AERA_Narrative Practices, National Identity in France_website Version

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Kyle Greenwalt Narrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France Because of their strict copyright policy, Harvard Education Review does not allow me to post this manuscript online. Anyone wishing to read or cite that piece, I would direct to: http://www.hepg.org/main/her/Index.html . The piece below is a substantially earlier piece I wrote about contemporary French students and their national identities. This manuscript was presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association. I would ask that it not be cited or referenced under any circumstances. 1

Transcript of AERA_Narrative Practices, National Identity in France_website Version

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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France

Because of their strict copyright policy, Harvard Education Review does not allow me to post

this manuscript online. Anyone wishing to read or cite that piece, I would direct to:

http://www.hepg.org/main/her/Index.html.

The piece below is a substantially earlier piece I wrote about contemporary French students and

their national identities. This manuscript was presented at the annual conference of the American

Educational Research Association. I would ask that it not be cited or referenced under any

circumstances.

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Forty-five years ago, Eric Hobsbawm (1962) proclaimed that “the progress of schools and

universities measures that of nationalism” (p. 166). And though it is only one possible reading of

a large body of literature, one which has since developed a history of its own, Hobsbawm’s 1962

text can be read as marking an opening moment in the subsequently much-debated questions of

nationalism. Given the prominence of compulsory public schooling to the explanations generated

by this body of literature, it is perhaps surprising that within the field of education, it has largely

been overlooked. This paper seeks to fill that gap by bringing to the field’s attention the rich

theorizing that has happened around these most commonplace of concepts—nation, national,

nationality, nationalism—and by arguing for their continued relevance, even utility, in an age of

massive economic and social change.

Important literature subsequent to Hobsbawm’s 1962 formulation—by Hobsbawm again

(1983, 1993), as well as Ernest Gellner (1983) and Benedict Anderson (1983/1992)—all pick up

the theme of the crucial role of schooling in both generating and sustaining the national

imagination. While educationalists have not generally taken up the historiographical literature of

nationalism, there is, on the other hand, a very strong body of international work in history

education that has critically explored the links between school history and national identity. This

work has emerged out of research and theorizing about the case of North America (Barton &

Levstik, 1998; Rosenzweig & Thelen, 1998; Seixas, 2000), East Asia (Kan & Vickers, 2002), the

United Kingdom (Barton, 2001a, 2001b; Daddow, 2006; Shemilt, 2000), and continental Europe,

including work done in France (Audigier, 2005; Borries, 2000; Lantheaume, 2001; Leeuw-

Roord, 2000; Tutiaux-Guillon, 2007).

This paper begins, then, by building connections between these two bodies of literature,

both of which in some manner address the questions of national identification, national

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narratives, and schooling. This paper seeks to construct these bridges between the two bodies of

literature by constituting France as a case studying in how the nation was built historically and is

reproduced today. That is, in the second half of this paper, I will examine a group of French

students in the context of their local school, and then seek to explain how it is that one particular

form of social identification (the national) gets accentuated at the expense of other possible

forms of social identification (social class, religious, regional, or racial). As a central argument, I

will explore the reproduction of the nation by paying particular attention to the implicit

curriculum as it is constituted in one particular localized case. This focus on the implicit

curriculum—informed, as it is, by my own position as a researcher foreign to the French national

context—provides researchers with new insights into the workings of French public schooling.

The case of France not only provides a rich legacy of theorizing about the nation, but a

multiplicity of historical examples speaking to the way in which diverse subjectivities are

“made” national. As the historian Eugen Weber (1976) has noted that, “the French fuss so much

about the nation because it is a living problem, became one when they set up the nation as an

ideal, remained one because they found they could not realize that ideal” (p. 112). This paper

seeks, then, to take advantage of that fussing. It will do so by first reviewing scholarship on

French nationalism and French schooling. It then turns to defining this nation by examining

scholarship on collective memory. The paper then moves to an examination of two contemporary

narrative strategies practiced by French secondary students as they construct their own locations

within the national collective. Finally, the paper ends by considering the lessons that might be

drawn for educational scholars: the potentially positive manner in which an implicit curriculum

(Eisner, 1979) of informal civic apprenticeship can engage the explicit curricular practices which

play a part in constituting a nation’s collective memory.

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Nation and Nationalism in France

Historical scholarship on nationalism has continued to evolve since the important early

writings of Hobsbawm (1962, 1983, 1993), Ernest Gellner (1983), and Benedict Anderson

(1983/1992). All three authors tended to focus slightly less on France and more on slightly later

waves of nationalism in central Europe, the Balkans and South America. Within the field of

scholarship on the French Revolution, their work on nationalism was continued and refined most

effectively by David Bell (2003). All four authors tended to view nationalism as a project of

civic integration—nationalism understood as an explicit program for nation-building. That is,

nationalism is understood through a vertical model whereby governing elites sought to bind their

subjects into a united body who shared similar modes of speaking (the elimination of local

dialects, patois), consumption (the spread of internal markets of trade), where religion was

gradually relegated to the realm of private experience (the “disenchantment” of the world), and

where secular bureaucracies worked to form a strong and centralized state apparati. Nationalism

as thus defined is primarily a product of the later nineteenth-century, though the groundwork for

such phenomena were clearly developing centuries prior (see Marx, 2003).

In this paper, I will follow the work of David Bell (2003) in defining and distinguishing

between the terms “nation” and “nationalism.” For Bell, the use of the term “nation” reflects a

larger eighteenth-century shift in how the peoples living within the Kingdom of France

experienced communal life. He writes about the terms, “société, nation, patrie, civilisation, and

public,” that each:

described an entity which did not owe its existence to any religious or political

authority or indeed to any principle external to itself. If anything, each was

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conceived as something that existed prior to both politics and organized religion

and that delineated elementary forms of human relations. (p. 26)

Bell therefore locates the rise of the nation amongst a constellation of other concepts, all of

which sought to displace the notions of a divinely-ordered and historically-sanctioned monarchy.

Bell goes on to argue that the rise of personal identification with the nation was a society-based

process, largely anchored among dissident elites, and triggered by the rise of print capitalism as

well as the decline of religious outlooks. Indeed, much of his work describes the process

whereby eighteenth-century literate elites would fight over the right to “represent” the nation.

It was not until the French Revolution passed to the Third Estate the task of governing

that another crucial shift took place. National sentiment, developed through social interactions

among the literate elite, led to the paradoxical realization that the nation—defined in the French

context as the united body of the people, self-governing, ground of all authority—did not indeed

yet fully exist. Nationalism, as state-based project to be realized, would hence gain ground. As

Bell (2003) states:

national sentiment and nationalism are by no means the same thing, even if

modern theorists frequently conflate them. More than a sentiment, nationalism is

a political program which has its goal not merely to praise, or defend, or

strengthen a nation, but actively to construct one, casting its human raw material

into fundamentally new form. (p. 3)

Primary among the tools employed by the state to build this nation would be the common,

compulsory, secular school.

