Ethnic prejudices amongst researchers in Brittany

Edgar Morin died on 29 May 2026. This provides an opportunity to look back at the Plozévet study (1961–1967), one of the most extensive ever carried out in the social sciences in France, in which he took part. Rereading the books that emerged from this study today holds a surprise: the sincere and rigorous researchers who carried it out viewed Brittany through the lens of centuries-old prejudices, inherited from Frankish chroniclers and then cemented in the 19th century by Michelet, Hugo and Flaubert, amongst others. They are evident everywhere: in the choice of the study area itself, based on a suspicion of endogamy that revives an old accusation of incest; in the word ‘savage’, used uncritically by the researchers; in the study’s failure to address the Breton language; and in the silence regarding the extent to which alcoholism was linked to cultural alienation.

This is not a matter of bad faith, but of conceptual framework: the French state, centralised and unitary, recognises no minorities within its borders. Researchers, whose legitimacy depended on this state apparatus, never broke free from its categories of thought.