Old regime

In 1593, under the old regime, Henri IV gave Brest the title of city and in 1631, Richelieu made Brest a military port . He then created the port and the arsenals on the banks of the Penfeld . These constructions required an abundant labor force which had to be accommodated. Brest is, along with Toulon , the only port capable of accommodating large warships in the 17th century. The latter, which are heavier and heavier because of the ever heavier weight of their artillery, require ever greater drafts , ie 7 m after 1680. The site is however under predominantly heavy winds. west, which makes it difficult to leave the squadrons , a problem that will only be solved with the appearance of steam in the 19th century.

The Church of Saint-Sauveur

Louis XIV guided by the reports of the Chevalier de Clerville in 1667 and those of the intendant Chertemps du Seuil in 1670 and 1675, incorporates Recouvrance , a small town on the right bank of the Penfeld, in Brest, then only on the left bank, in 1680, by letters patent . The local expression Brest itself, used by the old Brest residents, designates Brest left bank within its traditional limits before these annexations, as opposed to Recouvrance.

Main article: Recouvrance .

The population went from 2,000 inhabitants in 1661 to 6,000 inhabitants in 1683, in just twenty years, under the action of Colbert . In twenty years also, the royal fleet went from 36 to 276 ships, Brest being able to manufacture a frigate in 22 hours against 30 hours at Rochefort . In 1683 , Vauban fortified the city, which had about fifteen thousand inhabitants in 1715.

In 1686 , coming by sea aboard L'Oiseau and La Maligne, landed in Brest, three ambassadors of the King of Siam accompanied by six mandarins, three interpreters, two secretaries and about twenty servants, loaded with many presents, they came to visit King Louis XIV in Versailles . Taking rue Saint-Pierre on foot, they amazed the people of Brest, who renamed the street rue de Siam .

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a few Brest shipowners and merchants armed in the race, the best known of the Brest privateers being Jean-François Riou de Kerhallet, born in 174.

In the 18th century, Brest was part of the archdeacon of Ac'h falling under the bishopric of Léon and included two parishes, Saint-Louis (on October 29, 1702 , the cult was transferred from the old church of the Sept-Saints at the Saint-Louis church) and Saint-Sauveur , which became a separate parish in 1750 , the district of Recouvrance which previously depended on the parish of Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon having been annexed by Brest in 1680 . The village of Saint-Marc , which previously depended on Lambézellec, had become in 1635 a truce of the Brest parish of Sept-Saints. In order to enlarge the territory of Brest, initially tiny, the neighboring parish of Lambézellec was gradually eaten away.

Main article: Lambézellec .

In the 18th century, the Brest engineer Antoine Choquet de Lindu directed the works of the port and, in 1750 , built the Brest penal colony, which was not abandoned until the middle of the 19th century. Vidocq , son of a baker from Arras and the most famous Brest convict, managed to escape. Many lime kilns were then used to help with the construction of the various buildings 11 .

In November 1757, the return of Du Bois de La Motte's squadron to Brest brought typhus , then called "Brest disease". At first, only the sailors are infected, then the epidemic is transmitted to the city. This epidemic caused around 5,000 victims in Brest itself, double if we take into account the neighboring region.

Among the admirals of the Ancien Régime who commanded the Navy, the port and the city of Brest, special mention must be made of the dynasty of admirals of Roquefeuil including father Jacques Aymar de Roquefeuil and du Bousquet then son Aymar Joseph de Roquefeuil and du Bousquet exercised this function for thirty-three years between them (1728/1740 then 1761/1782). A street in the Recouvrance district still bears their name.

During the American Revolutionary War , Brest, under the leadership of the Count of Hector, played an essential role in arming the large squadrons bound for the Americas. Due to the fear of an English landing linked to this war, a belt of forts was built to protect Brest, including on the land side: the fort Montbarey was built in 1784, the fort de Keranroux, the fort du Questel , the fort de Penfeld, during the reign of Louis XVI .

