Brittany dispatch

Nice place, Brittany. A glorious chunk of wild and windswept countryside, it has pretty white-walled, slate-roofed villages, picture-postcard beaches, mouthwatering crepes--and a liberation front.

In twenty-first-century Western Europe this is, of course, absurd. Oppressed people in many parts of the world would give their eyeteeth to be part of precisely what the Breton Liberation Front (and its armed wing, known by its French acronym, ARB) wants out of, which is a cruel, repressive, and anti-democratic state called, er, France. But there's no accounting for taste, and the fact is that a small number of Bretons have been fighting for full independence ever since an unfortunate ruler of Brittany, François I, signed the Indissoluble Act of Union with the Crown of France in 1524. After that, to be fair, France was not always overly kind to Brittany. The region lost what was left of its administrative autonomy in the 1789 revolution, and the centralizing Napoleonic drive for uniformity all but crushed Breton customs and culture. Above all, the Breton language, an ancient Celtic tongue related to Welsh and Cornish whose earliest surviving text--a treatise on medicine--dates to the eighth century, was effectively outlawed. One hundred years ago, schoolteachers in Brittany beat any pupil caught speaking Breton.

But today things have completely changed. Breton culture is blossoming. Near extinction 50 years ago, the Breton language is now spoken daily by some 200,000 people and taught in special, newly founded bilingual schools to some 5,600 children a year. Where once an overenthusiastic demonstration of Breton nationalism earned a prison sentence, these days hardly a town hall in the region neglects to fly its Gwen ha Du, the black-and-white Breton flag, alongside the French tricolore. Celtic music festivals, or festou-noz, outcompete discos and nightclubs. And the launch of TV-Breizh, a Breton-language TV station, is planned for August. The station is partly funded by a media magnate, Patrick Le Lay, who, like several other successful French businessmen, proudly proclaims his Breton origins.

ll of which makes the death of Laurence Turbec so absurdly tragic. The pretty, blonde 28-year-old was an employee at a McDonald's in Quevert, a small Breton town not far from the picturesque resort of Dinan. At ten o'clock in the morning on April 19, she opened the number-one serving window at the back of the drive-through and a bomb blew up in her face. No one seems clear why the Breton separatists--who have previously attacked only empty state buildings--chose McDonald's. The fast-food chain itself, a target of various ransackings by French farmers last summer, was mystified. In a moving newspaper ad, it commiserated with the family of its dead employee and stated simply, "Enough is enough."

Until last month's murder, the ARB seemed merely silly. It has at most 15 active members. One of its alleged leaders was born in Toulouse, several hundred miles to Brittany's south. And, although it has now carried out some 250 attacks since the 1960s--including, in recent years, attacks on government buildings in Belfort, where the French interior minister is mayor, and Cintegabelle, the prime minister's political base--it had, until last month, killed only two people. And the two killed were ARB militants blown up trying to defuse their own bombs because they were afraid passersby might get hurt when the makeshift devices exploded.

But the ARB's strategy changed radically last September, when it stole eight tons of explosives from a quarry company's warehouse in the Breton town of Plevin. Not long afterward, the group issued a statement declaring: "The ARB need not limit its actions to the symbolic. When the French constitution recognizes the existence of the Breton people, the integrity of our territory, the Breton language, conditions for real democratic debate will be in place. Armed struggle seems to us to be the best means to obtain those conditions."

Then, on April 19, minutes before Turbec died, police defused another bomb outside the main post office in the regional capital, Rennes. The dynamite used to make both, police scientists later confirmed, came from the eight-ton cache of Titanite 30 stolen in September. Authorities have also determined that some of the dynamite has been used in a recent spate of bombings by the Basque separatist group ETA in Spain. Five tons of the explosives have been recovered, but three (enough for maybe 100 bomb attacks) are still at large.

And so it was that the absurd cause of Breton independence claimed its first innocent victim since World War II. Last week, in its first statement since the killing, the ARB expressed no regrets and said the group's fight would continue "until the state meets our principal demands." Nonetheless, the group protested that it was not responsible for the Quevert attack. The French police were unconvinced and arrested six alleged ARB members in connection with the bombing last week.

Almost without exception, Bretons were horrified by the attack. Nonviolent Breton movements like Emgann, which means "combat," deplored it, with several leading members announcing their resignation from the political struggle.

The irony behind all this is that the case for greater Breton autonomy, as opposed to Breton independence, is not crazy. The fact is that France has refused, for example, to ratify a European charter on regional languages--meaning that while Breton may be spoken, taught, read, and broadcast, no administrative or legal procedures may be carried out in any language other than French. Senior French politicians appear strangely terrified of official recognition for Breton. There is an almost visceral fear that, in the words of the interior minister, it would lead to a "Balkanization of France." The archconservative newspaper Le Figaro said formal autonomy would "dislocate the French identity."

This, say even moderate Bretons, is the response of a reactionary state still living in the Napoleonic era. They note that Scotland and Wales have recently gotten their own parliaments. But Brittany almost certainly will not follow in their path toward true autonomy. And the people most responsible are the same people who claim to want it the most: the killers of Laurence Turbec.

JON HENLEY is Paris correspondent for The Guardian.