Jean-François Dupeyron: In the School of the Paris Commune. The Story of Another School – A Secondary Publication

Abstract

We know it, we have learned it, and often we teach it: public schools became secular for the first time in 1882. Well, no! As Jean-François Dupeyron said, the first secular public school in France was that of the Commune. Understanding why this fact was – and still is – obscured is the subject of Jean-François Dupeyron’s book, A L’École de la Commune de Paris: L’Histoire d’une Autre École. The author’s thesis is that, during the second half of the 19th century and up to World War I, the workers’ movement developed the project of another school, a school independent of both the Church and the State. It is against this other school, desired by the Commune and then the labor exchanges and the General Confederation of Labor, which was at the time of revolutionary syndicalists, that Jules Ferry’s school was constructed. Why has this “history of another school” been concealed?