first reason for this is that it was simply not my subject: even if it is, obviously, oh so closely related to what I am describing, it is nonetheless a very different place in a broad continuum of behaviors. What I'm talking about here is simply the unnoticed, omnipresent inequality that many men and women take part in without even thinking about it. This inequality has, in Breton music, some particular contours which it is interesting to consider in themselves. Concerning attacks, on the other hand, as appalling as the case currently under investigation is, which has been making a lot of noise lately (and of which I was unaware at the time of the conference), I hope I am not mistaken in saying that it does not prove that there are more attacks in Breton music than elsewhere; However, it reminds us that we would have to be very naive to imagine that there could be fewer of them . 

What I am about to describe to you is not the sociological and statistical study that it would be useful to carry out on the subject; it is my testimony and my reflection as an artist. From this point of view, what does “being a woman in Breton music” mean? The first obvious answer is that it's being quite alone. In any case, often being the only woman surrounded by men.

PART ONE: THE PRESENT LANDSCAPE

1) THREE SATURDAYS ON TAMM-KREIZ.BZH

To find out for sure, I did a little exercise: I went to the Tamm-Kreiz.bzh site, which centralizes almost all of the fest-noz announcements. I chose, arbitrarily or almost, three evenings: the first in peak tourist season, last August 14; the second out of season, Saturday September 28; the 3rd closest to us: tomorrow evening's date 1 . I counted the men, the women, the singers, the singers, and the instrumentalists of both sexes 2 , in the festoù-noz and concerts in historic Brittany announced on the site 3 .

I did this very quickly and I am not immune to an error, but, as you will see, the trends are so marked that we are not within a few units.

For the three evenings, with a total number of 205 to 276 people on stage, we had:

• many more men than women: the proportion of women ranged from 13 to 17%;

•  among women, a majority of singers (between half and two thirds), while singers are only a minority among men (7% to 17% 4 );

•  therefore an even more marked minority for female instrumentalists (from 6.38% to 7.25%);

• despite the disparity in the proportion of singers/instrumentalists for each gender, there are so many more men on stage that the ratio between the number of singers and the number of female singers will above all reflect this favoring: in one case, 12 singers for 20 female singers, and in another there are 24 singers for 12 singers.

A glaring inequality, a very sensitive debate

Immediately, I posted the figures for August 14 on Facebook. The result was 48 hours of multiple, very rich conversations, which testify to the sensitivity of this subject.

Several people suggested that things would be different in other traditional music: Occitan music was mentioned, as well as Irish music. In the case of the latter, it is clear that in fact, there seems to be greater recognition for female instrumentalists and even (perhaps especially?) young women. Irish girls have their own issues though, which I won't get into! But these observations suggest, in any case, that gender inequalities can have slightly different contours for each musical environment, including within the “traditional music” category. This is an important point because, as we will see, many of the mechanisms of this “musical patriarchy” are those of patriarchy in a general sense; this can lead us to lose sight of the specificities of each environment.

Many of the reactions I received focused on the only phenomenon observed: the place of women downstream, at the time of programming.  As if the question were only: “Is there any reluctance among programmers to work with an existing female act? » On this, the testimony of a summer festival organizer is interesting: “We take care to highlight the work of women,” he told me in substance, “but we do not, however, manage to exceed a proportion of 20 to 30%. » This confirms the general feeling: there are actually fewer women in this line of work. But 20 to 30% is still practically double the figures from my little “sampling”! It is therefore good that, in ordinary times, there is a brake on the programming of female musicians, even if they are, moreover, in the minority. There is therefore a problem downstream AND upstream.

At the same time, fellow teachers all report either a majority of girls in their classes and their internships, or at least a female presence which will not then be reflected on stage, and even less in professionalization. It is therefore not, as we can still hear, that Breton music attracts fewer girls, it is that, somewhere in the transition from girl to woman, musical practice tends to become invisible.

So, again: why?

The question has already been explored for music in general. Many of the mechanisms identified then are those found at work in Breton music, obviously; I will try to quickly cite a good part of these, so as to have time to develop a few others, perhaps a little less universal.