University education in later nineteenth-century France, rather than focusing narrowly on

the training of professionals, aimed instead at developing a body of research knowledge that

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would create a more effective elementary and secondary teaching corps (what in France is

known as la pédagogie nationale). Pedagogical courses, followed by chairs in pedagogy, make

their first appearance in France at this time. As George Weisz (1983) has noted, “if teachers at all

levels were to train citizens for democracy and solidarity, it was necessary to provide them with

adequate training for their role” (p. 280). This focus on the creation of a unified teaching corps

therefore marked the principal nation-building strategy of nineteenth-century France. Indeed, as

Eugen Weber (1976) has noted, the “revolutionaries of 1789 had replaced old terms like

schoolmaster, regent, and rector, with instituteur, because the teacher was intended to institute

the nation” (p. 332). The Ferry Laws of 1881-82, which provided for free, obligatory and secular

elementary education for the French population, therefore brought to each village in France

teachers whom scholars have likened to secular missionaries.

The curricular subject whose nation-building “mission” was mostly clearly formulated

was that of history—taught, of course, in the French language. The France of 1880 was a country

“in which French was a foreign language for half the citizens” (Weber, 1976, p. 70). If

nationalism is the project whereby the state engages the allegiance of the people, the absolute

precondition of such allegiance is the extension of the people’s imagined communities outwards

so as to embrace the nation as its natural and essential form. The combined study of the national

past in the national language were twin vehicles for the achievement of just such an extension.

Just as the mother tongue was not the tongue of their mothers, so the fatherland

was somewhere more (indeed, something else) than where their fathers rather

obviously lived. A vast program of indoctrination was plainly called for to

persuade people that the fatherland extended beyond its evident limits to

something vast and intangible called France. (Weber, 1976, p. 334)

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In this campaign, systematic use of common national textbooks and maps would be employed in

classrooms. What Benedict Anderson (1983/1992) calls the “map-as-logo” would work to create

in the minds of children a sign instantly recognizable, the idea of France as a hexagon whose

borders were fixed and natural.

It is in school textbooks, then, where one can therefore best read the gospel of the French

Republic. And as the French historian of memory, Pierre Nora (1997), has noted in this regard,

those widely-used textbooks written by nineteenth-century French historian, Ernest Lavisse, are

in this sense exemplary. For as Nora (1997) notes, the primary focus of these textbooks was on

the nation’s ability to synthesize all differences, to create a national body out of the

particularities left by history, environment, and climate. If the nation were a jigsaw puzzle,

Lavisse’s school histories were written so as to explicate and justify the complete assembly of

the whole through time, province by province, conquest by conquest. History becomes the story

of nation-building, told as a romantic adventure. In this, the golden age of France’s Third

Republic, with its metanarrative of national progress, is at is ascendancy.

The Nation Defined by its Commemorative Practices

What, then, is the essential element of this nation which elites sought to build through the

school? For contemporary French scholarship, the answer has to do with a specific set of social

practices—practices that mobilize certain common, historical memories and images (Birnbaum,

2001; Nora, 1996; Rousso, 1991). In defining the nation like this, French scholarship is drawing

upon a long tradition, one first established by the nineteenth-century scholar, Ernest Renan. For

as Renan would famously note in a speech delivered in 1882, “the essence of a nation is that all

individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things”

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(1882/1996, p. 45). That is, as Henry Rousso (1991) will note in more recent times, national

unity is essentially nothing else than “structured forgetfulness” (p. 4).

According to Pierre Nora (1996), the Third French Republic constructed its schools as a

milieu de mémoire, a total environment constructed around the texts and practices that would

continually invoke the nationalistic legacy of the French Revolution, as a patrimony meant to

unite a fractured and divided society. French schools could thereby ensure that national history

was the dominant target of commemorative practices—seeking to eliminate thereby religious,

immigrant, and social class frames for remembering the past.

However, Nora (1996) continues his argument by claiming that contemporary French

institutions no longer function as milieux de mémoire. They have adapted, becoming instead lieu

de mémoire. As Nora (1996) notes:

Societies based on memory are no more: the institutions that once transmitted

values from generation to generation—churches, schools, families, governments

—have ceased to function as they once did. And ideologies based on memory

have ceased to function as well, ideologies that once smoothed the transition from

past to future or indicated what the future should retain from the past, whether in

the name of reaction, progress, or even revolution. (p. 2)

Traditional institutions therefore no longer serve their commemorative function in quite the same

way as they did in the past. Schools and their curriculums no longer saturate their students

exclusively with national forms of consciousness, as recent debates about the role of religion in

French schools makes clear (Judge, 2004).

Nora (1996) claims that commemoration of the national past has largely given way to

anticipation of a globalized future; similarly, the apprehension of social continuity has given way

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to the lived experience of constant social change. Nora (1996) therefore claims that collective

national memory has migrated to local “pockets” of continuity, becoming embodied within sites,

what he (1996) calls lieux de mémoire. “Lieux de mémoire exist because there are no longer any

milieux de mémoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience” (Nora,

1996, p. 1). Massive economic, social, and technological change—these have ensured that the

nation’s memory no longer functions as it once did.1

The spontaneous anticipation of the nation’s “destiny,” based upon living memory of its

“glorious past,” is therefore gone. Among those populations left most vulnerable by the decline

of a protectionist nation-state (industrial workers, managers in globalizing corporations, cultural

workers), reaction, fundamentalism, and nostalgia have therefore become very real dangers.

With the nation’s memory threatened by economic globalization and technological revolution,

national forms of identification have become more problematic. Clearly, then, these are

important social phenomenon which public schooling must work to understand and confront. In

the case of France, such a confrontation can be played out as a specious rehashing of nineteenth-

century nation-building techniques, such as the insistence upon secularity in the schools

(Birnbaum, 2001; Judge, 2004; Langlois, 1996). Or it can be played out in ways that are more

positive, as my paper will seek to demonstrate. The remainder of this study, then, seeks to

examine the issue of national reproduction as it is played out in one particular instance in France,

before finally turning back to the field of educational scholarship, so as to reflect on the gain the

French context might provide.

Uncovering the Experience of Nationality

1 Nora believes that all forms of social commemoration now revolve around these distinct sites—not just national forms of commemoration. I stress the nation’s memory here so as to provide continuity for the reader.

