Claudine Fisher

The Breton Black-Foot Claudine Fisher

The Breton Black-Foot, recounts how the child, Mathurin Guégan, leaves Brittany and moves to Paris. As an adult participant of the 1848 Parisian Revolution, he decides to settle in Algeria. His seafaring captain grandfather was cod fishing in the waters of Newfoundland; his Acadian grandmother, caught in the French and Indian War or Great Upheaval as a girl, had to return to France via England; Mathurin's soldiering father fought in the Napoleonic wars. The ascendants' varied experiences act as counterpoints to the lives of Mathurin's descendants, Pieds-Noirs or Black-Foot French, during the chaotic war of independence for Algeria (1954-1962.) The Breton Blackfoot, being both prequel and sequel, ends the trilogy of Paris In Paris Out. In book 1, The Reluctant Paris Rebel, Mathurin Guégan, experienced the 1848 revolution. Book 2, The Southbound French Settlers focused on Mathurin's voyage and his homesteading at the Castiglione colony, near Algiers. Book 3, The Breton Black-Foot evokes the good and bad times of mid-twentieth century Algiers, just before Moslems gained independence from France.