2) EVER PRESENT QUESTIONS

Let us recall some major general issues, those that we will potentially find in all areas, and which make the simple act of playing or singing in public a transgression for a woman:

•  Motherhood: the pot around which we constantly turn. The image, and unfortunately the reality, of a musician's life are in conflict with the life project of many young girls – or with the project that those around them envisage for them. For me, as long as society as a whole has not moved forward in the management of parenthood, and the musical world as well, we will not really progress. (I'm not just talking about sharing home tasks.)

•  Gendered visibility: in a world where “someone” without specifying gender is necessarily a man, every woman is automatically distinguished by her sexual characteristics, at least as long as she is old enough to appear a possible partner. Our mere presence on stage is therefore, whether we like it or not, sexualized and literally remarkable. This gendered visibility also goes against the education received, where from early childhood we are instilled with the values of discretion, modesty and modesty.

•  It also results in hypervisibility: every woman being remarkable, we will have a feeling of parity when there are in reality only two women out of ten people; and as soon as you are scheduled twice, we feel like we only see you.

•  Authority: men are presumed competent, and their comments presumed interesting, and women presumed incompetent and their words assimilated to chatter; and this at all hierarchical levels, in all environments. However, in the current world of Breton music, which has been the subject of gigantic collection work largely carried out by the musicians themselves, knowledge is an important value.

•  Power: the musician on stage exercises direct power over the audience; like all power, it is considered naturally masculine. (In Breton music, this dimension of power is particularly strong in dance music.)

•  The attribution to the emotional and the lack of self-control: emotion and abandonment are however very valued in certain music; the fact that we nevertheless came to consider that these traits, ordinarily attributed to women, disqualified them, clearly highlights how central the criteria of authority and power remain.

•  Potential seduction . I will have the opportunity to come back to it.

It is in all music that these factors contribute to perpetuating male domination, which remains very strong.

3) CURRENT MUSIC, BRETON MUSIC: A MEN’S WORLD

By narrowing the focus on current music, we can add strong values that can be described as macho , and some of which are very strong in Breton music.  Very present in particular:

•  partying through drunkenness, risky behavior;

•  power: sound power among others, power of the aforementioned power;

•  an idea of freedom, independence, even rebellion, which is also hardly compatible with the family-life project typically proposed to girls;

•  the sexual symbolism of the instruments (very strong for the blowers, among others; extremely strong for the biniou-bombarde);

•  a historical substrate of activism, with what this will entail in demonstrativeness;

•  in the particular case of bagad, the military, even paramilitary, origins of the formula (however far from this spirit the bagadoù of today may be). Let us remember that some bagadoù have only been mixed for a short time 5 .

Something else that is particularly strong in Breton music: the primordial role of affinities . Being a Breton musician is as much a way of social life as it is an artistic practice. The result is a musical environment that relies mainly on human connections, and therefore, among young people, on gang phenomena: a lot of groups are founded from groups of friends, where girls have little space. And the groups of friends do not found lasting musical groups, because, for all the reasons that I have been listing earlier, the majority of girls abandon the practice as they settle into adult life. Those who remain are most often isolated within male networks 6 .

The exclusive nature of this masculinity still often materializes in the performance environment : absence of toilets near the stages, impossibility of washing hands, dressing rooms which serve as a general foyer, accommodation with questionable security, etc. If you think these are just small, inconsequential annoyances, then you are a man! Having to cross the entire marquee under full view, to sink into the cornfield hoping not to be followed, to endure excruciating cramps because you couldn't change your sanitary tampon, that's also what being a woman in Breton music. Besides the fact that our dignity, our health and our safety are at stake, it is also, each time, a rather violent reminder of the fact that our very existence was not planned.

Finally, women are at a disadvantage when it comes to travel , so valued in Breton music and world music: in addition to the obvious questions of security and the prohibition of certain spaces, it is impossible for them to be invisible, impossible to expect a priori a simple and cordial socializing with local musicians. The position of musician, because it presupposes a relationship of equals, seems to me more difficult to maintain even than that of observer (ethnomusicologist or journalist). A woman can obviously establish deep, long-term contacts in other countries; but the “musical tourism” of our colleagues is sometimes complicated, sometimes impossible, and often dangerous.

