Professor John Merriman:
Okay, I want to do two
things today;
but, I know what I'm going to
do, I'm going to end up talking
about what I want to,
and that's schools and the role
of schools in identity.
But first of all I want to talk
a little bit about the question
of when, and it's a big
historical debate,
when people in France began
thinking of themselves as
French, and then I'm going to
specifically look at the role of
schools in that.
And I guess I'd better talk a
little bit about schools today
too, because identity is
something in an age of mass
tourism that's a little hard to
hold onto.
So, I think I'm going to talk
about that as well,
at the end.
I know I am because I love
talking about it.
And so I will be repeating just
a couple of things that I said
the first day,
but many of you were shopping
other things the first day.
So, sort of the
problématique,
or the question to be resolved,
is when did people in France,
the majority of the population
or all the population,
begin thinking of themselves as
French, as opposed to something
else?
And as I said the first time,
that in 1789 about half the
population of France spoke
French.
In 1871 about a quarter of the
population spoke French.
And so it's a leap of faith to
think that the language you
speak totally informs your
identity or who you think you
are.
I gave the case of Alsatians
who spoke German who,
many of whom considered
themselves French after Alsace
and much of Lorraine were
annexed to Germany in 1871.
Now, there was a book published
in--a long time ago,
ooh-la-la--by a friend
of mine who unfortunately
recently died,
sort of an homme de
lettres, a wonderful writer
called Eugen Weber,
that put forward a view that
some people find convincing and
which I don't find convincing at
all.
But it became sort of the canon
or the accepted,
assumed truth about national
identity and France--was that in
his view until about 1880,
until the Republic became
rooted, that you had in
provincial France and
particularly in rural France and
particularly in the south of
France,
you had almost a total
unawareness of what it was
like--of French identity.
Somebody in about 1864,
if I remember right,
went into a school in the
Lozère,
which is France's least
populated department (only about
77,000 people now live in the
Lozère) and asked them
what France was,
and the students in the school
had absolutely no idea.
And this particular book
marshaled all sorts of evidence
about sort of savage beliefs,
as he put it,
that people believed it was
just a superstitious,
isolated, rural France in which
civilization,
entre guillemets (in
quotes), could only come
through, along with national
identity,
through these sort of agencies
of change.
And this is what sociologists
used to call Modernization
Theory, almost at its worst;
and I say this with
considerable affection for my
late friend Eugen Weber,
and we had debated this before.
And the three big agencies of
change, some of which you've
already heard a little bit
about,
according to Weber,
that transformed peasants into
Frenchmen were railroads;
that is, again the trunk lines
reaching out from Paris,
all railroads leading
eventually to Paris;
secondly, military
conscription,
teaching people Breton or
people from Gascony or even
limousins,
people from the center of
France, good French,
or males anyway,
by forcing them to speak
French;
and third, schools;
that is, the increase in
literacy in France,
dramatic.
In the course of the nineteenth
century there was always a big
gap between male literacy and
female literacy,
and this gap is closed,
such as by 1900 the vast
majority of people in France can
read and write.
How do we know that, by the way?
Well one of the ways that
historians have tried to assess
those things in the past is
looking at military conscription
records or,
for example,
looking at the people who are
witnesses to life's great
ceremonies,
births, marriages,
deaths, whether they can sign
their name or whether they just
simply write an X,
that they can't sign.
And of course there are other
ways of knowing this too,
studying school records and
this sort of thing.
So, this is the basic kind of
interpretation that became for
many people quite compelling,
as I said the other day.
So, by 1914 you have these
Bretons, and Breton is a
language that has nothing to do
with French at all,
being able to go off to die in
1914 or subsequent years singing
the Marseillaise.
Now, the role of language in
the military is an interesting
subject.
If you take the
Austro-Hungarian Empire,
which had at least,
depending on how you count it,
twelve major national groups or
nationalities,
to get anywhere in the Army,
and the Army was this kind of
social promotion,
to become an officer you had to
know German;
in order to become a bureaucrat
or to become a teacher,
in most parts of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire,
you needed to know German.
And so the argument has been
about France,
as well.
The traditional view is that
these--the schoolteachers
gradually, while they're sort of
forcing the Virgin Mary off the
walls of public schools,
replacing her with Marianne,
the female image of the
Republic, are also bringing
French to all of the little kids
and therefore civilizing France
and turning French peasants into
French men and women;
or so that is a conventional
view.
Well, I don't agree with that
view, and what I want to do is
nuance it and then,
drawing on some of the research
of my friend
Jean-François Chanet,
talk a little bit about the
role of schools in the last half
of the nineteen century,
and then talk a little bit
about the role of schools now,
because as I said I find it
interesting.
