Abstract
French pedagogues of the late nineteenth century saw the urgent need to emancipate literary pedagogy from classical rhetoric, and as a result, candidates for the baccalauréat examination in 1902 no longer were required to demonstrate proficiency in Latin or Greek. In practice, the reforms met opposition from the public and from teachers of literature, providing a case study in the resistance to change, even (or especially) when it is badly needed. The debate at the turn of the twentieth century foreshadowed the current one over the general relevance of literary education, such as the argument that literature is to be universally taught only insofar as it cultivates marketable skills.
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Notes
- 1.
The conclusions of Ribot’s “commission on public instruction” are summarized in his important work La réforme de l’enseignement secondaire (1900), which was one of the first official attempts in France to make public education, including literary pedagogy, responsive to the social conditions of a broader cross section of the population. As such, it is a direct precursor to the 1999 reforms that brought on very similar reactions, as we will see in the next chapter.
- 2.
The brevet was the diploma certifying completion of the “primaire supérieur” track, the traditional, less prestigious alternative to the lycée for students who continued their education beyond the obligatory age of twelve. It still exists today as the “brevet des collèges”, or certificate of completion of middle school.
- 3.
The concours général, formerly concours académique, is a contest open only to students selected by their schools as among the “best of the best”. It was in the concours for “Latin verse composition” that Rimbaud won first prize in 1869, as mentioned earlier in this chapter.
- 4.
The work of historian Marie-Madeleine Compère gives the best explanation for the persistence of the “cult of Latin” in literary pedagogy, that still exists to this day.
- 5.
“Bachot” is the slang word still in use today, along with “bac”, to refer to the baccalauréat exam; “bachotage” is the activity of cramming for the exam.
- 6.
The politics of this movement varied considerably, as the examples developed here show: Péguy was from the left, “Agathon” from the right. Though it is an oversimplification, it helps to see the debates over the teaching of French in the 1900s as dividing society along similar fault lines as the Dreyfus Affair, from which the country was still recovering. Péguy, both a Dreyfusard and a foe of the “Nouvelle Sorbonne”, is one example of an exception to this pattern.
- 7.
The meaning of the verb “servir” in this context is not “to serve”, or not only that, but rather: “to be used or to be useful (servir à quelque chose)”.
- 8.
This very influential polemical work displays affinities with Maurras and l’Action Française, and Massis indeed later joined the fascist movement (though Tarde did not). To Péguy and Agathon, the two most famous critics of the Nouvelle Sorbonne, one should add the names of Gustave Le Bon and Pierre Lasserre, whose contributions to the debate were especially influential (see Bibliography). Both authors are discussed at length in George Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863–1914 (1983). Massis and Tarde were the primary foes of Emile Durkheim according to the account of sociology’s early struggles for legitimacy by Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (1988).
- 9.
Taylor’s theories on the rationalization of industrial labor started to have a profound impact even before his first book, Shop Management, appeared in 1903. His most influential work, however, is Principles of Scientific Management, published in French translation in 1911, the same year it came out in the United States. The two men writing as Agathon would certainly have been aware of the phenomenon of Taylorism, and it is not surprising that their book, which can be read as a backlash against the growing mechanization of labor, appeared at roughly the same time as Taylor’s.
- 10.
I am grateful to Leon Sachs for reminding me of the moral as well as political and social dimensions of the esthetic arguments put forward by Massis and de Tarde.
- 11.
The belief that the quality of oral and written expression declined in society after Latin ceased to be a requirement for all candidates of the bac was widespread in the early twentieth century (e.g. Henri Bergson 1923), and still exists in some circles today (e.g. Jacqueline de Romilly 1993, and Marc Fumaroli 2015). Historians of education have thoroughly exposed the mystical connection between Latin (and Greek) and French as an amazingly persistent and popular myth, arguing for example that the alleged “decline of French” among members of the scientific elite in the early twentieth century became an issue long before the students who no longer had to take Latin had even finished their studies, and it therefore could not have been a factor. Gustave Lanson himself pointed out in 1910 that fears of the decline of French style due to the absence of Latin in the required curriculum were a bit premature, given that the students who joined the Latin-free science track in 1903 would not become engineers until 1916 at the earliest (Jey 1998, 201). In spite of the lack of historical evidence, Latin’s aura as an antidote to bad French seems destined to endure.
- 12.
The current budget for the Ministry of Education is the largest of any French government agency at more than 65 billion euros (not counting an additional 23 billion for higher education and research, which only recently have come under its jurisdiction) (http://www.education.gouv.fr/cid82613/projet-de-loi-de-finances-2015.html). That is more than twice the budget of the French Ministry of Defense, which stood at 31.4 billion euros in 2015 (http://www.defense.gouv.fr/sga/le-sga-en-action/budget-finances-de-la-defense/budget). By way of comparison, the United States defense budget currently stands at 496 billion dollars (http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2015/fy2015_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf, 7), about sixteen and a half times larger than France’s, while the budget of the Department of Education, admittedly much less powerful than its French equivalent, stands at 68.6 billion dollars (http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget15/summary/15summary.pdf, 5), or about 10 percent smaller than France’s. Because the size of the French population is approximately one-fifth of the American, one can say that its public education budget per capita is close to five times larger (but its defense budget by the same calculation is then about one-third, instead of one-sixteenth, of the American one).
- 13.
Precise comparative sales figures for literature in France versus the United States indicate that in 2010, 2.53 billion books were sold in the United States, about one quarter of which are literature, excluding the educational market (http://www.statista.com/statistics/240088/total-book-sales-of-the-us-book-market-by-quantity/), versus 451.9 million in France, of which almost half are literature, excluding the educational market (http://www.statista.com/statistics/420733/book-sales-france/). According to those figures, the size of the book market is about the same in each country relative to the population, but the market share for literature in France is about twice as large.
- 14.
These figures come from a 2009 survey conducted by the TNS-Sofres agency and first published in La Croix, the French Catholic daily newspaper.
- 15.
- 16.
These figures also come from the survey conducted by TNS-Sofres in 2009.
- 17.
While the statistics on reading do not differentiate between literary and nonliterary works, at least half of the overall market in France is in fiction, as already mentioned. Literary genres such as poetry and drama would be included under the “fiction” category.
- 18.
There is little trace of this particular slang use of the word “misérable” that survives, but those who lived in France before Victor Hugo was replaced by Louis Pasteur on the five franc note might remember.
- 19.
During the time it was on the air, from 1975 to 1990, “Apostrophes” regularly drew an extremely large weekly audience by French standards, of between 1.3 and 2.3 million households, a total viewership well in excess of one tenth of the entire population. While the program undoubtedly had a substantial influence on sales of featured authors, known as “l’effet Pivot” [the Pivot effect], the numbers of people who bought a book after seeing its author on the show was never more than a tiny fraction of the overall viewing audience. It is also difficult to assess the effect, if any, of “Apostrophes” on the book market in general. A similar conclusion can be drawn in regards to the “Oprah Winfrey Book Club” in the United States (Painbéni 38).
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Guiney, M.M. (2017). Inventing and Defending the General Education of Literature. In: Literature, Pedagogy, and Curriculum in Secondary Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52138-1_4
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