Education: Free and Compulsory

Universal compulsory education, like compulsory military service, was ushered into France by the French Revolution. The revolutionary Constitution of 1791 decreed compulsory primary instruction for all. The Government could not do much to put these principles into effect at first, but it tried its best. In 1793, the Convention prescribed that the French language be the sole language of the “republic, one and indivisible.” Little was done until the advent of Napoleon, who established a comprehensive state education. All schools, whether public or nominally private, were subject to the strict control of the national government. Dominating the entire system was the “University of France,” which was established to insure uniformity and control throughout the entire French educational system. Its chief officials were appointed by Napoleon, and no one could open a new school or teach in public unless he was licensed by the official university. Thus, in this law of 1806, Napoleon acted to secure a monopoly of teaching to the State. The teaching staff of the public schools was to be routed through a normal school operated by the State. All these schools were directed to take as the basis of their teaching the principles of loyalty to the head of the State, and obedience to the statutes of the university. Due to lack of funds, the system of public schools could not then be imposed on all. By the end of the Napoleonic era, slightly less than half of French children attended public schools, the rest largely in Catholic schools. The private schools, however, were now under the regulation of the State and were obliged to teach patriotism on behalf of the rulers.

With the Restoration, the Napoleonic system was largely dismantled and education in France became predominantly a Catholic Church affair. After the revolution of 1830, however, Minister Guizot began to renew State power in his act of 1833. Attendance was not made compulsory, and the private schools were left intact, except for the significant requirement that all educational institutions must teach “internal and social peace.” Complete liberty for private schools was restored, however, by the Falloux Law, passed in 1850 by Louis Napoleon.

With the exception, then, of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, French education remained free until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Just as Prussian compulsion and absolutism had received a great impetus from the defeat at the hands of Napoleon, so did French compulsion and dictation receive its inspiration from the victory of Prussia in 1871. The Prussian victories were considered the victories of the Prussian army and the Prussian schoolmaster, and France, driven by the desire for revenge (revanche), set about to Prussianize its own institutions. In acts of 1882 and 1889, it inaugurated universal military conscription on the Prussian model.

Leader in the new policy was Minister Jules Ferry. Ferry was the main champion of a new policy of aggressive imperialism and colonial conquest. Aggressions were carried on in North Africa, in lower Africa, and in Indochina.

Demands for compulsory education arose from the goal of military revanche. As a leading politician Gambetta put it: “the Prussian schoolmaster had won the last war, and the French schoolmaster must win the next.” To this end, a clamor arose for extension of the school system to every French child, for training in citizenship. Also, there were demands for compulsory education so that every French child would be inoculated in republicanism and immune to the lures of monarchical restoration. As a result, Fey, in a series of laws in 1881 and 1882, made French education compulsory. Private schools were nominally left free, but actually were greatly restricted by the compulsory dissolution of the Jesuit Order and its expulsion from France. Many of the private schools in France had been run by the Jesuits. Moreover, the laws abolished many monastic orders which had not been formally “authorized” by the State, and forbade their members to conduct schools. Attendance at some school was compulsory for all children between six and thirteen years of age.

The effect of the new regime was to dominate the private schools completely since those that were not affected by the anti-Catholic laws had to subsist under the decree that “private schools cannot be established without a license from the minister, and can be shut up by a simple ministerial order.”23 Private secondary schools were severely crippled by the Walleck-Rousseau and Combes acts of 1901 and 1904, which suppressed all private religious secondary schools in France.

• 23Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1970), p. 297.