Catholic Organisation in Brittany

Extract

More than any other part of France, Brittany has a distinct existence apart from the rest. Its old Celtic language is still spoken habitually among the working people over a great part of its western departments, while in St. Malo, and further east still to the very borders of Normandy, Breton is still the native language of a considerable proportion of the older people, who as often as not are quite illiterate, although in the best sense of the word they are highly cultivated, with their inheritance of traditions that have their roots centuries behind the present day. Brittany includes only five in all out of the ninety more or less equal departments into which (including Alsace Lorraine) modern France is divided. But this small north-western corner is thickly populated, and while it is barely larger than one-twentieth of the whole of France, it contains all but one-tenth of the population. What is more important, Brittany is one of the very few districts in the country in which the population is actually increasing at a normal rate, thereby helping to reduce the steady shrinkage of the whole French population. It is the most conspicuous example of the obvious fact in modern French economics—so obvious that it is now openly, if reluctantly, admitted by the most anti-clerical newspapers—that it is only where the Catholic tradition has remained vital that large families are still to be found as a general rule.