Pierre-Jakez Hélias in the Pays Bigouden, Brittany (France)

A prolific bilingual (Breton/French) writer, playwright, poet, journalist, and teacher, Pierre-Jakez Hélias was born in 1914 in the village of Pouldreuzic, south-west of Quimper in the Haut Pays Bigouden, Cornouaille (département of Finistère), one of these pays, which are small, distinct areas of Brittany (Hélias & Le Doaré, 1975). He lived in Pouldreuzic until the age of 11, then went on to attend high school in Quimper, before moving to Rennes to study French literature. He held different positions as a teacher before returning to Quimper, where, from 1946 onwards and until his retirement, he worked at the École Normale d'Instituteurs in Quimper, teaching linguistics and pedagogy to future primary school teachers of French. (Monot & Le Gros, 2025, personal communication).

In those years, Hélias started his quest for the fundamental elements of the Breton-speaking peasant civilisation to which he belonged. "Breton still had many speakers. Many of them – faced with the surge of consumer society driven towards uniformity – became aware that their language was under threat, as well as the culture it conveyed.” (Frain, 2025, personal communication). After compiling testimonies of oral traditions, beliefs and myths in the Pays Bigouden, from 1946 and for twelve years, he directed a weekly comedy talk show in Breton on Radio-Quimerc'h (Peytard, 2012), continuing his lifelong work of making a record of Breton tales, legends, and folklore, including dialects, costumes, music, songs and dances. "Through classical education – French, Latin and ancient Greek – he had a comprehensive vision of languages, of their history and of the likelihood that they could become extinct. This enabled him, very early on, to appreciate the richness of his own Breton culture and the need to document it before its native speakers disappeared." (Frain, 2025, personal communication).

He published newspaper articles based on these narratives and later merged these accounts with those he recalled from his childhood – inspired by his grandfathers who were both wonderful storytellers in their way – in what would become his masterpiece, Le Cheval d'Orgueil (The Horse of Pride): too poor to own another horse – one of them said, lending the title to the book – he would still have the powerful "horse of pride" (his dignity) in his stable (Hélias, 1975). Hélias became a storyteller of a popular oral repertoire of the first half of the 20th century and of a disappearing way of life.

Hélias wrote Le Cheval d'Orgueil, subtitled "Memoirs of a Breton in the Pays Bigouden", in Breton first, under the title Marh al Lorh (1986). Then, the book saw the light in French in 1975, published by Plon as part of the Terre Humaine collection created by the French explorer and ethnologist Jean Malaurie. It instantly became a bestseller: “Suddenly, he was in the limelight and he was astonished by his success: he had not expected it at all.” (Le Gros, 2025 personal communication).

“With The Horse of Pride, Hélias sought to preserve the language. He was a passeur de mémoire [a memory keeper] and was an excellent ethnographer. The success of his book played a key role in raising awareness of the beauty and dignity of Breton culture, and beyond that, of all traditional cultures.” (Frain, 2025, personal communication). In a dedication on a personal copy of Le Grand Valet to his friend Marc Le Gros, who had been his colleague between 1972 and 1975 at the École Normale d'Instituteurs in Quimper, Hélias wrote (Le Gros, 2025, personal communication): “...ces essais de donner la parole et de livrer la scène à des gens qui ne savaient pas toujours écrire mais qui parlaient superbement.” [“… these attempts to give voice and stage to people who did not always know how to write but who spoke superbly.”]

Linguistic elements specific to the Breton language (bretonnismes) are often found in the French version of his works. In The Horse of Pride, “from Breton into French, Hélias immersed himself in the language; he wanted to create an impression, to render the sound of the original language in the target language. If we took an image from a painting, we could say that his style is impressionistic rather than figurative. This gives the text a great deal of warmth and authenticity.” (Monot, 2025, personal communication). He stressed that he did not translate it but rewrote it in French, since he always found Breton and French complementary and saw the exercise of translating between a Celtic and a Romance language utterly confronting, if not impossible (Peytard, 2012). In poetry, with the idea of complementarity in mind, he would often write dual texts, with Breton on the left and French on the right, establishing a dialogue between the two languages and producing what he called an interécriture, an intertwined writing (ibid., 2012). Le Cheval d'Orgueil was published in English in 1978 by Yale University Press (translated by June Guicharnaud) as The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village, in an abridged form and with a new subtitle. In 1993, it was published in Galician by Xuntaza (translated by Xosé María Proupin) as O cabalo do orgullo: memorias dun bretón do país bigudén – an interesting initiative in a minoritised language. Moreover, emeritus professor Hidetoshi Yanagawa, of Kagoshima University in Japan, translated the first two chapters of The Horse of Pride from French and published them in the VERBA Journal no. 39 of Kagoshima University in 2015. (Yanagawa, 2025, personal communication).

