CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE CELTS IN FRANCE
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Olivier Buchsenschutz
CELTIC FRANCE
T
he title of this chapter would suggest Brittany and the Celtic languages, rather
than the ancient Gauls, to the contemporary French public. The success of
the Asterix books (Goscinny and Uderzo 1960), which portray an idealized world
peopled by very conventional Gauls with characteristics inherited from the Age
of Romanticism, has only marginally increased the interest of the public in these
obscure periods: the concepts of 'the Iron Age' and of 'protohistory' remain
completely unknown to them. French archaeological research has concentrated
on the Palaeolithic and on Gallo-Roman antiquity, the latter considered to be
the principal source of French culture. Historians of the medieval period have failed
to consider the protohistoric substratum of the country's occupation and it fell to
F. Braudel, a modern historian, to suggest the development of a 'long-term history'
in which the contribution of these far distant times might be taken into account.
Although the French of today take little interest in scientific research into Celtic
culture, they do acknowledge the Gauls as their 'ancestors'. As is the case in several
European countries, references to early, ancestral inhabitants first appear during the
Renaissance, in works on genealogy which set out to link the royal dynasty to
classical and biblical antiquity, drawing on - in this case - Gallic intermediaries. In
subsequent centuries, a more scholarly analysis of the classical texts obliged writers
to bring the Celts within the scope of acceptable 'history' which, at that time, did not
extend back beyond the antiquity of Greece and Rome. In the explanations they
offered, authors of this period tried to counterbalance the defeats of 52 Be at the end
of the Gallic War by reference to the victorious raids during earlier centuries, when
Gallic troops spread terror in Greece and Italy.
Not until the work of the Benedictines of Saint Maur (Dom Martin Bouquet 1738)
do we find scientifically based critical analysis of the classical texts. At that time,
however, archaeological finds were still regarded as little more than curiosities of
interest only to antiquarians. The complete lack of any means of ordering chrono-
logical sequences for pre-and protohistoric periods led to the wholesale attribution
to the Gauls of everything that was not recognizably Roman.
The archaeology of the Celts of Gaul effectively begins in the middle of the
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