Dublin Opinion

This weekend, I started reading Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People. So far, its very enjoyable and interesting. This weekend too, someone gave me a 2009 exam paper for 1st year history in UCD because they thought I might be interested to see how the paper may have changed since I sat it over a decade and a half ago. I was surprised at how annoyed the Irish paper made me. However, having read it I found the following piece in the Sand book chimed with what I was thinking. The quote is from the introduction where he is explaining why he has written a book exploring the founding myths of Israel. First of all he has to explain where he’s coming from, so the first section is on his own story, those of his grandfathers and of other Jews he has come into contact with who have not been able to quite ’fit’ within the criterion set by the modern state of Israel. Then he explores how other ’constructed memories’ also feed into what an historian is trying to do when researching the history of his nation.

Over and above all these components is the fact that the historian, like other members of society, accumulates layers of collective memory well before becoming a researcher. Each of us has assimilated multiple narratives shaped by past ideological struggles. History lessons, civic classes, the educational system, national holidays, memorial days and anniversaries, state ceremonies - various spheres of memory coalesce well before a person has acquired the tools for thinking critically about it. By the time the historian has taken the first steps in his career, and begun to understand the unfolding of time, his huge universe of culturally constructed “truth” has taken up residence in the scholar’s mind, and thoughts cannot but pass through it. Thus, the historian is the psychological and cultural product not only of personal experience but also of instilled memories.

[…]

Although historically the nation-state arose in the world before compulsory mass education, only through this system could it consolidate its position. Culturally constructed memories were firmly entrenched at the upper level of state education; at their core was national historiography.

Page 14 - 15, Introduction to The Invention of the Jewish People - Shlomo Sand

Here’s the paper. Perhaps I’m being a little too sensitive but is it really necessary on a course that is described as ‘Doing History” to only ask questions on the Easter Rising? Discuss.

Which brings me to an article that the above image is taken from. As the abstract describes it:

This article charts the origins and course of the wartime Breton collaborationist force, the Bezen Perrot (Perrot Unit). For the first time in English, and employing source material previously unused in any language, it investigates the impact of the ‘Irish example’ upon Breton militancy from clandestine beginnings to military ‘alliance’ with Nazi Germany, with particular focus upon nationalist leader Célestin Lainé (aka ‘Neven Henaff’). Employing primary material such as interviews with Bezen Perrot veterans and their descendants, previously unpublished photographs, and Lainé’s own unpublished memoirs, the motivations of the Bezen’s chief identities are contextualised within a Celtic nationalist framework. The article presents an anglophone readership with a largely unexplored chapter of Celtic history while simultaneously challenging much of the French historiography on this controversial subject.

The idea of “a Celtic nationalism” within a “Celtic history” in a journal dedicated to “Celtic Studies” is repetition of the illusion of historical continuity that Sand so deftly picks apart. In the same section I quoted from he goes through other founding myths and the many places where the idea of a nation of ‘people’ connected to a lost tribe of some sort going back millennia was reinforced by the national sages of the present age. I’ll quote only one such example:

Even Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and owner of many black slaves, insisted that the state seal of the Unites States bear the images of Hengist and Horsa, who led the first Saxon invaders of Britain during the century in which Clovis was baptised. The reason he gave was that it was they “from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and who political principlles and form of government we have assumed”. p16

It is perhaps not too surprising that, as the author of the article Daniel Leach put it, “autonomists from minority regions such as Flanders and the Ukraine still wore German uniform, legacy of the vain hope that military support for the Nazi regime would result in political independence”. Although that doesn’t mean we have to have any sympathy with them.

Indeed, in the case of these Breton nationalists it’s worth noting their specific motivation:

Although this formation decided to throw in its lot with the Germans and its members wore Waffen-SS Feldgrau10 devoid of Breton insignia, its members did not see themselves as collaborators. Instead they viewed themselves as a national force continuing Breton military resistance against France. As such, most were opposed to identification with French collaborationist formations such as the Milice française (the internal security force of the Vichy government) or the Légion des volontaires françaises contre le Bolchevisme (Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism: LVF). Indeed, most in the Bezen considered these ‘Jacobin’ forces as inimical to Breton interests as the Gaullist and communist fighters of the Resistance with whom they engaged in combat.

And its not that odd that they would see Ireland as a model for their nationalistic aims:

Inspired by foreign-sponsored forces in Breton history, and more recent examples such as the Czech and Polish legions of the First World War, militants steeped in tales of Irish rebellion found their most powerful inspiration in the struggle of their Celtic cousins to the northwest. MacBride’s Brigade, which fought for the Boers in South Africa, was an especially potent example. Roger Casement’s Irish Brigade of former POWs, whilst never actually seeing combat, was likewise powerfully intertwined in the Breton nationalist imagination with the glories of the Easter Rising in 1916 (Fig. 2). By this time, the nationalist Camille Le Mercier d’Erm had embraced the “old Sinn Féin formula” and imagined a time when “France’s difficulty would be Brittany’s opportunity”.

Louis Le Roux’s La vie de Patrice Pearse (Life of Patrick Pearse, published in 1932) was an especially influential publication for young autonomists, and cemented their identification with the Republican struggle in Ireland. Indeed, for many nationalists, Irish heroes exerted greater influence than their own.

What is a bit surprising, and irritating is that after the war most of the Bezen Perrot settled in Ireland, the land that was such an example to them when they fought alongside the Nazis:

As for its exiled leaders, few retained an interest in the movement, let alone involvement in militancy. Alan Heusaff channelled his energies into constitutional activism on a pan-Celtic scale, becoming General Secretary of the Celtic League in 1961. Others led relatively uneventful lives in Irish business or education. Ange Péresse in Germany was the only Bezen veteran alleged by the French state to have had any involvement in FLB attacks.208 The Irish-based spokesperson and ‘letterbox’ of the movement, who formed a Comité nationale de la Bretagne libre (National Committee of Free Brittany: CBL) at Bray in County Wicklow from 1967 on was in fact Yann Goulet—the former leader of the Bagadoù Stourm who had opposed the formation of the Bezen Perrot.

Also in Ireland, Lainé, now ‘Neven Henaff’, retreated further into Celtic mysticism—developing a Celtic ‘Giam/Sam’ spirituality leavened with Japanese yin/yang theory courtesy of an association with George Ohsawa.209 He remained unapologetic about the Bezen and its conduct. It has even been suggested that he claimed to have deliberately led it on an “unforgettable”210 course so as to more strikingly assert Breton rights to independent action. While some of the unit may have been motivated by such desperation, and by an ardent hatred of ‘Jacobin’ France, Lainé’s own motivations in 1943 and 1944 appear to have been more firmly grounded in a very rational, if ultimately erroneous, assessment. This was simply that Germany would win the war and Breton nationalists would do well to curry favour with them. In that respect, it is worthy of note that, in private—his unrepentant attitude and belief that time would eventually vindicate him notwithstanding211—Lainé is said to have admitted to “serious political miscalculations” during the war.212 Heusaff, too, is reported as commenting he and his comrades “backed the wrong horse”.213 Lainé was also, it is claimed, known to deny the Holocaust. “After a while, one avoided the subject with him,” remarks the historian Peter Berresford Ellis.214 It is perhaps for these reasons that the wartime actions of the Bezen Perrot continue to weigh heavily upon Breton nationalism. For that movement, as the Breton historian Christian Bougeard remarks, they remain “le passé qui ne passe pas”215—the past that does not pass.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it Michael Laffan.