11 - Changing Identities

Summary

CULTURALLY and linguistically, Guernsey was a very different place on the eve of World War I than it had been at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. Immigrants had contributed to the metamorphosis, but they were by no means the sole agents of change. In examining the nature and timing of developments, it will be necessary to evaluate the contribution of immigrants against that of a host of non-human agents. Several levels of change can be distinguished. These are not so much orderly strata as inter-cutting layers, each impacting on the other in a jumble of cause and effect. Right at the surface are the obvious cultural and linguistic shifts which can be seen as both a symptom and a cause of realignments in insular identity. Further down there are the political and administrative reforms which also simultaneously reflected and pushed forward social change. Deeper still are the developments in transport and communications which set off structural changes further back. Ultimately, of course, there is the major economic transformation which swept through not only the Islands but much of western Europe in the nineteenth century. In Guernsey’s case, this saw the commercial revolution begun in eighteenth-century St Peter Port spread Islandwide and finally supplant the traditional rural economy and social structure.

Each strand of change enumerated above will be discussed in a chronological account of the process of cultural transition. The account will be divided into four sections. Firstly, the forces which moulded a distinctive Channel Island identity in the centuries preceding the nineteenth will be outlined. Following this, developments specific to Guernsey from the end of the Napoleonic era will be analysed in three sections corresponding roughly to the periods 1814–39, 1840–79 and 1880–1914. Most attention will be given to the last of these phases, since it represents the final working-out of a range of processes set in motion earlier in the century.

Insular identity – the historical background

Unlike the Isles of Wight, Man, Skye or Shetland, the Channel Islands are geographically peripheral not to Britain but to continental Europe, or, more particularly, to France. They are situated in an international frontier zone, a region where political, linguistic and cultural boundaries meet.