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Many of these Bretons returned home with the new creed of republicanism and “Rights of Man” and laid the foundation in Nantes and Rennes for the wider French Revolution. However, the result of the French Revolution was the abolishment of the Breton Parliament in 1790 when “everyone in France was declared equal.” The inequality of this lay in fact that the Bretons were not French. The “abolition of the Breton nation” created a reaction. On January 18, 1790, de la Houssaye, president of the Breton Parliament, protested to the National Assembly. “Les Corps out des privileges. Les nations out des droits!” (Parliament has privileges. Nations have rights!) There was a general uprising against the French in 1793 led by George Cadoudal and Armand de la Rouerie. French republicans found themselves fighting Breton republicans and Breton royalists (as many were pushed back into the royalist camp by the centralist attitude of the French republic). The war went on for years, mainly after 1804 as a guerrilla war or the war of the chouans. The return of the monarchy and the later republics did nothing to return any form of autonomy to Brittany. Brittany survived the nineteenth century as a predominantly Celtic-speaking country. In 1914 some 1.5 million of its 2.5 million population spoke Breton. In spite of the decline to 800,000 speakers today, Brittany remains essentially Celtic in attitude, and many have not lost the desire to see it self-governing once more.
[I] Palace of the Boyne, identified with New Grange, which was first the fortress of Nechtan and later the home of the love god Aonghus Óg.
A historical battle of a.d. 937 that is variously placed on the east coast of Britain, usually in Northumbria. It is of immense importance as the Celtic defeat that caused the Celts to accept the kingdom of England, to cease calling themselves “Britons,” and to give up their dream of eventually driving the English invaders into the sea and reestablishing a Celtic Britain.
A Celtic confederation was formed to attempt to curb the aggressive expansionist policies of Athelstan of England. In the tenth century, a poem entitled Armes Pyrdein Vawr (The Prophecy of Great Britain) was written in support of this confederation. It survives in the Book of Taliesin. The poet urges the Cymry of Wales, Cumbria, and Strathclyde, the Cornish, the Scots, the Manx, and the Irish, including the Norse-Irish of Dublin, to join together.
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