THE dictionary meaning of the French word patrimonieis "cultural heritage", but like the famously untranslatable la gloire, patrimoniecontains a myriad of ancillary ideas, patriotism being one.
There is scarcely a village, hamlet or fair-sized town in France that doesn't indulge patrimonieto the full, and enthuse about it. In Brittany, patrimonieis almost a religion. It goes without saying that this makes the Bretons and the French infinitely more culturally aware, and culturally energetic, than we are.
Cultural heritage is not merely something to be squeezed into a new museum, it is a vital component of one's everyday living and of one's personal and communal history and as such must be preserved for future generations. Ignore one's heritage and the generations to come will not forgive you for the contingent loss.
Nor is culture bound up with the ghostly administrations of a centralised department or the like. Culture is song, the way a workman handles a saw, the manner a field is ploughed or divided, the way a workhorse was bridled a hundred years ago, the steps of a dance. It is about great art and literature, but also about the way you might carve out a wooden clog or produce an amateur watercolour. Patrimonieis a psychological state. In Ireland, it is a commercial transaction.
The tiniest village in France has a street, and often more than one, named for a French writer, diplomat or philosopher. Indeed Grande Isle in the North of Brittany has a street named for Joseph Conrad. Yet there is not one street in Ireland named for W.B. Yeats. The beautiful lakeside town of Huelgoat, again in Brittany, has a plaque on its bridge noting that Jack Kerouac's family originated there, Kerouac being an obviously Breton name.
For whose benefit was this plaque put up? The benefit of patrimonie, of course. In other words, an acknowledgement of one's cultural heritage, however far-flung, is its own reward. ("Damn," remarked an attractive American tourist, "I thought he came from Ohio or someplace.") One enters a quiet village slumbering in the heavy cloud of a Breton afternoon, and there is the cultural centre. Not a tourist office, mind, a cultural centre, open, and packed to the rafters with well-produced cards of the village as it used to be and brochures on the hefty number of events taking place all around, soundly giving the lie given to the impression that the village is dead. One gets used also to the fact of being met behind the reception desk by a scarily beautiful young girl, helpful, informed, gracious, welcoming, and armed with the kind of smile that should be made illegal, She is not chewing gum or making a mobile call which she refuses to finish simply because there is a customer in the building - behaviour one gets used to in Ireland.
Pride is a major component of patrimonie. My village may be hard to find on a map, but the statue in the square shows that we sent our young men to die, often several from the same family, in two world wars, and we have history and have done our duty and we are who we are. The message is clear.
The Breton village of La Chèze was holding a local open-air get-together of music, old-time dancing and food in the street when we arrived; and it was not sponsored by a beer company - a shock to the Irish system.
Nearby, in the rue du Moulin, the Musée Régional des Métiers was open. Pity you didn't get some of the food, the delightful receptionist told us - it was terrific. Installed in a restored 19th-century tannery which belonged to the Allaire family, the building hosts a slate-maker's display, a forge, a clog-maker's and a saddlery. A craftsman worked at creating wonderful and ridiculously inexpensive baskets. Upstairs were the implements of veterinary medicine of bygone days, an ancient film-projector, photographs of how the village used to be. All of this was well laid-out and meticulously maintained, yet La Chèze is most certainly not on a main tourist route. So why all this effort? Pride. The deep and almost mystical implications of patrimonie. The entire contents of the museum, it must be added, were donated by local people and people in surrounding areas.
Pick up any local newspaper and patrimoniescreams out at you. Grey photographs of proud people raising a glass to a local monument, the opening of a painting competition, a group of children standing around a fair stall on which an elderly farmer is demonstrating how one made one's own toys in the days before mobile phones and vicious, mind-raping video games. Here is a cultural centre named after the great Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz; there, yet another street named after a local poet. Throughout Brittany and the rest of France - and surely this is not coincidental - the most commonly purchased books are personal reminiscences and autobiographies.
Here is another village hosting a Fest Noz(Breton ceili) in the evening with open-air feasting at a long table under whispering rain; there is a street celebration, free of charge, by local rock bands, raising the question of why heavily sponsored arts festivals in Ireland continue to charge admission to their events. Is it merely to keep the beautiful people in suits?
All of this, broadly, may be taken to indicate patrimonie, that enthusiasm for cultural remembering and on-going community celebration that seems to extend from exhibitions of Breton wrestling, to making enormous communal stews, creating wonderful cultural centres in the smallest villages and naming streets after great artists. Meanwhile, back home, the powers that be refuse to permit living poets to hold readings in Thoor Ballylee and we are busy scarring Tara.
We have no sense of patrimonie, for all our bluster. Perhaps its spirit was finally laid to rest under the concrete that buried, forever, the Viking village at Dublin's Wood Quay.