Now, the whole question of
timing is essential in trying to
understand when we can at least,
and this may be sort of a leap
of faith, assume that French
national identity had permeated
all of the
départements in
France;
and Corsica is a case apart,
that's even more complicated.
So, the question is timing.
But again, simply to repeat
what I said the very first day,
if you look around the map of
France,
what did people speak in 1871,
what did they speak in 1789?
They don't always speak those
same things now.
In most cases they don't.
So, that suggests that timing
is crucial in all this.
But just again,
I did this the other day but,
what the hell,
let's do it again,
up here, in Flanders,
many spoke Flemish;
if you're moving into Lorraine,
amputated Lorraine and Alsace,
most people,
the vast majority,
and we'll be more specific
about this when we talk about
the origins of World War I,
spoke a German dialect that's
very similar to that spoken in
Fribourg.
Savoie was annexed in 1860,
they spoke a Savoyard language
or dialect that's very much like
Piedmontese, in the case of
Italy.
Language is fascinating.
At the time of the unification
of Italy in the 1860s and '70s,
remembering that Metternich
once said that Italy was a
geographic expression,
the percentage of the Italian
population that spoke now what
we consider to be Italian was
about five percent;
that is, the people spoke
Tuscan or what they speak around
Florence.
So, if you move down here,
and they spoke
Provençal,
which is a real written
language and had a revival with
various poets in a place called
Les Baux here,
which has turned into kind of
the equivalent of EuroDisney,
sort of a tourist trap,
like so many places in the
south;
moving to Languedoc,
they spoke a language of Oc,
they spoke Languedocien and
with all its patois variants,
spoken language variants.
In Auvergne they spoke an
Auvergnat patois.
Down here they spoke Catalan.
Here they spoke a patois,
influenced by Spanish.
Here they spoke Basque which
doesn't have anything to do with
anything, outside of a little
bit of Hungarian and Finnish.
Up here they spoke Gascon,
and I gave cases before of
people speaking patois,
even in Normandy and even,
for that matter,
in the Valley of the Loire.
And here they spoke Breton.
There's a wonderful book,
if you want,
now here's a good paper topic,
take a book called The Horse
of Pride,
written by a man called Helias.
He wrote it in Breton.
It was translated into French
and then into English,
and it's about growing up in
the 1920s and '30s in
Finistère,
which is the most-- the
furthest, most Breton of all the
départements,
and it's about what happens
when the outsiders,
that is the French,
begin to come.
And they start calling the
French Kodakers because they
come with Kodak cameras,
and so they become the
Kodakers.
And so the church says you got
to--we have to stop all these
crazy superstitions--in Brittany
people rubbing statues to cure
themselves from various
ailments.
The most ludicrous was probably
a saint, an imaginary saint
called Saint Sans Pissou.
So, if you rubbed or said
prayers to Sans Pissou--you
probably already got it--you
cured yourself of urinary tract
infections, sans pissou.
So, they send in these priests
who are supposed to preach in
French, in Brittany.
This is the 1920s.
So, again the question of
timing is crucial.
And at one point he tells this
hilarious story where the
priest, and I guess I can
remember this,
when I was little tiny boy,
the priest would turn around
and say, at some point in the
Mass,
"Kyrie eleison."
I guess that means,
"Christ has mercy.
And he would turn around and
all these Bretons,
particularly all the Breton
kids,
he'd turn around and say
"Kyrie eleison," and he
was greeted with gales of
laughter because Kyrie
eleison means,
in Breton, purely by
coincidence, "there are many
wagons."
And then they would all laugh
at him.
And so there was a failure to
understand each other,
and the idea that somehow these
Bretons were all kind of
plooks,
were bumpkins,
were uneducated people who
could never become part of the
true France because they didn't
know French very well.
And of course what the Breton
do is they move to Paris,
in large numbers,
and the first thing you see in
the Gare Montparnasse is the
Assistance,
still today,
it's the Social--the Office of
Social Assistance for Breton,
and they all live around the
Gare Montparnasse,
which is why so many
cafés around the Gare
Montparnasse in Paris are named
after Breton towns--La Ville de
Saint-Brieuc,
La Ville de Nantes,
Dinan, and all this kind of
stuff.
Okay, so what about timing in
all this?
So, was Weber completely wrong?
No, it depends on what you're
talking about.
If you wanted to talk about
when people in the Loire begin
thinking themselves as French,
the answer is really in the
seventeenth century or in the
eighteenth century.
And certainly the French
Revolution, which precipitates
this enormous civil war in the
west,
was basically a war between
Jacobins, that is,
Paris centralizing French,
and people speaking patois who
resisted,
in the name of religion and in
the name of their nobles,
who resisted the influence of
the French State.
