The Pedagogical Imagination: The Republican Legacy in Twenty-First-Century French Literature and Film

5. Writing on Walls

5 Writing on Walls Laïcité and Literary Form in François Bégaudeau’s Entre les murs Of all of the works under consideration here, François Bégaudeau’s Entre les murs may seem the most critical of republican education. But this best-selling, award-winning chronicle of life in a troubled Paris middle school is in fact steeped in the very tradition that it appears to critique. Moreover, it enacts republican pedagogical method—however old-fashioned that might sound—as a solution to, or at least a means of engagement with, the current school crisis. One of the most talked about French titles at the start of the twenty-first century, Entre les murs has also, in adapted form, become a stage play and an internationally acclaimed cinematic success.1 If Entre les murs has become so popular, it is undoubtedly because its subject matter speaks to everyone. Through vignettes taken from his own experience as a teacher, Bégaudeau records the signs of the school system’s ills: students fail to grasp the basic skills of oral and written expression; they ignore even the most rudimentary notions of general French culture; incidents of disobedience and violence abound; and there is a pronounced divide between the republican institution and the diverse racial, religious, and ethnic makeup of the student body. The question of whether the republican, secular school can integrate or at least find a modus vivendi with this multicultural population produces a discomforting tension throughout the text. This is not, however, the only picture that Bégaudeau paints. He offsets images of ill health with others more heartening: we encounter a student, 146 | Writing on Walls Sandra, who reads Plato’s Republic in her spare time. There is Alyssa’s thoughtful and elegantly written argument against the reestablishment of traditional disciplinary practices. And Bégaudeau counterbalances the many hostile exchanges between students and teachers with displays of mutual respect. In sum, Bégaudeau neither whitewashes nor overstates the crisis. He seems intent on showing the good with the bad, in order that we, its readers, might judge for ourselves. The book could not be more topical, a point evidenced by the promotional blurbs on the back cover of its English-language (and “movie tie-in”) edition.2 There we read that Entre les murs, or The Class, as it is known to Anglophone audiences, “explores timely issues of race, class, identity, colonial history, immigration, and education.” It “suspend[s] judgment and liberat[es] the raw words of kids in a deconsecrated classroom .” Directly below this appears the New Yorker film critic David Denby’s observation (as if the film and the book were identical—which they are not3) that “The Class is a prime document of French post-colonial blues, though its relevance to American urban education could not be any greater if it had been made in the Bronx or Trenton or South Los Angeles.” “Timely,” “raw,” and “relevant,” Entre les murs appears to have a privileged relationship with the here and now. Readers, reviewers, and critics treat it as an objective report on the reality of the schools. Writing in the pages of Le Monde, J.-L. Douin declares that Entre les murs is “a work of astounding authenticity.”4 Bégaudeau himself describes it as a “chronicle” of his actual experience in the classroom.5 It does indeed read like a chronicle. Episodes follow one another according to the school year calendar. There is thus no organized plot in the Aristotelian sense of a purposeful progression uniting beginning, middle, and end in a “complete and unified action.” In other words, the chronicle as a formal device reduces the sense of authorial interference and increases the reader’s impression that the book is an impartial presentation of fact. Not everyone, however, commends the book for its truthfulness. Bégaudeau’s former colleagues, teachers at Françoise-Dolto middle school, are angered by the work, denouncing it as an inaccurate depiction of Writing on Walls | 147 themselves and their students.6 But even these critics who doubt Entre les murs’s faithful portrayal of reality express their reservations in terms of the same criteria of truth and falsehood used by everyone else. With few exceptions the first response to Entre les murs concerns its verisimilitude , its referential fidelity, its mimetic precision—in short, its accurate representation of the real school. This focus on...