This amazing man was in his time a small peasant, a shipping magnate, a pig-breeding tycoon, a ruthless riot activist and a pan-Celtic visionary.
He was also a sharp-minded realist who did more than anyone to rescue Brittany from its poverty and its over dependence on Paris, and to forge new links with the outside world — notably through Brittany Ferries, which he founded and led. It was thought to be an example unique in Europe of farmers starting their own shipping line and taking the lead in regional expansion.
Arrogant, eloquent and autocratic, Alexis was a believer in strong-arm tactics, which led some of his critics to brand him fascist. His pig farm became the largest in France, but he began life modestly, the son of a labourer and smallholder on the fertile vegetable-growing plain near Roscoff, north Brittany. Leaving school at 14, he was moulded above all by the Jeunesse Agricole Chrétienne, the Church-led youth movement that did so much after the war to shape a new generation of progress-minded French farmers.
When most ambitious young Bretons were emigrating to Paris or other cities, Alexis decided to stay, and to fight. He and his colleagues grew furious at their exploitation by the middlemen, which led the vegetable market to collapse in face of seasonal glut. Their anger reached flashpoint in 1961, in the famous “artichoke wars”. At Morlaix, 4,000 young farmers invaded the streets with tractors and seized the sub-prefecture. Elsewhere they set fire to ballot-boxes. When Alexis, their 24-year-old ringleader, was arrested, sympathy riots spread through the west. But this was not just another routine French farm protest: it marked a crucial turning point. For the first time, French farmers were rioting for progress, not against it. “ L’agriculture de papa est morte”, read their triumphant banners.
De Gaulle’s Government quickly responded by applying a radical reform to help the farmers against the middlemen. And Alexis and his allies created a marketing cooperative (Société d’être Collectif Agricole - SICA) near Roscoff that was able to control prices and thus defy the middlemen. In an area that produced 70 per cent of French artichokes and cauliflowers, this SICA came to be the most powerful of the hundreds in France. And some of its 2,500 members grew rich.
Aware that farm progress alone could never solve Brittany’s problems, Alexis set his sights wider. Though proudly Breton, he was never a political separatist, and since his aims were purely economic the Government found him a useful ally. He set up a development board for western Brittany, which lobbied persistently in Paris and in 1968 played a key part in persuading ministers to allot lavish new funds for Brittany’s infrastructure, including the building of a deep-water port at Roscoff.
Alexis was gambling on Britain’s entry into the EEC and the new trade that would follow. Cross-Channel links in the west barely existed, and a direct Roscoff - Plymouth ferry seemed the answer — but who was to run it? The shipping firms all declined: so Alexis and the SICA took their courage into their hands and launched their own company (today called Brittany Ferries), to the scorn of other lines which expected it to flop — “Vous êtes des amateurs, pas des armateurs (ship-owners),” they joked. But by hiring the right know-how the farmers succeeded, and in 1973 BF started the daily ferry service to Plymouth that has since done so much to develop trade and tourism between la Petite et la Grande Bretagne. Other routes followed, including Portsmouth - St Malo, Roscoff - Cork and Plymouth - Santander. In 1996-98, facing new, tougher competition, BF went through a crisis and had to be bailed out by a state subsidy. But it was soon back in profit. Alexis remained chairman until his death, and he and other farmers owned more than 60 per cent of BF’s capital. Its passengers have always been mainly British, but the SICA’s farmers have used it to export to Britain 50,000 tonnes a year of their potatoes, 20,000 tonnes of cauliflowers, and so on.
When Prince Charles visited Finistére in 1988, the local media apparently headlined his meeting with Gourvennec as 'Prince of Wales at the home of the Prince of Brittany'
After giving up his chairmanship of SICA in February 2004, Alexis was able to spend more time at Brittany Ferries. Differences with Michael Maravel, managing director of the company, over its response to competition from low-cost airlines, led to Maravel’s departure in August 2005. The company remained solid, but Alexis continued to lobby for it to be granted the same exoneration from social charges that similar companies in other EU countries enjoyed. New ships, the Mont St Michel and the Pont-Aven, were brought into service in 2003-04 and a RoPax vessel ordered for delivery in autumn 2007. In 2005 Brittany Ferries enjoyed a rise in passenger numbers and commercial vehicles transported of 9 and 10 per cent, respectively, after the withdrawal of P&O from a number of its routes.
Alexis always believed that Brittany’s destiny lay with its maritime links, the best means of escaping “the bear-hug of Parisian centralism”, as he put it. “In our history we have always fared best when we embrace the sea. Today Europe is lurching too much to the east, notably since the fall of communism. To counter this, we and other Celtic lands must build up le Grand Ouest, an axis from Scotland to Portugal, and our ferries will play their part.” Other leaders along Europe’s western fringe have followed his call to promote a so-called “Atlantic arc”.
Alexis, the inspiring idealist was also a tough businessman. Near Morlaix he owned Europe’s biggest pig farm, with a staff of 60, breeding 90,000 animals a year. This former champion of the small grower steadily evolved into an outspoken advocate of large-scale industrial farming, and he clashed with the local firebrands of the Marxist farming union, Coopération Paysanne, who raided and damaged his piggeries. “These silly Leftists have their heads in the sand,” he scoffed. “Farming is a business and must follow economic rules. If the car industry were made up of thousands of small producers, how could it survive? Brittany still has far too many small uneconomic farms, and they must die.”
Yet some years earlier, he had his own commando team of local thugs, some of them paratroop veterans of the Algerian war, and they did not “follow economic rules” but would wreck lorry loads of artichokes about to be sold by non-SICA members.
The super-dynamic Alexis did much to transform and modernise Brittany, not just in farming. Though he came to live the jet-hopping life of a tycoon, he kept his rough peasant manners and accent, and prided himself on his earthiness and rejection of high-life graces. At one banquet in a top Paris restaurant, he brushed aside the Mumms and Châteaux-Lafites and said to the waiter: “Donne-moi un bon coup de rouge, mon vieux”
He is survived by his wife, Annie, and their son and daughter.