Alan Heusaff, also Alan Heussaff (born Pierre Alain Marie Heusaff, 23 July 1921 in Saint-Yvi, Finistère – died 3 November 1999 in Galway) was a Breton nationalist, linguist, dictionary compiler, prolific journalist and lifetime campaigner for solidarity between the Celtic peoples. A co-founder of the Celtic League in 1961, he was its first general secretary until 1984. Professionally, his career was spent in the Irish met service as an aviation meteorologist (1952-1986).
A native Breton speaker, he trained as a primary school teacher but in his early twenties joined the separatist Bezen Perrot militia (1943–44), for which he was sentenced to death in absentia at a court martial by the post-World War II French government, but eventually amnestied in 1967. After studying mathematics and physics at the University of Marburg, Germany, he arrived in Ireland in 1950. He continued his studies at University College, Galway, and, on graduation, joined the Irish Meteorological Service, becoming a naturalised Irish citizen in 1955.
An aviation meteorologist, he devoted his spare time and retirement to peaceful activism, promoting the languages, culture and autonomy of the Celtic countries. Among the honours he received for his work was the 1986 Gradam an Phiarsaigh (annual Pearse award) presented by the President of Ireland, Patrick Hillery. In the same year, at the Welsh Eisteddfod, he was elected as a Bard of the Welsh Gorsedd. He was fluent in all the six modern Celtic languages as well as English, French and German.
Youth in Brittany Heusaff was born in 1921 in Sant Ivi, near Rosporden, now in Kernev (Cornouaille, Department of Finistère). His family originated in nearby Toulgoat and his parents, Sébastien and Mari Heusaff, were native Breton speakers. Heusaff spoke only Breton at the time he was sent to school. When Heusaff was growing up it was estimated there were well over a million native speakers of this Celtic language. In 1925 the French Minister of Education, Anatole de Monzie, made clear the Government policy: "For the linguistic unity of France, Breton must be exterminated". Now banned by law was the teaching of language, literature, history, folklore and anything interpreted as "nationalist".
Arriving in a French-speaking school in these circumstances profoundly affected the boy. His community's language was openly vilified and children were punished if caught speaking it. Nevertheless, Heusaff had a good ear for languages and eventually joined the École Normale in Kemper (Quimper, Finistère) where he trained as a primary-school teacher. He continued to be acutely aware of the state's policy on Breton. Most native speakers, under these conditions, were made illiterate in their own language by the state. Yet Breton was an old literary language with the first manuscripts in it surviving from a century earlier than such manuscripts in French.Oldest surviving mss is Leiden MS, Vossianus Latin fo.96A ; see also entries on Breton language and literature in
To teach himself literacy in Breton, Heusaff sent for a correspondence course from Skol-Ober founded in 1932 by Marc'harid Gourlaouen (1902–1987). As it was not politic to do so openly, he found help from a native speaker who offered the use of his address as a post-restante to receive the lessons. In an interview in 2005 with the historian Daniel Leach, his widow, Bríd Heusaff commented on the effect of his school experience on his life: "I'm fairly certain that if Breton had been taught at school when Alan went there... and if there had been some respect for it, that he would never have become involved in the Breton movement at all. Because his main interest, really, was the language".Daniel Leach, interview with Bríd Heusaff, 19 June 2005 – copy of mss.
In 1938, as a teenager, Heusaff joined the Parti National Breton (PNB) which sought to re-assert Breton independence. The crowns of Brittany and France had become unified by the marriage of Anne of Brittany to Charles VIII of France, as a condition following the defeat of the Breton armies at the Battle of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier in 1488. Following the death of Charles VIII in 1498, Anne was forced to marry his cousin, Louis XII of France, to ensure the French crown's continued control of Brittany. Under the Traité d'Union de la Bretagne à la France, 18 September 1532, the Breton Parliament remained in being until the French National Assembly, following the French Revolution, arbitrarily abolished it in 1790. This caused a complicated situation in Brittany as many Bretons had spearheaded the Revolution as a means of overthrowing the centralist politics of the French monarchy.
Heusaff stated in 1970: "From 1938 onwards I shared the conviction that Brittany could never regain her freedom "by consent"; the French state would use all its strength to prevent that ever happening. I agreed that we should seek external support, wherever it came from, because we were too weak to attain our aims alone. Why should we not do what all free countries do when their freedom is threatened; seek alliances? By doing so we were affirming that we were already free". Chapter 5.
Heusaff joined the PNB's uniformed but unarmed Bagadoù Stourm and then gravitated to the Kadervenn group of PNB, which believed in direct action. He became convinced that only separation from France would save both the language and the cultural identity, which he believed was dependent on its survival. Like many other Breton nationalists, he was greatly influenced by the Irish example of the 1916 Easter Rising. From the experience of their fellow Celts of Ireland during World War I, many young Bretons came to believe that if war were to break out again, then France's difficulty would be Brittany's opportunity.