PART TWO: A NOT SO DISTANT PAST

That is the observation in the present, but all this does not date from yesterday. This is even my point: we are dealing not only with an inglorious state of affairs, but above all with roots which go back to even much harsher realities. These realities belong to another time, but a time not so distant, in which certain habits and certain shadows persist.

1) “CLASSICAL” MUSIC AND WOMEN

This applies to music in general: we can never stress it enough, the opening of the world of music to women was very late, much more so than that of literature, for example. I have a history of music which dates from 1946 and where the philosopher Charles Lalo calmly explains to me why the nature of women prohibits them from musical genius.

Even when there is openness, it is rare that it is not accompanied by disrepute: we know the quote by Virginia Woolf from a music critic from the interwar period, comparing Germaine Tailleferre to “a dog who walks upright on his hind legs: it’s not that he does it well, it’s that you are surprised that he does it” 7 .  Let's rest assured, the Grove music dictionary from 1995 still tells us that Germaine Tailleferre's music “remains graceful and feminine”.

We might think that classical music is not our problem. We would be wrong: it remains the source of references and concepts, even when we work to free ourselves from it, and even when we have not been directly trained in this framework.

2) TRADITIONAL FUNCTIONS IN BRITTANY

Musical practice, a reflection of general inequality 

Music was no exception, in the past, to the general rules of society. For example, for the potato threshing or digging festivals before 1945, the singer Marcel Guilloux describes young men going to sing and dance wherever they want, including being accepted by their very singing; girls, on the contrary, can only participate if the party takes place at home, or elsewhere, if they took part in the working day or if they join their sister who worked there 8 . In other words, music and dance are for boys the means of emancipation from the family, while girls remain connected to the latter. Apart from beggars and singers (often the same ones), women are not supposed to sing outside their intimate circles.

Furthermore, for my part, I do not know of any great ancient female instrumentalist in Brittany. Either there isn't one, or, at the very least, we don't talk about it. Since instrumentalists can be, unlike singers, "professionals", invited and paid, most often in the context of a well-watered party, we understand why this thing was forbidden to women. Perhaps we should add to this the relative rarity and high cost of musical instruments.

3) COLLECTION IN BRITTANY: WOMEN IN THE HONOR?

Collectors and collected 

On the other hand, what will often be highlighted is the great presence of singers in collection funds, both old and recent. In a conference on women and gwerziù (to which I had the pleasure of contributing) 9 , Eva Guillorel underlined the disparity between, on the one hand, collectors who are almost always men, and on the other, informants who are mainly female informants. And this both in the 19th and 20th centuries. Here again, I will not have enough time to explain all the possible explanations to you, but I would like to highlight a few points.

Shadow collectors 

Bernard Lasbleiz told us about it: in the 19th and even 20th centuries, there was a significant contingent of “hidden collectors”: François-Marie Luzel’s sister, Perrine; the mother of Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, Ursule Feydeau de Vosgien; Madame de Saint-Prix; Constance Le Merrer, remained unpublished for a century. The assistance of the wives is also ignored: for example, closer to us, we rightly praise the role of Patrick Malrieu in the birth of Dastum, we generally forget to mention the enormous investment of his companions Magdie Bellego then Véronique Perennou.

Early 19th century: male romanticism

If we take the precursor works of collecting and folklorism in Brittany, The Last Bretons by Emile Souvestre and Barzaz Breiz by La Villemarqué, we would look in vain for this famous feminine omnipresence. The universe in question is virile, and even warlike in Villemarqué, with a romanticism where everything or almost everything is seen through the eyes of a man. The Breton is an actor in a story whose memory he voluntarily maintains. It seems to me that it was in the second half of the 19th century, and in particular with Luzel, that the figure of the singer-storyteller appeared, and that is where it is time to talk to you about the best-known 'between them.

Marc'harit Fulup: the “half-idiot” icon

Marguerite Philippe (1837-1909) is at the bottom of the social ladder: beggar and professional pilgrim (she can do almost nothing with her hands, one paralyzed, the other crippled), of course illiterate and monolingual. She was only in her thirties when she met Luzel, and we see the establishment between them of an intense relationship of collecting, over several years, both tales and songs. Much later, at the end of the century, when the regionalist movement developed, Marc'harit, through the writer Anatole Le Braz, a former young collaborator of Luzel, would become a kind of mascot, invited several times to sing at the congress of the Breton Regionalist Union. After his death, all the great regionalist poets will pay tribute to him.

