<div dir="ltr"><h1 id="gmail-headline" class="gmail-headline">Joan of Arc’s Shaky Pedestal: France Battles Over Its Identity at School</h1><figure id="gmail-media-100000004674003" class="gmail-media gmail-photo gmail-lede gmail-layout-large-horizontal">
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">An elementary classroom in Paris.</span>
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Fred Dufour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images </span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">PARIS
— Bikini — and burkini — season is over here, but with the new school
year, France’s battle over national identity has erupted on a new front:
its history curriculum.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">School
curriculums have long been a part of culture wars, including in the
United States, where there have been tussles over slavery and evolution.
But in France, where the state sets school programs nationwide, the
country’s understanding of its past — and how it uses education to shape
young <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-attack-puts-schools-under-scrutiny.html">citizens</a> — has become a hot-button issue in a fraught <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/world/europe/france-nicolas-sarkozy-presidential-election.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0">election season</a>.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Changes
to how Joan of Arc and other touchstone historical figures are taught
in elementary school, as well as changes to how French, Latin and Greek
are introduced, have sparked fierce arguments between right-leaning
politicians and intellectuals, who believe schools should foster
national pride, and the Socialist education minister Najat
Vallaud-Belkacem and her defenders, who argue that the curriculum should
reflect changes in society.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In a recent campaign speech and <a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2016/08/31/31003-20160831ARTFIG00269-francois-fillon-enseigner-le-recit-national-a-nos-enfants.php?redirect_premium">newspaper column</a>,
a former prime minister running in primaries for the right-wing
Republican party, François Fillon, said France “shouldn’t have to
apologize” for its history. And last week, former president Nicolas
Sarkozy, also a candidate in the right-wing party primaries, upped the
ante. “Once you become French, your ancestors are the Gauls,” he said,
adding that students should be taught, “‘I love France, I learned the
history of France, I see myself as French.’”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">This
increasing politicization of education is happening at a time of
intense debate over immigration, multiculturalism and national identity,
said Rachel D. Hutchins, a professor at the University of Lorraine in
France and the <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Nationalism-and-History-Education-Curricula-and-Textbooks-in-the-United/Hutchins/p/book/9781138801578">author</a> of “Nationalism and History Education: Curricula and Textbooks in the United States and France.”</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-1">“For
politicians, targeting history education provides a simple,
rhetorically powerful response to public fears over immigration,” she
said.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Mr.
Fillon, who was prime minister from 2007 until 2012 under Mr. Sarkozy,
said that if elected, he would insist the Education Ministry mandate a
“national narrative.” His remarks were seen as a rebuke to decades of
changes to textbooks that have come to cast France’s colonial exploits,
particularly in North Africa, in a negative light.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“Our
history has glorious moments and tragic moments, but it’s an entirety,”
he said. “We should embrace it and we do not have to apologize for it.”
He also lamented the removal this fall from the elementary school
curriculum of Julius Caesar, Cardinal Richelieu and Voltaire.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">This year’s <a href="http://www.education.gouv.fr/pid285/bulletin_officiel.html?cid_bo=94708">elementary school curriculum</a>
was changed significantly — to focus more on French history and less on
world history — after “a very intense debate,” said Michel Lussault,
president of the Superior Council for Programs, the state-appointed
independent committee of 18 experts that sets curriculums.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">The
debate centered on how best to teach history and the French language,
and how to divide the elementary school curriculum into three-year
cycles. But at a time when terrorist attacks have pushed questions of
national identity and civic education to the fore, it quickly became
politically charged. In the end, the committee’s decision to focus on
French history was a compromise between traditionalists who wanted more
of a “national narrative” and progressives who believed the curriculum
should resonate more with today’s students and make them more active
participants in the classroom.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Mr.
Lussault, a geography professor at the University of Lyon, said that
Mr. Fillon was playing politics. “This is a kind of political rhetoric
that doesn’t have much to do with the reality of the curriculum,” he
said.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Even
if the new curriculum eliminated detailed lists of historical figures,
including Joan of Arc and Caesar, teachers are still required to cover
their epochs. “I imagine if you’re teaching the Roman conquest of Gaul,
you would talk about Julius Caesar,” Mr. Lussault said.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">After last year’s terrorist <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/news-event/attacks-in-paris?inline=nyt-classifier" title="Complete coverage of the attacks in Paris." class="gmail-meta-classifier">attacks in Paris</a>,
the Education Ministry added more hours dedicated to teaching about
secularism and the republican values of liberty, equality and
fraternity.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Those
changes came amid a debate over what it means to be French. “So many
people have a French identity card, but the question of what is France
and how to transmit the knowledge or the love of France, that’s what the
attacks introduced into the debate,” said <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/12/world/europe/once-hopeful-for-harmony-a-philosopher-voices-discord-in-france.html">Alain Finkielkraut</a>,
a public intellectual whose 2013 book, “The Unhappy Identity,” about
the strains of a multicultural society, lamented what he sees as a
decline in school standards.</p>
<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content" id="gmail-story-continues-2">Ever
since the French Revolution — and certainly since the French state
wrested control of schools from the Roman Catholic Church in the early
20th century — education has been the government’s main method of
instilling certain values of citizenship. But what kind of citizens?</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“Should
history be civic history? Or a way of teaching curiosity and otherness?
That’s a big issue,” said Patricia Legris, a professor of contemporary
history at the University of Rennes. As for the kind of citizen: “Should
it be a national citizen? Or a European citizen? A world citizen?”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">In “The Phantom School,” published this month, the right-wing intellectual Robert Redeker <a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2016/08/26/31003-20160826ARTFIG00065-robert-redeker-l-ecole-s-applique-a-effacer-la-civilisation-francaise.php">argues</a>
that French youth are out of sync with French values because schools
have gone downhill. “Many are of North African origin and they are in
dissonance, they are like a separate people,” said Mr. Redeker, who has
lived under police protection since 2006, when he wrote an opinion piece
in Le Figaro calling Islam a violent religion.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“They
have a hatred of the country into which they were born,” Mr. Redeker
continued. “But rather than teaching love and respect for this country
and its language and its history, the school since the start of the ’90s
has taught them that ultimately we are mean, slave owners,
colonialists, almost murderers.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Mr.
Redeker and others who emphasize Europe’s Greco-Roman past are upset
that this year Latin and Greek, which are electives, were changed to
focus more on ancient civilizations and less on grammar. “It’s
pedagogical tourism,” he said. “Latin and Greek, like mathematics, are a
school of logic, one that teaches rigor in thinking.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Whether
curriculums can help solve France’s woes is another question. “A kind
of magical thinking goes on around them,” said Mark Lilla, a professor
of humanities at Columbia who has <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/mark-lilla/">written extensively</a>
on contemporary French politics. “The presumption is that if we add 15
more minutes of this or that, we’ve done something to fight the man or
to fight the barbarians that are at the gate.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">“In
a sense it’s testimony to their faith in the life of the mind,”
Professor Lilla added, “but it’s also a way of avoiding hard political
choices.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content"><br></p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">NYTimes Sept. 28, 2016<br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Eharoldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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