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The data gathered for this study sought to describe and analyze student experiences

which would shed some light on the processes whereby a French national identity is

(re)produced. In this regard, it is important to note that since the 1970s, comparativists in the

field of education have questioned the project of describing and comparing national systems of

education. Intercultural education, both within and across national units, has increased the

attention of comparativists towards “the micro-level of education, namely of individual schools,

communities and social mini-groups” (Mitter, 1999, p. 406). Patricia Broadfoot (2000) has

argued, though, that the focus of comparative scholarship has nonetheless remained on the

(admittedly important) problems of provision, equity, and access.

Broadfoot (2000) instead advocates for a neo-comparative approach, one that would free

scholars “from the conceptual blinkers which the existing apparatus of educational assumptions

represents.” She argues that “the heart of such a project for comparativists” must be “the

recognition of the central role of culture in facilitating and shaping the process of learning and

thus, of the need to study the part played by the perception and feelings of the individual learner”

(Broadfoot, 2000, pp. 369-370). This study builds on Broadfoot’s neo-comparative perspective

by attending to the experiences of French students in all of their locality, while nonetheless

keeping national, historical, and institutional factors in play.

The experiences under examination in this paper were collected as part of a transnational

comparative study, one part of which was conducted at a French high school (lycée) located in a

mid-sized industrial city (population of approximately 66,000) in the historic province of

Brittany. As with all qualitative research, its findings must be continually read in relationship to

the position of the researcher. And as will become clear below, my own position as a white, male

citizen of the United States opened up particular perspectives for my particular research project.

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My primary entry to the school, the Lycée Jules Verne, was secured by a history teacher, Marc.2

Using the American racial categorization system, Marc is white.3 At the time of the study, he had

ten years of teaching experience, all of them in the city where Lycée Jules Verne is located.

Lycée Jules Verne, like other French lycées, was composed of students in the last three

years of their secondary studies: seconde (what in the United States, would be called

sophomores), première (juniors), and terminale (seniors). While I observed students in all three

grades and in various tracks, the majority of my interviews came from Marc’s “favorite” class,

his senior literary students. Generally speaking, there are more females in the literary tracks, and

therefore, a preponderance of my interviews were with females.

The students at Lycée Jules Verne were mainly of working-class and middle-class origin.

Most of the students I spoke with planned to either attend the regional University in Nantes for

various sorts of post-baccalaureate studies or to take some years off from their formal studies,

with several indicating that they wished to work abroad to improve their language skills. Only

one student I spoke with planned to continue his studies in Paris and no students I talked with

planned to attend either a Parisian university or one of the highly prestigious grandes écoles.

Because repeating a year in French high schools is not uncommon, many of the students were

older than a typical United States high-school student (19 and 20 years-olds not being

uncommon). A majority of the students at the Lycée Jules Verne I would classify as white.

In this paper, I sought to access and uncover important life experiences through the

narration of personal stories (Elbaz, 1991). The primary research method for accessing formative

2 Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper for both places and participants.3 The reader will note that I have chosen to racialize my French participants. While the French Republic does not recognize racial categories as relevant to one’s public identity, and while it is doubtful that most of my “white” French participants would have described themselves in this manner, I have nevertheless chosen this representational strategy for two reasons. First of all, I write this study primarily for an international educational audience that is often interested in such categories and finds them relevant to any analysis. More importantly, such categories will play a part of the analysis presented in the study.

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national experiences was the unstructured, phenomenological interview (Van Manen, 2001). The

primary prompt used to invoke these stories was the following: Tell me about a time in your

schooling career that really marked your education. I chose this interview prompt because I

wanted to avoid making assumptions about the specific nature of the link between nationalism

and schooling (for example, by predetermining that I would ask for stories about the explicit

history curriculum, or about specific classroom learning experiences). I instead assumed that

since discourses about the purposes of schooling nearly always contain a national-civic

component, the stories students tell me should say something about how, and how well, those

national-civic purposes are achieved.

I made initial contact with my participants by spending time observing in Marc’s history

classes. I invited students in these classes to become formal participants in the study by agreeing

to be interviewed. Each interview took place and was audio recorded during my time in the field.

I later transcribed and translated these interviews for extended analysis. During my time in the

field, I interviewed a total thirteen white students and one black student; eleven of the students

were female and three were male. Five of these interviews were conducted in the English

language, while the other nine were conducted in French.4 Interviews were between thirty

minutes and an hour in length. Eleven of these interviews will be shared in this paper for

purposes of looking at two particular narrative strategies employed by participants in the act of

story-telling.

In undertaking phenomenological interviews, it is important to invite participants to dwell

in the pre-reflective lifeworld (Van Manen, 2001). That is, one encourages participants to put

into a narrative format their own experiences, with as much concrete detail and context as

4 These five students volunteered to be interviewed in English. I had made contact with them by observing their English language courses, and their teacher released them from their courses to conduct these interviews with me. The language in which the interview was conducted is always noted in the text for the reader.

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possible. I encouraged a narrative format to the experiential accounts by asking such questions as

“what happened next?” When I sensed that the participants were speaking in generalities, I asked

them to connect what they were saying to a particular time and place. When participants said

something particularly evocative, I asked for clarification and elaboration of the phrase. In

addition, within the interview context, researchers work to bridle or bracket their pre-

understandings of the topic at hand (Dahlberg, 2003). The protocol for phenomenological

interviews is generally kept simple and remains orientated towards openness: after introducing

the initial topic, one stays alert for moments that are conducive to elaboration and reflection, and

generally does as little talking as possible.

In doing my data analysis I was first led to a particular set of themes: view of schools,

relationship to teachers, and understanding and use of national history curriculum. Rather than

coding for frequency of occurrence, I worked hermeneutically by putting my pre-understandings

into dialogue with the sections of each participant story that seemed to me particularly evocative

(Gadamer, 2003). I then spent time analyzing differences among these initial themes, which in

turn led me to posit the existence of relatively distinct narrative practices—practices which in

turn became the basic structures through which I could purse my interpretive work (see Wertsch,

2002). Employing a form of imaginative variation (Van Manen, 2001), I finally delved deeper

into the narrative structures I was positing and attempted to confirm not only that they seemed

historically and theoretically sound, but also that my findings were educationally significant.

That is, I attempted to keep the political and the theoretical dimensions of research work in

tension (Hall, 1992).

As anyone who has ever undertaken such work will understand, working across national

borders presents qualitative researchers with unique challenges. For in doing comparative work,

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it is clear that there is a degree of border-crossing that well exceeds the literal act of locating

one’s self in a “foreign” context. Inevitably, certain meanings will remain unexplored in this

border-crossing process. Not only must I “write France” for an international, English-speaking

audience, but the participants of this study needed to (indeed, felt compelled to) “write France”

for a researcher from the United State. This is to foreground, then, the reflexivity required for

reading these interview transcripts. It is highly unlikely that a native-born French researcher

would have gathered the exact interview data that I did, nor even is it likely that another

American researcher differently positioned than myself would have had an experience similar to

my own. Indeed, working across national borders reminds us that data is never simply “gathered”

but is instead always generated and produced within a particular set of localized contexts.