When I started singing, Marguerite Philippe was the legendary figure of the singing tradition. However, in the literature devoted to it, something jumps out: the passivity attributed to it, presented as the guarantee of its reliability as a source. Le Braz, who venerates her, calls her “half-idiotic” 10 , Berthou writes that she “traveled the world without waking up”, and so on. Marguerite is presented as unconscious of what she is doing: she is only the vessel of tradition, a “human harp” in the words of Le Braz.

Now, Bernard Lasbleiz spoke about it earlier: if we think for a moment, she would have had to be really stupid, much more than half-hearted, to remain passive in such a recurring, rewarding collection relationship. and undoubtedly remunerative, especially since her activity as a pilgrim made her particularly capable of searching for songs and stories. Marguerite Philippe appears much more a kind of collaborator than a simple “collected”, and seems to have seen herself as such. But this aspect cannot be highlighted since it would make her an actress in her repertoire.

From ignorance to innocence, then to purity, there are only very small steps, and we see them definitively taken, among others by the poet Taldir who speaks frankly of his "virgin and wise soul" and by the writer Charles Le Goffic who visited Marguerite in 1905 and, lo and behold, discovered that she had a husband. In reality, not only is she married, but she even had two children who died before reaching adolescence; but we will have to wait another 80 years to discover it in his biography by Guy Castel 11 – and even then we must not blink at the wrong moment: it only takes up three lines.

You will tell me: it's far away... But it was only in 1971 that, at the inauguration of the statue of Marguerite Philippe in Pluzunet, Father Bourdellès declared: “Yes, Marguerite was rich in spirit. But these riches had not been created by her. Marguerite by herself would have been nothing 12 , would have known nothing! Its wealth was an inheritance, a harvest raised over time by the Breton people. »

And you might tell me: it’s anecdotal. I invite you to look around you, in the presentation of music and ancient traditional musicians – and even current musicians, if they come from slightly exotic countries – for these two patterns which are ignorance-innocence and The absence of sexuality, particularly feminine, among the great performers recognized as such.

4) THE INNOCENCE TRAP

Unconsciousness, condition of tradition?

Traditional music is music described with the vocabulary of otherness. This thought of “purity”, of unadulterated authenticity, needs othering, of the 3rd person: not being by definition unconscious, “I” can never be completely “authentic”.

We can even consider that this is a definition of traditional music: music thought of by its performers as “the” music, without awareness that there are others of equal value. Obviously, this approach leads to the assertion that there are no longer, in the Western world, traditional musicians (we place their extinction somewhere at the end of the 19th century – as if by chance, at the time that we know from the works great folklorists, and known to the oldest witnesses recorded in the 20th century). This is of course undeniable, since the very definition contains this limitation. The problem is that this de facto excludes any enhancement of traditional music by the very people who play it: there can only be the external knowing and the internal ignorant. In a case like that of Brittany, I would like to emphasize two things: on the one hand it leaves us without words to name the complexity of current transmission, where the revivalist heritage does not exclude continuity with the ancient rural society, which was also not the long quiet river to which this narrow definition of tradition refers us; on the other hand, it creates a tension, a fundamental contradiction, which runs through all the work of the regionalists, and all the imagery and vocabulary that they have bequeathed to us to name musicians and singers.

The idea of being a traditional musician in a living community, among other communities, assumes that the music played is that of “self”, of “us”. But if we still carry this definition of tradition through this 3rd person of innocence, being a traditional musician therefore means not knowing whether we are “we” or “he”; it is to be a “we” whose ideal remains to be “he”.

