From Quaint to Bloodthirsty

For some in france, the 34-year struggle by militants in Brittany to gain independence from the "occupying Jacobin power" of the central French state had retained something of a Quixotic, folkloric nobility. It had an innocence that derived from the movement's success in not harming innocents despite scores of symbolic bombings. But that clean record and quaint reputation was stained in blood last week when a suspected Breton Revolutionary Army bomb killed a 28-year-old employee of a McDonald's restaurant.

The bombing of McDonald's in the Breton town of Quvert on Wednesday coincided with the discovery of an unexploded bomb at a post office in the regional capital of Rennes. Tests found that both had been constructed from explosives that were part of an eight-ton cargo of dynamite stolen in the area last September by Breton and Basque nationalists, and only partially recovered by police. Last week's assault followed nearly 20 attacks over the past 18 months by resurgent Breton militants, who have blasted standard targets like administrative offices, police precincts and utility installations, as well as more politically personalized sites in the home towns of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevnement.

In addition to the unprecedented fatality, officials say the attack on the McDonald's restaurant which had been shot at last month is significant in marking the separatists' adoption of anti-American and antiglobalization sentiment. "The traditional struggle against 'the colonial French state' is now expanding to war on globalization, expatriate corporations, agrobusiness anything running counter to their regional, ecological, traditionalist, back-to-the-earth ideology," says a French antiterrorist official. The extreme leftist politics of the original Breton nationalists may now be fusing with the anti-Americanism and the penchant for violence of younger militants. If so, last week's attack could presage more bloody assaults on the representatives of globalism by defiant warriors of a now not-so-quaint neo-tribalism.