Reading such contexts (in addition to the primary interview texts), and reflecting upon the way in

which they open up particular avenues of insight, therefore becomes a key stage in data analysis.

I will return to this important point in the conclusion of this paper.

Two Narrative Practices of French National Identity

In this section, I would now like to look at two national, narrative practices performed by

participants in the course of our interviews. These practices draw upon well-established

discourses, ones that reference distinct versions of the nation’s collective memory. And while

each narrative practice is distinct to the degree that it can be separated analytically, it nonetheless

is also clearly interrelated to other narratives and discourses, through the ability to both

acknowledge, confront—and at times, actively ignore—other, competing national memories and

discourses.

Narrative Strategy One: The Républicains, A Political Narrative about France’s Fight for

Objective, Social Progress

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The United States is, of course, a republic. But the rhetoric of republicanism is something

long since past from our collective national memory, evoking instead the ages of Thomas

Jefferson and Horace Mann in the post-independence era. Such is not the case in France. As

French historian Maurice Agulhon (1993) has noted:

In France, the “Republic” then designated the constitutional system, as in

Switzerland or America. But unlike the term “Republic” in the United States, in

France “Republic” evoked far more than a juridical system; it embraced a

complex set of values, and for a long time was the object of opposing

interpretations and rival passions. France’s originality in 1880 lay in adding to all

those objective political anxieties experienced by other countries an endless

debate on its own history and rules of play. (p. 1)

To invoke the Republic, in the French context, is therefore to take sides in a historical debate,

one that was begun in 1789 during the French Revolution with the struggle against church and

monarchy. As Agulhon notes, this debate had reached a new and crucial phase by 1880, the time

during which the Third French Republic became solidified.

The solidification of the Third French Republic came at exactly that time, it is important

to note, when Jules Ferry was introducing legislation for free, secular, and compulsory

elementary education. Indeed, “school” and “Republic”—the two words go together so well in

France that it is difficult to separate one from the other—l’école républicaine. And for this first

group of participant experiences that I wish to analyze, the school is exactly that: republican. For

these participants, the republican school represents not only a formal legal status (as opposed to

private religious schools, of which there are many in France), but as Agulhon notes, “a complex

set of values.”

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Thierry, among all my participants, best expressed this view. Indeed, the reader may

notice just how much Thierry works to not only share an experience in the course of our

interview, but to also explain republican schooling to me, the “outside” researcher. When I at one

point in our interview asked him about the source of his political commitments (which he had

been in the process of explaining), he told me:

To answer the question more clearly, this idea of revolution is everywhere,

because of our liberté, égalité, fraternité, it’s the Revolution, the idea of

revolution, and so the school, it’s a school of revolution when you see it. Our

public schools—liberté, égalité, fraternité—it’s always the same, it’s always this

idea of keeping our citizenship in mind and not accept all the things from our

leaders. (interview transcript, English-language interview)

For Thierry, and other participants like him, the school holds a special place in French life. It is

not experienced, as Marxist theorists have posited, as an arm of the state, as an ideological

apparatus that seeks to interpellate an oppressive subjectivity (Althusser, 1969/2001), but rather

the school is experienced for Thierry as a mechanism for revolutionary social justice. As he

noted, “I think we have the good fortune that school isn’t directed to the government [and its

policies], it’s, I think school is the last place where Republican ideology can still live. Here all

the people can live free, and can have the freedom to express themselves” (interview transcript,

English-language interview).

The bulwark of this republican school is of course the republican teacher. Yet the lived

reality of this teacher is highly ambiguous, demonstrated by the case of Marc, who was a strong

critic of the rigidity of the French classroom tradition (where lecture and recitation dominate),

yet equally a solid defender of the republican tradition, especially its commitment to secularity

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(laïcisme) and the common good. Teachers in France are civil servants (fonctionnaires). In some

ways, this explains for me their commitment to a pedagogy of telling and examining—it is as if

their job is simply to dispense information, validate its mastery, and pass the student along.

Power is therefore completely visible in French classrooms, and there can be little doubt that it is

the teacher who exercises it. Yet republican teachers’ status as civil servants must always be put

alongside their traditional pedagogical calling to transmit both connaissances historiques and

valeurs politiques communes (Lantheaume, 2003). This fact which was lost upon none of the

students to whom I talked. As Thierry again remarked,

the teachers are paid by the government, it’s very interesting because maybe you

suppose that the school [curriculum] is with the government. And maybe the

teachers could be with the government . . . but in fact, I’m sure it’s not. The

teachers here are very into the left, they are left, they are very in this way.

(interview transcript, English-language interview)

That is, the teachers were very much models for the students in their own republican activism.

This brings me then to the main narrative that was constructed by this first set of

republican students. For them, the key dates in the formation of their own civic identity are quite

clear: 1789 and 2006. This is a simple narrative, but all the more effective for that, in that

remembering the national past in this way speaks to an essential continuity of values across the

“nation’s life.” For as Nora (1996) notes, “memory is always a phenomenon of the present, a

bond tying us to the eternal present . . . it thrives on vague telescoping references, on hazy

impressions or specific symbolic details” (p. 3). Or, put another way, the narratives in which

memory lives conjoin a lived experience to a historical one. As such, the participants in this

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study always draw upon a lived present (one which is, of course, never static) in order to perform

a remembrance of something in the past.

Among the fourteen students I interviewed, eight of them mentioned the massive student

demonstrations that took place in April of 2006 against the CPE (contrat première embauche), a

government-inspired reform that would have liberalized the labor laws for young French

workers, allowing them to be laid off within their first two years of work without need of cause.5

Six of these students saw these events as positively influencing their own school careers, and by

extension, I would add, their own sense of civic identity. In what follows, I will draw upon these

six interview transcripts to illuminate this relationship.

Lycée Jules Verne provided these study participants with the forum from within which

they could exercise their republican values in their fight to have the CPE overturned. As another

participant, Louis, explained:

The day where I really felt French was when everyone around us was battling for

the same thing, for the cause of the revolution of social rights, for example. It was

an aberration: when somebody can be let go during the first two years without any

motive, without justification. Just the fact of participating in a demonstration, and

for getting together to do something reasonable, for such a person, for such a

world. We blockaded the school . . . So the CPE, it was an opportunity to bring

together everybody, all the generations, there were demonstrations, with teachers,

students, and workers who supported us too. (interview transcript, French-

language interview)

5 The CPE was imbedded in a larger law entitled, “The Law for the Equality of Opportunity.” According to Roger, in the March 8, 2006 edition of Le Monde, the law would do the following: “[The law] would be applied, in businesses of more than 20 workers, to youth of less than 26 years of age. Those parts of the previous Labor Code that deal with the breaking of the contract will not apply during the first two years of work. A termination notice of fifteen days will be required between the second and the sixth months, and a warning of one month thereafter.” The CPE was withdrawn by the government.