An anti-Marguerite Philippe: Marie-Yvonne Le Flem

This tension is recurrent, for example, in the notebooks of Anatole Le Braz. It is from these notes that I drew the material for a show 13 dedicated to one of his informants, who also sang for the musician collector Maurice Duhamel: Maryvonne Le Flem (1841-1926). She was only 4 years younger than Marguerite Philippe, she was also a monolingual illiterate, and Le Braz's notes cover from time to time a period of thirty years: firstly a somewhat impersonal collection (for La Légende de Death ) then truly friendly neighborhood. What attracted me to her is the kind of health that emerges from these notes: we see Maryvonne take possession of her story through what she tells Le Braz, and we see Le Braz being part of it. admiring (even if some tropes of passivity resurface from time to time). In a way, Maryvonne appears to be an anti-Marguerite Philippe: she has an opinion on everything; among other jobs, she works in masonry and blasts rocks in the fields; she has children including a daughter out of wedlock, a mother, a husband; in short, it has a story and it acts. We can even argue that his songs help him express himself, to “rebalance” his life. But we must hasten to point out that she will remain in the shadows: certainly Le Braz presents her to a few writers and artists, but clearly no one has the idea of making an idol of this physically powerful woman (she was of remarkable stature and vigor) and spirit. There may be all kinds of stupid practical reasons for this, but the result for us is that the one who is immortalized as an icon is indeed Marguerite the Innocent, in her misery and her indefiniteness. The one that Le Braz ends up knowing as a person, with her weaknesses and her strengths, remains in her notebooks, in complete obscurity.

Of course, this tension between first and third person also concerns men, just as it concerns more or less everything that relates to a tradition and not only music (when it comes to intangible cultural heritage, for example, she begins to make a deafening silence). But I would like to state that, in many cases, and particularly in the history of Breton music, it concerns women in a particular way because, in a masculine world, femininity is the first degree of otherness.

Older women: sheltered from the world… and from sex

For example, to explain that the majority of informants are women, we put forward demographics and a supposed female conservatism 14 . We focus less on the complementary idea: the purity of men's knowledge was supposed to be compromised, in the 19th century, by their military service, their travels, and the practice of French which was the consequence - which amounts to saying that the The reliability of women's knowledge was guaranteed by their lower status 15 . What we forget to see, moreover - and this is even more true for the 20th century - is that all or almost all of these women were old, so that the idea of their sexuality was non-existent for the young men who recorded them. In short, they were three times “other”, three times distant – women, monolingual (or, for the 20th century, with a main language other than French) and old – which allowed them to be “authentic”.

The Goadec sisters, “born old”

Let's take another legendary figure of singers, this time in the plural: the Goadec sisters, who sang on stage between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s. Here too, we imagine three old ladies, therefore necessarily prudish; but when they started singing in public, the youngest was 45, and at least one of their best-known songs is quite light. But in the general public's image, they are “born old” and have no intimate life; they reproduce by parthenogenesis, according to the fact that our fellow singer Annie Ebrel, due to distant kinship by marriage, is often presented as “the granddaughter of the Goadec sisters”…

As for unconsciousness, the image is more diffuse as far as they are concerned, but I note this little formula in a recent article from Ouest-France: “Over the years, their repertoire expands.” It is not they who enrich him, it is he who expands. What is omnipresent, however, are the mentions of their indifference to their media success, as of a kind of impermeability where it is not necessary to scratch much to find the notion of purity and passivity. However, in reality, the Goadec sisters leave the memory of combative competitors in competitions, and of brilliantly masterful performers, and conscious, of their effects.  

CONCLUSION: CLASH OF EXPECTATIONS, ISOLATION, UNDERMINED

This stereotype of the traditional singer, where the idea of old age goes hand in hand with the absence of sexuality, and authenticity with passivity, was still very present at the time when I started singing (at the beginning 1990s). It would not take long to come into head-on collision with the sexualization that I was talking about earlier, that of the musician on stage: in addition to the inevitable visibility, as the Breton scene has embraced the functioning of current music, the demand in terms of female image has married those of this music. It follows that today, to be a Breton musician on stage is to find oneself crushed between, on the one hand, the injunction to be young and pretty (and then, if one is no longer very young , at least very beautiful); and on the other hand the different levels of discredit that being young and pretty will bring you (or, if you are no longer very young, etc.). To the macho discredit in general – you lose in authority what you gain in visibility, or even in immediate success – will be added what we can call “folklorist discredit”, which means that if you are an attractive creature, you are not innocent; if you're not innocent, you're not authentic. There is only one very small niche common between these two injunctions: that of the pure young girl – a very brief career and not open to everyone… 

Difficult to fight against such opposing pressures at the same time; for my part, I went to war against this fantasized innocence, but I was forced to recognize that it sometimes made me bring grist to the mill of those who saw no other interest in us than to be attractive. To counter these, I had my ability to verbalize... Which could only push me further down into “folklorist discredit”.

