The Spectacle of Piety on the Brittany Coast

Abstract

Writing in the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber found the modern world increasingly "disenchanted": belief in the magical and sacred had receded to its uncolonized margins. In France, these margins on the Brittany coast drew a seasonal crowd of cultural tourists throughout the 19th century. Artists and writers who journeyed to the coast of Western Brittany were fascinated by the spectacle of local festive displays such as the yearly religious pardons at St. Anne de Palud. But instead of understanding ritual festivities on the Brittany coast as simply the encounter of an outsider and his or her rural other, we can read these events as collective experiences that provided many ways to be both spectacle and spectator. This article departs from previous studies of art in Brittany in two significant ways: it considers the experience of local travel to coastal festivities (such as pardons) rather than taking tourism only to mean travel on a wider national or international scale. It also widens the focus of previous critical considerations of pardons in paintings to an expanded archive of visual and material culture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rather than equating rural life and representations of it with an outsider's longings for an imaginary past, I employ methodologies drawn from feminist cultural criticism and the anthropology of material culture to view Breton pardons and their forms of visual culture as vibrant and ever changing performances and mediations of place and cultural identity. I consider these yearly public rituals as occasions that are marked as separate from ordinary daily routine yet that are also retrospectively integrated to everyday experience through their material and visual culture. Although paintings are central to my argument, this article takes a short detour away from concerns with artistic representation in order to engage with the bodily experience of the pardon, and then makes a return to the visual. This shift attempts to move past a primary focus on the "tourist gaze" and toward an interest in the experiential, concrete poetics of the festive and its relationship to the "everyday."