Hi everyone,
I'm a french air traffic controller at Bordeaux ACC (unfortunately not Brest), so I thought I might help here. And, by the way, this is my first post here
Basically, I can see 2 reasons why he gave you the other aircraft a direct BARLU and not you :
1) Brest sectors are fairly huge and maybe he was planning way ahead a sequencing at FL360 over BARLU. The acft ahead of you was n°1, another plane on a different route was n°2 and you were n°3 (or more...). According to the distance he has to put between each plane, he maybe needed to create more distance between you two and he realised that by giving a good direct to the 1st one and not to you...
2) As 1261 mentionned it, there is a complete segragation beween military and civilian control in France (which is kind of scary, but it's not our subject). The TSA (what you call the "danger zones") are activated in real time with a 10 minutes PPR.
So, maybe the zone was activated just after the first plane got his direct (in this case, we try to coordinate with the military the entrance into the zone, we don't want to ask the pilot to go back to the standard routeing just seconds after giving him a direct -- sometimes the military don't accept...) and as a consequence he went direct BARLU and not you...
I don't know if that helps...