8 - Marianne at school

Summary

For both Church and Republic, educating the young was the prime task; it determined what sort of society France would be. Given these high stakes, the Republic might predictably have insisted that its teachers at all levels should be committed to the vision of society that the Republic represented – even if that vision could be expressed only in terms of benign disenthralment: freedom of thought, freedom from obscurantism, freedom of the individual to make his or her own choices in life, etc. (Anything more prescriptive would immediately have run the risk of splitting the Republicans between those who believed in social equality and those who preferred to settle for equality of opportunity – to say nothing of creating war between the intermediate staging posts, all stoutly defended by their particular enthusiasts.) The creation of a sternly Republicanised teaching body might have seemed all the more likely and justified, given the sacrifice of effort and goodwill that had been given to ridding the country of such a sizeable sector of the rival Catholic school system. There would seem little point in wrecking the enemy's installations, while allowing its troops to infiltrate the home citadel. Yet recruitment of the State's educational forces involved much less political scrutiny than is commonly supposed.

As far as secondary teachers and university lecturers were concerned, archival records indicate an ambivalence of attitudes in the relevant sections of the Ministry of Education. It recognised the impossibility of ignoring political issues, yet there was more than a hint of fastidious distaste for having to take such matters into consideration.