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Under the Revolution , Brest takes on a new importance. This great military port must at all costs remain acquired by France. In 1789 , the city mainly committed itself to the Revolution. The largest city in western Brittany, Quimper was nevertheless preferred as the capital of the department of Finistère when it was created under the Constituent Assembly in 1791 . In 1792 , it was even the Brest federates who, with the Marseilles federates, took the Tuileries , on August 10 , in order to imprison the king. However, after revolutionary radicalization, in particular the coup d'etat of the Montagnards against the Girondins in June 1793 , the municipality of Brest, mainly Girondine, broke away from the new orientation. It took part in what was then called “federalism”.

In retaliation for revolutionary policy, the English imposed a blockade of the city from 1793 to 1805.

After the failure of this movement, repression was activated: on February 5, 1794 , the representatives of the people on mission, Tréhouart and Laignelot set up the Revolutionary Tribunal of Brest, which tried one hundred and seventy-five people and sentenced seventy accused to the guillotine . It was also at this time that the execution of 26 administrators of the department (equivalent to today's general councilors) took place at the cost of a prosecution and without any real possibility of defense on the part of the officials. accused.

At the same time, the navy was straightened out by André Jeanbon Saint André . After Robespierre's death, the news arrived in Brest late and initially did not cause any change: the guillotine continued its work. However, in September, prisoners of the Terror were released: they launched a vast movement of opinion against the Jacobins whom they quickly called "terrorists". They accuse them in particular of having been bloodthirsty and even of having drunk the blood of the victims (without there being any trace in the sources). The bidding up ultimately leads to the arrest of most of those linked to the Terror.

The old notables of the city, those who had been in power at the start of the Revolution, regained their influence and their place within the organs of the city. Thus, during the elections of 1795 for the new directorial assemblies, three Girondins were elected. In 1800, Joseph Caffarelli was appointed maritime prefect .

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XIXth century

The monument La Consulaire erected on the quays of the Penfeld in 1833: taken at war of the conquest of Algeria.

Chateaubriand describes Brest as follows in Memories from Beyond the Grave:

“This sea that I was to meet on so many shores bathed in Brest the extremity of the Armorican peninsula: after this advanced course, there was nothing more than a boundless ocean and unknown worlds; my imagination was playing in these spaces. Often, seated on some mast which lay along the quai de Recouvrance, I watched the movements of the crowd: builders, sailors, soldiers, customs officers, convicts passed and repassed in front of me. Travelers disembarked and embarked, pilots commanded the maneuver, carpenters squared pieces of wood, rope-makers spun cables, mosses lit fires under boilers from which issued a thick smoke and the healthy smell of tar. We carried, we carried, we rolled from the navy to the stores and from the stores to the navy bundles of merchandise, sacks of food, artillery trains. Here carts moved backwards in the water to receive loads; there, hoists lifted loads while cranes lowered stones and mole cleaners dug landings. Posts repeated signals, rowboats came and went, vessels set sail or entered the basins. "

“My mind filled with vague ideas about society, its goods and its ills. I do not know what sadness overcame me; I left the mast on which I was sitting; I went up the Penfeld , which flows into the port; I came to an elbow where this port disappeared. There, seeing nothing but a peaty valley, but still hearing the confused murmur of the sea and the voices of men, I lay down by the little river. "

However, the city lost a lot of influence: due to the permanent English blockade, the Navy was almost paralyzed and could no longer play the role of the Republic's outpost. Thus, the city is experiencing a phase of calm. The testimony of Jules Michelet describes the atmosphere of this port in 1833 during his visit, but also the difficulties encountered by the Navy:

“At the other end, it is Brest, the great military port, the thought of Richelieu , the hand of Louis XIV ; fort, arsenal and penal colony , guns and ships, armies and millions, the strength of France piled up at the end of France: all this in a tight port, where one suffocates between two mountains laden with immense constructions. When you travel through this port, it is as if you were passing in a small boat between two high-sided vessels; it looks like these heavy masses are going to come to you and you are going to be caught between them. The general impression is great, but painful. It is a prodigious tour de force, a challenge to England and to nature. Everywhere I feel the effort, and the air of the penal colony and the convict's chain. It is precisely at this point where the sea, escaping from the Channel Strait, breaks with such fury that we have placed the great depot of our navy. Certainly, it is well guarded. I saw thousand guns 18 . We will not enter; but we do not come out as we want. More than one vessel perished at the Brest Pass. This whole coast is a cemetery. Sixty boats are lost there every winter. The sea is English in inclination; she does not like France; it breaks our vessels; it silts our ports . "

Bibliography Jules Michelet , History of France, 1861 , Chamerot, Paris. (volume II, pages 9-10)

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The Second Empire

The port of Brest in 1864, by Jules Noël (Brest, Musée des Beaux-Arts)

After a century of stagnation, the development of Brest resumed under the Second Empire . In 1856 , Napoleon III allowed the city to build a bridge over the Penfeld, a swing bridge 21 called first “Imperial Bridge”, then “National Bridge”. The Emperor and Empress were received magnificently when they stayed in Brest from August 9 to August 12, 1858 . In recognition of this welcome, Napoleon III enlarged the arsenal and extended two railway lines to Brest and created the commercial port 22 .

The rail reached Brest in 1865 with the opening of the line from Paris-Montparnasse to Brest . Some sections of this line remained on a single track for several decades: this was still the case, for example in 1892 for the Rennes - Saint-Brieuc and Guingamp - Kerhuon sections, that is to say almost as far as Brest. .

Surrounded by its fortifications, the city of Brest manages to expand: by the law of April 25 , 1847 , Brest annexed the territory of Fort Penfeld as well as others located to the east of Penfeld like the villages of Harteloire and Lannoc-ar-Pape, the beach of Porstrein and the village of the same name.

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By the law of May 4 , 1861 , Brest annex 172 hectares of the commune of Lambézellec 25 (called for a time "the extension" or "the annexation": its main axis was the old "Grand Chemin" which took the name of “Rue de Paris”, current “Rue Jean-Jaurès” in Brest) and including for example the current Place de la Liberté, l'Oataire, the Saint-Martin and Kerfautras cemeteries, the Saint-Martin church, the he current commercial port, the station district, the powder mill ravine, etc., to extend beyond the walls and include its new commercial port. In return, the municipality of Brest must participate in the financing of the reconstruction of the church of Lambézellec 28 . The inhabitants of Lambézellec, by losing their maritime facade, also lose the right to cut seaweed on the shores , a right reserved for inhabitants of coastal municipalities.

By the decree of May 24 , 1865, part of the territory of the municipality of Lambézellec comprising Bot, Douric and Pen-ar-Creach was transferred to the municipality of Saint-Marc ; in 1864, the General Council of Finistère had given a favorable opinion "given that the part of the new borough (at 92 meters), one arrives on the territory of Lambézellec". This transfer concerns 26 hectares and 200 inhabitants, all in favor of the said annexation. The city is therefore growing and is also changing considerably.

Main article: Annexation district since become Saint-Martin .

La Penfeld in 1901, with the rotating National Bridge and the Duguay-Trouin cruiser, nicknamed Borda

On October 11 , 1866 in Brest, more than 20,000 people attended the place Fautras at the quadruple execution by guillotine of four sailors (Pierre-Louis Oillic, Lénard, Thépaut and Carbucci) who were part of the mutinous crew of the Fœderis Arca, a three-masted barque that left Sète for Veracuz loaded with wine and alcohol intended for the officers of the French expedition to Mexico . They had been condemned to death by the maritime tribunal of Brest on June 22 , 1866 for having assassinated Captain Richebourg, his second Theodore Aubert as well as the 11-year-old boy during their mutiny on June 30 , 1864 before sinking their ship in the Atlantic Ocean and to take place in a lifeboat where they had been collected by claiming to be victims of a shipwreck. Four other sailors from the same mutinous crew were acquitted for two of them or sentenced to lighter sentences for the other two.

