Pêr-Jakez Helias

Pêr-Jakez Helias, baptised Pierre-Jacques Hélias, nom de plume Pierre-Jakez Hélias (1914–1995) was a Breton stage actor, journalist, author, poet, and writer for radio who worked in the French and Breton languages. For many years he directed a weekly radio programme in the Breton language and co-founded a summer festival at Quimper which became the Festival de Cornouaille. Helias was born in 1914 in Pouldreuzig, Penn-ar-Bed, Brittany. His father, Pierre-Alain Hélias, was a native of the nearby village of Plozévet. Helias' mother, Marie-Jeanne Le Goff, had grown up in Pouldreuzic, to which her husband moved after their wedding in 1913. Hélias' paternal grandfather, Yann Helias, was a tenant farmer, sabot-maker, and storyteller known in Plozévet as Yann ar Burzudou ("Yann the Wonder-Man"). Pierre-Alain Hélias had previously served at Vannes in an artillery unit of the French Army and, upon the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, he was recalled to active service. Pierre-Jacques Hélias later recalled that, during his father's combat duty as a Poilu on the Western Front, he and his mother were given, "twenty sous a day... to keep ourselves alive". His father's sickle was wielded during harvest-time by his mother and was sharpened upon a stone moistened with her tears. Hélias further recalled, "When my father returned home from the battlefield, he let his wife keep the sickle. For he thought he was no longer it's master, that mother had truly earned it... In the end,it's blade wasn't much bigger than that of a pocket knife. I rather think that tears are more effective than stone for wearing down a sickle." One of Hélias' maternal uncles, who had been serving before the war as an officer in French Indochina, was less fortunate, and returned to France only to be killed in action during the First World War. Hélias had a modest upbringing, but this included a good education. During the interwar period, the village was divided between "Reds", who discretely supported the anti-clericalism of the Third French Republic, and "Whites", who supported the Catholic Church in France.