‘France is my mother’: The Subject of Universal Education in the French Third Republic

Abstract

Explores efforts by the French Parliament to establish a system of nationwide primary education for children of the popular classes. Argues these reform laws were meant to ensure the long-term survival of the Third Republic by creating a nation of loyal republican citizens no longer subject to the dictates of the Catholic Church or the monarchy it supported. The regeneration of the nation was to be effected by teaching the masses to exercise their reason through the study of the sciences and Kantian rationalist morality. Believes authorities thought that by learning this universally shared independent morality, citizens would become capable of exercising sovereignty over themselves and the democratic nation. Posits that the new curriculum was designed to subjectify the relation of the pupils to the republican State. To moral education, the Opportunists added a civic instruction whose goal was to inspire the children’s respect, gratitude, and obedience toward the Republic by depicting it as their mother. Concludes the unity of the nation was thus purchased at the expense of splitting the subject of universal education: rhetoric was now pitted against logic, and while the demand was for universalism, freedom, and autonomy, the desire was for nationalism, obedience, and dependence.