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The twentieth century

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The Belle Époque (1890-1914)

The war port around 1912 ( autochrome photograph by Jules Gervais-Courtellemont )

The presence of the Royal explains that very early on, Brest was an island of Francophonie in a Breton world, as evidenced for example by a survey of 1902: Brest was then one of the only three municipalities in Finistère, with its neighbors Saint- Pierre-Quilbignon and Le Relecq-Kerhuon where catechism teaching is given exclusively in French, while in 169 communes of the department it is given in Breton and in French, while in 123 other communes catechism is given in Breton while the pupils know French and that in only one commune ( Guengat ) the teachers declare that the pupils are incapable of understanding French.

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World War I

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In 1917 , Brest became one of the two landing ports, with Saint-Nazaire, of the American Expeditionary Force , the American expeditionary force, which came to support the Allies of the First World War . A large military camp was set up in Pontanézen .

“Brest saw the Russian, Portuguese and American troops land on its quays in turn. From May to October 1918, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers landed in Brest. The largest steamer in the world, the SS Léviathan , only served Brest, and carried 10,000 men on each trip. Camps were established all over Brest to house all these soldiers while awaiting their transfer to the front. The Pontanézen camp alone contained 110,000 men: it was a real town next to the town. (…). From the entry into the war of the United States until the armistice, the harbor of Brest received 105 troop transports and 784,110 men. (…) The number of workers in the arsenal was still close to 6,000 34 . "

Pierre Keraudren, born in Brest in 1896, soldier in the 76th infantry regiment , was shot for example on January 4 , 1918 at Craonne ( Aisne ), "killed during a mutiny".

Between two wars

The activity of the port was also great in 1919-1920 at the time of the re-embarkation of the American troops. The sale of American stocks at the end of 1919 and in the course of 1920 attracted a crowd of speculators to Brest, looking for the windfall of low-cost purchases.

At this time, Brest became a workers' and union fortress: demonstrations and strikes were numerous there and real riots broke out, such as that of August 7 , 1935 36 , which caused the death of an arsenal worker and around twenty wounded.

The Second World War

In June 1940, before the Germans arrived in the city, Brest was the starting point for gold from the Banque de France .

German troops entered Brest on June 19, 1940 . They will then build a submarine base there. The first Allied bombardments on the city began that same year, so on September 25 , 1940 , RAF planes bombed the neighboring town of Saint-Marc three times as well as the city center of Brest, one bomb hitting in particular the delivery clinic of Dr Delalande. "The emotion and indignation of the people of Brest are extreme" comments the newspaper L'Ouest-Éclair , then controlled by the German authorities. The bombardments will last until the liberation of the city on September 18, 1944 by American troops after a siege of forty-three days, which will be called the Battle of Brest . The damage is immense and the city largely destroyed.

Between 1940 and 1944, Brest was the target of 165 bombings (for 480 alerts), which left 965 dead and 740 seriously injured.

The Sadi-Carnot shelter , dug in the city center of Brest in 1941-1942, served as a refuge for the 2,000 Brest residents who remained in the city, as well as for the German occupation troops. The accidental explosion on the night of September 8 to 9 , 1944 caused the death of 371 French people (including that of Victor Eusen , president of the special delegation responsible for administering Brest between 1942 and 1944) and 500 to 600 German soldiers.

Daily life in the Saint-Martin district in Brest during the war was told by one of its inhabitants 41 .

About sixty Brestois were shot by the Germans and 146 were deported.