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As with Thierry, Louis helps the “foreign” researcher by noting how important common struggle

is for his sense of French national identity. As he notes, anti-CPE radicalism brought students

together with other students, labor union members, and their teachers. The primary action at

Lycée Jules Verne was the blockade of the school—that is, a complete occupation of the school,

where classes were cancelled through a complete work stoppage—but there were other actions

taken by the students as well.

Louis was very supportive of the school blockade, and therefore took a large role in it. I

asked him to describe how a typical day would unfold during the demonstrations. He told me

that:

Well, during the blockade I had to verify that none of the doors were open to foot

traffic. I would get up at five o'clock. Then there was a tour of the buildings, I

would return home, have some breakfast, at seven o'clock the first person arrived,

and I would then stay in the buildings to make sure nothing happened. There was

often a meeting, for example there was a meeting with the teachers sometimes at

one o'clock to discuss things. There were messages to pass along, by cell phones.

There was a real rhythm. (interview transcript, French-language interview)

Louis therefore committed himself to getting up quite early, and working throughout the day.

Even nearly a year after the demonstrations, he remembers the experience as marked by a

distinct and pleasant rhythm. Clearly, being away from class did not at all make him feel bored

or aimless. Indeed, it seems to me quite plausible to interpret Louis’ words as implying that, for

him, the protests were an educative experience, an opportunity to live out the republican values

that the school and his teachers represent.

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Many students mentioned the meetings with the teachers, which were called by all the

participants a “general assembly.” Thierry described these general assemblies in this manner:

Thierry: [The teachers] were against the CPE, there were a lot of teachers who

were with us in the cafeteria, and in it we made a general assembly, we say what

we are going to do, and the teachers were with us, they were with us.

Researcher: All of the teachers?

Thierry: No, not all, but they were with us, they were with our struggle. They

were with us, were with our struggle, and they support us.

Researcher: Who organized the students to go to the cafeteria?

Thierry: It was students, at the base, it was only students. Afterwards there were

the [labor] unions, but they came after. Before the unions, we were only students.

There was less organization. We need the unions to help us print tracts . . .

(interview transcript, English-language interview)

Therefore, it was the students who, with the closer cooperation of the teachers, took the initiative

to form a representative body. Like the Third Estate, which, in 1789, took upon itself the title of

National Assembly, and then proceeded to obtain support from the clergy and the nobility—so

too did the students of Lycée Jules Verne constitute themselves as a representative assembly,

imagining thereby that they represented the common good of the nation (as opposed to just their

generation or age cohort). In inviting the support of their teachers—those who traditionally

exercised power in the everyday experience of these students—I would like to point out just how

exactly these students reproduced the traditional narrative of French republicanism in making

sense of their own life experience.

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Anti-CPE radicalism, which succeeded when the government withdrew the reform bill on

April 10, 2006, therefore allowed these students an apprenticeship in republicanism. This

apprenticeship primarily drew upon the example of teachers. Teachers not only helped students

form the generally assembly, but they more generally took the opportunity to openly encourage

and praise the students, while also helping to ease the consequences of missing so much class

time. Therefore Liliane noted:

There was a great solidarity last year between teachers and students, because the

teachers, certain teachers created an Internet site, so that we could get caught up

on our courses. Because when the school was occupied, there were no longer any

courses. Therefore certain teachers made this site to help us get caught up in our

courses, so that we weren’t penalized, because it lasted nearly a month. (interview

transcript, French-language interview)

Indeed, if anything, certain teachers I talked to implied that the current generation of students did

not go far enough. During one class that I observed, Madeleine, a Lycée Jules Verne history

teacher, contrasted the current generation of students with those of May 1968. During the course

of a lecture on the events of that year, she remarked on how the students at the University of

Nanterre had provoked the government by pushing the Minister of Sport into a swimming pool

during a visit to campus. As I recorded in my field notes, she almost wistfully said that the

current generation could never go that far, given the relative precariousness of their employment

prospects.

In exploring with this group of participants the larger meaning of their experiences, many

of them made direct reference to the early phases of the French Revolution. For them, it was this

event which quite simply defined their civic identity, as a model to which French republicans

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could return again and again. So Louis said, “it's part of the history of France, it goes back to the

French Revolution, the fight for social rights. The French model goes back to 1789. It’s really all

I can say about it” (interview transcript, French-language interview). Similarly, Thierry claimed

that:

when I see our history, I understand most of the facts about our way to think. We

had some of the worst leaders of the country, I mean, all of history, Louis XIV of

course, all of the kings were quite bad. A few people were quite happy, the most

part of people were living in very bad conditions. Like a country of Africa, like

Somalia today. And it was a very bad country, a very rough life for the French.

And one day, they decided that it was enough . . .There is this idea of revolution,

still in our blood and in our feelings. We are still, this idea of revolution, you can

bow your head, that is the spirit of being French for me, you can bow your head

for a long time, a very long time, bow your head before a king, or a dictator, you

can do it for a very long time. And when the French rise up, they rise up. They

can [give] rebirth [to] themselves against the oppression. (interview transcript,

English-language interview)

Drawing upon a romanticizing historical discourse (with clear parallels to that of nineteenth-

century French historian, Jules Michelet), Thierry therefore sees “the people” on a journey

towards justice. It is a universalizing discourse, one that would equate the France of Louis XIV

with the Somalia of today. And finally, the discourse says that the people can be reborn through

the remembrance and re-enactment of revolution, again and again.

By invoking history, which the republican students generally saw as an objective

discipline, these republican students were similarly invoking their history teachers, whom they

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also saw as generally objective. This, interestingly, went against the grain of how the history

teachers saw themselves. The history teachers I met at Lycée Jules Verne were quite aware of the

problems involved in doing historical scholarship. Yet many of these republican students had a

difficult time accepting this. Witness this encounter, where I am finishing my interview with

Evelyne, with Emilie also present, when Lucien, another history teacher at the school, decides to

break into our conversation, making a point for the students, but also drawing upon his

knowledge of the US to make links with me, the American researcher:

Emilie: I think it’s necessary to try and be objective as you can in history. I think

that teachers, I like a history teacher who really tells things as they were. And

then later I can decide how to make use of it. You can’t just sex it up, sure they’ve

got a point of view, but if they just tell it however they would like, it’s dangerous.

