ReportageNearly 100,000 Bretons left, between 1880 and 1980, to “look for dollars” on the other side of the Atlantic. A real network of emigration was set up from the villages of Gourin and Roudouallec, which still keep the memory of it today.
The Statue of Liberty is one of the most copied monuments in the world. France alone is home to more than fifty replicas, more or less successful, more or less faithful to the original, sculpted by Auguste Bartholdi.
Until recently, Gourin, a small Breton town of 4,000 inhabitants, on the edge of Morbihan and Finistère, had a resin model, as white as it was fragile, which had to be put away as soon as the fine weather was over. On June 24, 2020, the frail imitation had not yet left its shelter when a majestic bronze prototype was erected there, Place de la Victoire. It has not moved since, and four flags frame it, those of Brittany, Quebec, Canada and the United States. On its plaque, written in Breton, French and English, we read that the bronze, nearly three meters high, was erected in memory “of the freedom, courage, determination and spirit of adventure of the Bretons who crossed the Atlantic in search of the American dream”. Never had the small town of the Montagnes Noires so deserved its nickname of “Gourin the American”.
How many were these “adventurers” Bretons who left Gourin and the surrounding villages for the American megacities? Nearly 100,000 in a century, between 1880 and 1980, left ” look for dollars, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the words of Jean-Claude Le Broc, who emigrated to New York in 1964 with his wife, Yvonne.
This saga is little known, because the Armoricans of America did not all return, made their fortune, build flashy palaces – it is not in the mentality of the country. The richest have, at most, had discreet houses built in the neo-Breton style.
This Breton legend recognizes a pioneer, Nicolas Legrand. In 1881, on the advice of a conscript met during military service, this stonemason from Roudouallec, a village near Gourin, left his wife and children to set sail, work as a lumberjack in Canada and then as a worker in New England. . On his return, his apparent financial well-being and the story of his experiences, popularized in the local press, created vocations. During the half-century that followed, nearly one out of two men from the region traveled to the Americas to enlist in factories, foundries, silks…
Sector reactivated
“My father, Jean Fichen, was born in New York in 1920 and grew up there until the age of 12.says Yvon Fichen, 70 years old. My grandparents had been hired as workers in the Michelin factory in Milltown, New Jersey. » The tire manufacturer was then conducting recruitment campaigns in Brittany, a land of reputable workers. But, swept away by the Great Depression of 1929, the Milltown factory closed, and the Fichen family took the boat back to Roudouallec in 1932.
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