Abstract EN:

The thesis deals with the whole island societies of the massif armoricain. In the study, we took into account all the isles which have known a more or less prolonged or important human settlement throughout history. Nevertheless, we put the emphasis on the durable and specifically island settlements (we consequently did not take into account noirmoutier, which have been linked to the mainland at low tide through the gois passage since the end of the eighteenth century, and by a bridge since 1971). In our research, we concentrated on fourteen isles or archipelagos : a multilocal canton (belle-ile), three monolocal cantons (ouessant, groix, yeu), eight parishes (brehat, batz, molene, sein, ile-aux-moines, arz, houat, hoedic) and two dependencies of coastal parishes (chausey, glenan). We tried to treat the historical evolution of those human groups through the testimony in the regional litterature, which really developed in the contemporary age (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), while taking into account the geographical constraints and sociological variables. Thus we reached a current classification of the isles according to the available data.