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This chapter tells the story of Jean-Marie Galles and how he became one of the Parisian bourgeoisie, not only in title but also in spirit. When the family decided that Jean-Marie needed a Paris apprenticeship, he went to spend a year with his uncle’s master. On June 6, 1759, he was received as maître imprimeur-libraire de Vannes, but soon would be on his way back to the capital—a move that would begin to chart the Galles family’s place on a larger map. Jean-Marie Galles’s way was paved by his uncle and godfather, Jean-Nicolas, under circumstances not at all of the latter’s choosing. This chapter discusses the arrest and imprisonment of Jean-Nicolas Galles in February 1760 in the Bastille in Paris. It also describes the strong conjugal love between Jean-Nicolas and his wife, Jacquette Bertin, and how kinship enabled the Galles family to gain a monopoly of the book trade in Vannes. Finally, it examines Jean-Marie Galles’s love affair with a Parisienne that ended unhappily.

This chapter examines the integration through marriage among the Galles, Jollivets, and Le Ridants—families who were already related through a vast sibling archipelago. The disappearance of Jacquette Bertin marked the end of an era. She had powered the Galles enterprise through a succession of difficult moments, the family’s social ascent, and promoted a fine match for her son that opened the way to a universe of social, intellectual, and political leadership across France. This chapter begins by focusing on the talented royalists who accommodated Napoléon Bonaparte as emperor of France before turning to René Jollivet and his involvement in local politics. It then considers the new generation of Galles, Jollivets, and Le Ridants and the families’ consolidation of class power. It also discusses the courtship and wedding of Adèle Jollivet and Eugène Galles to highlight the link between cousin marriage and the political integration of Vannes’s bourgeoisie.

This chapter focuses on the correspondence between Eugène and Adèle Galles during Eugène’s deployment in Spain. The marriage of Eugène and Adèle bore all the fruits imaginable for those of their milieu in the years that followed their first encounters with the trials and joys of “establishment.” Adèle returned to Vannes in 1821 to live once again in the Galles’s ancestral home. This chapter first discusses three weddings involving the Galles and Jollivet families: between Joséphine Le Monnier and Jean-Marie Galles, between Yves Jollivet and Zuma Kerviche, and between Louise Jollivet and Augustin Le Montagner. It then examines the crisis that hit the Galles-Jollivet household as a result of a “fever” of “epidemic” proportions in Vannes. It also considers the military and domestic affairs of the Galles and Jollivets, including the birth of Eugène and Adèle’s new son and René Jollivet’s arrival in Vannes.

This book concludes by discussing the legacy of the Galles family and their kin in the areas of nation building and civic leadership. It shows how kinship contributed to French nation building in the nineteenth century and provided the glue binding a national bourgeoisie, and explains how the inward-outward character of provincial bourgeois ascendancy was replicated by the Galles and many other families not only in Vannes but also throughout France. It examines the role of professional accomplishment, civic leadership, and intellectual influence in the processes of national bourgeois class formation and bourgeois contributions to nation building. It also considers the movement for Breton autonomy and the Société polymathique du Morbihan’s (SPM) criticism of “Bretonisme”.