Rancière & La parole ouvrière

In 1976 Jacques Rancière published (together with Alain Faure) a collection of texts by workers from between 1830 and 1851 under the title La Parole ouvrière. His short introduction to this collection, appearing as it does well before La nuit des prolétaires, his own thèse on the same material, is a good (and concise!) starting place for understanding what Rancière is up to in this early post-Althusserian phase of his thinking. I would describe this introduction as working on two levels at once: the first and most fully-stated is a methodological and historiographical argument with a certain kind of social history; the second is an intervention into what we can, problematically, call ‘post-Marxist’ theory. Neither intervention is without ambiguity.

           

In returning to the archive of “la parole ouvrière” between the revolution of 1830 and the coup of 1851, Rancière is, he says, above all not looking for an origin story. He wants to avoid the teleological story of a working class that is at the beginnings of what we all know will eventually be its self-consciousness as “proletarian.” But of course we are in the presence of growing class-consciousness. The specificity of this experience of class-consciousness in this moment for Rancière is that “La prise de parole qu’ils [les ouvrières] effectuent constitue elle-même un élément décisif de cette expérience” (10). This new accession into la parole was a claim to full humanity on the part of the workers. To be more than arms or rifles, but not because they are strong, because they are just as able to speak truth and justice as anyone. This was never separate from other forms of struggle (18-19). But there was nonetheless something particular about the claim to speech: “Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant. La parole fonde un droit que la violence ne saurait se donner à elle-même.” For this, education, and self-education, was required because it was clear that violence would be met with greater counter-violence and experience taught the likelyhood of political betrayal. “Entre la violence suspendue et la servilité refusée, ce dialogue nouveau avec la bourgeoisie exprime un idéal qui est moins de prendre la place des maîtres que de les réduire à leur rôle de marchands ou de prêteurs, d’avoir avec eux ce que Grignon appelle des ‘rapports d’indépendance et d’égalité’” (13). Or, differently put, “Le désir d’être reconnus communique avec le refus d’être méprisés. La volonté de convaincre de son droit engage la résolution de le défendre par les armes” (14). This was a dialogue with the bourgeoisie, and that is what gave it a class character.

This class character has, Rancière says, been challenged or missed by scholars who can see nothing but ideological domination in the adoption by the proletarians of the language of the bourgeoisie. What else but ideological domination could be indicated by claims to the same humanity as the bourgeoise? Claims to respectability and the like? This is to read badly, according to Rancière. The proletarian takes the language of the bourgeoisie literally, turns it against itself, denies to the bourgeois the exclusive right to determine the meaning of this language. “C’est aux ouvriers seuls qu’il revient de nommer leur situation et leur révolte” (16). Rancière pushes especially heavily on the use and reuse of the term “esclave.” The workers are not slaves. They refuse to be slaves. They are quick to feel that they have been called slaves. They refuse to be treated as slaves—and so we have a journal called “Spartacus” Because the workers are “Les Spartacus qui ne veulent pas qu’on les traite d’esclaves prennent les armes” (16). It is difficult, given the state of scholarship today, to read these lines without wanting some reference to the fact that contemporaneous with these exchanges during the Second Republic there is debate on and then the abolition of slavery in the Antilles. But Rancière doesn’t mention this. He is interested, rather in the “sourd travail de réappropriation des institutions, des pratiques et des mots” (18) undertaken by the proletarians. He is interested, that is, in the question “Que se passe-t-il quand la classe qui est dépossédée également des moyens de la production intellectuelle s’efforce de prendre la parole pour s’identifier?” (19).

In historiographic terms, Rancière is calling for a history of “la pensée ouvrière qui occupe cette place demeurée pratiquement vide entre les histoires des doctrines sociales qui nous résument Marx, Fourier ou Proudhon, et les chroniques de la vie ouvrière qui nous deecrivent l’horreur des caves de Lille...” (21). This, let us remember, was written in 1976. We are here after EP Thompson, but in the midst of the ascendency of social history. We are ready for the turn to cultural history that, in this labor-history context, we can associate with Joan Scott, Bill Reddy, Bill Sewell, and others. (Indeed, although I’m not going to try to reconstruct it here, Rancière took part in face-to-face debates with anglophone historians, I’m thinking, if I remember correctly, of a 1983 conference reproduced as Work in France eds Kaplan and Koepp, 1986). It would be interesting to explore the difference between the account of political practice through experience that Rancière suggests here, or even more so his later interventions into arguments about political subjectivity and Joan Scott’s famous anti-“evidence of experience” argument. The two after all both come from French working-class history. Here Rancière is of course aiming at something much more historically specific: “il faudrait étudier comment l’expérience quotidienne de l’exploitation et de l’oppression trouve à se systématiser en empruntant des mots ou des raisonnements au discours d’un haut, comment des idées deviennent des forces matérielles, comment des plans de réorganisation sociale sont mis en oeuvre à l’échelle d’un atelier, d’une corporation, d’un quartier...” (21).