Lucien (breaking into the conversation): The curriculum is already orientated in

one direction.

Students: Yes but . . .

Lucien: The curriculum is politically correct. In the United States there is

certainly more liberty, for example, certain people think that Roosevelt provoked

the Japanese, even that he was well informed of the attack, and that’s why he sent

a cargo plane . . .

Evelyne: Yes . . . This way of teaching that allows the teacher to be for or against

something, it’s a [bad] method, for example, I can say, “it’s like this really.” The

goal is to be objective . . .

Lucien: Even in a book, there is the choice of text, choice of photos, it’s not

neutral . . . In the United States, the view of the Indians has changed, for

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example, in the cinema, it’s clear. In some old films the Indians were bad, but in

films like Dances with Wolves, with Kevin Costner, that has totally changed. And

in recent censuses, there are a lot more people reclaiming their Indian roots, in the

census during the 1990s. (interview transcript, French-language interview)

It is perhaps easy to imagine why students might be uncomfortable with this discussion. If

teachers are the ones from whom students are to learn republican values, values which are

supposedly universal, a discussion about teacher bias is troubling. Teachers are politically

orientated, that is true, but they are orientated towards a universal, republican left—a position

that admits of no bias, only progress towards “the” common good. Viewing republicanism as just

one more value among others, and teachers as only one more interest group among others,

jeopardizes the way in which these students conceive of their own national identity.

Finally, then, it is this nagging doubt about the universality and justness of one’s own set

of values, choices, and actions—it is this doubt which most strongly marks the republican

students. This undercurrent of doubt was expressed by nearly all of these students, usually as a

critique of other students who had participated in the anti-CPE demonstrations. So Thierry said,

“sometimes you see the general assembly, it’s like a game for everybody, the adults are very

happy to be on strike, because it reminds them of May of ‘68. And the children are very happy

because they think we are going to make a May of ‘68 too” (interview transcript, English-

language interview). Emilie observed that, “I felt a little, like everybody, was carried along by

the crowd, everybody” (interview transcript, French-language interview). Finally, Paulette stated

that, “The demonstrations were too superficial . . . Because the people who were demonstrating

didn’t know why they were demonstrating . . . It was for dodging classes, or because they liked

the demonstration” (interview transcript, French-language interview). The notion that political

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work could be carried out lacking a full commitment to traditional republican ideals, and that the

meaning of both lived and historical experiences can and do conflict—such notions left these

republican students deeply ambivalent.

Narrative Strategy Two: The Social Pluralists, A New French Identity through Recognizing the

French Melting Pot

1789 leads to 2006—that is, the opening phase of the French Revolution provides the

“template” with which the republican students understood their own lived experiences and out of

which they constructed their civic identities. Absent from this brief chronology, of course, is the

Revolutionary Terror of 1793-1794. Hence, republican students are not simply borrowing a

schemata suggested by their history texts; rather, they omit certain aspects of the French

historical record which are inconvenient for the sake of building a “usable” past. Such omissions

can presumably operate on all levels (from the highly intentional to the completely unconscious),

but generally speaking, the act of omission works to preserve the continuity of republican France

and its “eternal” values. These values may be betrayed by certain historical actors at certain

historical moments (e.g. the use of terror during the Revolution, or more recently, collaboration

with Nazi Germany during World War Two and the use of torture during the War in Algeria),

but never are these values themselves implicated by any particular historical actor or event.

Memory externalizes all things unpleasant.

Likewise, also absent from the republican narrative is May of 1968. May of 1968 is an

extremely important date for many contemporary French citizens—many of whom have personal

memories of those times. As such, it is another interesting event that can be noted by its almost

complete absence. As to the “events of May” themselves, they can for the purpose of this paper

be reduced to the follow: from March of 1968, university students had been protesting over a

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range of issues, and beginning in May, were subject to unusually harsh police tactics. This

elevated and expanded the protests, to the point where (against the advice of their own unions)

industrial workers, civil servants, and many other workers in French society went out on strike.

French society was essentially paralyzed for several weeks, as shops closed, trains stopped

running, newspapers halted their presses, and television went off the air. President De Gaulle

briefly fled the country and considered resigning, before eventually returning and leading a

“return to normalcy.” Unlike 1789, where historiography, pedagogy, and mass media have had

ample time to impose a particular set of meanings around the event, 1968 continues to exist as a

set of strongly contested meanings.

It is therefore well nigh impossible to locate a stable, popular meaning for May of ’68—a

meaning upon which participants might draw in constructing their national narratives. In this

manner, the second narrative strategy I would like to analyze departs quite radically from the

first. Yet for this second group of participants, a group I shall call the social pluralists, I would

like to argue that May of 1968 nevertheless enters into their narratives in very important ways.

That is, the social pluralist national narrative draws upon discursive features which link it to May

of 1968. Chief among these discursive features are a displacement of traditional political

practices (a questioning of the “proper” domain of politics), the emergence of a relational

political subjectivity (a critical reappraisal of the antagonistic relations historically constructed in

republican France between workers and students, colonizers and colonized, etc.) and a desire for

recognition among different social groups (a questioning of the “secular” identity of the

traditional republican political subject). In assigning such a meaning to May of 1968, I am

drawing upon more recent critical work on May of 1968, much of it undertaken by American

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academics interested in the very questions I am pursuing here (see Bourg, 2007; Ross, 2002;

Starr, 1995).

Among the narratives that the social pluralists shared with me for this study, always

foregrounded then was a (implicit) critique of the traditional republican narrative. These

narratives were about a new form of politics, oftentimes one that took the form of an incipient

multiculturalism. It also took form in how these students viewed their teachers: as equals (whose

interests and views were neither objective nor universally shared), rather than as strict political

mentors. It is almost as if these social pluralist participants were following the May of ‘68

slogans they could find in their textbooks, demanding that teachers and students relate to each

other in more active and informal ways.6 For the social pluralists, I would ultimately like to

argue that May of 1968 represents the causes of social recognition, contact, and fluidity—as it is

precisely these values which marked their national narratives.

Five of the fourteen interview participants in this study mobilized a social pluralist

narrative in our interviews.7 Interestingly, they could be quite critical of the anti-CPE

demonstrations at times, as well as of their teachers. For example, Françoise told me that “I

thought it was just the blockade, it was nothing important really . . . the CPE, I knew it was not

for the history of France” (interview transcript, English-language interview). Audrey stated the

case much more strongly, especially regarding her teachers and their role as political mentors.