In an interview on the flagship radio programme Radioscopie in 1977, Hélias explained that, with The Horse of Pride, he had tried to do justice to the country folk, not only of the Pays Bigouden but of France as a whole. He interpreted the book's success as a result of a combination of favourable circumstances: the family ties that many people had to the countryside, a generalised discontent with urban civilisation, the popularity of second homes (going back to the countryside did not mean cultivating the land, though), and the nostalgic memories of a less sophisticated world, away from a society of overconsumption and waste (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, 1977). The Horse of Pride, however, also sparked a fierce debate when Xavier Grall, a Breton poet and writer, an advocate of Brittany's autonomy, published Le Cheval couché (The lying Horse, in 1977), blaming Hélias for being too nostalgic and pessimistic, not believing that Brittany would be able to keep up with the pace of change. “The war of the horses between him and Grall – who saw him as the nostalgic cantor of a Brittany which had turned into folklore, at complete odds with his own revolutionary vision of a vibrant territory – was a vain, overrated quarrel for him, a mere journalistic set-up.” (Le Gros, 2025, personal communication).

Hélias, through his ethnographic work, had been pleading the cause of the Breton language, but had been criticised by the buoyant Breton militant movement of the time for being somewhat pessimistic about the future of the Breton language in the last chapter of The Horse of Pride. “It was felt that his ideas ran counter to the linguistic and cultural revival taking place throughout Brittany in the 1970s. It had a chilling effect on the militants’ enthusiasm.” (Rouz, 2025, personal communication). For some, “he was part of an educational system that largely contributed to the decline of the Breton language” (Rannou, 2025, personal communication). This decline is inextricably linked to Brittany’s long and tortuous history. Following the French Revolution of 1789, in the name of national unity, highly fragmented Breton-speaking areas started to recede westwards and, "while France was swept along by the Industrial Revolution, Brittany was left behind" (Coativy, 2023). Brittany was seen as a remote and underdeveloped province and only became more accessible by the middle of the 19th century thanks to the railway, when it slowly opened itself to tourism (ibid., 2023). The elites – such as the Viscount de La Villemarqué, with his influential Barzaz Breiz (1839), a collection of ancient Breton popular songs – began to take an interest in popular culture and artists such as Paul Sérusier and Paul Gauguin followed, inspired by this "wild land" (ibid., 2023). They would create clichés of Brittany while, at the same time, attracting throngs of nostalgic visitors.

After World War II, Breton language and culture were again set aside. In France, as in many European countries, a single official language was considered a necessary condition to ensure the well-being of the state (Judge, 2007). “Breton was the language of the heart, of the countryside, and of conviviality”, but it soon became ”the past and […] the stigma of an undervalued social status”, while “French was the future and a guarantee of upward mobility” (Calvez, 2010; 3, own translation). “In the 1950s and 60s, in the countryside, the ancestors’ kitchen dressers and box beds were relegated to the back garden and replaced by their modern Formica equivalents. Hélias was deeply disappointed by what he saw.” (Le Gros, 2025, personal communication).

The Breton language and culture revival started in the 1970s, particularly through music. Alain Stivell spearheaded a massive wave of support for Breton culture in Brittany and achieved global success (Rouz, personal communication). Hélias had previously valued folklore, which he saw as a form of art and culture (Hélias, 1990). For many years, he was a member of the steering committee for the Festival de Cornouaille in Quimper, which soon opened up to the participation of Celtic folklore groups from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, as well as from a wider international community. He would thus contribute to the revival of Brittany, boosting cultural tourism. Some of Pierre-Jakez Hélias' writings reflect on the development of tourism and the profound changes experienced by society. In La Bretagne en Couleurs (Colourful Brittany), Hélias remarked that tourism had contributed to safeguarding some distinctive features which would have otherwise disappeared, although embracing modernity would have also meant losing part of the area's appeal (Hélias & Le Doaré, 1975). Mastering "the art of untangling what still deserves to be looked at, felt and experienced" (Hélias & Le Doaré, 1975; 3, own translation) seems to be highly relevant even today.

A niche of literary tourism in the Pays Bigouden is Pierre-Jakez Hélias’ birthplace in Pouldreuzic, which has been well preserved as a municipal museum, the Maison Natale de Pierre-Jakez Hélias. It is a penty, a late 19th-century small stone house typical of Brittany, with one room and a traditional hall on the ground floor. Upstairs, there is a small library and another room for temporary exhibitions. Some of his personal belongings – including his pipes and fisherman's cap – are on display, and “visitors are mostly people who knew Hélias or were his students, as well as scholars and teachers from all over France and from abroad." (Vivien, 2025, personal communication). The literary trail Sur les traces du Cheval d'Orgueil (In the Footsteps of the Horse of Pride) was set up in 2006. The trail starts in front of the house museum and leads through the village, crosses the countryside, all amidst a scenery of churches, chapels, sacred fountains, and calvaries (cut stone blocks representing the Passion of Christ), the heritage of Brittany's rich history and religious fervour, along seventeen stations presenting excerpts from The Horse of Pride in Breton, French, and English.