And if you're going to
take--Alsace and Lorraine were
conquered by--Louis XIV would
have conquered Wyoming,
if he could have--and they
become French in the seventeenth
century.
So, there was a shared identity
there.
You can have more than one
identity.
You have more than one identity
in your lives yourselves,
so it's kind of silly to look
for this one national identity
that emerges.
If you wanted to--one of the
historical facts that's bad news
for this kind of general,
oversimplified interpretation
is a series of events,
that doesn't concern you in
this course,
and that is the Revolution of
1848.
There's a big revolution in
1848, and what begins as an
urban revolution in Paris,
and in Rouen,
and in Limoges,
and Lyon and all sorts of
places, becomes basically a
rural movement of people on the
Left,
in much of the center,
but much, even more of the
south of France;
and it ends in 1851,
when Louis Napoleon,
the prince--the guy who would
become Prince President,
who would become Napoleon III,
when he has a coup
d'état,
the 2^(nd) of December,
1851, and people in Paris wake
up with pill boxes.
But what happens next--and
don't write this down,
but it's good to know--is that
it gives rise to the largest
national insurrection in France
in the nineteenth century,
to defend the Republic.
And most--the Secret Societies
that were formed have a lot to
do with this.
I once read the interrogation
of a great-great-great-great
uncle of our neighbor who was
arrested for trying to defend
the Republic,
and his interrogation had to be
translated from patois into
French.
And so in departments,
I won't go through them all,
but from the Pyrén&eac
ute;es-Orientales,
to the Aude,
to the Gers,
the Hérault,
the Gers--Bas-Alpes,
for now it's called the
Alpes--Haute-Provence,
the Drôme,
the Ardèche and all
these places,
they rise up to try to defend
the Republic,
and the vast majority of those
people that did were peasants,
and many of them did not speak
French.
Now, political action is a form
of establishing one's own
national identity.
They were fighting for a French
republic.
One of the ironies is that
people, for example,
in Catalonia were fighting in
Catalan,
in the Catalan language,
for a Jacobin view of the Left,
held by the Left,
that would view their own
language as something
antithetical to progress of the
civilization that people thought
was represented by the French
language.
So, the question of timing
here, you could argue that for
this area here,
which was extremely backward,
though I hate that word--the
Limousin, these departments
here--you don't have to know the
departments--but the Creuse,
the Corrèze and the
Haute-Vienne,
where I used to live in the
Haute-Vienne--I don't have much
affection for it actually--but
that these areas,
the timing is much earlier than
1880s, and they didn't have to
wait for trains,
military conscription or even
to be able to know the French
language vis-à-vis the
school.
And so there's some more things
that could be said,
also in terms of explaining how
complicated this whole question
of identity is.
And we have a tendency,
people who believe in
modernization and that
everything has to pass though
modernization,
believe that history runs on
railroad tracks,
and all you have to know is
when the train arrives in the
station,
and that you forget people
along the way.
A friend of mine once said,
"it's bitter hard to write the
history of remainders."
That's something that's always
haunted me, that phrase;
people who weren't modern and
therefore aren't interesting and
shouldn't be studied.
But in fact the roads,
the increase in roads in the
eighteenth century,
the improvements in roads in
the eighteenth and the first
half of the nineteenth century,
were more important than
railroads were in achieving in
many parts of France this kind
of integration.
And furthermore,
if you look at the expansion of
the French economy--and again
the only--what we're thinking
about is timing,
don't worry about these
details, just having you think
about national identity--the
French economy expanded rapidly
in the 1820s and '30s and '40s,
and again in the 1850s and
'60s, when railroads had
something to do with the '50s
and '60s.
But it expands with the
improvement of roads that bring
people into towns that make them
aware of La France and
make them aware of politics.
And what these,
all these departments,
there were eighteen of them
that rose up in 1851,
that rural people before--as
they dropped their--and run
across the fields,
dump their pitchforks and their
hunting rifles as the troops
come.
But all, every one of these
people, what they really had in
common was that they were in
areas in which the market had
expanded in the 1820s and the
1830s through better roads.
So again, railroads were
important.
The first railroad ride that
many people took in France were
pilgrimage sites,
to Lourdes and things like
that, more about that another
time.
But that's not all that's
important, and if you just look
for what is "modern,"
that is like TGV,
or the godawful trains going to
New York from here,
then you miss a lot of the
action.
So, the timing is important.
But what about 1914,
did these Bretons who are
conscripted, did they really
know much about France,
that they're going off to fight
for and to die for?
Well, that's a leap of faith as
well.