Here, though, we turn to the second, and less fully-articulated point that Rancière wants to make in this particular text. Taking a step back from the argument he has been making, he ventriloquizes a counter-argument: you will say that all of this history is really the past, “songeries d’artisans englouties en pratique par la grande industrie et anéanties en théories par le marxisme” (21-22). Now, there is a kind of social or cultural history that would pause here and say—but all utopias, all ruptures, all possibilities unrealized, are worth recovering. This is one of the great tasks of the historian: to rescue, to paraphrase Thompson, voices from the enormous condescension of posterity. But that is not what Rancière goes on to say. He turns, rather, to Marx. And he introduces two rather surprising (1976!) mechanisms into his narrative to do so: contemporaneity and choice. He writes, “L’idée de la révolution prolétarienne est inexorablement contemporaine des discours de cette avant-garde ouvrière qui pense et agit non pour préparer un futur où les prolétaires recueilleraient l’héritage d’une grande industrie capitaliste formée par la dépossession de leur travail et de leur intelligence, mais pour arrêter le mécanisme de cette dépossession” (22). These soon-to-be obsolete artisans saw themselves to be presented with a choice between two possible futures, “celui de l’organisation capitaliste qui, dans chaque métier, annonce, à travers la réorganisation du procès de travail, l’exacerbation de la concurrance entre les bras ouvriers ou le renforcement de la discipline de l’atelier, l’instauration d’un esclavage nouveau; ou celui de l’association ‘libre et volontaires’ des travailleurs. C’est dans le sentiment de ce choix que se forme l’idée de l’émancipation ouvrière sur laquelle viendra se greffer la théorie de la révolution prolétarienne : non à partir de la conscience des prolétaires formés à ‘l’école de la fabrique’ mais à partir du point de vue de ceux qui entendent refuser cette école” (23).

Marx could abuse Proudhon for his theoretical incompetence. He could struggle to assert that utopian socialism was past, that his own socialism was scientific. But between this science and the political dream of emancipation there was a gap and “ce décalage se trouve d’entrée de jeu au coeur de la problématique marxienne.” (Is this still an Althusserian reading of Marx? But historicized differently?) Marx “n’a pas pu penser le but à atteindre dans d’autres termes que ceux de ces ‘artisans’: communisme, émancipation des travailleurs, abolition du salariat, libre association des travailleurs. It s’est efforcé de penser avec plus de riguer la nécessité du renversement du pouvoir et les conditions de ce renversement,” along with his political economy, but “il ne pouvait se représenter l’avenir communiste autrement que ne le fait en 1850 le mécanicien Drevet: monde d’ateliers sociaux et de magasins coopératifs où, dans l’égalité de tous devant le travail et le loisir, des travailleurs librement associés régaleraient leur production sur les besoins désormais connus et reconnus de leur frères.” 23-24.

But this does not mean—as for instance is suggested by the recent Sperber biography, as well as the grand narrative of bourgeois life outlined by Jerrold Seigel—that Marx is himself somehow surpassed by subsequent social-economic history. Rather, “la mise en place de ce réseau de mots et d’images où la pensée de Marx prend ses repères peut aussi être le point de départ d’une réflexion matérailiste sur l’histoire des transformations du marxisme” (24).  Rancière, much like Antonio Labriola in the 1890s, asks that we return to the moment at which Marx’s thought was constituted in order to understand it and further the project of emancipation. Although perhaps I am reading Rancière as more sympathetic to Marx than he really is?

