The History of Education in Nineteenth-Century France: A Survey of Recent Writings

Abstract

tn the last five years few fields of social history have grown as 1 rapidly as that of the history of education. If the writing of history stays faithful to its own past, moreover, the current crisis of educational systems throughout the world will generate an even greater output of books and articles as scholars seek to understand the origins of student unrest and institutional change. A survey of some of the most important recent writings on the history of French secondary and higher education may thus serve to summarize the contributions already made and to indicate some of the problems still in need of study. Two recent general histories of the subject are of special value. The first to appear, Felix Ponteil's Histoire de l'Enseignement: 1789-1965 (Paris: Sirey, 1966), is a solid, if uninspired, narrative history of all levels of the French system: higher, secondary, primary, and technical. Ponteil emphasizes the legal, administrative, and political history of education, especially the long campaign for freedom of teaching (liberte de l'enseignement) that began soon after Napoleon established the State monopoly over secondary and higher education and ended shortly before World War I when the Radicals abandoned their attempt to re-establish that monopo]y.l His concluding bibliographical essay contains valuable references to widely scattered books and articles published during the last hundred years. Whereas Ponteil fails to present much information, especially of the statistical sort, concerning the relationship between educational developments and other social changes, Antoine Prost's Histoire de I'Enseignement: 1800-1967 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968) makes full