“I opened the book, and I saw my father there! », wonders, moved, Gilles Commault. This Saturday, December 14, he wanted to come to the dedication of the work “Saint-Brieuc in black and white” in the municipal archives, in order to unravel the mystery. Her father appears in a family photo taken on a beach in Valais in the last century, where we pose, all smiles, with our feet in the sand. But who provided the photo? The archives service hastened to seek out one of the 18 contributors to the book, Catherine Citot, née Boschat. Her distant cousin. “It’s incredible!” », enthuses the latter… who is quick to evoke common memories. “In this photo too, it’s my father,” Gilles informs him, pointing at this man posing on a bridge, between two women. “He appears emaciated because he was certainly returning from a prison camp in Germany.”
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2 Memories of friends
How long have they known each other? Roselyne Le Bon and Annie Cam burst out laughing: “We don’t even know anymore! » The duo grew up together in the Garden City of Ginglin. Like their parents before them. “In this photo, my father and my two aunts, as children, are doing acrobatics in the middle of the Chaptal roundabout,” recalls Annie Cam. The street was theirs! “. It’s 1943, “there wasn’t the traffic there is today. Besides, the neighborhood was a real little village. We only have good memories. »
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3 The little girl in the photo
The little girl in short pants on the racing strike is her. In 1968. The place was nothing like the open-air dump that it would become. Sylvie Dolé and her family go there by car, on rest days, to take a dip in the salt water “like any good Briochin”, smiles the person concerned. At the time, she lived in Cesson with her parents. “My father, like his father before him, is passionate about photography and he takes these photos. » Sylvie sent five to the municipal archives. A way “to pass on a part of our heritage and local history”, she believes.
Daughter and granddaughter of photography enthusiasts, Briochine Sylvie Dolé poses with the photo of herself, as a child, at the Races strike during a family outing to the beach. “We lived in Cesson and like any good Briochin, we went to the beach on our days off. » (Le Télégramme/Fanny Ohier) -
4The spine of the book
For two years, Yolaine Coutentin has collected, gathered, digitized around 400 photos sent by Briochins and Briochines… To retain 200, printing quality requires. The task of the person responsible for the municipal archives was not easy: it was necessary to create “a global history from specific stories”. For this, she was inspired by a photo, shown on page 10. A woman dressed in black, another in white, admire the industrial port, from the heights of the city. “This photo guided the creation of the book that I built around polarity,” recalls Yolaine Coutentin. Hence its construction in chapters “town and countryside”, “festivals and leisure”, “war and peace”. His personal satisfaction in the work? “It’s a joy, this Saturday morning, to see all these people meeting and even rediscovering each other,” she confides, with a smile on her lips.
Books