To close this rapid overview of a single, now-ancient, text I want to present a methodological-political anxiety. I worry that the intellectual historical call to be open to the demands of the texts we encounter—dialogic, but also for instance the way Gordon frames it—makes it difficult for intellectual historians to make the kind of move that Rancière does. How can we not, if we begin by trying to allow Marx to speak directly to us, fail to read him against these worker-philosophers in just the way he wants us to? Rancière wants, we might say, to use the context of Marx to make Marx’s thinking alive in the present. But this is not the message I get from Gordon. Rancière uses the notion of historical choice—two choices, a moment of clear decision creating a rupture in imaginative futures—to insist that the workers of the 1840s, rather than the theorists, remain contemporary to the idea of revolution. This, it seems to me, requires a set of absolutely contemporary commitments (for Rancière we can say, to equality) that are simply not available to the historian. Or, if they are so available, it is at just the cost that Lilti, contra Gordon, says—we won’t be doing history any longer, but rather politics, because it seems to me that there is nothing else that a claim about contemporaneity can ultimately mean. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and this is to some degree what Gordon (et al, he’s getting unfairly abused here, see also Jay and LaCapra) wants. But with that come responsibilities and obligations that have nothing to do with professional historical training or practice. That would be militant history. That would be history that begins with a choice in the present imagined in the same way that Rancière claims works in the 1840s began with a choice. Evidently this is a problem of long standing. My worry, I suppose, is really the idea that intellectual historians (rather than, say, historians of social movements who are in many ways better equipped for this) should be particularly obliged to confront this problem of contemporaneity. Surely it is for us to ask, rather, why there could be a choice of that kind at all, in the particular moment that it seemed to present itself? There’s a problem of recursion here, of course, and the inevitability of making a choice at the beginning of subject-matter. But, then, if you begin by saying that you are an intellectual historian, probably you have already made a choice against, at the least, the equality with which Rancière begins—a choice for Marx and not the proletarians? 

Paul Lapie. "La justice pénale"

A colleague recently pointed me to a short essay, “La justice pénale,” by Paul Lapie in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. It’s from the March 1898 issue of the journal and this colleague came across it because the Union pour l’action morale reprinted and distributed it. Lapie, and the Rmm, have figured in my work before. So I read with interest and finally could no resist writing a little bit about it.

The essay, only about 12 pages long, might at first look like a book review, although it appears in the “Questions pratiques” rubric. At its head we find a book listing: Jean Cruppi, La cour d’assises, but also “La collection des journaux française, depuis six mois.” Many of Céléstin Bouglé’s essays from this period had similar notices, but I’m not sure how common the practice was. Especially in Bouglé’s case, the notices are clearly intended for the curious reader, but also as sign of scholarship, a bibliography even in the field of what was never really admitted to be polemic. In other words: I may be writing about contemporary political matters, but I’m a scholar not just some scribbler. It’s hard, though, not to smile at Lapie’s breezy ‘the papers in the last six months...’

In any case, the essay is divided into two parts—institutions et croyances—and the first draws directly (or so it appears) on Cruppi to present practical issues in this particular part of the French legal system, arguing that the vices of the civilian courts are magnified in the military ones. I’m not prepared to adjudicate in any useful way these claims. But a few points. First of all, the judges are not really impartial, because they are associated so closely with the prosecutors. We needn’t be thought simply to be copying the English system, Lapie says, if we simply want to bring a bit more independence and institutional separation to the judge (265). Judges also simply do not have the time to think about cases in a meaningful way. Lapie quotes Cruppi telling us that some judges are obliged to rule on as many as a hundred cases a day (262). Absurd. To judge, after all, is complex. “Les faits établis, ils [les juges] sauront appliquer les lois. Mais comment les faits sont-ils établis?” (261).  Even the question of what happened is not so straightforward, “l’accusé est-il l’auteur du fait incriminé?” is one question, another is “l’accusé est-il responsable de son acte?” (262) Finally is correct application of the law. Thus there are three questions, the first is essentially historical, the second moral, and the third juridical. One needs both time and method—science—even and perhaps especially for moral problems.

And here is Lapie’s great theme. Given the current state of affairs, judges and juries have no choice but to fall back on “la conscience.” Since in this format I can, here is a large block quote:

(263)

Among the things I wish I understood a bit better is the claim here about the yes-or-no nature of the judgment. Is this really the case? And I am a little amazed at the link between the historian and the judge. How common was this comparison at the time? (It’s history, not historiography that is supposed to be the Weltgericht). But it’s really the necessity of falling back on ‘intimate conviction’ that Lapie finds objectionable. He admits that judges have no choice: “la méthode qu’on les contraint de suivre les supent [sic?] dans le vide.” They are obliged to fall back on experience guided by intuition to make rapid decisions. This is not acceptable. Lapie raises the practice of indicating doubt as to true guilt with lighter sentences as an especially outrageous byproduct of the situation.   

