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.

This study belongs to a growing body of scholarly reassessments of the history and legacy of republican education. While others have studied the fundamental conservatism of both Jules Ferry's school reform¹ and literary studies in fin-de-siècle France,² the originality of Guiney's contribution lies in the analogy he establishes between Catholic notions of "sacredness" with respect to Scripture and the idea of "literariness," a term Guiney uses to describe the "sacred" status of literature in republican education. In contradistinction to the Russian Formalists' use of the term to define "scientifically" the object of literary study, literariness for Guiney refers instead to that quality of literature that eludes precise definition and which, like the "sacred," "resists empirical analysis" (206). Guiney shows how this "sacred aura of literature" was exploited by republican educators in their effort to fashion a coherent national culture that would buttress the French national identity still healing from the turbulence of 1870-71.

Leaders of the Third Republic faced a problem that had already emerged under the First Republic: how to spread literacy for the purpose of creating a democratic citizenry, without exposing the people to the dangers of literature, an elitist, aristocratic art form marked by rhetorical vacuity, obfuscation and abstraction. It was far preferable to discover truth through the direct study of concrete things and to communicate it in a transparent – i.e., non-literary – language. In short, the problem with literature was that it did not "heed the call to reason" (38). The Third Republic's educators solved this problem, says Guiney, by misrepresenting the literary tradition and limiting students' opportunities to interpret literary texts. For example, with respect to formulating the national canon, Guiney observes that only those works would be "consecrated" that could be shown to illustrate the qualities or principles that the Republic wanted to promote. Thus, the predominance of seventeenth-century literature in the canon is explained by the fact that such works exhibited the qualities of reason and restraint, while avoiding those of irrational genius and inspiration, which the conservative Third Republic, eager to separate itself from the radical Jacobin legacy, sought...