She stated that, “in all subjects, in everything they say, it is subjective. For example, revolution,

6 “We students are occupying our schools. WHAT DO WE WANT? Modern society denies us . . . the slightest contact with our teachers outside of the classroom; not the slightest possibility of exchange with each other . . . Students listen but do not participate in active life. Will we ever become real citizens?” (Bourel & Chevallier, 2004, pp. 260-261).7 I will additionally draw upon an informal conversation I had with another student in the school. It is also important to note that three of the study’s interview participants are not discussed in this paper due to reasons of space and thematic coherence. These three participants mobilize a strategy I refer to as “isolating,” in that their narratives put into play a discourse of social mobility and individual improvement. That is, the past they commemorate seems to be related in interesting ways to the end of France’s Thirty Glorious Years of economic growth after World War Two, and the rise of globalization and neo-liberal economic policies.

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the French Revolution is taught [as if] it’s the only thing . . . Whereas it is something very

horrible, dreadful, so bloody, the real history” (interview transcript, English-language interview).

A common practice among the social pluralists was to use another country to gain a

perspective on the meaning of the French national identity; in particular, three participants used

class trips abroad to reflect on the broader meaning of French national identity, French history,

and French society. Participants were quite clear about these trips’ purpose. On the one hand,

they aided in creating a certain esprit de corps among the students assigned to a particular class.

But they also aided in getting to know the teachers. In this, these students’ relationship to

teachers was much different than that of the republican students: they viewed their teacher not so

much as a political mentor, but as a potential equal. The ever-present power of the teachers in

their institutional incarnation was not so much desired and pursued as it was displaced. Witness

Sylvie, who told me about her class’ trip to Spain and the route to Santiago de Compostela:

In fact it allowed the class to come together, because we went 20 kilometers each

day, and all of this walking, it finally allowed for everyone a common experience.

We talked with our teachers too, outside of the class, therefore, a different type of

relation, we could get to know them. I talked a lot with them. (interview

transcript, French-language interview)

This trip to Spain, where the students walked the last 100 kilometers of the famous medieval

pilgrimage, therefore opened up for students a new side of their teacher, one they were not

permitted to see in class.

This same trip was also mentioned by Marie. In her case, the trip opened up a whole new

perspective on the inner life of the teacher. Witness this exchange, which builds upon her

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previously telling me that “we [the students] could visit all we wanted, we could leave at night,

to meet other people, to go in bars, in pubs.”

Researcher: So like going to the pub, or letting you go out at night, that wasn’t a

surprise for you?

Marie: Not really because teachers who lived with us are cool. In class, they are

serious, but we see in their personalities that they, they know that we are young,

and we need to go in bars, to make, to go to parties . . . I would like to go again,

and it, teachers were nice with us, when you returned, it was different. The

atmosphere was more [relaxed] . . . In class, we worked a bit, but it was a new

relationship with the teachers, because we know them better than before we left.

(interview transcript, English-language interview)

This exchange should be contrasted with the role of the teacher in the republican narratives. For

the social pluralists, teachers are potentially “cool” people outside of the classroom, people who

are, in Marie’s words, “young in general” and “remember that they were [also once] young.”

Nevertheless, despite of all these characteristics of the social pluralists, there was one

word that generally reoccurred in all of these narratives, a word that would immediately engage

my attention: melting pot. In the United States, the phrase is of course generally associated with

attempts to assimilate immigrants, and has a fairly negative connotation. Yet such negativity

does not attach itself in the French context. There, to speak of the melting pot (le melting pot),

was to speak of openness to new experiences, to new cultures, and to new possibilities for

France.

We should compare this valorization of the French melting pot with the republican

students, whose narrative is silent about November 2005, the month during which the riots

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against police brutality which began in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois took place.8

While republican participants would sometimes insert references about the dangers of extreme

nationalism (usually represented by extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front), the

republican students generally made no reference to the riots or to movements which would make

France a more multicultural society. Neither did any of them make mention of the French

melting pot. I found this silence telling. So while the republican students viewed their own

activism in 2006 as justified by the events of 1789, I would therefore argue that the social

pluralist narrative was most legible when it brought together two other dates: May of 1968 and

November of 2005.

For the social pluralists, the shame of the November 2005 riots was represented in the

possibility that former Interior Minister, Nicholas Sarkozy—who called the 2005 rioters in

Clichy-sous-Bois racaille (scum)—could be elected president of France. Yvette, during an

informal discussion, told me that if Sarkozy were to be elected president, she would emigrate to

London (a place she had visited on a class trip), where, according to her, “you can see Indian

people walking down the street, and broadcasting the news.” For her, London represented a true

melting pot of peoples. For her friend and classmate Françoise, the situation was similar:

That’s what was really great, with the people, because in my opinion, [London] is

a great city. We said this in class. Yvette, my friend, she really loves English and

London, because for her it’s a big melting pot of cultures, civilizations, many

people from all around the world. This side, this view of England is really

attractive for us, because even the English, England as we see it every day, is

really great. And not just [London], all the country, everyone in class loves the

8 In November 2005, two young French citizens of color, chased by the police, were electrocuted as they hid in a power substation in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois. This set off a month of rioting in banlieues across France.

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foreign countries. With the English, we could talk and share our cultures, our

ways of life, which are completely different from [their] peoples’. (interview

transcript, English-language interview)

London represented a way of life, and it provided a critical perspective on what the social

pluralists perceived as a great shortcoming in French society. Interestingly, when I asked some of

these students about Paris, they could only reply that they had never been there. A connection to

the traditional center of national power was absent; yet rather than “fall back” upon particular

ethnic, racial, religious or regional identities, these students instead made use of other lived

experiences so as to reimagine a national community that would be more open to cultural

differences.

With Michel, the use of the melting pot analogy was also in play, but in a slightly

different context. Michel, rather than talk about a trip abroad, told me about his experience as a

student-journalist for the regional newspaper, Presse-Océan. Michel explained his work for me

like this, “I spend a lot of time reporting on the cultural scene. On the weekend, I go see

something at the theater or go meet with the French political parties, current events, things like

that. You spend a day with a doctor, every day you meet somebody.” Included among the people

he had interviewed for the paper were former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and former

President Jacques Chirac. Yet more than these political leaders, he also stressed his joy at

meeting “just really simple people.” Witness this exchange:

Researcher: And you like this job a lot?

Michel: Enormously.

Researcher: How come, explain a bit.

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Michel: Because being a journalist is work that takes you everywhere. That is, it’s

hard. Still, you meet a lot of different people, people from lots of different

backgrounds: White, Black, Arab, Catholic, everything.

Researcher: This is important for you?

Michel: It’s important to speak with people who have different cultures. (italics

added for researcher emphasis, interview transcript, French-language interview)

Among all the students I interviewed—indeed, among all the people with whom I spoke in

France—Michel comes closest to using an explicitly racialized discourse, one that names

whiteness as well as blackness, and thereby comes closest to recognizing the privilege inherent

in being recognized as a “real” (i.e. “white”) French citizen. Such racializing practices strongly

counter the traditional republican discourse, which maintains a “secular” attitude to all identities

that complicate that of the national.