In the case of military justice, the situation is even worse. Without impugning the honor or rectitude of the officers concerned, it is still necessary to point out, Lapie says, that here there is hardly any of the juridical learning that, at least, civilian judges have. “Nous retrouvons donc dans la justice militaire, aggravés par l’incompétence, les vices de notre justice pénale.” Conscience is invoked especially often within the military.

(265)

Especially that last line! And this is in March of 1898. Zola had been convicted for libel only the month before—not, of course, that the name “Dreyfus” appears anywhere in this piece. Indeed the above is one of the more direct references to what Lapie also refers to later on as “the present crisis,” with no modifiers.

Since any citizen might be obliged to sit on a jury, why not bring some measure of juridical education into the curriculum? This is not, Lapie hastens to add, to say that we should teach everyone law, only “tous devraient avoir acquis le goût et l’habitude de la recherche méthodique” (266). Here, again, the historian is the model. We demand more evidence of “esprit critique” in the historian reconstructing “les faits et gestes de Clovis” than of judges, and this is wrong. This plea for education makes Lapie transition to the second part of the essay, which looks at the underlying cause for the institutional problems, which Lapie sees in “croyances...la survivance d’anciens préjugés” (266). I’ll point out, given this straightforward refusal of sociology, that the first article in the very next issue of the Rmm is Durkheim’s “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives.”

Two contrasting pairs of terms dominate the second half of the essay: justice and order, as a pair of governing principles, and then conscience and science. We claim today, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, says Lapie, to prioritize justice. But it is easy to see that most people—a legacy of empire?—prefer order. The appeal to conscience is simply another form of the religious mindset. Yet it remains widespread in “une sorte de kantisme instinctif d’après lequel il suffit d’obéir à sa conscience pour faire le bien” (268). And we should vigorously refuse the idea that balance must be struck between order and justice. Of course, the government is charged with maintaining order. But we must not be hypnotized by the old regime: “la justice n’était jadis qu’un moyen de maintenir l’ordre; l’ordre ne doit être maintenant qu’un moyen de garantir la justice” (268). For we inhabitants of the 21^st century, this remains an attractive formulation. But Lapie’s counter-intuitive move is to firmly reject the appeal to conscience in just this context. To have the “intimate conviction” that you have done your duty is almost completely worthless. Some lines from one extraordinary paragraph: “La conscience n’est souveraine que si elle est éclairée...Un jugement n’a de valeur morale que s’il a de la valeur logique: s’il ne’st pas appuyé à des preuves, il est presque nécessairement la cause d’une injustice...Il n’y a donc pas de probité morale distincte de la probité scientifique: toute action reposant sur un jugement, la méthode qui sert à établir des jugements exacts peut déterminer les actions bonnes...la morale n’est pas seulement affaire de conscience, mais affaire de science...une conscience dénuée d’esprit scientifique peut devenir criminelle” (269). With that last line, especially, Lapie offers the precise opposite of the more typically 20^th century judgment that science without conscience easily (inevitably) becomes criminal.

Lapie wants to retain the idea of collective action and morality—that is, political choice and commitment—but without the pernicious form of collective responsibility that holds an individual responsible for the supposed crimes of, say, the race, family, nation, and so forth. In a curious turn of phrase, Lapie writes “Toute notre étude est destinée à montrer que nous sommes tous responsables de la crise qui vient d’éclater” (270). I take this to mean that the study he is now winding up shows that the present crisis has roots in collective conscience, in various collective and institutional failures for which we are all, in a certain way, responsible. Because, he goes on to say, we aren’t all equally responsible. Those who have simply failed to conquer their outmoded prejudices, who have failed to reform institutions as justice demands, that is the vast majority, are partly to blame, “mais quelques hommes, qui ont joué un rôle important dans l’affaire, encourent une responsabilité plus directe” (270).   

