Pierre-Jakez Hélias is best known for "Le Cheval d'Orgueil," one of the most important books in the 1970s current of "autoethnography" or "témoignage," that heralded a renewed interest on the part of the urban middle class in its/their cultural memory, conceived as their roots in the provinces and on the land. As a result, Hélias became a media figure, "le Breton," consulted on any number of questions and credited with the Breton cultural renewal of the last three decades.
Hélias is also a major writer in Breton, a poet and dramatist. I discuss three of his plays in my "Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton, and Occitan, 1920-1990" (2000). And, in part because he became the spokesman for Brittany in the French public sphere, Hélias was and is a subject of fierce controversy, indeed a "sujet de scandale" in Breton cultural circles. He has been denounced in the principal literary review "Al Liamm" and by the poet Xavier Grall ("Le Cheval couchÈ," 1975) and, in more scholarly terms, by Pascal Rannou ("Inventaire d'un héritage," 1997). The issues were very much alive and the polemic deadly, at the 1999 Rennes Conference on Hélias's life and work, "Pierre-Jakex Hélias, Bigouden universel?"

Among the critiques addressed at Hélias are the following: he identified only with his small Bigouden corner in Cornouaille and not with Brittany as a whole; he treasured the old Breton rural culture (the museum mentality) but never worked toward its renewal for the future; he treasured his own Bigouden speech but was opposed to the teaching of normative, literary
Breton in the schools; he ignored or disdained the rich literature written in Breton prior to himself, from the 1920s on; he was a man of nostalgia for rural populism, in rebellion against modernity and inherently anti-intellectual; and he never blamed the French Republic for its suppression of the regional languages and their cultures.

The issues raised by the Hélias controversy are central to our understanding the writers and militants of Breizh and Occitania, the dilemmas they face and the choices they make. The issues are central to our understanding cultural memory in the regions (and on the margins), and how, on the margins, militants and writers create new cultural identites.