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

Introduction

Introduction Reading the Republican Legacy Alphonse Daudet’s short story “La dernière classe” (The Last Class), published in 1872, takes place in a rural schoolroom in Alsace shortly after France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870–71. Beyond the classroom walls, in the distance, one hears the military exercises of the Prussian troops, a reminder that the annexed provinces of Alsace-Lorraine have fallen to Bismarck. The story describes the schoolchildren’s last French class. Thereafter, they will be required to study German. The narrator, a mediocre student named Franz, arrives late to class to discover a curious scene. Adults from the village occupy the empty seats, and the teacher, Monsieur Hamel, dressed in his Sunday best, conducts the lesson with unusual ceremony. Amid the exercises on grammar, reading, writing, and spelling, Monsieur Hamel pauses to celebrate the richness, beauty, and clarity of the French language. He also admonishes his pupils and fellow citizens for their past neglect of their studies. The teacher stresses, in particular , the urgent need to preserve and defend the French language. The nation’s survival, he explains, depends on it: studying French, learning to read and write the language, is tantamount to fighting for France. As this, the last French class draws to a close, Monsieur Hamel begins to offer some parting words. Overcome with sadness, however, he cannot speak. Instead, he turns to the blackboard and painstakingly writes in capital letters: vive la france! He then, with a wave of the hand, dismisses the class. 2 | Introduction Daudet’s story is as relevant today as it was at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the threats to France’s security have changed, the crucial connection between education and national welfare continues to dominate politics, public debate, and even literary and cinematic production. Modern communication technologies spawning pidgin languages (of email and sms), cultural globalization typified by the boundless American entertainment industry, and the growing impact of beliefs and practices of immigrant communities from former colonies have generated an anxiety about the survival of both the national language and republican values. Daudet’s Prussian troops have been replaced by text messaging, Hollywood movies, and the hijab (or headscarf ) worn by some Muslim schoolgirls.1 Just as Daudet did in 1872, France’s leaders , intellectuals, and educators today invoke the school as a bulwark against these potential threats to French culture and identity. And just as Monsieur Hamel’s lesson suggests, the French language and literature class—the place where one learns to read and write—still constitutes the epicenter of the struggle. The Pedagogical Imagination examines present-day versions of Daudet’s story. It studies some of the most popular and critically acclaimed works of recent literature and film treating problems of education in France: François Bégaudeau’s Entre les murs (2006), Erik Orsenna’s La grammaire est une chanson douce (2001), Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’esquive (2004) and, a less obvious, more subtle example, Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000). All of these works are concerned in one way or another with what many refer to as the school crisis in France. Though typically defined in terms of academic underachievement, school violence, and student disregard for republican values, the school crisis that concerns us here is more closely related to the issues that concern Daudet: questions of language learning, reading and writing instruction, and literary studies. The works studied in these pages place the very act of reading—how we read and how we should read—at the center of their reflections on republican schooling and French education. They do not merely depict scenes of learning, however. The works of Bégaudeau, Orsenna, Kechiche, and Varda engage with the question of Introduction | 3 education through experiments with form. They represent the educational milieu—teachers, students, classrooms—but they also use formal devices such as mise en abyme, the play of text and image, fragmented narratives, and curious interpolations of realia to stimulate the reader’s or viewer’s active engagement with the material. They promote, quite simply, an act of critical reading that in and of itself, I argue, reproduces basic pedagogical principles of modern education, principles that have been especially consequential in, and central to, the French republican tradition. To put it another way, The Pedagogical Imagination argues that a particular conception of modern progressive pedagogy manifests itself in techniques of form and...