On this picture, you can also see the jacket with gilded yarns embroideries, which is a part of the traditional Sunday clothes. The cap here is smaller, it's made for girls between 12 and 18 or so. This photograph was taken on the harbor of Lesconil. Here, you can see another Bigouden, with an adult cap. The male dress is less particular: it includes the traditional round hat with ribbons, and a sumptuously embroidered jacket.

This is the castle of the Bridge's Barons; it was built in the 18th century (the round tower dates from the 14th century). The barons' motto is typical of the Bigouden spirit: "heb ken", i.e. "ourselves". This castle nowadays houses the city hall and, in the dungeon, the Bigouden Museum about which I talk further.

This local particularity, which gives the region so much character, is largely due to this Bigouden spirit: withdrawing into one's lands (it's the region where the Breton language is most spoken) and taste for material modernity (which one is always proud of) at the same time, and a huge importance attached to reputation, to the gossip, to the show, i.e. to what other people see and think about you. Women are particularly sensitive to this since the traditional Bigouden society is a matriarchy. The consequence is of course an unusual pride: the symbol of the bigoudeny is a stylized peacock.

You can recognize this pattern on the

And the worst misfortune which could happen to a Bigouden is neither famine, nor mourning (due to accidents out at see), nor disastrous crops or hauls, even if all these plagues often struck my land… No, the worst misfortune is shame, dishonor. Here is what Pierre-Jakez Hélias says about it in Le Cheval d'Orgueil (The Horse of Pride):
« The wife governs the house with an iron hand while doing her best to save their face, because of the shame ("ar vez"). This shame terrorizes the Bigouden woman more than any trumpeting archangel of the Last Judgment. You can be assured that she will fight against it everywhere and by every mean. Sometimes I enter a pub with adults of my family. And there, I'm a little bit surprised, when the bartender asks a man what he wants to drink, and when his wife replies instead of him: a small Saint-Raphaël [which is a soft liqueur wine]. It is common knowledge that the man prefers rum or red wine, but he simply grumbles: "memez tra!" (the same for me). Women's constant fear is to let their husbands sink into alcoholism. The drunkenness is one of the three major temptations of the average Bigouden; the two others are avarice and ambition, if we are to believe the people of Quimper, those pedants. His best weapon against these three threats is pride. Or honor, as Montesquieu would have said. »

This book, The Horse of Pride, was published in 1975 and is available in English at Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. It is the narration of the author's childhood as a poor peasant in Pouldreuzic. He had been raised at the beginning of the century in a rural world, of which he analyzes the social codes, with a wonderful writing and humor. Pierre-Jakez Hélias (1914-1995), on the left side, had become the poet of the Bigouden country for twenty years, and was also a writer, a journalist and an ethnographer. If you're interested in the Bigouden lifestyle and spirit, there is no better source: even if the living conditions changed a lot since the inter-war years (we even are on the phone! ), the turn of mind and the proprieties are almost still the same nowadays, and their knowledge is indispensable to a foreign person for understanding this slightly special society.

This spirit gets on well together with the region's quite wild nature, which has never been damaged by any wide-range real estate project. However there's no need to become an ethnographer if you want to admire our sights or to enjoy the wide Bigouden beaches of fine sand… turn the page!

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