Decorative or didactic? Art à l’école and the ambivalent status of aesthetics and democracy in Belle Époque primary schools

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Belle Époque quest for a modern beauty (an ‘art nouveau’) extended into France’s system of free primary schooling, established in the 1880s by the Third Republic to educate the popular masses. Design reformers’ belief in the underlying unity of the fine and applied arts, and their growing emphasis on the importance of individual initiative and creativity to the latter, suggested that integrating the right form of artistic education into public education, especially primary schools, would serve both economic and democratic ends. The quasi-official Société Nationale de l’Art à l’École (National Society for Art in School) was founded in 1907 to support this goal. An examination of its efforts nevertheless reveals that its distinction of didactic and aesthetic aims, as well as the parameters it imposed upon content and style, blunted their democratic, emancipatory potential in ways that echoed the broader limitations of the French expansion of education.