Certainly it's true that the
French language spreads among
Bretons, through the war
experience,
those people lucky enough to
have survived,
that weren't in the 1,500,000
dead.
But that's coming during the
war, it's not necessarily coming
before the war at all.
Furthermore,
just because one didn't speak
French, did that condemn people
to eternal backwardness?
I've studied strikes in Limoges
in 1905 and before that in which
the workers were striking
against big companies,
against Haviland,
the porcelain--oh,
that's another story--the
Haviland American Porcelain
Company,
they were chanting,
"long live the Social
Republic," not in French but in
patois,
but in patois,
in a Limosin patois,
and not in French.
Does this mean they
don't--they're not French?
No, it doesn't mean that at
all, but it just means that part
of their identity is being from
that particular part of France,
and you can have multiple
identities.
And so the sort of simplistic
view of when these people start
seeing themselves as French is
extraordinarily complicated.
What about Corsica?
You've still got about seven or
eight percent of the population,
that's just a guess,
who don't want to be French at
all.
You still have people blowing
up occasionally these high rise
apartments, condominiums,
in Corsica because they don't
want tourists there in August,
and to an extent--I'm not for
blowing up anything,
but who can blame them not
wanting tourists there in
August;
we're just blighted by tourists
in the south.
So, it just is terribly
complicated.
And of course the case of
Brittany is classic.
Gradually the French Language
moves in this direction,
but still in the 1920s and '30s
the overwhelming percentage of
the population still speak
Breton in daily life.
What about--just an aside,
one of thousands of asides--but
what about time since World War
II?
Before I get to schools,
what do people speak--when does
patois disappear?
Well, I've always been
interested in that because we
live in a village of about three
hundred and thirty-nine people.
It's a very old population.
The church bell rings slowly,
very, very often,
and another of us has been
snatched away,
sadly.
In the south,
in this part of France,
in the Ardèche,
in what you call the Vivarais,
the Bas-Vivarais,
it doesn't matter,
people spoke patois in daily
life in the 1920s and 1930s,
and then people who were old
would speak it among themselves
in the 1940s,
the 1950s.
The people that I know that are
old, including my boule
partner--boule,
we play boule,
and we drink a little
Chardonnay--oh,
I'm not supposed to say that,
but we drink a little
Chardonnay on the side,
or pastis, quelque
pastis de temps de temps;
pas de temps de temps,
tous les temps!--the people
that are playing--my friend
who's 80,
he can understand patois but he
can't read it and he can't write
it.
When I asked him to correct
some sentences that I'd copied
in patois, in a book that I did,
for the French translation,
he couldn't do it.
So that's disappeared.
But say in Auvergne,
Auvergne are these departments
here, I won't go through them
all but Aviron,
Cantal, Haute-Loire,
et cetera,
Puy-du-Dôme up here,
maybe Dallier a little bit--in
the 1960s and early 1970s patois
was still spoken in many
households.
And when the classic,
kind of eternal triangle,
that is, the parents,
the school kid and the teacher,
was often then had something to
do with language,
because the parents felt
themselves at a disadvantage
because their French wasn't as
good as their patois;
and this isn't the 1860s,
this is the 1960s.
And in Corsica there's still
people who speak Corsican
language but basically almost
everybody now speaks French.
And even in the movie I
mentioned this the other day by
Jean, Jean de Florette,
and all of that,
there they had to equip one of
the main actors,
Daniel Auteuil,
they had to train him,
even though he's from Avignon,
how to speak with a real
Provençal accent.
But that's false because in the
1920s, when he comes back from
World War I, they're going to be
speaking Provençal,
they're not going to be
speaking French.
Now, what about--well,
I don't even have time to get
into this, but about
universities?
One of the things that's been
good in the last 20 years in
France is that before--as I
said,
de Gaulle wanted to crush
regional languages and cultures
like grapes--but one of the
things that's happened is that
now universities are very active
in teaching these languages that
are part of the regional
identity;
that is, not necessarily
antithetical at all to the sense
of being French.
The University of Nantes,
which is horribly rightwing;
but, Rennes,
Rennes in particular teaches a
Breton, and there's been a
revival there;
or Perpignan,
very, very strong in Catalan
studies;
and in Toulouse,
which--there's a very good
university there,
though the city is wonderful
but the university is a dump;
and also when we had the big
explosion there,
we were there when that all
happened in the Fall of 2001
where--there were some even more
horrible explosions in this
country,
as you well know--the whole
campus was sort of moved by this
huge explosion when this
chemical factory blew up.
But there, there's been a
revival in the teaching of
Occitan, the sort of Languedoc
languages that were soon to
disappear,
et cetera, et cetera.
