Bretons are one of the few surviving ethnic cultures in France, resisting even Emporer Napoleon's cleansing of the nation. The children of Bretonne were beaten in school for speaking their native tongue and yet it somehow survived, barely. Breton folk live in what is known now as Brittany, the far northwest peninsula of France, very near to the British Isles. Bretons are ethnically Celts, the only major tribe to resist expulsion from the European mainland.