In sum, for Lapie, the current crisis—the affair, not yet capitalized—has to do with our failure to fully assume the moral consequences of the scientific revolution. Systematic doubt is difficult, and so we prefer not to practice it. But if justice is to be our ordering principle, then we must prefer truth to opinion or mere conscience. Lapie wraps things up neatly, invoking in his closing paragraph the difference between authorship of an act and the various grades of responsibility and social consequence, as well as closing with the same mot from Tostoy (or, Tolstoï)—“il est très bon qu’un cas de conscience se pose pour la France”—good indeed, Lapie says, if we meet the challenge not with simple reaction, but with measured self-criticism and improvement of “nos institutions et de nos esprits” (271).

How to interpret this text, and the appeal it had for the Union? It is, most obviously, a text in favor of revision of the verdict against Dreyfus. Lapie argues powerfully against the injustice built into military courts, and is clear that truth, pursued in a scientific way—and here is an argument for a certain style of republican professor—must be the overriding value. That truth and justice are coincident he feels he may simply assert. The ‘instinctive kantism’ remark is interesting in light of the neo-Kantianism that pervaded the Rmm, but Lapie himself—as many others—was as much a Platonist as anything else (although what that means is a difficult question). Much that Lapie says appears today almost laughably naive, and surely one must quickly ask after who, exactly, is in a position to enunciate the truth of which he speaks. And yet.

The desire for a public that is institutionally committed to methodical doubt, to the pursuit of justice through that of truth—this is appealing. And further there is something appealing about the round rejection of conscience-claims. This sounds, on its face, flatly antiliberal. Freedom of conscience is a fundamental freedom. But I don’t think this is quite what he means. He means, rather, that because you feel something deeply does not mean you have any kind of right to assert it as true. We can go one further and say that since truth is intersubjective, this can be extended to mean that you do not have a right to oblige others to accept what you feel deeply just because you are “intimately convinced” of it. This is, as Lapie would doubtless be happy to further explain, an Enlightenment point of view. There is no truth, and so no justice, without ruthless critique. It would be easy to object to this sort of position, for instance in its characterization of conscience, in the necessary connection of truth and justice, or in how Lapie relates the individual to the institutional. Indeed people Lapie knew well made such objections to him at various points. He has, nonetheless, the merit—more rare than one might think—of writing with great conviction about the need to temper conviction with evidence and doubt.

What was liberalism?

Duncan Bell. “What is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42(6), 682-715, 2014.

It is tempting to regard liberalism as a ‘sick signifier,’ a term that may now have polemical value in certain situations, but the meaning of which is so poorly determined as to make use counter-productive. A temptation, I think, worth resisting. Bell’s useful article attempts an answer to its titular question, although the author believes that his material “calls into question the general utility of “liberalism” as a category of political analysis” (705). Bell restricts his investigation mostly to the British, and (almost—more on that below) entirely to the Anglophone, political fields. He begins with the observation, drawing on David Scott, that today we are all “conscripts of liberalism,” meaning that “the scope of the [liberal] tradition has expanded to encompass the vast majority of political positions regarded as legitimate” (689). How to respond to this over-inflation of the concept?

Acknowledging that one’s definition of a concept (especially a political one) will depend on what one is trying to do, Bell writes, “I propose the following definition (for comprehensive purposes): the liberal tradition is constituted by the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, across time and space” (689-690). This technique accomplishes several things. It restricts us, first, to the 19^th century. Second, it is a way of accounting at least partially for the polemical uses of the term. Third, it is important that history, in the sense of conceptual continuity and change, is built into this approach. Traditions can only be, as Bell writes, “constituted by the accumulation of arguments over time” (691). Bell has sensible things to say about the difficulties of adjudicating at the edges of this, as well as about the importance of differentiating between liberal speakers and liberal arguments.  

The historical content of Bell’s argument—although the article is rich and many of its notes are ones I should follow up—is easily summed up. In the 19^th century, liberalism was not among the most important of political terms. Together with socialism and conservatism, it was taken to be a product of the ‘era of revolutions’—the French especially—and to be broadly synonymous with democracy. So, Bell gives us James Fitzjames Stephen in 1862: “As generally used . . . “liberal” and “liberalism” . . . denote in politics, and to some extent in literature and philosophy, the party which wishes to alter existing institutions with the view of increasing popular power. In short, they are not greatly remote in meaning from the words “democracy” and “democratic.”” (694). John Locke appeared essentially nowhere in these discussions. Herbert Spencer, the enormously popular social scientist and surely a liberal, mentions Locke hardly at all.