Now, so, be a little cautious
in assuming that well everybody
in 1914 felt themselves French,
or thinking that these sort of
agencies of modernization are
what created this,
what we'd have to admit is a
strong French identity.
But also one of the things I'm
able to see--I'll probably be in
tears by the end of the lecture
because I'm so afraid that these
regional identities are going to
disappear and that tourism may
have something to do with that
as well,
and that would be too bad,
with the end of these license
plates and things like that,
that I mentioned before--that's
not impossible.
Ironically, those of you,
anyone who's been to France or
been anywhere,
know that the green Guide
Michelin,
in a way that may have even
had, along with the gastronomy
guides, as a way of at least
making people think about
regional culture,
tying it closely to what is
unique about a region and
presenting it to tourists,
and what's unique about cuisine.
And some of the really
famous--and now if you want to
spend deux cents
cinquante baldis for
one person to eat in these
places it's $250.00 per person.
Some of them have even so
emphasized their local origins
of what they're preparing that
this may work against this sort
of onslaught of this single
French culture,
and so, well,
let all these flowers continue
to bloom.
Now, what about schools?
Certainly Weber,
like anyone else,
is right that schools make a
huge difference.
And the history of schoolhouses
is very interesting.
Now, basically until 1833,
until 1833, and I'll explain
why 1833 in a minute,
there are two things that could
be said about the teaching of
anything, or three things.
One is that girls were much
less likely to go to school than
boys;
second, that many
schoolteachers were
forains which were--or
mobile.
There are people who simply
would go from town to town,
teaching for a month or two,
that villages--some were very
resourceful and would start
schools, taking advantage of one
of these people--but that the
church,
education was primarily
dominated by the Catholic
Church, and education in the
informal sense as well.
Now, to be sure five percent of
the French population were
Protestants, more about that
when we get to the Dreyfus
Affair.
But the priest was often,
in the^( )eighteenth century,
the only person who could read
in many villages,
and his reading knowledge would
be basically limited to the
Bible, repeating things that
he'd been trained to say.
But the church and the teaching
Sisters, the nuns,
really dominate,
in many parts of France,
in places that were still
practicing that old-time
religion, dominate education.
Now, in 1833 a law comes along
called the Guizot Law.
Guizot was a Protestant from
Nimes.
He was not what the French
would call rigolo,
he was not a very
happy-go-lucky guy that you want
to have a couple of beers with
or a couple of 7-Ups with.
And he was Protestant,
and so what he wanted to do was
to wrest education away from the
clutches of the Catholic Church,
as he saw it.
So, through his inspirations
they pass a law that says that
in every village in France,
in every one of France's 36,000
communes, you had to have a
school.
Now, the reality was that many
were so poor that they couldn't.
In our particular village,
and I'll have to make reference
to this because I've studied it
a little bit,
the school moves from rented
place to rented place.
But 1833 matters,
because the schoolteacher now
has the stamp of official
authority.
He is supposed to teach in
French.
Now, how do you know that?
When I say he has the stamp of
official authority,
what does that mean?
So, I got curious as to what
that means, and to see what
difference he made I did the
following,
which is that,
as I said before,
the big rights of life,
birth, baptism,
marriage,
death, have to be witnessed.
And since the French Revolution
this is kept by the State,
not by the parishes.
So, you have to have people who
witness it, who say,
"I see this baby,
I sign on the dotted line."
Now usually what you do in a
small village is you would take
some notable person,
who knew how to read or write,
perhaps your wealthy uncle,
or somebody's wealthy uncle,
and then you'd--because the
person can sign his name--and
then you'd take your cousin,
who probably couldn't sign his
name, but can make a pretty good
X, when push comes to shove.
With 1833 I start looking at
all these registers,
just for a day,
that'll do it,
but I look at all the births
and all the baptisms and all the
marriages and all the deaths.
And what happens is this proud
signature of the schoolteacher.
He becomes this sort of,
not obligatory,
but the chosen person to say,
"I have seen this baby," "I
have seen this couple," "I have
seen this corpse."
And does that tell you
something?
Well, French schoolteachers
still have this wonderful
signature that my kids who write
terribly,
have terrible signatures,
like mine, were never able to
pick up.
But that tells you something
because he has--he's supposed to
get a minimum salary of two
hundred francs,
which is virtually nothing;
some people are paying him in
asparaguses, depending on--or in
endives or in apples,
or not paying at all.
Families that were too poor
were exonerated from having to
pay anything.
And he's just barely scraping
by.
But he doesn't have a red,
white and blue sash,
like the mayor does,
but he represents the State and
the authority,
and above all the prestige of
the State.
