School and nation. Identity politics and educational media in an age of diversity

Abstract

The French colonial empire was essentially formed in the nineteenth century, for the most part in Africa, Asia and the West Indies. Composed of territories and populations with diverse statuses, subjected to colonial political and economic development projects, the empire was, until the 1960s, an important topic in education. The space formerly devoted to the empire in curricula and textbooks testifies to its importance, as does the effort displayed in them to keep abreast of colonial affairs, hewing fairly closely to the current situation at the time. Until the beginning of the wars of independence, the history of the empire (involving conquest, exploitation, relations between the empire and metropolitan France) was the focus of a narrative that served the aims of a national cohesion that was battered and bruised by political and social divides, the various revolutions of the nineteenth century being just one expression of these divisions. A different 'us' was being created, combining ideas of national and imperial grandeur. Education seemed to be a way to forge a common awareness of 'us', and this concept, however heterogeneous and non-egalitarian, displaced the other – the potential enemy to be dominated – outside of mainland France. Which Kind of School Narrative for the Colonial Empire? The colonial empire has played various roles for France, with economic and political ones being the most often emphasised. However, beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the empire also served as an antidote to the fear of decadence and division haunting the French, who dreaded a return to the ancien regime's 'unconstituted aggregate of disunited peoples' (Mirabeau), or to post-revolutionary divisions. The colonial project had federated otherwise antagonistic forces. According to the view long held by the majority, the empire was advantageous to both concerned parties. On the one hand, it benefited metropolitan France; on the other, progress in the fields of economy and education brought technical rationality, that is, the enlightenment that would likely liberate colonised peoples from the 'obscurity' of 'archaic beliefs' and from poverty. The invention of the empire entailed a reorganisation of arguments and imaginaries around a new geographic and symbolic space of reference. Education accompanied this project, feeding on the process and feeding it in return by enrolling a number of generations in it. This can be seen as an updated reinterpretation of schools' mission on the French mainland: the peasant children of Indochina, Africa and the Maghreb replaced those of Brittany, Savoy and Auvergne, as well as the proletariat of industrialised cities. To educate them, to