Today, we are all sure that Locke is, perhaps not the very beginning of liberalism, but its defining thinker. Bell argues that “Locke became a liberal during the twentieth century” (698). Beginning at the end of the 19^th century, but especially during the “crisis of liberalism” and its utter failure in the 1930s, scholars pushed the origins of liberalism back into the early modern period. Bell makes this “retrojection” the first chronological and discursive element constituting the new, hegemonic, idea of liberalism. The second and more important, beginning during the 1930s and accelerating through the war, was “the emergence and proliferation of the idea of “liberal democracy.” As representative forms of political order came under sustained fire, intellectuals propagated an all-encompassing narrative that simultaneously pushed the

historical origins of liberalism back in time while vastly expanding its spatial reach. For the first time, it was widely presented as either the most authentic ideological tradition of the West (a pre-1945 storyline) or its constitutive ideology (a view popular after 1945)” (699). In this new postwar dispensation, liberalism was “centered on individual freedom in the context of constitutional government” (699). And this was really a postwar understanding, one which Bell signals as defined by complex disciplinary histories in “the context of a transfer of scholarly authority from Britain to the United States” (701). “As a global conflict over the proper meaning of democracy raged, the modifier “liberal” simultaneously encompassed diverse representative parliamentary systems while differentiating them from others claiming the democratic title, above all Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union” (703). In short, Lockean liberalism, which is the historical story underpinning the combat concept of ‘liberal democracy,’ are Cold War anti-totalitarian relics still exerting unreasonable influence particularly in political theory departments.

Bell’s article is, as I’ve said, rich and valuable. I wish I’d read it some time ago. The story is not a surprising one for me, although I am not especially familiar with the British context on which he focuses. I’ve already cited his point that the transformation he describes is defined by a transfer of scholarly ‘weight’ from Britain to the US. He also mentions the importance of émigré scholars in building the history of ideas as a discipline in the US. (As an aside, I hadn’t realized that the Journal of the History of Ideas took CIA money), as well as the translation from Italian of Guido De Ruggiero’s fascist-era History of European Liberalism. Now, I have sympathy with the need to make linguistic and even national restrictions for practical reasons, and even for certain methodological ones. But it seems to m pretty clear—and of course Bell wouldn’t deny this—that the larger story here is a European or larger one.

This moves in two directions. The first is that, it seems to me, we would get very different responses depending on which national or linguistic tradition we started with. For instance in Germany, I think the postwar would find us looking not back to Locke, but perhaps back to Protestant theology of one kind or another. This would not be a liberalism of property, but one of personality (although equally anticommunist). In France we would see a very different sequence. We would not find the consolidation of ‘liberal democracy’ in the 1930s-50s. We would see a ‘liberal republicanism’ well before the First World War, which might look back to 1789, although also further back, and which would balance democratic claims with claims to fundamental individual rights (as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen) in a way not so different from ‘liberal democracy.’ The second is that, as I continue to think, the international sphere is more than the sum of its parts. (I would hate to have to say precisely how). All of this, moreover, leaves aside arguments about the essentially imperial origins of modern liberalism (for instance, at least as I understand it, in Andrew Sartori’s most recent book, which I haven’t yet read).

SFHS 2015. Part One of Two.

This past weekend was the meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies at Colorado College. I saw a number of excellent papers and some quite cohesive panels. I’m going to do brief write-ups of only two of these panels. The first, here, is a panel titled “Education, Religion, and Laïcité in Republican France,” with papers by Linda Clark, Eleanor Rivera, and Rachel Hutchins.

Linda Clark—“Women Educators and the Politics of Laïcité: Normal School Directrices, 1879-1889”—spoke about the directrices of écoles normales for women in the first decade after the institution of generalized secondary education for women. In this period, there were approximately 180 such directrices (Clark has the exact number, but I missed it). A few écoles normales already existed, of course, but a large number of new women were needed to run the new schools that would be created under the law. Eventually, although not at first, these women would be trained at the new ENS at Fontenay-aux-Rose. Clark opened her talk with a letter sent by an archbishop to Jules Ferry in 1880. Did Ferry know, the archbishop asked, that one of his directrices was a Protestant? Ferry replied that he did, but that her religion was not important, only her professional capacity. Clark is broadly interested in this question: how laïque were these early teachers? Who were they? Clark’s paper was rich with valuable detail about this all-important group. After all, if the schools were the heart of the republican project, and the republic could survive only if it ‘won the battle’ for women, then this group—those who would run the schools to teach the teachers—was of great importance.