By the way, the power and limits of this visible sexuality is a debate which runs through all music today, and which also concerns us; Let us remember, however, that in this same world of current music, the gestures and overtly sexual expressions of the men on stage rarely raise questions.

To be a woman in Breton music today is therefore: to be quite alone and, so to speak, unforeseen; being caught between conflicting expectations; for singers, it means being measured against past figures who become limiting for the very reasons that made them sacred; for instrumentalists, it still means lacking figures with whom to identify, it means having to invent an entire culture of musical practice. It is also, for all of them, adding up the reasons for lacking self-confidence: I said earlier that a certain definition of tradition leads a musician to never know if he belongs to “us” or “they”; However, being a woman already means never knowing a priori whether we are perceived as “us”, “they” or “her”. These two phenomena combine to profoundly undermine the confidence of female musicians, including at high levels of recognition.

The idea of parity is a tool, not a goal. Basically, if it were to turn out that yes, women are generally happier elsewhere than singing or playing, I wouldn't be any worse off. The problem is that that's not what I see today. What I see is the rarely spoken suffering: that of women who have ended up giving up, that of young girls who see their fellow boys encouraged towards a vocation that no one envisages for them, that of each of us when programming figures, or a little comment in passing, remind us that we are not alone in devaluing our skills.

So I don't dream of parity, any more than uniformity. What I want is true diversity, true equality. May music truly be a possible choice for a woman as much as for a man. I don't know what's happening with all our neighbors, but I know that in Breton music, even if we are currently experiencing the beginnings of awareness, we are still far, very far from equality.

Notes:

1  October 19, 2019.

2  I only excluded the groups for which I did not have information, and in particular the bagadù. In any case, we can observe that, given the numbers of the latter, it would not necessarily have been wise to include them in the statistics without distinction.

3  Note that there is no observation tool that allows the same kind of “coring” to be done on concert practice alone, on which Tamm-Kreiz is much less exhaustive than on fest-noz. The fact remains that the fest-noz is a very important activity of a large number of Breton musicians; that for many of them, it is the only one; and that it is also, as a general rule, the most visible.

4  This 17% was, moreover, increased by a large fest-noz sung that evening.

5   The stories I have heard speak of an opening in the 80s to 90s, and not without debate. However, it should be noted that each bagad has its own history.

6  In the discussion that followed, I had the opportunity to clarify that this isolation is not necessarily unpleasant, particularly at the beginning: being a woman surrounded by male friends can be fun and rewarding! The isolation is no less real, and reveals itself over time, as we try to understand our experience: it becomes apparent to us that we have not shared with anyone everything that, in our career, was linked to our status as women, both for lack of interlocutor and because, all of our desire to be “a musician like the others”, we have minimized this specific experience.

7  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own , 1929 (chapter 3).

8  Marthe Vassallo, Ifig and Nanda Le Troadec, Marcel Le Guilloux, singer, storyteller, farmer from Central Brittany, Dastum/PUR, 2019 (pp. 71-72).

9  Eva Guillorel, conference Women victims, women guilty? Breton society of the Ancien Régime through the prism of complaints from oral tradition , on the occasion of the 2016 Congress of the Society of History and Archeology of Brittany.

10  Quoted by Françoise Morvan, François-Marie Luzel , Terre de Brume/PUR, 1999 (p. 189).

11  Guy Castel, Marc'harit Fulup, tales and legends of Trégor , Les Cahiers du Trégor, 1989. (All my quotes concerning Marguerite Philippe come from there, with the exception of note n°10.)

12  Emphasis added.

13  Maryonne the Great , created in 2017.

14  Eva Guillorel pointed out, in our conference, that it was the vision of Luzel, who cited Plato and Cicero in support of his choice to interview mainly women.

15  I think it is for the same reason that there is no male equivalent to Marguerite Philippe. The regionalists had their ringers, but younger and who were not the subject of the same canonization.

By Marthe Vassallo, Jan 31, 2020 at 6:11 p.m.