German occupation In 1940, German forces overwhelmed France and Marshal of France Philippe Pétain signed an Armistice. The establishment in July of Marshal Pétain's French collaborationist government in Vichy, however, still gave it legal authority not only in the "unoccupied south" but also in northern and western France occupied by the German Wehrmacht. Many Breton militants soon realised that Germany was of little support. Rather than help the Bretons achieve their freedom, the German Occupation allowed the French collaborationist government of Vichy to remove a large section of Brittany, the department of Loire-Atlantique, in 1941. This area included Naoned (Nantes) the capital and seat of the Dukes of Brittany. The transformation of ancient Breton borders was something post-war governments were happy to inherit. With German approval, Vichy suppressed the Breton National Committee (Comité national Breton, CNB, which had been declared by nationalists in 1940) and its journal L'Heure Bretonne.
From 1941, as resistance to the occupiers grew, Breton nationalism became more divided. Moderates adopted a neutralist position, imitating that of neutral Ireland. But others, including militant activist Célestin Lainé (later known as Neven Henaff), continued to make overtures to the Nazis, hoping for their support for an independent Brittany with ties to Germany. The more supportive nationalists were of Germany, they reasoned, the more likely Berlin would be to abandon Vichy and create a Breton state. The war divide within Brittany as a whole deepened at the same time and members of the Maquis, the French Resistance, began to view all Breton nationalists as potential collaborators. They allegedly began a policy of assassination of leading Bretons in September 1943. Yann Bricler, a PNB official in Kemper and manager of the PNB magazine Stur, was shot dead in his office. Another nationalist, Yves Kerhoas, was also assassinated. On 12 December 1943, Abbé Yann Vari Perrot, the 66-year-old parish priest of Scrignac, was shot dead on the steps of his church. Perrot had been decorated for his services in World War I, but was a native speaker and leading cultural Breton nationalist, playwright and writer, involved in devising a standard orthography for the language.
Célestin Lainé had led an underground physical force movement, Gwenn-ha-Du (white and black, named after the Breton national flag) from 1930, had organised militant groups such as Lu Brezon, renamed Bezen Kadoudal, and now saw the opportunity to organise an open, uniformed and armed group – Bezen Perrot. The conditions of this unit was that it would not fight outside the borders of Brittany but remain as "a protective militia" against the French Maquis's attempts to eliminate Breton activists. But as the conflict on the ground intensified and German reprisals became more ferocious, the authorities took the Bezen Perrot and other groups in hand. By 1944, they had provided the unit with uniforms and weapons, and listed them as a unit of the SD, Sicherheitsdienst. Lainé made clear that Bezen Perrot's war was against France and was on behalf of Brittany not Germany. But although he was reported as concerned that the unit should not operate on behalf of the SD it was used by them and mounted guard on the SD interrogation centre in Rennes. In the months before and after the D-Day landings in June 1944, atrocities were reported on all sides of the conflict in Brittany.
Heusaff had been working as a primary school teach at Kerien (Querrien) and between 1941 and 1942 he began to write articles about the problems of Brittany under the pseudonym "Mab Ivi" (Son of Ivi, his home village). Others articles appeared in L'Heure Bretonne" and "Arvor. In 1942, he resigned his teaching post. Heusaff had become a kerrenour (lieutenant) in Bezen Kadoudal, which, in December 1943, became Bezen Perrot and which Heusaff saw as the nucleus of a Breton independence army.
"We were prepared to co-operate with the devil himself, if that would get rid of the French. The French were the greatest enemies of the Breton people".Interview on Welsh language current affairs programme Y Byd ar Bedwar, S4C (ITV) 1989/I.
A fuller account of the Bezen Perrot, including Heusaff's role, is given in Daniel Leach's Fugitive Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2009). Among controversies, Leach deals with some later accusations depicting Heusaff as a member of the LVF, showing them to be unfounded. The main focus of the book is an analysis of why Ireland gave asylum after the war to some Bretons and other foreign militants who had collaborated with Axis forces. Controversies on these issues are also elucidated in Leach's article "Irish Post-War Asylum: Nazi sympathy, Pan Celticism or raisons d'etat?" (History Ireland, May/June 2007).
In June 1944, shortly after D-Day, Heusaff was at Ploërdut, Morbihan, with members of the Bezen Perrot, when they became involved in a firefight with members of a Free French commando unit. He was seriously wounded in the shoulder and lung. Two others members of his unit were killed. Locals took Heusaff to hospital where he remained for a few weeks before evacuated to a German hospital in Montabaur, Alsace-Lorraine, where he remained until September 1944.
While in hospital, he was visited by Friedrich Hielscher, the poet, philosopher and journalist. He had connections with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für keltische studien (German Society for Celtic Studies) in Berlin and had been on a research trip to Brittany in 1943. It is suspected that he took this trip on behalf of the Abwehr, or the Ahnenerbe, which came under the SS. According to some reports, Hielscher had been involved in a resistance circle to the Nazis since the 1930s, helping Jews and others in danger from the regime. Indeed, Hielsher had contacts with members of oppressed "peuples de culture" since 1927 and some members of his group were arrested as early as 1933.