Clark divides her subjects into three groups. There were 17 normal schools for women in France when the new law went into effect in 1879. 10 had laïque directrices, and all these were retained as new schools were opened. This is the first group. Second are the 33 directrices appointed to newly-created schools mostly in the first year (79-80), who did not pass through Fontenay-aux-Rose. Third is the remaining majority, women who passed through the ENS at Fontenay and thus received the laique training that was, ideally, supposed to prepare them for their task.

Clark’s paper showed that, at first, Ferry and co. had to rely on more Catholic teachers, and allowed much greater latitude for the expression of Catholic doctrine on the part of these directrices. In fact, especially in the early years, Catholic directrices sometimes met with more success in effective laicization than did non-Catholics. There was great turnover in the first few years. This depended in part on regional differences, with more turnover in more Catholic areas. Vendé saw four different directrices in four years. Mostly these women were not married. The directrice had to live in the school, so some people thought they should not be married, or perhaps that it wasn’t a good idea to have husbands in the “couvent laïque.” On the other hand there are several examples of married women as directrice causing no particular difficulty or scandal.  Republicans were in principle committed to tolerance, so they noticed but accepted Catholic directrices as long as this didn’t disrupt or obstruct laicization. Religious practices on the part of directrices could be cause for dismissal—often were, although sheer incompetence was as well—but there are also cases of directrices being accused, and then defended successfully. Perhaps surprisingly, complaints came both against too radically laïque directrices and against those who were not laïque enough. By the late 1880s, there was less tolerance for Catholics. Once the ENS at Fontenay is running, dismissals because of excessive Catholicism drop off sharply. Only 1 of the 81 who went through was, ultimately, dismissed for catholic practices. 

My central take-away here was that, indeed, these directrices were an effectively laïque bunch. Compromises were made, especially at first, but the larger picture is of a surprisingly effective construction of a corps of elite teachers.

Eleanor Rivera’s paper, “Neutral Space: Laïcité and Early Third Republic Classrooms,” also examined the contested edges, we might say, of Ferry-era laicization efforts, but in a quite different mode. She uses the optic of space to inquire about how laicization worked at the level of the primary school, focusing on the Seine-inférieure. In fact what this means is a close look at very local conflicts over the signs and symbols of religion mostly within classrooms—especially crucifixes. I wonder, then, if Rivera’s framing might be different: perhaps it is not so much space as material or visual traces of religion that interests her? Or perhaps I’m over-remembering the spatial framing of her paper?

However that may be, the paper itself was a fascinating and detailed recounting of several such conflicts. Although at a different level of the French educational systems than Clark, Rivera’s paper also demonstrated the great variations according to local response that characterized efforts at laicization—and, concomitantly, the flexibility in many cases of the higher administration. Even after it became illegal to have crucifixes up in classrooms, many remained when local conditions made it difficult for the administration to have them removed without great conflict. Guidelines existed, Rivera tells us, for when and how local teachers might best take these symbols down (over a long break, quietly, quickly, and decisively). Conflicts nonetheless arose. Rivera recounted in some detail one particular sequence in which a local mayor declared his complete legitimacy—given by universal suffrage—in attempting to re-install a crucifix removed from a classroom in his town. This is interesting partly because the election of mayors was an innovation on the part of the Third Republic, and so we see here a nice dialectic of democratic legitimacy being accepted by opponents of republican policies. The broader point of Rivera’s research (at least this part of it) was that especially in primary education, teachers and administrators were willing to retain a substantial amount of Catholic paraphernalia in and around the classroom if it meant they could get the children into the school, and they could still control the curriculum.

Rachel Hutchins’ paper took us out of the early Third Republic and into the (late?!) Fifth Republic. She is interested in the uses of the term “laïcité” since 1980 in French primary school curriculum and textbooks (which are importantly different). Hutchins’ paper, too, was rich with detail and impressed upon me how little I know about recent French pedagogical debates. For instance, in the early 1980s official policy removed ‘histoire’ from the curriculum, replacing it, on the basis of reasoning drawn from Piaget and Annales historians, with direct interaction with artifacts and historical documents, but without significant framing? If this is even partly right, I’d be interested to know more. 

