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

Conclusion

Conclusion The Strangeness of Republican Culture In 2002 Flammarion published, under the direction of two of France’s leading historians, Christophe Prochasson and Vincent Duclert, the first Dictionnaire critique de la République (Critical dictionary of the Republic).1 With more than two hundred essay-length articles by eminent historians and political theorists, the volume constitutes an editorial tour de force. It is also a sign of the times, a magisterial reminder, among the recent flood of publications on the subject, that the Republic—its identity and values—is in apparent crisis. It is surely no accident that such a compendium of expert analysis should appear at a moment when demographic, geopolitical, and widespread cultural changes are said (yet again) to threaten the survival of French republican traditions. As this publishing enterprise attests, the very meaning of the Republic preoccupies French thought with renewed urgency.2 The question of education, moreover, permeates the work. Many of its entries— “Learning,” “Condorcet,” “School,” “Ferry,” “Instruction,” “Laicity,” “Language,” “Larousse,” “Book”—underscore the indissoluble link between the Republic and its obsession with the school; it is inconceivable to discuss the one without the other. On its face, however, the Dictionnaire, hardly concerned with literature or the arts, seems to have only a tangential connection with the central aesthetic concerns of the present study. But a closer look at the editor’s presentation suggests that their project is nearer to our own than it would at first appear. In Conclusion | 177 fact, what these concluding pages hope to show is that the stated aims of these historians call for precisely the kind of aesthetic investigations proposed here in The Pedagogical Imagination. The editors insist throughout their preface on the elusive nature of their object of study. Multiform, multifaceted, and ubiquitous, the Republic, they argue, cannot be observed from any one angle. It resides in constitutions and institutions; it provides the conceptual foundation for the construction of French society, the state, and the nation; it preoccupies political philosophers, and it penetrates the collective imagination of the people. For more than two hundred years, they remind us, it has been a source of conflict, tension, and constant questioning. For some, the Republic embodies progress and democracy; for others, it is a frozen object of devotion and an impediment to further democratization. It is a site of paradox where faith in political process meets disenchantment with democracy and its promises. “It would be useless and dangerous,” explain Duclert and Prochasson, “to pretend to offer a single vision of the Republic” (11). Their investigation of this multifaceted concept thus requires the dictionary form, a compendium of different perspectives, or, as the editors write, a “plurality of readings.” “Reading” the Republic is not easy, explain the historians. Its very ubiquity makes it hard to see. A constant focus of scholarly study and public debate, the topic itself can seem commonplace and stale. The historian’s perception of it, say Duclert and Prochasson, risks growing dull: “A mundane environment (milieu banal) in which the contemporary historian finds himself immersed day after day, republican culture must rediscover its strangeness (la culture républicaine doit retrouver son étrangeté). Placed at a distance, it will reveal the secrets of its longevity and those of its remarkable plasticity” (12). The editors are right: “[R]epublican culture must rediscover its strangeness .” Historical perspective is essential for seeing republicanism anew. The Pedagogical Imagination subscribes to this argument. All of the analyses in the preceding pages have insisted on recovering the historical forces and resonances that bear on contemporary cultural production. Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse illustrates the point most boldly. Gleaning, 178 | Conclusion the filmmaker’s all-purpose metaphor, refers in part to recuperating the past, to recycling history and integrating it into the frame through which we observe the present. Recalling the legacy of Pierre Larousse and Laroussian pedagogy, Varda unites her own cinematic and instructional project with the nineteenth-century republican lexicographer’s promotion of universal education. Orsenna’s La grammaire est une chanson douce brings together different literary traditions. It reproduces in narrative form the fabulist tradition of La Fontaine, but it also reveals a debt to the “child’s tour of the nation” genre of which the republican school manual, Le tour de la France par deux enfants, is the prototype. We might say that Orsenna’s story continues the republican tradition of fusing traditions, in this case the...