For this group of students, then, those that I have characterized as the social pluralists,

France is a society in continuing need of reform. The overt republican activism of their teachers

(and fellow classmates) was either critiqued or ignored, with teachers instead being viewed as

concretely embodied and socially positioned members of a traditional republican hierarchy who

would hopefully come to recognize students as social equals. Yet most characteristic of the

social pluralists was their use of another nation—one perceived as more open to difference and a

“melting pot” of peoples—to gain greater insights into the state of contemporary French society

itself. In this, their experimentation with discourses that critique the traditions of republicanism,

secularism, and a body of objective knowledge which is tied to social progress, these participants

serve to commemorate “a whole terrain of scattered resistances derived from ‘68” (Ross, 2002,

p. 9).

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Prospects for Intervening in Collective Social Memory

Coming from the United States, where there is at least one line of tradition which

supports student-centered pedagogy, French classrooms seemed to me particularly strict places:

power was continually and constantly on display, and exercised almost exclusively by the

teacher. In this, my reading does not significantly differ from that of French researchers. For

example, Nicole Tutiaux-Guillon (2007) has argued that:

Most history teachers in France are inclined to identify teaching with the

transmission of knowledge, even if they allow some room for interactive teaching

supported by documents. Pupils are expected to comply with the teacher’s

agenda. Teachers ask questions, they accept or reject answers, complete or correct

them, and incorporate them in their own discourse. Most of the time, they

dialogue briefly with just one student, and then inform the whole group what must

be memorized and written down. (p. 182)

For Tutiaux-Guillon, such practices represent a true dilemma. Training for citizenship, schooling

and theories of knowledge are intimately related in theory, yet in France (as elsewhere),

contradictory in practice. As such, the effects of such history teaching and citizenship education

must be understood as mixed.

Tutiaux-Guillon (2007) notes that French teachers tend to resolve this dilemma by

pointing to a certain natural maturation process. She writes that:

The ability to judge, debate, or solve problems is supposed to arise from

knowledge. Having learnt the “truth,” the citizen is presumed to know how to act

responsibly. Of course, teachers recognise that this will not immediately work

with their pupils, but they really believe in a sort of natural germination of

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responsible action out of the rich soil of knowledge . . . This conviction allows

them to reconcile their adhesion to the civic objectives of history teaching with

their everyday knowledge-centred practice, which is almost wholly dissociated

from such objectives. (pp. 182-183)

Tutiaux-Guillon goes on to argue that if the French “canon” is to be reformed, it will have to

address not only the state-mandated curriculum but also classroom pedagogical issues as well. In

this, I agree. But what has interested me in this representation of French classrooms is its

blindness to something that I, as an American researcher, am perhaps in a better position to

observe and demonstrate: the complimentary role of the implicit school curriculum in French

history education. That which is implicit can often remain hidden, so it therefore makes sense

that an “outsider” might better be able to read the significance of such parallel learning practices.

The data presented in this paper demonstrate that the power exercised in French schools

is not uniformly experienced by students. On the one hand, a group of participants in this study

narrated their “personal” experiences of schooling via the mechanism of a traditional, French

republican narrative and its attendant discursive features. That is, the meaning of these

participant experiences was tied to practices which served to commemorate the founding event

of republican France, the Revolution of 1789. The self which is (re)produced in and through such

practices is one that appears to me, in my position as an American researcher, as a positive social

good, in that it brought into the realm of the possible a notion of citizenship which stressed

national solidarity and civic activism. Yet it maintained a blindspot to social diversity, an aspect

I found less appealing.

On the other hand, there was also a group of participants in this study who narrated their

“personal” experiences of schooling via a newer set of discursive practices, ones I have tied to a

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set of processes which emerged most clearly during the events of May of 1968. Drawing upon

historiographical work that identifies more in the events of May than a family drama whereby

“youth” revolted against the strictness of their “fathers,” I have argued that the participants in

this study commemorate a different national past, one that is critical of the republican tradition,

and that represents a “flight from social determinations . . . with a disjunction . . . between

political subjectivity and the social group” (Ross, 2002, pp. 2-3). This disjunction is operated by

means of invoking the French melting pot, a discursive move which strikes at the very heart of a

French republican tradition which oftentimes equate pluralism with a rigid, identity politics. The

self which is (re)produced these practices seems equally benign, in that it could help to usher in

the more hybridized identities upon which a post-modern and globalizing world thrives.

A civic imagination—the stock of images which we come to recognize as embodiments

of “our” community to which we feel a sense of belonging—is, of course, socially constructed.

In my own country of origin, the United States, the desire for “social cohesion” has most

typically played itself out in an atmosphere of fear, nostalgia, and scapegoating. This study has

renewed my admiration for a set of educational practices wherein a variety of civic discourses

attached to the notion of social solidarity can play themselves out. Such solidarity teaches

students to take greater cognizance of what the “common good” might mean in our increasingly

complex world.

Clearly, then, not every attempt to extend the boundaries of the civic imagination is a

straight-forward attempt at colonization, assimilation and homogenization. The nation-state, as a

political entity whose cultural and political boundaries perfectly overlap, may be (perhaps must

be) an ideal whose time is over—yet it has been my purpose here to suggest that the nation itself

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need not be discarded in the process. A national ideal which can balance both pluralism and

social solidarity seems a worthy goal to pursue in all forms of civic life, schooling included.

French nation-building no doubt has historically exceeded that done in the United States,

where racial, religious, and regional identities have more strongly persisted. Yet national

identities must too be continually reproduced, they too must be practiced in the course of

everyday living (just as surely as gender, racial and social class identities), and it is through

institutionalized discourses and practices that this happens. In the case of France, students are

able to practice multiple routes, utilizing different commemorative practices, to connect to a

national “center.” In this paper, I have analyzed two of them: a route based upon a traditional

French republican narrative, and a route based upon a newer narrative of social recognition and

diversity. Multiple paths toward inclusion insure that the process is not one of “terrorist”

inclusion, an assimilation that will tolerate no difference or dissent—for each path mediates and

complicates the other.

When a school’s explicit and implicit curriculum align—the subject matter to be learned,

along with the attendant civic experiences provided in the course of learning that subject matter

—a nation’s heritage can remain vibrant, flexible and alive. In the United States, this finally

entails historians, history teachers, and educationalists asking: what parts—if any—of the

national past(s) do we wish rehearsed in collective social memory? For what social purposes?

Through what types of explicit and implicit curricular experiences?

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Endnotes

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