And he's a challenge in his
very existence to the Virgin
Mary being on the wall of these
public schools,
these are public schools.
Now, in 1850,
this is before the course,
it doesn't matter,
there's a law called the
Falloux Law, which you can
forget as soon as I said it;
and in the Falloux Law,
really it's a compromise with
the church, and Louis Napoleon
hands back control over local
committees to the church.
And in parts of France in which
people still practice religion,
where religion still mattered,
in private and public life,
to the degree it always had
been, you still have people that
want to have church schools.
And in the north of
France--when you're reading
Germinale you have to
also imagine you've got these
Belgian nuns with these wild
hats that they used to have,
still teaching in the schools.
You have convent people coming
down that know a little
literacy, not very much,
and they're teaching and
they're doing the best they can.
The quality of the clergy in
France was never higher than in
the eighteenth century;
it was pretty low in the
nineteenth century.
But still you have these
competing sources to educate the
young people.
Now, parents often resist their
kids going to school.
Why would they want to do that?
Well, mothers are responsible
for the household economy.
You have to have enough money
to keep the household going.
And for very many people,
and not just workers and
peasants, it was difficult to
explain what difference in the
long run that mattered if their
child learned how to do more
than the very minimum of
learning how to read and write.
So, I got ahold of some
statistics on truancy,
for example,
and that was pretty interesting
to see.
And it's quite clear that
whenever there was a harvest,
a silkworm harvest in much of
the southeast of France,
a wine harvest in Champagne or
in Burgundy or in Bordeaux or
Languedoc, almost anywhere,
or the various harvests that
begin in July,
usually with the grain,
the kids just didn't go to
school because they weren't
needed there.
But there's always this
tension, because parents said,
"my little girl should be in
CP,"
or "my little boy should be in
CP," which is the equivalent of
first grade,
"but I need her," or "I need
him to watch the small animals."
The big kids watch the big
animals, that's the way it is.
The big kids go on the
transhumance;
that is when you take the sheep
up into the mountains.
We still have that.
Every year we still--my kids go
on the tour, or at least one of
them goes on the
transhumance,
with the sheep going up in the
mountains.
And they would say there's no
way I'm sending my kid to
school.
But in France,
as you'll read from Chip
Sowerwine's book,
they put in laws,
as they do in Italy,
as they do in Germany,
and as they do in Britain,
that says you don't have any
choice,
pas du choix;
you have to go to school,
and you have to be there until
the age of eleven or the age of
twelve.
So, the assumption is,
in this kind of view of how
this all works,
is that these guys,
these teachers,
male teachers--increasingly
women teachers later,
but only later,
it becomes a job along
with--well we'll talk about this
some other time,
along with department store
clerks,
and when clerks becoming more
female as opposed to male,
it becomes a way for peasant
girls and working class girls or
young women to get jobs.
But the view is that these
teachers, who are called
instits in French,
instituteurs,
but just teachers,
these primary school
teachers--virtually nobody went
to lycée,
goes to high school;
hardly anyone goes to
lycée until,
really until the second half of
the nineteenth century--that
these people are teaching the
French language,
and that this is how you're
going to learn it.
And there's always a story told
almost everyplace how in school,
even during recess,
recreation, recess,
the last person who says a word
in patois has to clutch for the
remainder of the period some
oddly shaped rock or coin,
until somebody else screws up
and says a word in patois.
Are you kidding me?
It doesn't work like that at
all.
Jean-François Chanet
started, he went out to study,
in the 1850s and '60s and
1870s,
schoolteachers and schools,
and he begins with surveys,
some of which I've read.
They asked schoolteachers,
"what do you want for yourself,
what do want for your village,
for your school,
and what do you want for your
kids?"
And they would reply.
But these guys,
they're filling out forms that
their superiors in this
hierarchical,
centralized society are going
to look at, and if they write,
"basically they don't
understand French,
we talk about the great battles
of Napoleon, but we do it in
Auvergnat, in patois,
or we do it in Languedocien or
we do it in Catalan,
then they're going to get
themselves in trouble.
So, you have to sort of sneak
around a little bit these
sources.
And the more Chanet looked at
these places,
it's clear that regional
identity is still very
important.
The famous map of France or the
famous map of the world that
had, in the 1890s,
after the big period of New
Imperialism, you have the color
of France in its colonies in
Senegal or what now is Mali or
Réunion or anywhere.
But you have to begin with a
region.
And so they're beginning with a
region.
If they're from the Heyraud,
if they're from Montpellier or
from around Montpellier,
that is their frame of
identity.
And so it's absurd to think
that they weren't actually
teaching in these languages,
local languages and dialects,
in patois, just as it's absurd
to think that people who didn't
master French,
perfectly, or even very well at
all, didn't have some,
depending on the timing,
some sense of being French.
