Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Lorient, Brittany, France
About Auguste Brizeux
- Julien Auguste Pélage Brizeux (12 September 1803 – 3 May 1858) was a French poet.
- He was said to belong to a family of Irish origin, long settled in Brittany.
- He was educated for the law, but in 1827 he produced at the Théâtre Français a one-act verse comedy, Racine, in collaboration with Philippe Busoni. His most important works are, first, Marie (1832, 1836, 1840), then, Les Bretons (1845, 1846).
- He also wrote in the Breton language, notably Telenn-Arvor and Furnez Breiz. Brizeux was born at Lorient (Morbihan.
- Though he was brought up with the Cornouaille dialect of Breton, in his Breton language verse he used the standardised Breton codified by Jean-François Le Gonidec.
- He became an ardent student of the philology and archaeology of Brittany, and had collected materials for a dictionary of Breton place-names. A journey to Italy in company with Auguste Barbier made a great impression on him, and a second visit (1834) resulted in 1841 in the publication of a complete French translation of Dante's Divine Comedy in terza rima.
- In his collection Primel el Nola (1852) he included poems written under Italian influence, entitled Les Ternaires (1841), but in the rustic idyll of Marie (1836) turned to Breton country life; in Les Bretons (1845) he found his inspiration in the folklore and legends of his native province.
- In La chasse du Prince Arthur he created a narrative around the short life of Arthur I, Duke of Brittany, murdered by King John of England.
- His Histoires poétiques (1855) was crowned by the French Academy. Following his death at Montpellier on 3 May 1858, his Œuvres complètes (2 vols., 1860) were edited with a notice of the author by Saint-René Taillandier.
- Another edition appeared in 1880-1884 (4 vols.).
- A long list of articles on his work may be consulted in an exhaustive monograph, Brizeux; sa vie et ses œuvres (1898), by the abbé C.
- Lecigne. Known as "le prince des bardes bretons", he was credited as the founder of modern Breton literature by later Breton Celticists.
- Théodore Botrel created a monument to him in Pont-Aven, which is ceremonially adorned each year at the Fête des Fleurs d’Ajonc.
- His works in Breton, Telenn Arvor (1844), and his collection of proverbs, Furnez Breiz (1845), were republished by Roparz Hemon in the Breton language literary magazine Gwalarn in 1929.
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