HISTORADE

Let's retrace together the environmental and social history of the Rade de Brest

Coordination

Yves Marie Paulet

Project type

Regional

Funding

Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)

La Zone Atelier Brest-Iroise (ZABrI)

L’ Université de Bretagne Occidentale (UBO)

L’ Institut Universitaire Européen de la Mer (IUEM)

Le Service Historique de la Défense (SHD)

Project duration

Start Date

03/12/2024

End Date

03/12/2024

Links

https://historade.fr/

HistoRade is a university research project created in 2019 and supported by the Zone Atelier Brest-Iroise (CNRS). It brings together several scientists and professionals from the world of the sea around a double objective:

To study the environmental history, still unknown, of the Brest roadstead;
Analyze the relationship between the people of the roadstead and nature (land and sea)

This study seeks to clarify a very current issue: why do certain marine species appear and disappear? Vast question that does not always find answers! This is why the support of history could help us to explain the present and anticipate the future. To do this, the HistoRade research group sought to answer three main questions:

Has the Brest roadstead experienced, in the past, phases of appearances and disappearances of species?
What have been the causes of this?
How has society reacted?

Since 2019, archives and testimonies have pointed us to these questions. This investigative work, carried out in close collaboration with academics (historians, ecologists, economists,...), fishermen and other actors of the roadstead, has allowed us to write a first report of a Master's degree on the history of the variations of certain marine resources that have evolved in the roadstead of Brest, between 1866 and 1963. It concerns the evolution of flat oysters, scallops, scallops, clams and marine amendments (maerl and red seaweed).