Celtic Environments: Welsh Industrial Landscapes through French Travelogues

ABSTRACT

It has rightly been argued that the growth of the cult of the local in France has to do with France’s need to re-invent its own past in the wake of the Revolution of 1789. This article suggests the importance of the Industrial Revolution, and changes to physical environments in this same development, by analysing travelogues by Celtomaniac French visitors to Wales in the 1860s. Unlike Brittany, France’s Celtic land, Wales was a place where concerns of modernization, industrialization and changes to the local environment met head on with the issue of the survival of an ancient indigenous culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Wales
• Brittany
• travel writing
• industry
• Celticity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Heather Williams read Modern Languages (French) at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, and has specialized in cross-cultural work in French and Celtic Studies. She has published widely on nineteenth-century French literature, particularly the literature of Brittany, and has a strong interest in translation studies, postcolonial studies and ecocriticism. Recently, her work has focused on cultural exchanges between French, Breton, Welsh, and English, as well as travel writing. She was Co-I on the AHRC-funded project ‘European Travellers to Wales: 1750–2010.’ Her publications include Mallarmé’s Ideas in Language (Peter Lang, 2004) and Postcolonial Brittany: Literature Between Languages (Peter Lang, 2007).

ORCID

Heather Williams http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8684-1921

Notes

1 For a discussion of the gradual valorization of ancient ‘Celts’ and ‘Gauls’ in post-Revolutionary France, with particular reference to nineteenth-century Brittany, see Williams (2007, p. 36 ff).

2 Guest had a strained relationship with Viscount Hersart de La Villemarqué, author of a collection of Breton ballads translated into French, Barzaz Breiz (1839), that was famously condemned as a fake. The two ended up in a race to publish a translation of the middle-Welsh text Peredur in 1839, which Guest won (Guest and John [1989] 2007, 109–10).