So, these schools are terribly
important.
And they could be teaching
about all this stuff they had to
learn about the kings of France
and all this crap that they
still learn,
over and over again.
And they're teaching that stuff
in patois and in dialect.
And maybe in the north of
France--you have to--everybody's
always talking about this
imaginary line from St.
Malo to Geneva,
here, and it's mostly in the
south of France where these
languages persist,
and I don't mean persist in a
derogatory sense but where they
continue to thrive.
But this bilingualism will
continue.
And also, a lot of the views of
these sort of backward provinces
are written by Parisians or by
military officers,
for example,
who shop, and they find some
peasant walking down the street
and they say,
"hey you,
can you give me this
information?"
And that person understands
perfectly well what they want
but they identify some person
coming,
speaking French,
as a tax collector or a
military guy or something like
that,
and you're apt just to give
that secret smile and pretend
like you don't understand a damn
thing,
just a secret smile.
And then they go back and they
write, "boy, I've never--these
people here they can't speak
French at all,
they are hopeless,
they are out of date,
they are plooks,
they are bumpkins,"
and all of that.
So, but eventually,
as I said, you have these
schoolhouses that they will
improve over time,
they get more resources,
they're made to have more
resources.
The towns do more and more for
them.
Girls schools start up,
girls education increases
rapidly and thus it's
quite--another Zola novel,
which is a great one,
called Au Bonheur des
Dames, which is about a
department store,
it's about the department store
Bon Marché,
in Paris.
For these young women get
really miserable jobs,
and what they're doing is
they're sleeping in dormitories,
under horrible,
sort of draconian regulations
about what they can do.
But for them to get those kinds
of jobs they have to be able to
count, they have to be able to
read, they have to be able to
write.
And so women's education
increases dramatically during
this whole time.
But what does not change is the
prestige that the schoolteachers
have, that they maintain as
representing not only national
identity but also regional
possibilities,
and in teaching the youth of
France how to read and write.
Now, I thought,
just because maybe you'll find
it interesting for the last ten
minutes,
since I did what I basically
wanted to do and held myself
down in not giving countless and
countless examples,
is talk a little bit about now.
Because one of the things that
I became interested in is how,
if these areas in the south,
particularly,
that are tourist infested,
during the year,
if they are going to remain
more than simply sites for
tourists from the north,
from Belgium and from Germany
and from the Netherlands and
literally from the north of
France,
to come and visit,
schools have to maintain their
traditional role in representing
the identity of these
communities.
And those of you who are--if
there are any people here from
Nebraska, where my wife is from,
or from Idaho or from Oregon,
where I'm from,
from Eastern Oregon,
or from Wyoming and places like
that,
will know the process by which
schools are closing down,
because there are not enough
kids left.
France had in 1851--two-thirds
of the departments in France in
1851 were larger than they were
in 1939, because of two things;
one, the collapsing birthrate,
which I will talk about another
time.
In much of France people
stopped having babies,
point,
period, or they'll have 2.1
babies or 1.8 babies--that's
kind of hard,
but statistically.
And second is that what in
French you call le grand
départ,
or the big departure,
starts, as people who have lost
access to common resources,
for example,
in the mountains,
or the silk industry collapse
or the wine industry
collapses--more about that when
I talk about phylloxera disease;
don't write that down or even
try to spell it now--there is
this huge withdrawal from the
countryside toward more
urbanized departments,
and because the population has
stopped growing basically by
1900, if it wasn't for the
arrival of people from Italy and
other places,
and from Spain,
the French population wouldn't
even reproduce itself,
it wouldn't even stay constant.
In much of France,
and indeed I would argue of
36,000 communes,
let me say that perhaps in ten
or twelve thousand communes,
after World War II,
there were one-room
schoolhouses.
And a one-room schoolhouse you
know, you've seen movies
involving them.
They have them in the United
States too.
In a one-room schoolhouse
you'll have all the kids,
have all the grades being
taught by one person.
Our kids were several years in
a one-room schoolhouse.
It's a great way to grow up.
In France you have grades
from^( )first through^( )fifth
grade, they're called CP
un, CP deux,
et cetera.
And the oldest kid,
if he or she is remotely
intelligent, will help with the
younger ones,
but everybody's together in the
same school.
And with the depopulation,
what they did is they tried to
have single sex schools,
you have a boys school and a
girls school.
But that becomes too expensive,
because the State is paying for
all this and the communes are
paying part of it.
So, what they do is they say,
okay, we're going to have one
school.
