Welsh Journals

THE ABBE PEZRON AND THE CELTS by P. T. J. MORGAN, B.A. PAUL PEZRON (1639-1706) was in all probability the inventor of the modern Celts, and thus of Celticism. It would be untrue to say that Celticism is an important living concept; but it is something which is taken for granted in the self-consciousness of the Welsh and has been taken as such since the mid-nineteenth century. 'Celtic' refers to ancient linguistic contacts, and it is an ancient Classical term. But it was not applied to the so-called 'Celtic nations' until after 1700, that is, until the period of Edward Lhuyd and Paul Pezron.1 It may be thought absurd to compare Lhuyd and Pezron. The history of ideas has to take into account the influential rather than the great. Books now forgotten may have been of vast influence in their time. Newton's Principia Mathematica may have been little understood in 1687: but in 1686 anyone could read Fontenelle's now-forgotten, Pluralite des Mondes, and the historian of ideas has to give Fontenelle as much attention as Newton. Edward Lhuyd, with his Archatologia Britannica, 1707, laid the foundations of modem Celtic comparative philology, certainly. But in his time he was less read than was the now- forgotten work of Paul Pezron, L'Antiquite de la nation et la langue des Celtes (1703). This was soon (in 1706) translated into English as the Antiquities of Nations, and ran into many editions up to the early nineteenth century,2 and Pezron's views soon became widely known to the Welsh through the mediatory history book of Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd,3 the most 1 L. G. Michaud, Biographie UniverseUe (Paris-Leipzig, 1842-1865). s.n. Pezron G. Grente, Dictionnaire des Lettres Frangaises: Le XVIIIe Siecle, ii, pp. 368-9. s.n. Pezron (Paris, 1960). cf. London, 1809 edition of the Antiquity de la Nation et de la Langue des Celtes, called Rise and Fall of States and Empires by Pezron, which contains a short biography of him, pp. i-xxiv. cf. Levot, Biographie Bretonne (Paris, 1857), ii, pp. 595-6, and Harter, Nomenclator Literarius (Paris, 1910), pp. 819, 829, 1158. For Lhuyd, see D.N.B. s.n. 'Edward Lhuyd'. The last recorded editions appear to be those of 1809, called The Rise and Fall of States and Empires, and of 1812 (issued under the original translation title by D. Jones in 1706). In full, the French title (Paris, 1703) ran as Antiquite de la Nation et de la Langue des Celtes autrement appelez Gaulois. 8 i.e. The Mirror of the Principal Ages (Shrewsbury 1716, 1740). For Evans, see Dictionary of Welsh Biography, s.n. cf. also B. L. Jones, Drych y Prif Oesoedd', Y Traethodydd, vol. 118, January 1963, pp. 30-47, for the great influence of Evans's work on the reading public.