Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic (review)

As he explains in the preface, M. Martin Guiney’s study of the teaching of literature under France’s Third Republic is motivated by a desire to understand what he sees as a paradox at the core of the republican school, namely, the institution’s “persistent authoritarian character” that exists alongside its emphasis on autonomous rational thinking. Guiney locates the origins of this contradiction in what he describes as the deceptive educational policies and practices of the early Third Republic. He argues that republican leaders and education reformers, while appearing to uphold Enlightenment principles and fulfill the aspirations of the revolutionaries of the First Republic, were simultaneously implementing a pedagogical program modeled in large part on the practices of ancien régime institutions, in particular those of the Catholic Church. To put it another way, while claiming to implement a modern, democratic educational system that granted autonomy to the individual student, republican leaders were actually perpetuating a “top-down, dogmatic transmission of values” (207) more characteristic of the institutions that the Republic sought to displace. Guiney thus presents late nineteenth-century republican education reform not as a true break with the past (as defenders of the myth would have it) but rather as “continuity disguised as change” (xii). Privileging literary studies in both primary and secondary education as the site for observing this republican stratagem, Guiney analyzes school manuals (e.g., G. Bruno’s Le tour de la France par deux enfants), textbooks, syllabi, and many of the classic reference works of the period (such as Gabriel Compayré’s history of educational doctrines or the monumental Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire edited by Ferdinand Buisson) to make his case.