It's called in French a
classe unique,
and it's a wonderful way to
grow up in--where you've got
cats and you have dogs and you
have the older kids are trying
to get ready for their exams;
they don't have it anymore,
but a brevet to show
that through a certificate that
they have been in class through
our equivalent here in America
of the fifth grade,
and you might have a--if they
have a kindergarten you might
have a little boy or a girl
peeing in the corner,
literally, while all this other
stuff is going on.
In our class a dog gave birth
during the middle of math in our
class in this school.
And all of the tests that
people have had show that kids
with--who come out of that
environment do just as well,
in fact even a little better,
than people in your normal
class where you've got everybody
in^( )the first grade,
there they all are,
and here's the second grade,
and you've got sort of an elite
class for those people whose
parents are pushy enough to get
them in that;
and you got all that stuff,
and some of which you've seen.
But as all this is expensive
what's happened over time is
that these one-room schoolhouses
are closing down.
And between 1975 about,
and about let's say 1990,10,000
one-room schoolhouses in France
closed.
And what this does is it causes
unemployment for schoolteachers
but many of them can stay on in
other capacities.
But it means that there are
long bus rides;
they are already long bus rides
because many
départements don't
have that many high schools and
you've got to take buses in
order to get to the high
schools,
and that sort of thing.
And that is sad because that's
a wonderful way to grow up,
in these schools.
And that's part of regional
identity and village identity
that's going to disappear.
And let me give you an example,
again from our village,
because it's interesting.
We were faced with the fact
that the school was going to be
either grouped with another
village, a detested rival,
or be shut down.
So, what are our kids supposed
to do, where are they supposed
to go to school?
And one day we were convoked to
the town hall,
to the mairie,
by our schoolteacher.
And our--most of our parents'
meetings with the schoolteacher
ended with a bottle of armagnac,
I'm pleased to say,
and we're all dear friends;
even the people that you're not
dear friends with you got along
with fine.
But remember what I said about
the role of the school.
The school represented,
from the outside,
France looking into the
village, in principle,
teaching French,
providing opportunities for
people to get educated,
get a job in the post office or
the train station or in a
department store in Paris,
Avignon, Toulouse or wherever.
And one day we were convoked by
the mayor, and the mayor then
wasn't a friend of ours,
just somebody we knew,
and he had a sash on,
and he said vous instead
of tu,
he spoke to us formally.
And the teacher was nervous,
he said, "God," he said,
"we have the great pleasure of
having Monsieur la
Maire."
And we're all looking at him
and saying, "Quoi?,
qu'est-ceâ€¦?"
"Monsieur la Maire is
going to hear,
he's going to be here to talk
to us."
And we'll all a little nervous
because our school is maybe
going to close down.
We'd started a semi-illegal
cantine to feed the kids,
lunchrooms so that parents
wouldn't put their kids in the
other school.
At one point we had like nine
kids left in the school,
we could get closed down,
and we were a little nervous.
And the guy says,
"my friends," which he's not,
we're not--he said,
"we are gathered here together
so that we can best see how we
can cheat the State."
And the minute he said cheat
the State we had an alliance,
all of us, because how are we
going to keep a semi-illegal
lunchroom going so that we can
keep a couple more little kids
in our school,
how are we going to do that?
And I realized then that the
relationship had totally
changed, that the school still
represents France.
It's a cruel system where you'd
be in the fourth grade and your
teachers will call the parents
and say, "votre fille,
elle est nulle."
That happened to one of my
daughter's friends--your
daughter, she's nothing,
she has to go off and do this
menial job because she's never
going to make it to the next
level.
There's always tension in these
parents' meetings.
It's a cruel system.
But it was the outside looking
in, it represented the
possibilities of France and the
French language which we've
already--we've exaggerated.
And I suddenly realized that
now it was very different,
and that if our village,
like all these other villages,
are going to remain living,
vivant,
and more than just a Michelin
infused speck on the dot where
people come along with their
green guides because it's so
beautiful--and this is true of
all of these places;
they're not all equally
beautiful--that our school has
to survive.
Because even people whose
families have hated each other's
guts for generations,
who detest each other,
all agree that since the church
is now just a voluntary
association like any other,
like  the
pétanque club,
the boule club,
or the fut club,
I mean the soccer club,
that the only thing that
arguably will hold the village
together is the identity that
comes through this school,
the school of this particular
village which is called Balazuc.
So, just simply in conclusion
let's not exaggerate this one
national identity,
nor assume that modernization
has to come crashing along.
Let us realize the complexity
of national and regional
identities, which can become
intertwined,
which are intertwined,
and let us realize that these
schools have a remarkable role
still in these communities,
terribly important at the most
basic level, and that remains in
France, neighborhood and
village.
See you on Wednesday.