The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the French edition of The Horse of Pride and the 30th anniversary of Pierre-Jakez Hélias' passing. Pouldreuzic's town council is hosting an exhibition entitled Pierre-Jakez Hélias aux milles facettes (The multifaceted talents of Pierre-Jakez Hélias), combining the last five exhibitions spanning the author's literary genres: the genesis of The Horse of Pride, his storytelling, plays and poetry, as well as the author’s presence in the media. Conceived as a travelling exhibition, it can be loaned to other municipalities and schools. Master's students in cultural heritage management from the Pierre-Jakez Hélias complex of the University of Western Brittany in Quimper collaborate regularly with the exhibition development team, bringing in the insights of younger generations and contributing to the perpetuation of Hélias' legacy.

The yearly number of visitors to the house remains small – between 500 and 600 people – essentially due to the fact that, apart from the European Heritage days, it is only open two months a year, in the summer. In 2025, the house is likely to join the dynamic Fédération nationale des maisons d'écrivain & des patrimoines littéraires (the French National Federation of Writers' Houses and Literary Heritage). “The Maison Natale de Pierre-Jakez Hélias is the writer's authentic birthplace, it is open to the public at least two months a year, and displays some of the characteristics included in The Horse of Pride” (Ragot, 2025, personal communication). This new membership will undoubtedly give a new impetus to the author’s birthplace as a literary destination. Moreover, the Federation organises numerous dedicated forums and study days: in March 2025, the Journées sur les langues régionales dans le patrimoine littéraire de France (study days on regional languages and literary heritage) were held in Strasbourg, and literary tourism was the theme of the 2023 XVIIe Rencontres de Bourges, providing a unique opportunity to reflect on current trends concerning writers’ houses and the heritage they represent.

Pondering the valorisation of Hélias’ work within literary tourism, as linked to the promotion of Breton, means addressing complex sociolinguistic and political issues in a society where the use of Breton is in sharp decline. Breton is one of the nine regional languages of metropolitan France (Judge, 2007). Nowadays, the Breton language is in great danger, often absent from the public and the family spheres of Brittany. In 1950, one million people spoke Breton, and, according to the Assises de la Culture et de la Langue bretonnes en Cornouaille (Conference on Breton Culture and Language in Cornouaille) held in Quimper in 2023 (attended by the author), there are currently around 200,000 Breton speakers in Brittany. The Conference indicated that, despite a strong social demand to learn Breton, the decline of this minoritised language is expected to continue due to a lack of State support. As a result, there might be only 50,000 Breton speakers left in Brittany by 2050. The situation is complicated because Breton is subject to significant dialectal variations and a multiplicity of orthographies. The peurunvan orthography was adopted in 1941 and replaced by skolveurieg in 1951. A third one, etrerannyezhel, was briefly introduced in 1975, but peurunvan was finally adopted as the school standard at the beginning of the 21st century (Puillandre, 2024). Since Hélias used mostly skolveurieg in his works, it is seen as a limitation to their diffusion in Breton (Rouz, personal communication). This may partly explain why “the work of Pierre-Jakez Hélias is rarely included in the curriculum of primary and secondary schools in Brittany.” (Thomas, 2025 personal communication) However, “this is the case for all literature in Breton.” (ibid., 2025)

The promotion of Breton as a living language, fostering communication between the elders and the younger generations, is also carried out by the different branches of the Ti Ar Vro, which are cultural associations offering numerous activities in many areas of Brittany, all year round. Furthermore, “there is a wide-reaching phenomenon of groups of elderly people getting together regularly to read in Breton. They come back to retire in Brittany and want to reminisce about expressions from their childhood.” (Rouz, 2025, personal communication). At a European level, Breton could benefit from the FOSTERLANG project (European Commission, 2025), launched on May 1st 2025 as part of the EU Horizon Programme, which aims at safeguarding and promoting Europe’s 19 endangered and minoritised languages and providing an alliance between civil society and academia, with the firm conviction that the decline of many endangered languages can be halted and reversed. (Louarn, 2025, personal communication). What is dominating the scene now is the freedom of expression in a regional language as a human right.

On his part, Pierre-Jakez Hélias, through his rich and diverse creative work, has paid tribute to the Breton language, culture and folklore, proving that their preservation and development are not necessarily contradictory. As an author, he has yielded precious lessons on the value of local culture as the very essence of a significant part of Brittany, as a reassuring anchor when coping with an amorphous future.

How to cite this entry: Foscale, G. (2025). Pierre-Jakez Hélias in the Pays Bigouden, Brittany (France). In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

Note: The author confirms that the authors of the personal communications quoted in the text have given their written consent to publish.