A rare thing: the memoirs of a Breton peasant

摘要

The appearance of an English translation of the autobiography of the Breton peasant, Jean-Marie Deguignet (1834-1905), brings to the attention of a new audience a remarkable account of what in many ways was an ordinary life. Deguignet spent the firstyears of his life in and around Quimper in south-west Brittany, the son of a farmer who failed and was forced to give up his farm and take day labouring jobs a few months after Jean-Marie was born. When he was six, Jean-Marie was kicked in the head by ahorse. This gave him a wound which suppurated for a decade or more, and which, when finally cured, left him with a pronounced scar on his temple. Using cod-phrenology, Deguignet explained his acquisition of intellectual interests and abilities from thisinjury. But it was also a curse: his childhood companions had, he acknowledged, in some ways lived happier lives than he, 'but lives exclusively physical and animal' (p. 32).