"France is My Mother": The Subject of Universal Education in the French Third Republic‪.‬

In 1880, Jules Ferry presented a series of bills to the French Parliament designed to establish a system of nationwide primary education for the children of the popular classes that would be "obligatory, free and laic." These reform laws were meant to ensure the long-term survival of the still very-much-embattled Third Republic by creating a nation of loyal republican citizens no longer subject to the dictates of the Catholic Church and the monarchy it supported. The regeneration of the nation was to be effected by teaching the masses to exercise their reason through the study of the sciences and Kantian rationalist morality. Through learning this universally shared 'independent morality,' they would become free citizens capable of exercising sovereignty over themselves and the democratic nation, rising above the constraints of natural determinism. The rhetoric of saving the homeland (pattie) from 'anarchy' through regeneration thus dovetailed perfectly with the logic of rational universalism. But in order to have a real effect on the children of scarcely literate peasants and workers, the new curriculum was designed to subjectify the relation of the pupils to the republican State. To moral education, the Opportunists added a civic instruction whose goal was to inspire the children's respect, gratitude, and obedience toward the Republic by depicting it as their mother. The rhetoric of regeneration here was a metaphorical process of transference in which the natural mother was replaced by the national mother of the patrie. The unity of the nation was thus purchased at the expense of splitting the subject of universal education: rhetoric was now pitted against logic, and while the demand was for universalism, freedom, and autonomy, the desire was for nationalism, obedience, and dependence. **********