In any case, Hutchins’ central argument is that, especially in the textbooks that schoolchildren actually use, laïcité has undergone a process of idealization. It has been transformed, in Hutchins’ excellent phrase, “from value to myth.” She shows the differences between the official position taken in the preambles to various curricular documents and the actual content of the textbooks, which are not legally required to fit in any particular way with official curricula. An important turning-point, she argues, came as around 1985 national history returned to primary school curricula. At first, in textbooks from the late 1980s, laïcité is mentioned only briefly, if at all. By 2008, however, the main textbook for primary use on civil education gives exactly as much space to laïcité as to liberté, égalité, fraternité. Despite space also given to explicitly anti-racist messages, this way of presenting the 1905 law in fact re-enforces, and this last is a paraphrase of Hutchins, traditional nationalism in the guise of republican universalism. Hutchins even shows that Islam is handled in history textbooks so as to emphasize its warlike, conquest-oriented aspects. The crusades appear as a ‘reconquest’ on the part of Christian rulers. Muslims were commercial and scientific in the past, but not, these textbooks suggest, in the present. This part of Hutchins’ paper was very interesting, but I would have liked to see it treated in a broader way—not something, of course, there was time for in the paper.

A number of useful questions emerged from the audience. (There was a very substantial comment from Barry Bergin, but for some reason my notes from it are missing, so I won’t try to reconstruct it—suffice it to say that he raised several of the below points as well). Hutchins, for instance, who had framed the curricular changes she describes largely in terms of xenophobic or anti-immigrant discourse and the rise of the FN, was asked about other possible relevant changes. These are indeed numerous and not to be discounted in post 1968 France. Jean Pedersen asked two (related!) questions of the panel as a whole, which I shall mangle in paraphrasing. First, what is really the continuity or the difference between laïcité in 1880 and the same term today? Second, the form taken by laïcité in all these papers is subtractive (my word), that is it removed symbols or practices in order to achieve ‘neutrality.’ What about an (American) positive or inclusive model of neutrality? This last, for any number of reasons, was indeed never on the table in France. In fact, Rivera told in response a nice anecdote about a newspaper column in which this very specter was raised—a crucifix with a cross, a start of David, a ‘head of Mohammad’ (!), the mason’s level, all together—as a possible outcome of botched laicization. This appeared as an abomination in the 1880s. (And today it is left to Slavoj Zizek to become outraged (or at least worked-up) about the “coexist” bumper-stickers made out of these symbols.) Pedersen did not really get an answer to her first question—indeed it is a difficult one.

Of course, laïcité even over the long-term has been the object of an enormous amount of excellent scholarship in France. Jacqueline Lalouette leaps to mind here. It seems to me that we would be well-served to analytically separate republican anticlericalism, which has roots well before the Revolution and which played such an important role in it, from laïcité, which I would understand as a 19^th century synthesis of free-thinking and Protestant approaches to deconnecting organized or institutionalized religion from morality. It seems pretty clear that in the late 19^th century, in the run-up to 1905, Protestants played a key role in laicization, and that, at least on its face, there was nothing atheist (we might say) about laïcité. The default understanding—the rhetorical frame in the present—seems to be that laicization worked in the Third Republic, but isn’t working now, should be made to work with the same moral energy and clarity that it had in the 1880s. Certainly the papers in this panel suggest that Ferry’s project (not that it was only his) was a remarkable one. But it seems clear that to really understand the laïque schools of the 1880s, we need at least to begin with the educational policies and politics of the Second Empire. We need to think about the significance of the Paris Commune in shaping political possibilities (and fears) in the first decades of what would become the Third Republic. Republicans were not simply Enlighteners fighting obscurantist Catholics. They were also (even the more staunchly democratic among them) property-owners fighting socialists. And then if we want a bilan of the Republican school system, we’d better think very hard about the 1930s and Vichy, in particular the extent to which the latter had “Republican origins.” Hutchins’ characterization of laïcité in recent years as a “myth” rather than a “value” of the republic seems, at least from my perspective, dead on. The place that the concept—the administrative strategy—of laïcité had in the political conjuncture of the early Third Republic made it a functional part of the Republic and gave it, it seems to me, a completely different meaning than it has today. Laïcité may have been a genuine myth in the late 19th century, and today merely rhetorical cover. 

All of which is a long-winded response to three great papers, Bergin’s comment, and questions from the audience—as well, I should say, as conversation after the panel. Having just written substantially more about this than I meant to do, I’ll commit to doing the same (although at less length) tomorrow with another, quite different panel: “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France.”