After Avranches' breakthrough in Normandy on July 30, 1944, American troops progressed rapidly in Brittany. The Allies then wanted to make themselves masters of important ports, necessary for the supply of the troops, the port of Cherbourg having been largely destroyed . From August 7, Brest was besieged by the 2nd , 8th and 29th American Infantry Divisions 42 , members of the 8th Army Corps , commanded by General Troy Middleton , of the Third American Army. The city was not liberated until September 18 , 1944 after 45 days of fighting. During the siege, the city received 30,000 bombs and 100,000 shells; about 10,000 Allied and German soldiers died there. As in Saint-Malo , the Germans, on the orders of General Fahrmbacher who commanded the German troops in Brittany, showed great determination to defend the city and the port. Of the 16,500 buildings that existed before the war, only 200 were still standing, of which only four were in the city center.

The weekly Courrier du Finistère published testimonies from Brest residents who had suffered these bombings.

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The formation of Grand Brest and the Reconstruction

The Mathon plan as adopted in 1948.

Brest was enlarged for the first time in 1681 (annexation of Recouvrance to the detriment of the parish of Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon) and again in 1861 to the detriment of the municipality of Lambézellec (annexation of the district later called the Annexation from l current Place de la Liberté à l'Oataire, including among others the district of Saint-Martin ).

Main articles: Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon , Lambézellec , Saint-Marc and Bellevue .

But it was in 1944 (decree of October 3 , 1944 taken by Victor Le Gorgeu , then regional commissioner of the Republic ), that the municipality of Brest grew significantly, when its reconstruction began, by absorbing three neighboring municipalities: Lambézellec , Saint-Marc and Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon . The inhabitants, many refugees in other regions ( Sarthe in particular), then returned to rebuild, on the rubble of old Brest, a new town ( 1946 - 1961 ) according to the plans of Jean-Baptiste Mathon . Brest then became a city of modern urban design, opposing the pre-war Brest, where unhealthy neighborhoods existed. While the old town was very hilly, the new town, stripped of its ramparts, was leveled and opened. The city center of new Brest is therefore presented on a plateau, which in places is several tens of meters above the original ground. Unlike towns rebuilt in the spirit of the pre-war period such as Saint-Malo , Brest did not aim to preserve the aesthetics and historical heritage of the pre-war town. The Mathon plan, quickly adopted, is fundamentally conservative, from an urban planning point of view, and did not have the complexity of that of Auguste Perret in Le Havre in 1944 . Of old Brest, only the castle , the Tanguy tower , parts of Recouvrance , as well as the suburbs, resisted the American bombs and the Reconstruction.

Related article: Architecture of Reconstruction .

On July 28 , 1947 , the explosion of the Ocean Liberty , a Liberty ship loaded with 3,000 tons of ammonitrates (a very explosive fertilizer), beached on the bank of Saint-Marc , causes 26 deaths, a hundred seriously injured and considerable damage throughout the city, the blast effect having been very important. “The hut-hotel located on the edge of avenue Amiral Réveillère was completely burned down […] The Ponchelet hospital was completely devastated […]. The ceiling of the Eden cinema has collapsed. […] The streets are littered with broken glass, ”writes the Ouest-France newspaper.

During this period of Reconstruction, wooden barracks were also built for the homeless. The Grossherzogin Elisabeth, a German three-masted school renamed Duchess Anne , was used as military accommodation from 1949 .

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Second half of the 20th Century

In March 1950, workers' strikes began by dockers and reconstruction workers, for a salary increase. Following an agitated demonstration on April 16, 1950 , bringing together 1,000 to 2,000 workers, officials of the Communist Party and the CGT were arrested. The next day, 2,500 strikers denounce these arrests and violently confront the police. The repression left forty-nine wounded and one dead, Édouard Mazé , a twenty-six-year-old worker killed by the CRS with a bullet in the head. The unions then launched a general strike in mourning. His funeral brought together nearly 20,000 people, while the National Assembly decided to officially blame only the violence of the strikers.

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XXI Century

The new Brest tramway was put into service during the summer of 2012 ( rue de Siam )

Long oriented towards the armaments industry, Brest drew its post-war prosperity there. But the decline of this industry requires, at the end of the 20th century, the reconversion of economic activities towards services, research and new technologies.

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